The Formula - A thought experiment, followed to the end

A note before reading:

This is a thought experiment, and it is labeled as one for a reason. It takes a formula that many people have quietly run in their heads, states it plainly, and tests it link by link to see whether it holds. It does not. Nothing here advocates violence against anyone. The piece exists to follow a dangerous idea to its end and show where it breaks, because ideas left unexamined do more damage than ideas taken apart in daylight. Read it to the last line before deciding what it says. 

I am a humanist, a Buddhist of sorts, and I wish harm on no human being. Therein lies much of our problem today against those who do not share that orientation. 

The answer is not to become them. Still, one must think it through. What follows does.

Here is the formula, stated plainly.

Remove Putin. Remove whoever reaches for the chair next, and the one after, until a Russian leader emerges who wants back into the world. Moscow, stung, answers in kind, and the American president falls to hands no one sees. Neither country's opposition carries the stain. Both are freed. Peace follows.

It has a terrible symmetry. Two countries locked in death spirals by two men. Two oppositions that cannot act without inheriting the illegitimacy of the act. One exchange that frees them both.

Plenty of people have run some version of it in their heads. Few have run it to the end. So test it. Link by link.

Link one: remove Putin

This is the strongest link, and it deserves to be taken seriously. The war is unusually personal. Putin wrote the essays denying Ukrainian nationhood. He made the decision in a small room with a smaller circle. Russian elections cannot remove him; this month's managed vote returned his party as designed. The people bleeding for the war cannot vote their way out, speak their way out, or walk out.

There is evidence that leadership removal matters. Economists Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken studied a century of assassination attempts on national leaders and found that successful killings of autocrats were followed by moves toward democracy more often than failed attempts were. Stalin's death in 1953 was followed within months by an armistice in Korea and the end of the Doctors' Plot.

So link one holds, as a proposition: Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. Keep that in mind. It matters at the end.

Link two: remove the next, and the next

Here the formula starts to strain. The constitution hands power to the prime minister. Behind him stand the security services, people who survived twenty-five years by being the most careful and most ruthless in the room.

Each removal teaches the survivors one lesson: the West kills Russian leaders. The ones who rise next are the ones built for a siege. The filter does not select for the rational. It selects for the paranoid.

And someone has to decide who counts as rational. Whoever makes that call is choosing Russia's leader. Russians have seen this before, in other countries, and so have we. Iran, 1953. The installed leader held power for a quarter century. Then came the revolution, and the grievance still shapes Iranian politics seventy years later. A leader chosen by elimination abroad is a leader illegitimate at home.

Link three: Moscow answers in kind

This is where the formula contradicts itself.

It requires the new Russian leadership to be two things at once: rational enough to want back into the international community, and willing to kill an American president. Those are not compatible. A rational leader seeking reentry does not commit the one act guaranteed to make reentry impossible. Through forty years of Cold War, with every motive and every capability, neither Washington nor Moscow killed the other's head of state. Not from squeamishness. From calculation. Both understood what came after.

If the retaliation comes instead from the security hardliners in the interval, before the rational leader arrives, then the formula has handed the decisive act to exactly the people it was designed to filter out.

Link four: no one carries the stain

This is the load-bearing beam. The whole formula exists to solve one problem: the domestic opposition cannot act without inheriting the act.

But the stain does not disappear when the hand is foreign. It moves.

If Russia is identified, Russia owns it, and the United States is at war footing with a nuclear power. If Russia is not identified, the vacuum fills with certainty in every direction. John F. Kennedy had a known shooter, and sixty years later most Americans still suspect a conspiracy. A death with no author would be assigned one within the hour, along tribal lines. Tens of millions would name the American left no matter what the evidence said.

The formula does not remove the stain. It distributes it to everyone.

Link five: both countries are freed

The American half of the premise holds that the movement lives only in the man. Remove him and it dissolves.

History says otherwise. Perón was exiled in 1955 and died in 1974; Peronism still structures Argentine politics. Chávez died of cancer in 2013; Chavismo continued through Maduro. Personalist movements survive their founders routinely. They survive best when the founder is taken from them. A sudden vacancy would not end the movement. It would hand it a martyr and hand the successor a mandate.

And it would hand the state a pretext. The Reichstag burned on February 27, 1933. The emergency decree came the next day. In Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, a gunman produced not collapse but a raised fist and a wave of sympathy. A government already testing emergency powers would not treat a sudden vacancy as an ending. It would treat it as an opening.

Link six: peace follows

The final link asks the United States to make peace with the state that killed its president. No American public would accept it. No American government could survive proposing it. The formula ends not in peace but in the war it was built to prevent, this time between the two largest nuclear arsenals on earth.

The verdict

On the American side, the formula fails at every link after the first. It does not break the spiral. It feeds it, then hands the spiral a martyr, a pretext, and a foreign enemy.

On the Russian side, the question stays open.

Link one held. Russia without Putin might be a different Russia. What the formula got wrong was not the destination but the hands. Every case where a leader's death changed a country's course for the better shares one feature: the change came from inside. Stalin's successors ended the terror because they feared it themselves, not because anyone abroad made them.

Whether that happens in Russia depends on whether the people around Putin decide the war costs them more than it gives them. That calculation is happening now, in rooms no one outside can see. The outside world can raise the price. It cannot pick the outcome.

Hundreds of thousands dead. One man ordering it. The arithmetic is real.

The formula is not. 

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.

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 Filing Cabinet Never Lied to Me, I Just Kept Changing the Rules

The Mess That Isn't One

For most of my life I've described my own organizational skills the same way, apologetically. I'd call them a nightmare. I'd say I work in a round robin, jumping from one piece of a project to another whenever I hit friction, following whatever sparks interest at the moment, circling back later to pull it all together. I'd say my filing, physical and digital both, is a disaster I've never solved in decades of trying. And I'd say all of this like it was a flaw I'd learned to work around rather than fix.

I want to lay out what I've come to understand about that pattern, not because I think I've cracked it, but because I suspect a lot of people with ADHD brains, or brains wired something like mine, have lived the same confusion without ever having language for it. If any of this lands for you the way it's landed for me, that's the whole point of writing it down.

Two different systems, and only one of them was ever broken

Here's the thing I got wrong for years: I treated "how I organize" and "how I produce" as the same problem. They aren't. They're two entirely separate systems, and only one of them was ever actually failing.

The producing side, the actual work of writing, filmmaking, tech writing, whatever the project, has never been the problem. I've moved through projects fast, one foot in front of the other, doing whatever seemed most productive or most interesting at the time, switching to something else the moment I hit an impediment, working multiple fronts until they converged into something finished. From the inside, that always felt chaotic. No plan, no sequence, no visible structure. But the results were consistently strong, often produced faster than people working a more linear, methodical way.

The storage side, archiving material, categorizing information, filing papers, remembering where things went, is the part that never worked. Every system I tried to build for it eventually became confusing and then just fell apart.

For years I conflated the two. I assumed the chaos in my process was the same chaos causing my filing problems. It isn't. The production chaos was never actually chaos. It only looked that way because the thinking happening underneath it was invisible, including to me, while I was in the middle of it.

What the production side actually is

I spent years as a technical writer, and I had a habit that, in hindsight, tells you everything about what was really happening. When someone requested a document, I didn't write one version. I wrote three: what they explicitly asked for, what I thought they actually needed in order to use it well, and what I suspected they didn't yet know they'd need. Every time. Across companies, across states, across managers who had never met each other and had no shared context for what I was doing.

They almost always chose the version that matched their original request. That was their call to make, and I was never bothered by it. It usually worked fine for them. Sometimes it didn't, and I could see that clearly when it happened, quietly, without saying anything.

What made this strange to the people I worked for wasn't the three versions. It was the process that got me there. I'd take notes in a meeting, write a first draft, and hand it over, and it would come back looking, to them, like I'd missed the point entirely. "How are you so off track here?" Then a second draft, closer. Then a third, final draft, the one they'd originally asked for, landing with a precision that visibly surprised them. One manager once asked me directly how I'd gotten to something so right, so fast, when my first draft had been so wrong.

The first draft wasn't wrong. It was me mapping the terrain before committing to a path through it, walking the version they hadn't asked for and the version they didn't know they needed, in parallel, before converging on the one they'd requested. What looked like being off track was actually the width of the search happening before the narrowing. The confusion those managers felt, more than once, in more than one company, wasn't about my competence. It was a mismatch between how they'd been trained to expect a draft to evolve (straight line, incremental correction toward a fixed target) and how I actually worked (wide first, multiple models held at once, fast convergence once the terrain was known).

There's a real term for this, sometimes called divergent-then-convergent processing: generating broadly, including deliberately exploring paths that won't be the final answer, before narrowing to the target. Most people are taught to go straight at a request. That method skips the information that, for me, is exactly what makes the final answer precise. Going wide first isn't a detour. It's how the correct answer gets found.

What the storage side actually is

Now the part that never worked, and still doesn't.

When I try to build a category system, physical filing, digital folders, doesn't matter, the categories I settle on make sense to me in the moment I create them. Weeks or months later, they don't hold. A document that felt like it belonged in one category when I filed it looks like it belongs somewhere else entirely by the time I go looking for it, because what I was thinking about, what mattered to me, has shifted. The framework itself doesn't stay fixed long enough to function as a framework.

This has a name too. Organizational psychology sometimes calls it schema instability: the categorization system depends on holding a consistent framework in mind and applying it the same way every time, and that consistency is exactly what doesn't hold. It's not that I lack a system. It's that my systems don't stay still.

It compounds. When I update my understanding of something, new information, a new angle, the framework changes in my head, but nothing marks what changed or when. The things I filed under the old logic just sit there, unlabeled as to which version of my thinking put them there. Later I'm trying to read my own filed material using a decoder that's already been quietly replaced. That's retroactive interference layered onto schema drift with no version history. The mess isn't that I forget where things are. It's that I forget which rules were in effect when I put them there.

A pile of unfied papers builds because filing requires a decision I've never been able to make reliably. Scanning becomes its own time sink for the same reason: it still requires deciding where something belongs, so it just becomes a digital pile instead of a physical one. The frustration isn't laziness. It's hitting the same broken step every time, no matter what medium I try it in.

Why this matters, if you recognize it

The reason I'm writing this down isn't to complain, and it isn't to make a case for my own process, though I'll admit some pride crept in while thinking through the tech writing years. It's because I think a lot of people with minds like mine have spent decades doing exactly what I did: treating the disorganization as the whole story, and missing that the "chaos" driving their actual work might be a completely different, and completely functional, system.

If you produce well but can't explain how, if your first attempts look wrong to other people right up until they suddenly aren't, if your filing has never once made sense to you a year after you built it, it might be worth separating those two threads the way I eventually did. One of them might not need fixing at all. The other one might never fully resolve, and that's worth knowing too, so you stop treating it as a moral failure and start treating it as a known cost of how you think.

I still don't have a solution for the filing cabinet. I'm not sure I ever will. But I finally understand what it is, and what it isn't, and that on its own has been worth the years it took to work out.

We Once Loved the Birth of the Internet.

We LOVED the text-based Internet.

"Information is free!" "Community, not capitalism!"

We weren't socialists, or communists, or anything but Humanitarian and purveyors of elevating humanity, education and enhancing everyone's understanding of the world around us. Many were of positions that allowed them access from higher levels, universities, research groups and so on as the Internet was disseminated on a larger and larger scope in pushing it out to every more people. Until people with not the best of intent gained access and we started to notice a downside.

People in newsgroups back in the late 80s and early 90s got run off, if not off of being online, our of newsgroups for trying to monetize OUR Internet. Our, being what we were cultivating in its best orientation for all, not just those with money, or those with military intent.

That was the deal. That was the culture. It was a positive thing, for the masses.

Around the same time, on C-SPAN, Newt Gingrich was giving fiery speeches to an empty chamber, knowing the camera only showed him, not the empty seats. Theater, not debate. A lie, not truth. Weaponizing what was for everyone, for only the few, his few.

Anything goes, once you decide you're done losing. That's where our toxic politics really got its legs.

Then the internet grew up, and it turned out to be the perfect stage for exactly that kind of theater, at scale. Gingrich-style scorched earth built the audience. Russian disinformation operations later found that same audience ready-made and went to work on it. 

I spent decades studying KGB influence tactics, going back to my Air Force years in the late 1970s. By the 90s I started seeing the same playbook show up in GOP messaging, and it floored me that almost nobody else in public was saying so out loud. 

Not until about the 2010s when people started realizing it and saying aloud what they had not that long ago claimed I was crazy for saying. It was relieving, rewarding, and irritating for the two decades of abuse, or worse, being discounted. Ignored. Looked at like I was a fool, while I watched most of us acting like exactly that. 

Especially in one political party in particular. One that finally saw it's desired fruition in electing someone like Donald Trump. Twice. Now regretting that. 

Except for those making the most money under his mob boss tutelage. 

I started noticing in the early 90s how Soviet/KGB subversive efforts against America, against the West were being picked up and used by the American Right, the Republican Party, people like Newt Gingrich. Lies sold as truth. Spin was the rule of the day, they broke that barrier and pushed that spin by the Left were lies, and lies by the Right, were Truth. Now we have what?

Truth Social, perhaps the biggest lie of them all but our biggest liar ever.

The internet still gave us real things. More community. More connection, for more people who never had it before.

But capitalism got in anyway. And got in the way, as we knew it would. We watched out dream die on the vine.

And it won. Toxic politics and toxic capitalism ended up feeding each other, each one making the other more profitable.

Now we've got broken social media, engagement over humanity, platform owners emboldened by both.

An AI now able to weaponize it ALL. Against US, We The People. For THEM. Those who own most of the money while we all are struggling.

We tried. We failed. But all is not lost--yet. Only if we let it be.

Better leaders. Better products. Dynamics that pull us together, not apart. They are out there, asking for our votes, rather than for those whose only and best interests are not for us, but for them.

They merely say it is for us, but their actions prove otherwise, constantly, incessantly. Sadly. Sadly, for us as they grow ever stronger in wealth and power. But we are waking. Slowly, sick of the abuse.

Truth over spin. Over lies. Reality over performance.

We are the People. Never forget that.

Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!

9/11: Ignorance Was the Failure Then. It Can't Be Our Future Now

I wasn’t going to talk about this as I’ve written before online about my experience on 9/11/2001. 

But I’ve now heard several people on TV this week, today, being interviewed about their experience that day and I found it curious.

At 5:56AM, on 9/11 I was on the Bainbridge Island ferry, Tacoma, headed into Seattle’s Coleman Dock terminal. The M/V Tacoma has a maximum capacity of 202 vehicles and up to 2,500 passengers.

My wife was at home with our youngest watching TV.

I was sitting in the open area chairs at the point of the ferry when she called. She told me while they were watching TV a plane flew into one of the twin towers in NYC. I asked some questions, she answered.

I am not and was not a journalist. I am not and was not a journalist. I am a military vet, USAF. I did hold a secret level clearance for nuclear weapons. But I was a technical writer and had studied the Soviet Union for decades. In the 1990s I began to notice similarities between active measures by the KGB against America and others (certainly the UK who taught us a lot during WWII and the ABC coalitions about the Soviets).

My comment was that we were potentially and technically in a state of war now, with someone who had just attacked us. Though it’s still “possibly” and accident.

A few people sitting yards away from us, next to my friend I whom I sat with on the ferry sometimes, looked at me nervously and I could see them looking away, but leaning slightly in my direction.

A commercial passenger plane simply does not accidentally fly into the largest building in NYC. But still, it could be an accident. Accidents DO happen. But the coincidence here was remarkable to the point of ridiculousness.

And then she exclaimed aloud. I asked what happened.

She was silent.

Then she said while we were talking, another plane had flown into the other tower.

That was when I said, “Then we are technically and definitely at war with someone. We have just been attacked, twice. We just don’t know yet who attacked us. But it was an attack.”

I had said that louder than I meant to, but also louder because others needed to know, though not unreasonably. After I said it, I felt I should announce it. And yet, I did not. Information? Panic? On a passenger ferry? I was unsure the protocol. So I lowered my voice. Enolugh had heard me to look into it if they were curious enough and I was sure they would hear all about it once they arrived at work.

I looked at my friend next to me who had a very worried look on his face.

I looked around the large cabin and I could see people looking at me from yards away with concerned but questionable looks on their faces.

Were they wondering, ‘Was this guy on the phone nuts?’

I quieted down and considered my wife, our child home sick that day, my son at school, my position on a ferry and the tall building for work I was headed into and began to feel a little exposed. And worried.

I considered our house in the back of Suquamish, Washington, on a couple of forested acres in the woods just off Bainbridge Island. It is the small town where Chief Si'ahl of the Duwamish tribe—Seattle’s namesake, is buried.

I told her there was nothing to worry about as she was safe where she was, my older son (who has a different mother) was safe at school.

She asked if I was safe. I did not feel safe. I looked around the skies out the large ferry windows and saw nothing. I thought about the building I was headed into, not Seattle’s tallest but still a 16 floor building that stuck up higher than surrounded buildings and felt I was lying as I told her, “I’ll be fine, I’m sure I’ll be safe.” She asked me to turn around and come home. But I said I need to at least go into work to see how things were.

I ended up spending the day then many of his headed home a little early out of respect for our frightened families at home. Someone pulled a TV on a cart into our area at work and we had the news on all day.

During that day there were USAF fighter jets flying low over our building.

On the way home there was a Coast Guard RHIB—Rigid-Hull Inflatable Boats (sometimes RIBs) with a mounted .50cal. that followed us to port and remained there for some time every day going back and forth. It was a relief that first day or two but then began to be concerning, worrisome.

Why do I mention all this?

Because I was informed and aware when the planes hit, and I'm not saying that to brag. I've been hearing people talk this week about how clueless they felt in the moment, how they didn't know what was happening.

One person said that when the first plane hit, he was stunned but aware, and when the second one hit, he knew it was Al Qaeda. He was a journalist who'd been stationed in Afghanistan not long before.

My point is simple.

I find it strange that so many people didn't know, at least fairly quickly, that we were under attack, or even ask themselves who was doing it. I find that unsettling.

By the second strike, and certainly by the Pentagon and Flight 93 (where the passengers themselves refused to let the terrorists finish what they started), there was no way this was an accident.

This wasn't rocket science. But it was a learning curve. Now we know. Europe had warned us for years how, if not this kind of attack could happen, we should be more prepared. We ignored them. We were America. Protected by vast oceans on either side. An anachronist view.

This wasn't rocket science. But it was a learning curve.

Now we know. We just weren't looking for it—we didn't think it could happen here.

We were wrong. Ignorance was the failure then. We cannot afford it now.

And yet we have an administration that doesn't fear ignorance—it depends on it. That's not incompetence.

That's autocracy. 

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!