Pun Salad

• Heeeere's Remy! His new smash hit: Clown World.

  Explains a lot, doesn't it?

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• In Russia … I'm told, all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Good news: my CongressCritter Chris Pappas found a happy one, as reported by Michael Graham: Another Pappas Ad Snafu: 'New Hampshire Home' Is in Putin's Russia.

  Now Pappas has released a new ad that begins, “Here in New Hampshire, we keep the government out of our homes…”

  But the kitchen where a happy family is enjoying corn on the cob and orange juice in the Pappas ad appears to be not in Manchester, but in Moscow.

  Here's the ad, which (for some reason) hasn't been taken down yet:

  This has a slight "too good to check" whiff, but I don't care.

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• Way past time to clean house. At Techdirt, Tim Cushing notes the stench emanating from the ugly brutalist building at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW: Hundreds Of FBI Employees Are Simply Walking Away From Misconduct Charges.

  The problem is one that every employer faces: when employees are caught doing bad things, there’s nothing stopping them from quitting, rather than facing the consequences of their actions. That’s the case here, where a whistleblower has provided information on the FBI’s apparently endemic sexual harassment problem.

  Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he obtained internal records from a whistleblower alleging 665 FBI employees retired or resigned following misconduct investigations to avoid receiving final disciplinary letters.

  Grassley said the whistleblower — whom he did not name — provided an internal Justice Department report that indicated the employees left between 2004 and 2020 and included 45 senior-level employees.

  “The allegations and records paint a disgraceful picture of abuse that women within the FBI have had to live with for many years,” Grassley wrote in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

  The exit of 45 senior-level employees may not seem like much, especially when spread over a 15-year period. But the problem isn’t limited to those at the upper end of the org chart. Following up on a 2020 Associated Press report — one that showed the upper echelon did little to discipline violators — Sen. Grassley is now demanding answers from the FBI about the mass exit of employees accused of misconduct.

  Supplemental light reading from Power Line:

  • FBI Offered Bribe to Bring Down Trump
  • How Corrupt Is the FBI?

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• 

  It's more than I'm willing to pay. Michael Shermer has a new book coming out (Amazon link at right), and he plugs it at his substack: The Cost of Conspiracism. He starts out with the recent Alex Jones trial, but moves on to more general observations:

  Or take Pizzagate and QAnon. Does anyone really believe that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats are running a secret Satanic pedophile ring out of the Washington D.C. Comet Ping Pong pizzeria? Edgar Welch did, and he went there with his loaded AR-15 assault rifle and a revolver to stop the crime when no one else would do anything about it. (The cost of conspiracism for Welch was $5,744 in damages and four years in prison.) But for most people who tell pollsters that they think there might be something to these conspiracy theories, their belief is more in the realm of what I call proxy conspiracism, in which the specific theory is a proxy for other paranoias (like Democrats secretly plotting to turn America into a socialist commune); or it’s tribal conspiracism (“it’s the kind of thing Democrats would do”), or it’s constructive conspiracism (“so many conspiracy theories turn out to be true that it pays to be a little paranoid”).

  Other factors are at work in conspiracism. It’s entertaining (Alex Jones once called himself a “performance artist”). It simplifies a complex world and reduces a tangle of causal variables to a single factor (Sandy Hook wasn’t caused by poorly-understood mental illness, lax enforcement of gun-control laws, poverty, family background, or genes—it was staged). It’s proportional to the event in which big events need big causes (JFK can’t have been killed by a lone gunman; Princess Diana cannot have died because of drunk driving, speeding, and no seat-belt, and Sandy Hook can’t just be the result of a mentally-ill young man with a gun). And it is comforting in the sense that the world is not as out of our control as it often seems. As scary as it might be to think there are powerful people somewhere secretly running the world, it can be even scarier to think that no one is in charge and that events often unfold as a result of chance, randomness, and accident.

  My spell checker doesn't recognize "conspiracism" yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Continuing with my rereading-Crais project. About a dozen novels left to go.

This one is a "standalone", not in his Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series. In a similar setup to Crais's previous novel, Demolition Angel, protagonist Jeff Halley is a broken cop, traumatized by his experience as an LAPD hostage negotiator: a young boy was killed, Halley blames himself.

So he's shut down, his wife and teenage daughter have left him, and he's taken a low-pressure job as police chief in a small California city. His situation is far from ideal, but it's tolerable. Until a trio of young men (a violent loser just out of a correctional facility, his wimpy younger brother, and a guy who turns out to be (small spoiler) a dangerous psychopath) decides to rob a convenience store. That goes very bad. The perps, fleeing the cops, take refuge in the Smith residence, occupied by father Walter, teenage daughter Jennifer, young son Thomas.

So Halley once again finds himself trying to save some hostages from violent criminals. But there's another complication: Walter Smith has an unusual job, and his superiors are very much determined that his work product not be revealed to law enforcement. And they're not averse to killing people in their way, or taking hostages themselves.

It's a very good crime/action thriller. (It was made into a Bruce Willis movie back in 2005.) A few too many exclamation points! As an amusing historical note, the MacGuffin here is two Zip disks; they were a thing back in 2001 when the book was written.