The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'cartoon exploding radio.'
There's been some crazy news lately. Another Trump assassination attempt. Suspicious packages reportedly delivered to election officials in Alaska, Georgia, Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Rhode Island, Iowa, Mississippi, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wyoming. Thousands of Hezbollah radios exploding all over Lebanon.
Trump's would-be assassin is a warmonger who tried unsuccessfully to recruit soldiers to fight with Ukrainian Nazis against Russia. Ryan Routh's fringe involvement in the conflict was apparently an embarrassment to those actually involved in the war. After his arrest, according to The New Republic, even the Nazis were quick to distance themselves from him:
The Azov 12th Special Operations Brigade, with its own checkered history and links to neo-Nazism, denounced Routh, who had allegedly shown up at one of their rallies after the war began. "We would like to officially state that Ryan Wesley Routh has no connection to Azov and has never had any connection to Azov," it said in a statement.
The most remarkable thing about the suspicious packages sent to election officials is that they were reported by the media. None of them were bombs. Oklahoma officials determined that one contained baking flour. I'm sure officials routinely get all kinds of weird stuff in the mail, so the fact that this story showed up in my Google News feed at all means that someone wants us thinking that the upcoming election is more scary and dangerous than it actually is.
EDIT: emerging evidence suggests that explosives were planted in the devices by Israeli intelligence before the devices were sold to Hezbollah.
The exploding radios are slightly more interesting. The hack that produced this result is as significant as the Stuxnet revelations were. How many other electronic devices contain batteries that could be remotely weaponized by a computer virus? Maybe a few. Maybe a great many. And if Israel has this tech, the US government probably has it too.
Although these news items are wild, they're not very relevant. The establishment wants us obsessed with war and elections, but we have very little power in these domains. Where we do have power is in our own lives. In our personal and social and civic relationships. In our business dealings.
Of course, our greatest power is in where we place our attention. There are people everywhere trying to take this power from us by determining for us what we should pay attention to. War. Elections. Race, gender, and abortion. Celebrities. Shows and movies that reinforce the ruling order.
Fortunately, it remains well within our power to ignore this stuff and thereby avoid the kind of thinking it programs into us. If enough people opt out of prescribed thinking, maybe we can begin to have more constructive conversations about societal issues and what to do about them.
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