machination dot org avatar

machination dot org

It isn't only a Wednesday, but is still just Wednesday?

A hell of a week, a hell of a day. There’s a baseline of complications, other bigger challenges of life, and bad omens of a personal nature which I need not broadcast here—compounded by smaller urgencies, many popping up today or robbing me of last night’s sleep to be truly felt today. As is true for us all from time to time, I think.

More notably, worth sharing a little less obliquely:

It is the birthday of a friend now passed too soon. To mitigate what a tragedy and shame that was, and is, those of us who know remember him and try to take inspiration from his unique contributions and acute observations of our shared time.

It is also the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. Plenty of us have dead grandparents, many never knew theirs. Mine, like so many of a certain generation, was a true antifascist. A NAZI killer, the only kind of killer I’d be proud of. He was a Republican who would not brook any of this bullshit we have today. I’m quite certain that I am not projecting, because I earned his open respect along with his open disagreement when he reflected on an indiscretion of mine as a youth. Through that, I believe I understood his principles, and how they were—at least in part—mine too.

¡Presente! 🥃

Donny's Internal Troops

While DC’s Attorney General continues to press the case against National Guard deployed in this city, I haven’t kept up on other developments but it feels like the occupation is expanding.

Today, in a walk near the end of the H Street Corridor, I saw a squad of goons I mistook for Guard (who, generally, I’m more sympathetic to as individuals). As they got closer I saw they were a quintet of DHS HSI officers in tactical gear. Not responding to anything. Just walking around. Just being here, making sure people knew they were here.

This is increasingly like Pinochet’s Carabineros or the Soviet Union’s “Internal Troops” (or like Russia’s policing style now under Putin for the last couple of decades).

Sometimes, just sometimes, I think we’re a bunch of amateurs that have ruined it all with all these electronic and digital connections, mimicking what we find in nature far before we understand it.

Not for religious reasons, nor because of any personal deference to or fandom of a military service, this is a nearly annual stop in a personal pilgrimage.

The United States Naval Academy chapel, photographed on 19 September 2026.

Can’t go back.

Can't go back.

But we should remember what we’ve lost. And fight to rebuild those most meaningful things we still have yet to rebuild.

Ground Zero

Every event is a prison

First, this note from Popville: all for a bunch of PED bros, friends of Donny — and a whole other kind of PEDo at that: Boatload of Street Closures and Parking Restrictions for the UFC Freedom 250 Bout at the White House Starting Thursday: “Residents and Visitors Should Plan Ahead, Ride Metro”.

At the same time, the Mall is riven by fence lines everywhere, setting up for mostly partisan-backed Freedom 250 events (the “state fair,” preparation for the 4th, the Indycar “race”). This turns a grand public space into balkanized compartments that are inaccessible and unlikely to be hospitable for most of those who care to participate, except, of course, VIPs most likely to be of one persuasion: monied brownshirt bootlickers and their guests.

I’m not naive about the need for security, but I question how we provide it and suspect most of it is theater that serves other ends rather than effectively keeping regular people safe (imagine how vacating a crowded, constrained area would go?). I feel pretty certain that there is not proportionate attention to inclusively addressing root causes.

I don’t see many of these events as being truly constructed with the public in mind. That said, my one photo is of the free “FIFA World Cup 2026 Fan Zone,” not a “Freedom 250” event this one is also part of the Freedom 250 program (and one of the many balkanized chunks of the mall), though this event and space might actually have broader ecumenical popular interest — but does it need a double fence? Is there a good reason why one can’t just stride through open space that is the whole point of America’s front yard?

Reading the news is hard.

If you really read it, and don’t just skim the home page of a news outlet or headlines in whatever form your feeds take. Sometimes I am wounded just sitting here, reading about how horribly we* treat children (even the news of advancements, which should be noted and encouraged) bely the horrors.

On other days, other horrors strike me.

Meanwhile, the headlines for American politics and where power is headed (or where it is sitting, with its thumb up its butt) are rarely in sync.

  1. We, as in humanity, society writ large. There are the individuals responsible, but there are also failing systems, and a lack of leadership if not also a lack of will to obviate as many of the threats by malice, false scarcity, localized scarcity, and outmoded traditions (or the cover given by them) as possible.

Church is the State now

Among other things, I went for a bike ride today. I went around the Hill area, and eventually made my way down to the Mall. Today there was a fairly large taxpayer funded, White House sponsored “rededication ceremony” under the banner of the United States' 250th anniversary. It was first and foremost a protestant, evangelical, Christian prayer and worship event.

The perimeter of it was behind fencing.

The stage featured a faux colonnade evoking the architecture of U.S. government buildings and monuments. But the backdrop mimicked the design of a stone church with stained-glass windows. Right there, up in your face, the mashing together of a specific sense of Church and the State.

Outside the fence: a heavy police presence, including National Guard MRAPs — because that’s what police looks like in this town now. Tour buses and RVs ringed the site, branded by the various factions contributing to the performance. One of them stitched together contemporary patriotism and military service with the images of historical figures widely recognized as patriots, Frederick Douglass among them.

Douglass did proclaim a faith. He was also an abolitionist. Not sure how you reconcile defending a monotheistic worldview that includes actively pursuing policies that return to Jim Crow with anything Douglass actually wanted.

When Church is the State, anyone’s faith is a costume for your legitimacy.

Were DC ever granted statehood, it would be called the Douglass Commonwealth. Douglass made his home here while fighting for Black voting rights, women’s suffrage, and against lynching. Free DC, the DC Statehood Green Party, and so many others have been fighting for full enfranchisement of DC citizens for years. The heretics on today’s stage want the costume, not the constituency.

My head has been down, except for when it’s been in the clouds for brief stretches. Ironically, not a lot of time for trite outgassing to the web and social media. I love it when we can use it to make culture or organize against threads. I’ve been pushing for support for just such an effort.

The red foam glider landed behind the fence of 94-year-old Mrs. X. This particular fun is over for now, until Mrs. X’s home health aide comes along tomorrow, sees the glider as she brings out Mrs. X’s trash, and tosses it over the tall chain link back our way. Now on to ice cream… and taxes.

Today, we ride (because they're making D.C. shitty again)

Admittedly, many things have improved during Mayor Bowser’s terms (it seems like so much after so much pressure, and so many failings due to mealy-mouthed language and corporate capture, and a heavy sprinkling of Vichy inspo).

Regardless, Donnie J.T. and his cult are insistent on making D.C. shitty again: from reckless, malicious downsizing as opposed to reform, to an ongoing, expensive, legally dubious occupation of our streets by National Guard troops, to effectively stealing 1 billion dollars in local District taxes, to dictating sweeping changes from his myopic cataract-laden view through the highly refracting window of “The Beast."

Which, currently, means, ripping out the 15th Street NW Protected Bike Lanes (in the midst of the Cherry Blossom festival, which needs to manage teeming masses of pedestrians and cyclists alongside vehicles safely).

So, today, we ride.

Fuck this stupid war

A friend of ours is active duty Air Force. He got deployed to Qatar for a tour last spring instead of his usual stateside assignment. He’s there now. The base he’s at was one of the first places Iran hit after our attack. My spouse just texted to tell me she saw his wife and daughter arriving at school after very obviously crying together.

I mean it isn’t the same as the families that lost someone already, and we don’t know what it was about, but this is a buttoned-down military family who believes in this kind of service (in a way that, frankly, I do not) and it’s fucking shit that they’re exploited in this way and pushed to the edge in this way.

Zero regrets having fallen asleep in the process of getting the kiddo to sleep rather than my intention of enduring the Putin-esque nearly hours-long fictitious free styling of Donald Trump. However, there is a now a flat beer as a casualty.

I imagine the Board of Peace being kind of like Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank/The Apprentice. Just dumber, crasser, and if we exclude the launching power of The Apprentice in even given Trump visibility, more negatively impactful on the world.