CHANGING THE DIVERSITY THAT MERITS CELEBRATION?

In the (Not Detroit) Free Press, Maeve Halligan rains on the pride parade.

Somewhere along the way, the movement that fought for gay liberation decided that gay people were the problem.

The original struggle for gay and lesbian rights was not misguided. Progress has been made. But the activist movement that was built to protect those same people has, in significant and measurable ways, abandoned them. And those paying the highest price for that abandonment are, increasingly, also, children.

Dear reader, I'm going to have to behave myself. Raining on parades?  Eating itself?

The movement has begun attacking its own. Consider the registered charity LGB Alliance—founded by two longtime left-wing lesbian activists whose sole aim is advocacy for same-sex attracted people. A murky coalition of LGBTQ+ organizations took the LGB Alliance to court simply for doing so. Their position: LGB people organizing on the basis of sex is transphobic. The movement eats itself.

That case failed, but the fact it was brought tells you everything. Gay and lesbian people across the world have drawn the obvious conclusion: The movement no longer represents them. When a community starts building escape hatches, ask what they’re escaping from.

And somewhere Riley Gaines takes a break from caring for her little girl and nods.

The organization that once marched for gay liberation now runs seminars on overcoming lesbians’ resistance to men. Many words come to mind. “Progressive” is not one of them.

By the way, let’s be clear: Over 80 percent of males who identify as transgender lesbians retain their male anatomy. The majority are, by any prior definition, heterosexual men. The movement that was supposed to protect lesbians is instead providing ideological cover for them to be coerced into accepting male-bodied partners rebranded as a matter of inclusivity.

Then there are the children.

It's not as if the Militant Normals haven't been calling attention for years.

What happens to gay and lesbian people when sex stops meaning anything? What happens to the children who may then grow up to be same-sex attracted? They’re being failed by the people who claimed to protect them.

Those who disagree with this argument are not bad people. They have been sold a story in which being “progressive” means never questioning the dominant institutional line—one in which compassion is equated with compliance. But real compassion asks hard questions. Real advocacy protects the people it claims to represent, even when that is inconvenient. Real activism does not silence lesbians, medicalize gay children, or tell a little boy who plays with dolls that he is a girl.

None of this is activism. It’s ideological enforcement, language policing, nasty online abuse, and regressive demands dressed up as virtue. And there are children—questioning, vulnerable children—who are paying the price for our collective reluctance to say so.

 It’s not bigotry to notice. It’s not cruelty to object. It’s not backward to ask who, exactly, modern LGBTQ+ activism is for.

 Be brave. Question the narrative you’re being fed. Kindness that involves lying to and medicalizing kids, betraying lesbian and gay people, rolling back women’s hard-fought rights, and threatening those who object is not kindness at all.

None of it ever was kindness.

DICK WOLF CANNOT CONCEAL WHAT PROGRESSIVISM HAS DONE TO CHICAGO.

Yes, that's revisiting an old theme, "I've suggested previously that the Dick Wolf Chicago-based procedurals are NBC's way of acknowledging that the Tragic Vision has some purchase."  Consider what transpired in last night's Chicago Fire.  The show might be available for your streaming pleasure, should you have bought the right kind of subscription.

The plot, though, is the better part of an hour calling attention to the wreckage Brandon Johnson and J. B. Pritzker have made of Illinois.  All those new taxes?  Not enough to spare Firehouse 51, as Engine 51 (in firefighter speak, "engine" refers to the pumper that puts water on the fire) is on the list of rigs to be idled.  But, the One Chicago procedurals being "How far can the cast get away with fishing off the company pier without triggering a sexual harassment investigation?,"  recent widower Dom Pascal, battalion chief at 51, gets the word about the downsizing from Annette Davis, the mayor's chief of staff, who is doing the fishing.  But she comes off as the kind of girlboss that the chief might be better off getting as far away from as practicable.  Maybe a state not run by progressives.

The episode ends with arson investigator, Captain Tom Van Meter, still in a medically induced coma, and Kelly Severeide with an assist from the police still trying to figure out who set a fire with the intent of taking out a high school principal.  During their investigation they encounter a canonical AWFUL with a red-diaper daughter who has already learned enough about the First Amendment to not rat out who the anonymous members of a Facebook group wishing ill on the principal are.  Fortunately, tech support is able to identify possible suspects to be rounded up next week.  Whether Pascal and Davis will go their separate ways is another matter.  The soap opera is the prime directive, remember?

Reap what you sow, Chicago, whether in real life or on the small screen.

TOM CLANCY COULDN'T IMAGINE DEMENTIA JOE.

I've been re-reading his The Bear and the Dragon, in part to refresh my memory about how the Chinese balance of payments went sideways in a hurry (not because of any special tariffs, mind you) and came across accidental president Jack Ryan musing, at page 540, about a press conference.

His eyes were scanning his briefing sheets for the mini-press conference.  The likely questions and the better sorts of answers to give to them.  It seemed very dishonest to do it this way, but some foreign heads of government had the questions prescreened so that the answers could be properly canned.  Not a bad idea in the abstract, Jack thought, but the American media would spring for that about as quickly as a coyote would chase after a whale.

Tom Clancy was seriously skeptical of the press, and of Democrats.  But the idea of the Easter Bunny serving as impromptu press secretary was too much even for him.

Members of the press behaving like Democrat operative with bylines, though?  Yes, from the very beginning of the Ryan presidency.  And Jack Ryan could talk smack to the journos way better than either Donald Trump or Karoline Leavitt.

THE BOTTOM STORY OF THE SEASON.

Is a lament about male "underrepresentation" in so-called literature really worthy of an Instalanche?

[B]rowse The New York Times Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list. There were none again in 2022, and just one apiece in 2023 and 2024 (since 2021, just 2 of 72 millennials featured were white American men). There were no white male millennials featured in Vulture’s 2024 year-end fiction list, none in Vanity Fair’s, none in The Atlantic’s. Esquire, a magazine ostensibly geared towards male millennials, has featured 53 millennial fiction writers on its year-end book lists since 2020. Only one was a white American man.

Over the course of the 2010s, the literary pipeline for white men was effectively shut down. Between 2001 and 2011, six white men won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction. Since 2020, not a single white man has even been nominated (of 25 total nominations). The past decade has seen 70 finalists for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize—with again, not a single straight white American millennial man. Of 14 millennial finalists for the National Book Award during that same time period, exactly zero are white men. The Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a launching pad for young writers, currently has zero white male fiction and poetry fellows (of 25 fiction fellows since 2020, just one was a white man). Perhaps most astonishingly, not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

“The kind of novel we think about as the literary novel, the Updike or DeLillo, I think it’s harder for white men,” a leading fiction agent told me. “In part because I don’t know the editors who are open to hearing a story of the sort of middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience. The young agents and editors didn’t come up in that culture.”

Yawn.  Seriously?  Yawn again.  Vanity Fair?  The New Yorker?  The Atlantic?  Esquire?  Disturbed people detailing their disturbed lives in more detail than the admittedly rudimentary Diagnostic and Statistical Manual can handle?  But so it is with the "literary novel," particularly if you're trotting out Updike or DeLillo or Roth and the disturbed sort of "middle-to-upper-middle-class white male experience" implied thereby.

MAROON SAM PIZZIGATI ON SHIP-TRAP ISLAND.

Common Dreams, in the name of equity, give other redistributionist lunatics their fair share of opportunities for me to make mock.

Sammy is too predictable.  In 2022, "we noted him channelling his inner Balph Eubank. 'The distribution of income and wealth will remain ridiculously top-heavy until we start limiting the 'rewards' gushing into corporate executive suites.'"

He then got worked up because trophy houses held their value during the bear market early in the Jarrett regency.  "[I]f you're a socialist of Sammy's caliber, all you can do is call attention to is those big houses and whine about how horrible it is there are still people living in small houses.  Real estate trading at higher prices?  Burn your woke manifesto if it raises the possibility that it's not a Musk or a Bezos or a Zuckerberg bidding up those prices."

Today, he fell off that yacht.  "How much — in our current 21st-century plutocratic climate — can our richest now get away with?"  After praising the efforts of some Swiss scolds to tax their productive citizens, he gets around to a new movie that apparently is winning some prizes.

How much — in our current 21st-century plutocratic climate — can our richest now get away with? They can, two Austrian filmmakers posit, get away with murder. Literally.

The two filmmakers, Daniel Hoesl and Julia Niemann, gave their latest collaboration a world premiere last month at the Sundance Film Festival.

“We always follow the money,” says Hoesl, the screenwriter of their just-released Veni Vidi Vici.

And the money this time led them to the story of Amon Maynard, a lavishly endowed billionaire who enjoys hunting humans.

“Decked in the epitome of rich-people elegance, Maynard seems to be the kind of man who has never heard no for an answer,” writes film critic Jose Solís in the journal Film Stage. “Killing a person doesn’t even seem to thrill him much as a fetish — it’s just something else he does in his free time.”

And what does Solis see as the “craziest thing” about Hoesl and Niemann’s “pitch-black satire about a wealthy family with a predilection for human-hunting”? The film, he notes, just “doesn’t seem that crazy.”

Why should it? As filmmaker Hoesl puts it: “Didn’t some country’s president say something like ‘I could kill someone on Fifth Avenue but still get elected?’”

I suppose if Harvard scholarship is derivative and uninspired, that is, when it's not cribbed from somebody else, why not indie moviemaking that's derivative and uninspired?  At least General Zaroff invented a new animal to hunt after he got bored with Cape buffalo and rhinoceroses and cheetah.

A STOPPED CLOCK IS ALMOST ALWAYS WRONG.

Once upon a time, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was, well, a publication written by atomic scientists.  They understood that in nuclear fission they had released great destructive power, as well as, if properly managed, an energy source of great potential.  To call attention to the consequences of misusing the destructive power, in 1947 their bulletin introduced the notorious Doomsday Clock.  "The scientists created the clock in 1947 using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero), to convey threats to humanity and the Earth."  After the Soviet Union closed up shop, the people who set the clock turned it back to a quarter before midnight.  (And the self-styled progressives who always made "turning the clock back" into a pejorative wet themselves, but I digress.)  The problem, though, with setting the clock in such a way as to suggest the Threat Level is Way Down, is that people will go about their lives without being afraid, and that way lies organizational extinction.  Thus, in the same way that the Southern Poverty Law Center no longer has anything to do with Southern Poverty, and the March of Dimes shifted focus from a polio vaccine to prenatal health generally, the people who set the clock set their sights on new ways to frighten people and keep the fundraising going.

PLAYING RAIL BARON IN THE GREAT PLAINS.

Fred W. Frailey, retired railroad journalist with experience at U. S. News, recently published Seldom Willing; A Novel of Railroading.  There's a lot of heavy reading in the reviewing backlog to be worked off, all the more reason to feature railway fiction as Book Review N^o. 1.

"Seldom Willing" refers to the South West Kansas Railway, one of the components of a fictitious Central Pacific Railroad with Chicago - Omaha - Denver and Chicago - St. Louis - Kansas City main lines; the South West Kansas and the Omaha & El Paso provided Omaha - Kansas City - Denver service.  Mr Frailey is coy about how Central Pacific came to be, the railway mania of the Gilded Age not turning in reality into all manner of superfluous lines west of the Missouri River the way it was east of there; and in this fictional world, Union Pacific and Burlington have their Omaha - Denver service, whilst the Santa Fe thwarted promoters of the South West Kansas at every turn, with Seldom Willing's promoters giving up any hopes of reaching Santa Fe and turning toward Denver instead.

Those tracks are still in operation in the 1970s as the promoter of the South West Kansas was more successful than the promoters of the New York and Ontario Midland were in getting potential online communities to subscribe to their stock sales; whilst the Omaha & El Paso made it as far as McPherson, Kansas before investors thought better of it.

So much for the transportation history lesson.  Seldom Willing might be the first novel since Fiddle Hill to use the railroad as the setting for the business and political machinations and human interactions that distinguish a novel from a picture book.  And any story that begins with a train wreck in the Marais des Cygnes River has the requisite drama.  Would you, dear reader, film a vodka commercial in the Swamp of Swans?

SEPARATING FOR LIGHT AND TRANSIENT CAUSES?

I'm going to combine observations on Kurt Schlichter's Inferno and Overlord, the two most recent Kelly Turnbull novels, now the seventh and eighth of a series, into a combined post.  The post therefore comprises Book Reviews N^o. 14 and N^o. 15, although we might view it as revising and extending a previous omnibus post dealing with the fourth through sixth novels.  In that post, I noted, "It's difficult to write speculative fiction in the middle of events, and I suspect that turning Kelly Turnbull loose to frustrate the wokies and kill people, whilst mocking the coastal cosmopolitans and their pronoun protocols and other manifestations of effete snobbery might sell more books than, oh, tackling the substantive political economy of separation, which was hinted at in Conservative Insurgency, and which calls for more concreteness as the Jarrett regency continues to flail."  That series of reviews concluded with the liberation of part of the West Coast in Collapse to prevent the Chinese from turning California into a colony.  Afterwards, the People's Republic fragmented further, with a west coast capital somewhere in Washington, er, Hillaryia, and another either in the Douglass Commonwealth or somewhere around New York.  The details don't matter; neither does the involvement of Russia on the side of the eastern half, nor an apparent European war and English civil war going on at the same time.  And, as with the previous books, the Colonel concludes, "Don't let this fiction become nonfiction."

A FUTURE PLOT COMPLICATION FOR THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC.

Kurt Schlichter has been writing a series of novels about an internal split of the United States into coastal areas controlled by the communist wing of the Democrats as the People's Republic of North America, and a surviving United States of America with fewer states.  In a few of those novels, the Democrats create a People's Militia out of liberated prisoners.  "The formula is simple enough: arm some former felons, tell them they are facing a race and class enemy, condition them to think of that enemy is "deplorable" (an Americanized version of Untermenschen), then turn them loose." That works to deal with the cowed normals within the People's Republic, but it doesn't work so well in the contested territory, or the United States, where people with field or military experience have better fire discipline.

Here's the plot complication.  Vladimir Putin is apparently freeing prisoners and turning them into irregulars.  It isn't working so well.  "They’re finally realizing they’ve been duped." They're moping off, or turning themselves in to Ukrainians, and asking not to be returned in any prisoner swaps. In addition, the recruitment videos include recorded executions of deserters.

About 20 armed inmates fled from the frontline in occupied Donetsk in recent days and the Russian military was forced to launch a manhunt for members of its own team, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Thursday. Three of the “fugitives” were killed in the ensuing search, Ukrainian authorities said, wryly noting: “Beat your own, so that others are afraid, as they say.”

The hunt was reportedly still on for the other fleeing inmates.

Even the people who do their hitch, and earn their freedom, return to Mother Russia with whatever bad memories combat brings, and their criminal skills intact.

WHAT WERE THE GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE?

Kurt Schlichter is one of the more colorful voices of the populist right, and he's written a series of novels that he hopes will persuade people an actual national divorce, with a cold or hot civil war, will be unpleasant.  The three most recent are, in his alternative chronology, Crisis, fifth in the series, which is where the unpleasantness began; The Split, sixth in the series (a seventh is in preparation), which has the first settling of scores within the sections, predating Indian Country and the revision of borders as well as predating People's Republic, the first of the series, foreshadowing the contradictions to which woke imagination is all too subject to; and Collapse, published fourth, hints at some sort of resolution, if brought about by rough men with rifles and tanks.  Between People's Republic and Collapse was Wildfire.

EXAGGERATION SELLS.

Last week's meditation on yet another flight of fantasy around the Kennedy assassination got me wondering whether the kind of freelance professional that featured in Day of the Jackal or occasionally get put forward as yet another gunman More Substantial Than Oswald really exists.

Sorry, no.  "Why, it’s like Hollywood is… exaggerating the truth."  Naturlich: there has to be the hunky, mysterious leading man, and the love interest somewhere on the spectrum between desperate housewife and useful idiot to keep the groundlings occupied.  In practice, developing the skills might involve a hitch in the military, perhaps screening for the special forces, although people who are really good at that might be cleared as intelligence officers.  That class of individuals differs from the loyal employees of a criminal organization, whether street gang or importing business.

Lots of people kill for money, but they wear other hats as well. They may work as burglars, drug mules, or bodyguards in private security firms. And while national intelligence services occasionally task operatives with targeted assassinations, it’s unlikely that any of them keep “assassins” in their employ who do nothing but kill. Of course, we only know about the murderers we catch. No one can rule out the possibility that a well-paid gun-for-hire is loafing around the Italian countryside right now waiting for his agent to call.

Apparently, the murder-for-hire market is worthy of academic study.

A recent effort to understand the market for contract killing by economist Samuel Cameron of the University of Bradford in Britain concluded that it makes little sense from any conventional economic point of view. “The majority of paid killings take place for very small sums, much lower than the economic value of life and lower too than what one would expect as compensation for efforts and risks of the hiree,” Cameron writes.

In what may be the most comprehensive effort to understand the business of murder-for-hire and its practitioners, a 2014 British investigation scoured 39 years of evidence about hired killers. The authors found hitmen range in age from 15 to 63, with the average being 38-years old. A gun is their weapon of choice. And the most common setting is a suburban streetscape with the target walking a dog or shopping. It also remains a gender-specific occupation. The authors found only one case of a female assassin-for-hire.

The British report proposes four distinct types of contract killers: novices, dilettantes, journeymen and masters. Novices are young, first-time killers often steeped in violent street culture. Dilettantes are generally older and come to the grim business out of dire financial need. Journeymen are local enforcers often well-known to police. Only the final category of master—someone who travels from hit to hit and leaves no local trace—matches the standard Hollywood image of the cool professional killer. It was also the only group for which the authors could find no solid evidence.

That's not the same thing as "no prospect of evidence."

“From discussions with our network of informants, it was clear that ‘Masters’ do, indeed, exist,” they write, arguing they often come from military or paramilitary backgrounds. “However, this is impossible to verify with any certainty. These ‘Masters,’ by virtue of evading justice, exist in the shadows—almost like ghosts—and it has therefore been impossible to build up any concrete picture of them.”

The popular image of the ghost-like assassin may thus be real after all. If it is, however, we’re still reliant on Hollywood for the details.

Yes, although it's not always clear where the boundary between the free agent and the intelligence officer lies.  Consider the early 1960s of the Jackal and the Kennedy speculations.  There were attempts by disaffected French veterans to kill Charles deGaulle, motivated by pique over his change of heart regarding Algeria.  I'll let students of Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon hash that out, and if they wish to engage the argument that Algeria was French longer than Texas was a State, they can dicker over the significance of part of the eastern border of Texas reflecting a late-seventeenth-century accord between Spain and France to deconflict missionary efforts to the natives.  There were anti-Castro Cubans who might have felt betrayed by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs.  In addition, there was a nasty civil war involving Congolese independence from Belgium that might have been another brushfire in the Cold War.  (The fine points of that conflict did not register on a grade schooler in Milwaukee.)  Lots of opportunities for intelligence officers, soldiers of fortune, and local gang members to participate in any of those events.

The Jackal's resume, however, suggests a man from an upper middle class milieu who tired of the office-and-commuter-train grind and created a career as one of those "Masters," with Katanga experience and a reputation that attracted the attention of a Zionist in New York who commissioned a hit on German rocket scientists in Egypt.  I think Frederick Forsyth got that right in a subsequent novel, The Odessa File, it was the Mossad (a state intelligence service) with the motive and the capability to take down that rocket project, and snag Adolf Eichmann at the same time.  Perhaps this Jackal knew enough of the clandestine arms business to choose a code name to cast suspicion on yet another participant in the clandestine hit business.

The success of Day of the Jackal is in creating the who-didn't-do-it, as everyone knows Charles deGaulle died of natural causes, and thus the fine points of the manhunt and the tradecraft are less important than the resolution (and the role of the desperate housewife.)  I suspect, though, that a state actor would have more success using false credentials than one of these "Masters."  An intelligence service can create a legend and forge papers without the annoying presence of a passport application in a file that could be cross-checked against death records, which is what led to the Jackal using other identities.  Those additional identities involved stolen passports, and wouldn't it be simple enough for someone to notice that the newest stamp on such passports was a London entry stamp: no British exit stamp, no French entry stamp.  That was the 1960s, there was a lot more passport stamping in those days.  Presumably with the bar codes and other electronic stuff these days, there are ways to twig to a passport in wrong hands despite there being less stamping going on.  That might also make the work of the intelligence service forgers harder.

MORE ECONOMIC WISDOM FROM RAGGEDY ANN.

This meme circulated earlier this year.

It gets better.  Now a senatorial request for the Congressional Budget Office to perform a sensitivity analysis creates a fake score.  Seriously.

Q Thanks, Jen. Republicans are circulating a modified version of the CBO score for Build Back Better. In their version, it included extensions of programs without being paid for, which we understand is not how the President put forward this legislation. But the reason that they’re saying they did that is because — Lindsey Graham says, “If you believe these programs [are going to] go away [after] one, [or] two…years, you shouldn’t have a driver’s license.” We all know Child Tax Credits are not going to go away after a year. What does the White House say to that?

MS. PSAKI: Well, to quote, of all people, Norm Ornstein at the American Enterprise Institute who put this quite well — quote, “You can’t assume programs will be extended just because Lindsey Graham wants to assure that. An estimate based on what’s not in the bill is bogus and fundamentally dishonest.”

I mean, this is not a CBO score. This is a fake CBO score. It’s not about the existing bill anybody is debating or voting on. This is about proposing the extension of programs that has not been agreed to without the commitment of the President — which he’s made repeatedly, publicly, that he would never support extending these programs if they weren’t paid for, period. That has been his commitment. That is his commitment.

That might work in Washington, where budget gimmicks, sunset provisions that might as well be written on the hot side of Mercury, and all sorts of magic beliefs about the "out years" are just another day at the office. I'm not persuaded, however.

SOMETIMES THE GOOD GUYS WIN ONE.

Jessica Lerner devotes much of her attention to the continuing Peyton Place that is the One Chicago series.

When the firehouse puts together enough information to put away a scheming real estate hustler who wants an Obamaville out of his sight, and the rookie has enough street smarts to help a kid who shouldn't be on the streets get into a more structured environment, it's a good shift.

Lastly, frequent readers know how much I love Ritter and how underutilized I believe the character is, so it should come as no surprise how enjoyable his subplot was.

It tied in nicely with the primary "cause of the week" storyline that occupied a good portion of our screen time while still allowing us more insight into Ritter.

We know very little about who Ritter is outside of being a firefighter, so getting to learn a little more about his backstory was much appreciated.

It wasn't immediately obvious where the writers were going with Ritter's interest in helping out Vanessa, but connecting it back to him having a homeless friend as a teenager was a nice touch

There's enough of the tragic vision in the causes of the week, if there are, indeed, causes, to make the ongoing flouting of all that human resources holds sacred worth putting up with.

THERE'S A CITY FULL OF PEOPLE, SLEEP WITH ONE OF THEM!

Why isn't the intelligence unit featured on Chicago P.D. one massive, ongoing headache for the human relations department?  Sometimes I think the show should really be called Ruzek and Burgess and Halstead and Upton.  Once upon a time, the first two were engaged to be married, but that came undone, and there's more scoring on the rebound than we've seen of the Blackhawks lately.  "As for Ruzek and Upton, there wasn't any movement on that front, but we can assume they are still sleeping together."  Or not, or the various participants in this four-way corner are attempting not to get on the train.

The triangle does not have to be this forced.

Within seconds, Ruzek flopped from trying to hook up with Upton to asking Burgess if he can walk her home.

Based on his jumpy attitude, Burgess should have picked up on something between him and Upton.

I hope Ruzek doesn't play both women, the only two women in the unit, at the same time.

I'd lose all respect for him.

But he is, even with some additional women in supporting roles.

Why would you want anything personal -- fling or otherwise -- to jeopardize yourself or the team?

The job requires everyone to work together, trust each other, and handle tough and emotional cases.

Even hurt feelings or a break-up can put someone in danger.

And realistically, friends with benefits don't exist. Even when two people are casually hooking up, feelings get involved, and things get messy.

Anything can happen in a cartoon, which is what the Chicago series has become, with the fishing off the company pier confined to the firehouse or the emergency ward or the precinct, even with all these cast members interacting on crossover episodes.  There's a thousand ways things can go wrong.  And plot complications.

I don't see #Burzek's reconciliation happening anytime soon either.

Admittedly, it was a little bit of a low blow to have Burgess find out about Ruzek and Upton's relationships by walking in on their flirty little moment.

For people who are trying to be lowkey about their romance, they really are not lowkey.

I enjoyed Upton and Burgess' heart-to-heart, but I didn't understand Upton's reasoning for keeping it from her.

That Upton didn't want to come clean about the romance because she once dated her Sgt., and people thought that was the only reason she got promoted was a lame excuse.

At the firehouse, there's a dual problem, with Severeide keeping Kidd at a distance in an attempt to make her promotion to lieutenant seem less corrupt, and that's not going to go well either.

It's the precinct that I want to focus on, though, where the turntables turn.

Ruzek cannot be mad that Upton moved on if he's having a baby with his ex.

I was surprised by how quickly Burgess told Ruzek.

I expected her to grapple with the decision or at least push it off till she found the right time to tell him, but coming out and saying it proves she respects him.

And it's not like Burgess could have talked it through with anyone else on the team. Rojas is too new, and Upton is the baby daddy's ex.

It's a new season, finally, after lots of delays recording the show, and it's shaping up as Ruzek and Burgess and Halstead and Upton, at least for now. "Everyone on the team has either lost a child due to the job or has chosen to remain a lone wolf out of the fear that the job would inevitably bring loss and pain. "

So far, though, every attempt by a civilian to get involved with a first responder has gone badly.  The script writers telegraph those, in increasingly cartoonish ways.  Thus far, neither human resources nor Me Too have been heard from.

WHAT WILL THEY DO IN 2022?

Former senator Bernie Sanders has never, and I emphasize never, understood the distinction between stocks and flows. "By taxing 60% of the wealth gains made by just 467 billionaires during this horrific pandemic, we could guarantee healthcare as a right for an entire year."  Nowhere in the diatribe does he mention the excessively long house arrests that are turning the yeomanry into paupers.

RUSH LIMBAUGH WENT THERE.

He was being funny, late on last Thursday's show, and he came up with this.  "My favorite conspiracy theory is that this virus is the work of a bunch of lunatic billionaires who really believe that we are destroying the planet and they have discovered that we can’t get to Mars in time and we can’t colonize the moon so they have come up with a way to get rid of billions of people to make the world have a longer survivability potential."  I've been referring, recently, to Tom Clancy novels, but I had no plans to go anywhere near Rainbow Six.

As the novel involves precisely that kind of lunatic billionaire, as well as some clandestine work to shut down the plan and disappear the plotters, because of the risk of "a global panic when people realize what a biotech company can do if it wants," though, well, perhaps there's another story in it.

Regular readers of Tom Clancy know that the likelihood of a secret being blown is proportional to the square of the number of people in on it.  The novel left a number of possible dots to connect to put together yet another story, one with the potential to topple governments.  If I had any sort of novel-writing skills, I might essay such a thing, although it might be more productive to offer some of the dots, as if a mental exercise in quarantine, should anyone wish to essay such an effort.

There are almost enough dots to make a post as long as a Tom Clancy novel.  They're below the jump.

ELYSIUM WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FICTION.

I'd call it dystopian fiction, except that the residents of the dystopia figured out how to procure the rights and privileges of the Laputans for themselves.

Perhaps that got the people with the means to get away from a less-than-livable Earth thinking about getting farther away.  "There's growing speculation that the the trend for billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to research space travel is more than just 'boys and their toys' – it could be a lifeboat to escape a dying Earth." To the Moon, or Mars?

Elysium?  Just a way station.  "In a New York Times article entitled The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet, Michael Suffredini, who is spearheading the creation of a new 'luxury' space station called Axiom, revealed the details of his designer orbital habitat."

The real goal might be Mars.  "Elon Musk has made no secret of his plan to establish a permanent settlement on Mars. He has stressed the importance of ensuring that humanity is a multi-planet species so that there will be seem of us left behind if the worst should happen."  It's unlikely that transportation to Mars will be like transportation to Massachusetts Bay, or Botany Bay.

Douglas Rushkoff has written that the overall direction of technological development was about creating an escape route for the super-rich.

He pointed out that combat robots would serve very well to guard the bolt-holes of billionaires remaining on Earth once climate change reached its end-game and described Elon Musk’s planned Mars colony as “less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.”

Perhaps so, although there are, as far as I know, no Wampanoag or aborigines on the Moon or Mars to help the settlers develop the resources. Everything will have to be transported, and the same sort of insurgency that can block a rail line would probably be able to block the supplies getting through to the space port.

But then, the niggling details of division of labor have long been a weak spot in science fiction, dystopian or otherwise.

ANTICIPATING OVERLORD?

I suppose History Channel's Vikings bringing in a gender-bending eunuch or a lesbian affair between a queen and a shield-maiden or a nun openly and notoriously violating her vows is to be expected, this being an era of celebrating transgressivity.

Why, though, invent a totally ahistorical invasion of Norway by their Russian cousins, who have already converted to the Orthodox, in order to pit Ivar's anticipation of the Higgins boat (being offloaded from hand-cranked sternwheelers??) delivering the first wave onto a beach guarded by Bjorn's Belgian gates, with bouncing bombs waiting up on the dunes?

It's all a bit much for Forbes reviewer Erik Kain.

At least there are only ten episodes left. Whatever happens will happen. The vikings seem to be utterly defeated, though, so that should make for an interesting twist on history.

“The gods abandoned you a long time ago, my brother,” Ivar says to Bjorn. “There’s no way you can win. Believe me. No way you can win.”

I sort of feel the same way about Vikings.

I'm not sure how much is real, how much is dream, and how much is an echo of Ingmar Bergman's chess game with Death.  Let's see what comes in the final ten episodes.

I'd still like to see Floki conceal that Holy Grail somewhere off the coast of the Golden Land.  Perhaps he can hide an extra large bowl there, too, the only Super Bowl a Viking has ever possessed.

IT'S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE.

History Channel's Vikings, which first sailed some seven years ago, and I've long had reservations about the messing about with real history and the injection of contemporary sensibilities into the show.

We're supposedly in the closing episodes of this show, perhaps by the time the growing season begins in the Northlands, and that means all the principal characters will have to die off, or perhaps deliver the Holy Grail to a sinkhole in an island off the coast of Vinland.  Perhaps I should hold my tongue about Oleg the Prophet building a great gate in Kiev and other Orthodox trappings worthy of a Mussorgsky opera, while Prince Igor is being groomed to liberate some of the khanates from the Persians, or is it Polovtsians, or am I thinking about a Borodin opera.  That's currently a side story, and there's been nothing going on in England or Ireland as of yet.

On the other hand ... what follows contains spoilers ... Goofy King Olaf has failed in his attempt to install Bjorn Ironside as the first king of all Norway, and now he and the winner of the electoral college, King Harald Fairhair, are at odds, with Olaf musing about how the outcome didn't come out the way he rigged it and there's got to be a reckoning.  With Fairhair looking to send Ironside to join his parents (I warned you there would be spoilers) in Valhalla, there's likely to be another episode of Deep State Among the Deep Waters to come.  Because a new character named Erik, who might anticipate an early crosser of the Atlantic, are we going to see this Deep State eventually sink in the deep waters of Green Bay, which is, after all, the world's biggest fjord.

But then comes the strangest plot twist of all.  Hvitserk, the least relevant of Ragnar's sons with Aslaug the Usurper, has had some kind of mushroom, and a wounded Lagertha returns to Kattegat as a serpent with a long tail.  And thus the Seer has correctly foretold that one of Ragnar's sons will kill her.  That means there must be a memorable Viking funeral, and any funeral of a sufficiently high-ranking Viking must involve a human sacrifice, the attendant to serve at Valhalla.  (Permit me a theological digression, if Valhalla is in the spirit world, are attendants or golden goblets or silk curtains really required?  The extension to those "harps of gold" the Heavenly Host are playing on that midnight clear is straightforward.)

The sacrifice, though, introduces an interesting twist on equity feminism.  As Lagertha was the greatest of shield maidens in life, her attendant in Valhalla must be from among the shieldmaidens and consent to the one-way horse ride.  Torvi volunteers.

Torvi offering to kill herself was the curveball that came out of the blue. Being pregnant and recently losing another child, you would think she would want to make sure she and her family were kept safe.

It's difficult to make sense of what was going through her mind. There's no question about whether she looked up to Lagertha. They had one of the strongest bonds on the show.

This could show how much Torvi thought of Lagertha that she would give up her life as a mother to help her get to Valhalla. It would have been a shock if followed through with the plan.

For that, I'm thankful Gunnhild managed to talk her down from it.

What this reviewer doesn't tell you, dear reader, is that Gunnhild invoked tribal law. Because Torvi is with child (and why is it that any drama involving events of the seventeenth or earlier centuries always uses that locution?) the child has no agency to volunteer to be sacrificed, and thus Torvi gets a pass from being serviced by the priests before the angel of death stabs her.  Make of that what you will.  Ironside gets to Kattegat just in time for the conclusion of the funeral, with the flaming arrows melting the ice for what remains of the pyre ship to sink.  "Bjorn is going to be unpredictable following the death of his mother. He's lost everything, including the election that he was supposed to win."

I wonder if he will call the Kievan Rus a longship of deplorables when they show up to install Ivar as a Ukrainian puppet.

DID NIKOLA TESLA ANTICIPATE THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE?

I found this (unverified) collection of Nikola Tesla quotes, among which is "If your hate could be turned into electricity, it would light up the whole world."

But if it were possible to turn that hate into electricity, couldn't you also use it to zap people who bother you?

On the other hand, if it were possible to channel electricity, wouldn't also be possible to capture it?

Perhaps (it's science fiction, after all) with a small resonant transformer in the handle of the light-saber?