The Chattering Class

 

My father did not fish, play ball, jog, play a musical instrument. (He did play opera on the radio, which was enough to drive me and my brother out of the house, but that was, mercifully, only on Sundays.)

Edward Steed, The New Yorker 1/19/26

He did go to the gym and pump iron.

When he was in his twenties he played handball.

But when I knew him, he mostly read. 

He read the Washington Post and on Sundays, The New York Times. And there were always books scattered around. Reading what others wrote seemed important to him. This was before there was way more written and easily accessible than you can possibly consume. 

The only political rally he ever attended, to my knowledge, was the famous  March on Washington, Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The rally was at the Lincoln Memorial, and people fanned out along the reflecting pool, and he had some time off from work that day, what with all the disruptions from people flooding into Washington, D.C., and his office was not far from the Mall so he wandered over. When he got home that night, he remarked that he had stood around and listened to some of the speakers and he particularly liked one of them. 

"Haven't heard rhetoric like that since Roosevelt," he said, admiringly. 

My brother turned on the TV with the news in the other room--it was about dinner time and the evening news, which then came on only at one hour of the day, was on-- and there was Martin Luther King in the midst of his "I have a Dream" speech and Pop pointed at the TV, "Yes! That's him. That's the guy!"

My brother and I watched it with him, and my mother wandered in, and we all watched and listened. 

"Now, that's rhetoric," my father added after King finished.

My brother was home from college, it being August, and I was 16 and had worked at the swimming pool all day. My mother, a school teacher, was in the last week before she was going back to work. We were all home that evening. I don't recall my mother saying anything, but she was smiling as she listened. I don't recall us talking about it.

We all had our lives--my brother was headed back to his senior year in college, and after that, medical school. "Current events," i.e. politics, were of interest but didn't affect us personally, in our home in suburbia, or at least it didn't until some years later, after my brother graduated medical school, and got sent to Vietnam. 

As the civil rights and anti-war movements picked up momentum, I would go to anti war marches during my summer breaks home from college. 

Four years later, I was working at the National Institutes of Health for my summer job, and I met Mickey Hutchens, a Black Howard University medical student, who worked in our lab. There was a ravishing blonde woman who worked in the lab, Sue Hayes, from New Jersey who went out with us to various bars Mickey knew, where they snatched your beer bottle as soon as you drained it because they didn't want those bottles used in bar fights. 

We went down to the Washington monument for some demonstration one evening and they sang "We Shall Overcome," and Sue sang along, but Mickey winked at me as we were walking back to our car, and he said, "She sings it, but she doesn't feel it." 

I had no idea what he was talking about. 

Later, I understood, when I got to know her better. 

She looked like a mix of Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie--same blue eyes and blonde hair, but Sue was prettier than either. I didn't care much about her political views, actually. I was 20. I had hormones. People nowadays talk about how kids don't care about big issues because they are too focused on their iPhones. We didn't care because of hormones. Probably the same thing works today.

All this is to say, people have their own lives and events, and issues are not what drive most people.

So I read a Substack article about Heather Cox Richardson written by Nate Silver, who apparently is envious of HCR's huge Substack audience. She is the leader of one of the three factions of the Democratic party:

1.The Richardson Resistance Libs faction. 

The other two factions are: 

2.The Capital L left faction  

3. The Abudance Libs (led by Ezra Klein) 3. 

Personally, I have never understood all the attention given to the number of hits or the number of "viewers" thing, which seems to obsess Silver, PBS News and even Paul Krugman. I sign up for lots of Substacks, the freebie option, and maybe read the first sentence.

What does a click really mean? Just because lots of eyes follow a woman into a room doesn't mean they are liking her. 

I understand if you pay for your Substack subscription, the author gets money and Silver estimates HCR makes millions from her Substack which has millions of "subscribers."

But if most of her subscribers are like me, they've stopped actually reading her posts.

I never pay for stuff like that, and I don't often read HCR's Substacks beyond the first sentence any more because it's like listening to myself think--no new insights. Yes, yes, yes. Yada. Yada. 

Maybe if she spent more time examining the opposing arguments, dumb as they are, if she did the aude alteram partem thing--hear the other side--it might be more engaging. But she is really just one polemic after another. 

Krugman (who I also get for free) I do read, until the charts, and Paul Offit's Substack I read all the way through every time. Offit starts with the latest inanity from RFKJR, playing a video of him croaking out his argument and then Offit takes it point by point and demolishes the whole thing, in particular, at length, thoroughly.

Krugman at least mentions the stupid things his prey have said, but then blows them up with graphs and charts and math I sort of follow.

Am I influenced by HCR? 

It's really all just stuff I already thought, but maybe I get a phrase or two I can use if I ever find myself debating a MAGAhead, but I almost never do debate MAGots now. 

Which, by the way, brings me to the topic of argument : I'm sorry to see Sig Sauer Savant bow out from commenting on this very small blog, with no where near a million viewers. He got sucked in commenting on "Anonymous," who I long ago realized is not actually a living breathing human being, but a robot and it seemed really weird to be going back and forth in heated debate with something which is no more sentient than a slot machine at a casino.

This bot comes very close to sounding like HAL (in the Stanley Kubrick movie "2001") which sounds very human or humanoid, but eventually, the human protagonist realizes HAL has gone rogue and has to be undone, and so wires get pulled and HAL winds down and ultimately winds up singing, in a very slow dirge, "Daisy, Daisy," which was one of the first songs this prototype for AI had been taught. And that's where, I'm afraid, BOT ANON is, winding down, spinning out the early stuff. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U0XpiqxXZ0

Sig Sauer Savant, is clearly a human being, with a back story, an evident military background, and I'm guessing some post deployment job in police or security but clearly a fondness for guns. And, this being a New Hampshire blog and Sig Sauer having its headquarters here...well, we can draw our own conclusions. 

But anyway, all I meant to say is there is reading, and listening and politics as a hobby, but in reality, most of us have our real lives we live until we are personally faced with some hooded goon on the street, but until we are mugged we don't think much about the police, or the government or what going from democracy to totalitarianism means for us individually.

The Letter

What do you do when you have a piece of evidence which looks so convincing, you think there is no way anyone can see it and not be convinced, but then you remember, there are cult followers who will see that thing and simply not see what you are seeing? 

So here is that piece of evidence, in the form of a letter written by Donald Trump to Norway's leader:

Dear Jonas,

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

All you can say is, well, let's let it fly and see what happens.

If you can't see the brain rot in this, well, that's another problem. But as far as Donald Trump's brain, this is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt whatsoever: You didn't give me the Nobel Peace Prize, so I'm going to attack Greenland. Well, okay, there it is.

I know, there will be Americans who read this and smile and say, "Go get 'em Donald! 'At's our boy!"

To me, however, this is like that CCTV tape in the Netflix series "Adolescence" where you are in total sympathy with the 13 year old boy who has been arrested by police for the murder of a girl, a classmate, and you believe him, because he is so convincing, until you see the CCTV tape showing him stabbing her repeatedly in a parking lot.

That is what is called "dispositive" evidence.

But, in Trump's case, there can never be such a thing as dispositive evidence because look at the people viewing it.

Trump's Principle, Their Village

 

There is a wonderful scene in "Dr. Zhivago" when Zhivago, captured by a partisan group led by a particularly blood thirsty partisan is brought before this fearsome man and, unexpectedly, the partisan engages him in a discussion of principles, why the partisan is fighting for the Reds against the Whites. It's all a matter of principle he tells Zhivago. 

"Oh?" Zhivago says. "I saw an example of your principle on the train ride out here: A village was burned."

"They had been selling horses to the Whites," the partisan says. "It was a matter of principle."

"Yes," Zhivago rejoins, "Your principle, their village."

Mad Dog was reminded of this at a meeting of the Select Board where the 5 member Select Board voted down a Warrant Article which would have instructed the Hampton Chief of Police to not sign a contract with ICE.

As is typical of Select Board meetings, the members of the Board listened silently as citizens speak in the "Public Comment" part of the meeting, but none of the Board ever replies to any of the concerned citizens and usually, none of them engage in any discussion with the other select Board members, lest the public, which is watching on Channel 22, should be informed of the thinking of these gods rendering decisions from Mt. Olympus. 

One of the Select Board members, Amy Hansen, who had been elected with the endorsement of the town Democratic Party, broke with this code of silence, and said she did not want to make this Select Board action "partisan," before voting against the other Democrats against supporting the warrant articles. 

"Well," replied Carleigh Beriont, a Democrat, "Due process is hardly a partisan issue." In the end only 2 of the 3 Democrats on the Board voted for the article and the 2 Republicans against, * along with Amy Hansen who is now referred to in Democratic circles as a "DINO."

Less than a week later, Renee Good was shot in the face by an ICE agents in Minneapolis, a cold blooded murder, recorded from multiple angles. It was, one might say, a murder by a partisan on principle.

Mother murdered on Principle

Chris Muns had introduced the warrant articles for the Board's consideration. Chris speaks Dutch and lived with his family in the Netherlands, and he is very aware of Anne Frank, who was arrested for being an illegal immigrant, deported and killed in a concentration camp. He says he does not want to remain silent in America under current circumstances. He happens to represent Hampton in the state house of representative in Concord. 

On the ballot, below the text of the warrant article will be a line in bold letters: NOT RECOMMENDED BY THE SELECT BOARD. That's another Hampton tradition. There are 30 pages of warrant articles, and most voters know little about any of them, so they simply read the recommendations of the Select Board, or the School Board or the relevant board and vote that way. It's supposed to be Norman Rockwell civic participation in town government but, in practice, it looks more like Soviet Russian elections: Recommended by the authorities, or not.

During the Vietnam war, an American general famously replied to a reporter's question about a Hamlet which had been napalmed by his forces. The village had been giving aid to the Viet Cong, he said  and he added, "We had to destroy that village to save it."

Napalmed on Principle

That's what Trump and his toadies Hegseth, Leavitt, Noem and Miller are saying now.

* Technically, this is not entirely accurate. Rusty Bridle voted against the article, along with Amy Hansen and Chuck Rage was absent, but we are told he will be allowed to vote later and he is a well known "dead Red" Republican so his vote is thought to be a forgone conclusion. Hegseth and RFKJR might denounce Trump tomorrow, but that has about the same chance as Rage voting for this warrant article.

The Good, The Bad, And The Truly Hideous

 

So now we have the wagons circled, and Trump and his hideous henchmen are claiming this is all about rescuing White Minnesota, where so many Scandinavian immigrants settled a century ago, being defiled by Black Somali immigrants, who are eating their neighbors' pets and maybe even thinking about inter breeding with their White neighbors.  

And we have Trump claiming he won Minnesota in both elections, which means, of course, he is invading that state because he sees Minnesota as a festering wound, knowing the election results there showed he could not win an election for dog catcher there, even among those descendants of Scandinavians. 

The blond folks have rejected him and he's going to make them pay.

When soldiers, still in uniform, returned home from Vietnam, Americans in airports shouted at them, "Kill any babies today?"

Now it's ICE hearing the chants: "Hey, Hey, ICE go away. How many mothers did you kill today?"

American soldiers were called "baby killers." Now American ICE agents are already being called, "Mommy murderers."

Now ICE men are facing the "How many mothers did you kill today?" taunts.

Even if ICE ever did anything positive or constructive, how many Americans will see them as anything other than state sanctioned mother killers?

NY TIMES VIDEO SHOWS AGENT MURDERING RENEE GOOD

 

The wonder of the 21st century and ubiquitous cell phone photography has coalesced into irrefutable evidence of ICE Agent Jonathan Ross murdering Renee Good. The online New York Times January 16, 2026 video (which Mad Dog does not have the technical expertise to import into this blog) published by the NY Times shows the agent, from various angles as he approaches Ms. Good and reaches out with his arm to fire directly at her, first through the windshield and then through the open window. 

You can scroll through, frame by frame, from different angles and see the Trump/Noem/ICE lie exposed and debunked.

Police Law & Order

It also captures the murderer's "Fucking Bitch" comment.

While we can never know for sure a person's motives, we can understand the thinking of an angry man,  the dictator of the streets, whose every command must be obeyed. We can see that once his authority is ignored, he will do anything to restore it. And we might consider his belief that Ms. Good's failure to obey his command is tantamount to insubordination, but, of course, she is not a soldier under fire who is fleeing the fight; she is a frightened woman fleeing an assault. 

Irrefutable video evidence convicted Derek Chauvin, whose own certainty that he was a street dictator whose orders must be obeyed on pain of death. The same would clearly have to happen here, if Jonathan Ross ever had to face a jury of his peers in Minneapolis. 

That is unlikely, as Trump and his cabal will do everything to whisk him away to some hidden location, and hide him as deep as the Epstein files.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant and Trump fears nothing more.

Phony Tough

Never did the ICE agent's torso or legs get run into by Ms. Good's SUV. He was firing his weapon,  and as he fired his legs slipped on the icy street, and his body slammed into the car which had already mostly passed by. He was not hit by the vehicle; he hit the vehicle.

It's all there for anyone with an internet connection to the NYT front page today.

The evidence is dispositive. It comes as close to showing the workings of a man's febrile mind as anything can: He was furious this impudent woman did not stop, and he was determined to exert his dominance in a homicidal way. 

A man like that should never be armed by the government. In that sense only, one might say he was innocent. You do not blame an attack dog for lunging at a citizen and attacking that innocent passerby--you blame the man who put that dog and his handler on the street where it was apparent only this result could come, given enough time.

ICE Would Not Mess with Her

Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Vance, Stephen Miller the whole hideous mob orchestrated a brew of nitroglycerin which they placed on that Minneapolis street, and then they took up the howl and blamed the victim when it exploded.

The MAGA Howl

 

Some say what we have in Trump is chaos, but Mad Dog does not see chaos. There is discernable order. Trump orders in the psychopaths he's recruited (at the cost of millions) into ICE and Border Patrol, violence ensues, because blood is their argument, and then Trump goes on Truth Social to claim it is all the fault of someone, anyone not him and his.

Trump's TRUTHS:

1/ "All the patriots of ICE want to do is remove criminals from your neighborhood." 

Oh, criminals? Like Renee Good?

2/ Joe Biden is responsible for admitting scores of "Dangerous people and criminals into Minneapolis and all ICE is doing is cleaning up his mess and because they are doing this, crime is way down in Minneapolis." 

Well, crime by the citizens of Minneapolis may be down, but crime is way up because ICE is now committing all the crimes.

3/ Crime has been suppressed in Minneapolis by ICE just the same way it was suppressed by ICE in Chicago. 

Of course, crime statistics are where you find them, but crime fell in Chicago long before ICE arrived and the new crime wave was an ICE crime wave.

4/ "FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING."

Well, that's a lot to unpack. We got a day of something big coming. Rapture is just around the corner, in a van driven by ICE. 

All this is stuff we've seen before. And, if the pattern (which is a pattern, not chaos, a modus operandi, not chaos) holds the next thing is FOXNEWS, and the rest of MAGALAND will take up the howl. And here it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG_EPeGz9IQ&t=130s

It's just like Zootopia, where the wolves take up the howl. They can't examine it. They can't think about it. They can't ask if it's true. The can only howl. And that's the Trump pattern. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw0c9z8EllE

The real wonder is that even a blog with as tiny a presence as Mad Dog has attracted it's very own AI wolf to take up the howl. But like the moneys of St. Louis, it's not 100% clear whether this is a human being or this is  simply AI. 

ICE Murders "F*king Bitch" Mother

 

Walking downtown today, at the corner of Lafayette and Exeter roads I spotted a group of 20 mostly elderly men and women holding up posters. Cars were honking and flashing thumbs up, and there was the occasional bearded man leaning out of the window of his pickup truck flashing the middle finger at them. They responded, "We love you, too."

They could have said, "I'm not mad at you," as Renee Good told her executioner in Minneapolis.

They held up signs saying, "Enforcement Is Now Execution," and "ICE=GESTAPO."

I stood there for about 15 minutes watching and listening, and I had never seen so many thumbs up, or heard so many supportive honks from folks in passing traffic. And I've seen dozens of such sign holdings at that intersection, which is where citizens go in Hampton to register their opinions for public consumption. It's the Hampton version of Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. That corner has hosted the local mad woman with her bullhorn, who rails about the Obama's birth certificate and Biden's laptop. There has been a guy waving a Palestinian flag, and during elections there are MAGA mob people and Democrats on alternating days.

But today, it was just citizens reacting to the murder of a mother in Minneapolis. One man in a pickup truck started shouting about Bill Clinton and spouting the cut and paste QANON stuff about leftist, elitist, DEI, replacements. 

But, then again, even a tiny blog like this attracts the cut and paste of the MAGAmob, like the AI/BOT troll, which cuts and pastes the Stormfront/WarRoom/Infowars stuff, triggered, presumably by keywords, to which the algorithm responds, but which sometimes the Mad Dog troll just spins off into totally unrelated things about Hamas butchers in Gaza, when the blog was about Marjorie Taylor Greene or  separation of church and state. The Mad Dog troll spun out the "radical leftists have seized control of the streets of Minneapolis," and of course, the ICE agents are the heroes for shooting  Renee Good, the sweet faced mother saying, "I'm not mad at you."

Those are just the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," zombies who inhabit the internet, and our town.

What I saw on Chris Hayes this morning was different, however. The tape from the ICE agent who fired his gun into the head of Renee Good, and as she turned away from him. She had just told him, smiling, "I'm not mad at you," and then the blurred jumble as he switches from camera work to shooting, and then a voice, likely the shooter: "Fucking bitch!"

Some newscasts have bleeped that out, because, you know, it's okay to show an ICE murderer shooting--that's not offensive--but those words! Collapse of all decency if the public witnesses those words. Shooting is fine. Words intolerable.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0gyLICnWQE&t=261s

It doesn't really matter who shouted that-- whether it's the murderous ICE agent who fired the shot, or one of his accomplices--it was certainly not from some innocent bystander. "Fucking bitch" is how these masked vigilantes, these agents of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem saw her. 

Jeff Bennet ("The News Hour") was right to observe: "We used to say, 'seeing is believing,' but now we have to say, 'believing is seeing.'" 

For MAGAworld, for the Trumpist trolls, what they see is only what their beliefs allow them to receive.

Brave men with guns. Unarmed woman without a gun. Well, that cannot be. We believe she is not the sweet faced woman we see, but a brainwashed terrorist suicide terrorist. The woman in the cowboy hat (one of many costumes she favors) derides her as a terrorist. Must be! 

Later, this characterization of the dead woman got cleaned up and spun on FOXNEWS as they sensed public sentiment slipping away from them-- spinning that she was a "sad lost soul," with "a life in tatters," who had been groomed and sent out as a suicide terrorist, likely by Biden and all the leftist Democrats.

Well, we have to agree: her life is in tatters now. Shredded by ICE bullets. 

And the next wave of ICE agents sent to Minneapolis is carrying assault rifles, as if they had run into stiff resistance, from the mothers of Minneapolis. 

Look at these heroes, so brave they do not want to risk their faces being seen, carrying assault weapons as if they are on patrol in Falluja. 

Then there was the youtube of the sheriff of the county which includes Philadelphia. She is decked out in her full chief's regalia, five stars  on her collar. But she is what Vance would call a "DEI hire:" she is Black and she can barely parse a grammatical sentence. She clearly never went to Yale Law School, and could never get into Yale Law. 

And yet, AND YET, she clearly knows more law, what one might call "street law," than Vance will ever know. She begins by saying real police do not wear masks. She says no real police would ever fire into a moving car. She does not quote Tennessee v Garner (the Supreme Court ruling forbidding police firing at fleeing suspects) but she does not have to cite that decision, because she knows what real police do and she knows what murder is. She IS real police. Natural born POlice, as they would say in Baltimore. The real article, not a fake policeman, which is how she describes ICE agents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR750pj6AoM

The MAGA troll will tell you she is corrupt right down to her dirty underpants. But we know what we can see. Whatever she is, she is dead on correct about ICE agents and murder. 

You may wish for the perfect victim and the perfect spokesman for the purpose of waving the bloody shirt, but that never seems to happen. 

F*king Bitch and Her Executioner

What we have though, is enough: A woman who clearly meant no harm, murdered before our eyes and then, in Philadelphia,  a police who knows the difference between community police and Gestapo. 

Strikes Fear into the heart of ICE agents! Fearsome!