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!

The Oldest Hustle in American Crime: When They Say It's About Who You Are

There is a script. It is older than anyone currently living. It goes like this:

I am not a criminal. I am a threat. And they hate me because of what I represent to you. 

Al Capone knew it by heart.

---

By the late 1920s, Alphonse Gabriel Capone was the most powerful organized crime figure in America. He ran bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution across Chicago with an iron fist wrapped in a silk suit. He ordered murders. He bribed police captains, judges, and aldermen wholesale. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre -- seven men machine-gunned in a garage on his orders -- was so brazen it shook the country.

And yet Al Capone's public posture, maintained with remarkable consistency, was that of a persecuted man.

"Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there's a murder or a fire or the marines land in Nicaragua," Capone said, "the police and the newspapers holler 'get Capone.'"

He wasn't just complaining. He was building a brand. Capone cultivated a Robin Hood image, donated to soup kitchens during the Depression, made himself accessible to reporters, and cast himself as a simple businessman being singled out by hypocrites. "When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging," he pointed out. "When my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality." He told crowds he had "spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time," and received in return only "abuse, the existence of a hunted man."

This country wanted booze, he said. He organized it. Why should he be called a public enemy?

The argument was not without a certain populist electricity. Prohibition was absurd. The rich did drink openly while working-class men went to jail. The cops Capone bribed were on every other corner. He was telling people things they already half-believed, and wrapping himself in their grievances as insulation against his own accountability.

His defense attorney argued at trial that the tax prosecution was simply a pretext -- that the government wasn't really after tax fraud, it was just trying to "stow Al Capone away." The jury should not, he told them, be a party to persecution in a time of public excitement.

The jury convicted him anyway. He died at 48, his mind destroyed by syphilis, the empire he built already in ruins.

But the script survived him.

---

Donald Trump did not invent the populist criminal's persecution narrative. He inherited it, refined it, and ran it at a scale Capone could never have imagined -- not across one city, but across an entire country, through television, social media, and the machinery of a major political party.

The playbook is identical. Only the costumes changed.

Where Capone said "every time something goes wrong, they blame me," Trump told his supporters at a Waco rally: "They're not coming after me. They're coming after you. I'm just standing in the way." The logic is the same move, executed a century apart. The criminal reframes his own legal accountability as an attack on the people who love him.

Where Capone cast himself as a simple man meeting a public demand -- beer, whiskey, a good time -- Trump cast himself as a simple man giving people what they wanted: jobs, a wall, a middle finger pointed at the people who looked down on them. "From the time I came down the golden escalator," Trump said after his first indictment, the radical left had been engaged in a witch hunt "to destroy the Make America Great Again movement." Not him. The movement. You.

Where Capone pointed at the hypocrisy of Prohibition -- the law applied selectively, to the poor and the ethnic, while the wealthy drank freely -- Trump pointed at real and perceived hypocrisy in the justice system: Hillary Clinton's emails, Hunter Biden's laptop, the two-tiered application of law. Some of those complaints had genuine substance. That's the point. The hustle works best when it's built on a foundation of things that are actually true.

Trump claimed the prosecution "would immediately stop" if he decided not to run for president -- framing his legal exposure as purely political, a weapon aimed not at a man who broke the law, but at a movement that threatened power. He compared his situation to Alexei Navalny dying in an Arctic prison. He called it "the existence of a hunted man."

Capone would have recognized that phrase. He used it himself.

---

Here is where the comparison becomes not just rhetorical but precise.

Capone ran an organization built on intimidation and bribery, surrounded himself with men willing to commit violence on his behalf, and corrupted every institution he could reach -- police, courts, city hall. He positioned this as American enterprise. "My rackets are run on strictly American lines," he said. He was not knocking the system. He was just using it.

Trump surrounded himself with what a presidential historian called "a team of felons" -- eleven top allies convicted or having pled guilty, their combined sentences totaling roughly thirty years. He pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. He urged his attorney general to go after Hillary Clinton. He leaned on election officials in Georgia to "find" votes. He was impeached twice. He was convicted on 34 felony counts. He pardoned rioters who broke into the Capitol at his encouragement, including the first man to breach the building.

And throughout all of it, his line never wavered: this is persecution. They are doing this because of who I am, and what I mean to you.

The crucial difference between Capone and Trump is that Capone never got his hands on the actual machinery of the state. He had to bribe it from the outside. Trump won the presidency twice. He used the Justice Department as a tool of personal vengeance. He pardoned his own criminal associates. He sat in the Oval Office and directed federal power at his enemies while simultaneously claiming to be a victim of federal power.

Capone claimed he was being hunted. Trump made himself the hunter, from inside the building, while still claiming to be the prey.

---

The populist criminal's greatest trick is not the lie. It's the grain of truth.

Capone was right that Prohibition was selectively enforced. Trump is right that the justice system does not treat everyone equally. Both men took that truth, swallowed it whole, and used it to insulate themselves from consequences for things that had nothing to do with inequality and everything to do with their own appetites for power and money.

Capone's defense attorney told the jury: don't be a party to persecution in a time of public excitement.

Trump's supporters say the same thing today, at a volume that shakes windows.

But here is what the script always leaves out: the question of whether the government is treating you fairly is entirely separate from the question of whether you did the things they say you did.

Al Capone did the things they said he did.

Donald Trump did the things they said he did.

The jury that convicted Capone did not acquit him because he made them feel good at rallies. The question of what we do with that fact -- what we do with a man who turned the oldest hustle in American crime into the platform of a presidency -- is not a question about him.

It is a question about us.

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.

If Corporations Are People, Then Lies Are Crimes Against the Body Politic

Citizens United gave speech to power. It never gave truth to anyone.

Why isn't our Body Politic just as important? 

Isn't it MORE important?

There is a law in the United Kingdom that makes it a criminal offense to knowingly make a false statement about a political candidate's personal character or conduct during an election. It lives inside the Representation of the People Act 1983, Section 106, and it is not theoretical. Candidates have been prosecuted under it. 

Courts have taken it seriously. The British legal tradition holds, without apology, that democracy requires a baseline of factual honesty about the people competing for power. Lie about your opponent's record on policy, fine. That is politics. Lie about who he is, what he did, what she said, what they are, and you have committed an offense against the process itself.

The United States has no such law. It cannot have one, according to the current Supreme Court's reading of the First Amendment. Political speech is the most protected category of expression under American constitutional doctrine, and the Court has repeatedly signaled that the government has almost no power to regulate it based on its truth or falsity. We are, by law, a country where you may lie about your political opponents without limit, so long as the lie does not meet the high bar of defamation, which requires proof of actual malice and damages that are notoriously difficult to establish for public figures.

This was always a flaw in the American system. But it was a manageable flaw, held in check by practical barriers: journalism, peer accountability, the sheer logistics of mass communication. Then came Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, decided in 2010 by a five-to-four Supreme Court majority, and the flaw became a wound. A wound that has not stopped bleeding since.

The Logic That Ate Itself

Citizens United rests on a foundational claim: that corporations are persons under the First Amendment, and that political spending is a form of speech, and therefore that limiting how much a corporation can spend on political messaging is an unconstitutional restriction on free expression. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. He argued that the government had no business deciding which speakers were worthy of constitutional protection and which were not. To restrict corporate speech, he said, was to create a two-tiered system in which some voices could be silenced by the state.

This reasoning has a seductive internal logic. If you accept the premise that corporations are persons with speech rights, the rest follows. The problem is the premise itself, and the downstream contradiction it creates that nobody in the majority seemed to notice, or chose to acknowledge.

If corporations are people, and corporations compose the body politic through their spending and messaging and political participation, then the body politic is people. Not metaphorically. Legally. Structurally. The architecture of democratic participation that Citizens United helped to build is one in which artificial legal entities, backed by concentrations of wealth that no actual human being commands, flood the political commons with messaging that is subject to no truth standard whatsoever.

The body politic, understood as the aggregate of citizens who form a political community and participate in its governance, has now been reconstituted to include entities that cannot vote, cannot serve, cannot be imprisoned, cannot die, and have no direct stake in the outcome of the society their money shapes. And those entities speak into that political commons with the full protection of the First Amendment, spreading whatever messages serve their financial interests, true or false, fair or fabricated.

The UK looked at this problem and said: lies about candidates are an affront to the democratic process. We criminalize them because the body politic, which is made of actual people with actual lives, deserves to make decisions based on something approaching reality.

The United States, post-Citizens United, has said the opposite, functionally if not explicitly: the body politic is open to all comers, including artificial persons with unlimited resources, and we will not discriminate based on the truthfulness of their messages. The marketplace of ideas will sort it out.

The marketplace of ideas has not sorted it out. It has instead been cornered by the best-funded vendors, who have discovered that lies are cheaper to produce than truths, faster to spread than corrections, and significantly more effective at generating the emotional states that drive political behavior.

The Affront Against the Body Politic

The British legal tradition's language is worth sitting with. Section 106 frames false statements about candidates as an affront against the body politic. Not merely as a harm to the individual candidate, which defamation law would address. As an affront against the collective process of democratic governance. Against the body politic as such.

This is a meaningful distinction. When you lie about a candidate's personal character during an election, you are not merely injuring that person. You are corrupting the information environment in which citizens make decisions. You are polluting the commons. You are committing what amounts to a fraud against the electorate, who are entitled to make their choices based on something resembling reality.

American law does not recognize this category of harm. We have libel and slander, which protect individuals. We have fraud statutes, which protect commercial relationships. We have perjury laws, which protect judicial proceedings. But we have no legal mechanism that says: lying to voters about their candidates is an offense against democracy itself.

Citizens United made this absence catastrophic by removing the practical constraints that had kept it from fully metastasizing. Before 2010, the money that could be spent on political messaging was limited. Political organizations had to identify themselves. Coordination rules created at least some friction between wealthy donors and campaign messaging. None of this was a truth requirement. But it slowed the machine.

After Citizens United, dark money flowed into super PACs. The infrastructure of political lying scaled. A single donor or a single industry could now fund a campaign of disinformation at a level that no opposing voice, however well-funded by normal human standards, could match. The asymmetry between a lie and its correction, which was always present, became overwhelming. A lie can be produced for the cost of a press release. A correction requires research, verification, dissemination, and an audience already disposed to receive it. At scale, with unlimited money behind the lie and none guaranteed for the correction, the lie wins most of the time.

Prescience and Its Discontents

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissent in Citizens United that has aged with uncomfortable precision. He argued that the Court's ruling would damage the integrity of elected institutions. He argued that corporations are not members of the political community in any meaningful sense. He argued that the identity of the speaker is relevant to the government's interest in preventing corruption and the appearance of corruption.

He was not listened to. He was in the minority.

Justice Stevens was talking about corruption in the financial-influence sense, the familiar concern that money in politics buys favorable policy outcomes. This is real and it is serious. But there is a second form of corruption that the Citizens United framework enabled and that the majority did not adequately weigh: the corruption of the information environment itself.

When unlimited money can be spent on political messaging with no truth requirement attached, the information environment becomes systematically corrupted. Not by any single act of lying, but by the structural incentive that unlimited money creates for producing and amplifying lies that serve the funder's interests. The marketplace of ideas fails not because people are stupid but because the market has been cornered. A monopoly on information is not less dangerous to democracy than a monopoly on voting.

We have built, through a combination of constitutional doctrine and corporate law and the economics of digital media, a system in which the most powerful speakers in the political commons are entities with no democratic accountability, no obligation to truth, and no limit on spending. We call this freedom of speech. The British, with their quaint little criminal statute about lying to voters, might call it something else.

The Flaw That Was Always There

It would be too easy to lay all of this at the feet of Citizens United. The decision accelerated and amplified a problem that was baked into the American approach to political speech from the beginning. The First Amendment's resistance to government regulation of political content has always meant that the United States would not build the kind of legal infrastructure around political truth that other democracies have. The trade-off was made. The idea was that free speech would be self-correcting, that the truth would win in open competition, that democracy would be resilient enough to absorb even vigorous disinformation.

That was not an insane bet to make in 1791, or even in 1950. The information environment was slow enough, local enough, and expensive enough to produce and distribute that the self-correcting mechanisms had time to operate. There were fewer actors, with lower reach, who could spread political lies. The town square had a manageable size. The body politic could, more or less, sort things out.

The digital information environment, post-Citizens United, is not a town square. It is a planetary-scale amplification system with no editorial standards, governed by engagement algorithms that systematically reward the emotionally inflammatory over the factually accurate, accessible to anyone with money and a message, including artificial legal persons with unlimited resources and no stake in the society they are shaping.

The flaw was always there. We chose not to close it because we valued something else: the principle that government should not be in the business of deciding what is true in political discourse. That principle is not without merit. Governments lie too. Governments abuse truth ministries. The instinct to keep the state out of the business of political epistemology has a real history behind it.

But the instinct has produced a structure that, under current conditions, advantages exactly the actors who are most willing to lie and most able to fund the amplification of those lies. The self-correcting market we hoped for has not materialized. What has materialized is a machine for the industrial production of political unreality, protected by the same constitutional guarantees that were meant to keep citizens free.

What Accountability Looks Like, and What It Would Require

The UK model is not a perfect solution. Section 106 applies to false statements about candidates' personal character, not to false statements about policy, or about history, or about the imagined consequences of the opponent's governance. It is limited in scope and has its own ambiguities. Prosecutions under it are relatively rare. It is not a truth machine. It is a specific, bounded legal acknowledgment that certain kinds of political lying are offenses against the democratic process.

What would it require to build something comparable in the United States? At minimum, it would require a different constitutional jurisprudence, one willing to recognize that political communities have a legitimate interest in the factual integrity of electoral discourse. It would require the Court to acknowledge that the body politic, which Citizens United has now constitutionally reconstituted to include artificial persons, is composed at its core of actual human beings who are materially harmed when the information environment in which they make decisions is systematically corrupted.

It would also require a political will that is currently absent, because the actors who benefit most from the current system are the ones most likely to block any attempt to change it. Unlimited money in politics buys, among other things, the political influence to keep unlimited money in politics.

But the contradiction sits there, regardless of whether anyone has the will to resolve it. If corporations are people under the First Amendment, and if those corporate persons now constitute a significant part of the body politic's voice, then the body politic is, legally speaking, people. And the body politic deserves what actual democratic theory has always said it deserves: a political commons in which factual accountability is not optional.

Citizens United gave speech to power. It gave amplification to money. It never gave truth to anyone. And a democracy that cannot distinguish, legally or structurally, between its citizens and its corporations, between speech and disinformation, between political argument and political fraud, is a democracy in the process of hollowing itself out from the inside.

The British have a word for what happens when you lie about a candidate to voters. They call it an offense. We have a word for it too. We call it protected speech. The difference between those two answers is the difference between a democracy that believes it has something worth protecting and one that has decided the protection itself is too dangerous to attempt.

We chose the latter. We are living with the results.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

Compiled with aid of  Claude AI 

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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.

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