This week we were met with scenes of police removing protesters in Barcelona, with outcries of heavy-handidness by Madrid. Absent the cries of police brutality was any suggestion of how police should handle the unwanted job of removing thousands of protesters, and what is an acceptable level of force - critical to me, as I'd meditated for 2 weeks on horrid images of US police wailing on and pounding a black man's head into the pavement for two minutes, along with unneeded body slams say of a skinny girl in a tight skirt.

More important, I didn't hear any discussion of what I'd been hearing for weeks - that Putin's bots had turned to fomenting dissension and turmoil in Catalonia, hoping for a final split that would give the EU another crisis to leave it on the ropes. This is impressive,as the story of how Russia manipulated the US election keeps snowballing as one unlikely scenario after another gets divulged.

The outcome of Catalonia's unapproved referendum will be predictable - the people who will show up will be overly in favor of secession even as the majority may be iffy, and the supposed police overreaction will be presented as proof that Catalonians need independence *now*, fait accompli. Meanwhile Putin must be sniggering in his kofje - not a complaint in sight.

The latest on the Michigan and Wisconsin elections is another shock rendered powerless as per Overton.  With Manafort basically ordering Trump to go to the seemingly unwinnable Michigan and Russia/Trump campaign microtargeting not just groups of voters but individuals, based not just on data stolen from Facebook but with Facebook's assistance as well, gives the makings of a good conspiracy novel. But it's just one piece of a much larger effort, and we simply have trouble piecing this together with the way life used to be, so we leave them as separate. Not only can't we connect the dots - we can't connect two highly incongruous photos.

Thus people will continue to say Hillary should have gone to Michigan to campaign more, even as we know the content of this barrage of microtargeting was Hillary-as-Muslim-illegal immigrant-supporting destroyer of everything American including the fictitious stance of taking away our guns - in short, completely different from the "where are our jobs?" concerns that supposedly caused the upset. What was she supposed to do, talk about jobs and health care when the Facebook and Twitter onslaught is talking ISIS in Kalamazoo?

I posted a link about just this scenario in Twin Peaks, Idaho, where 2 underage probably white kids molested an underaged girl, and local gossip and social media turned the tale into Syrian immigrants who don't exist around there, while the embargoed story (they were juveniles, after all) grew wings.

The Kabuki show isn't new - Drudge and Rush and Fox and the rest have been feeding blatantly false tales into the background noise for decades, but the delivery mechanism has gone past "just turn it off" or "those guys, they'll believe anything" to a universal footprint, "we'll come and find you".

We don't accept the absurdity in our position, the Sisyphean climb we encounter with every interaction. We don't extrapolate the knowledge that we've been fighting off Republicans for months trying to kill Obamacare *without an alternative plan*, in a way *that would kill and hurt thousands to millions* - and yet this has not significantly eroded the president or his party's popularity. Yet we keep waiting for one larger-than-life candidate to unify our progressive message and emotions, somehow we'll lead them Pied Piper-like off to the mountain of good community living. Yet in the Grimms' tale they weren't Children of the Korn, already following another piper. Somehow the rats are our target audience, but we mustn't call them "rats".

20 years ago I was complaining that broadcasters were putting most new resources into a medium that reaches 1/1000th the audience of airwaves. 20 years later, it's the opposite - few are turning on the news, but everyone's online getting pop-up and sidebar ads and other influencing content to keep our internet bubbles continually surrounding us. Once we let a few of our preferences slip out, it's a honing and amplifying process that makes our data complete.

The current legal battle brewing in UK to describe how that data was stolen and abused is informative, but you don't need an in-depth analysis to see how it works - just go click on some blender ads on Amazon.com, then watch blender ads follow you around for the next week or two. Or ever notice that only a few friends on Facebook show up in your prompts? Some algorithm has decided that those are the friends, the content, the data that you're most susceptible, will either reclick more or has been paid to promote. Sure, you can ignore the ads or click through to the rest of your friends, but will you?

The beauty in the Russian campaign is it's not trying to get everyone to move one way - it's just moving them away from the cheese they don't want you to eat. So if you're on the left, need to get you moving lefter; if you're on the right, get you moving righter; if you're near ground zero, just make you doubt yourself and depress you and otherwise just wreak little bits of confusion to make it all too complicated - maybe you just drop out.

So was that Catalonian referendum and protests and police response a groundswell of natural human sentiment, or an orchestrated parody of itself, a modern kabuki theater with known prompts and known responses, BF Skinner & Pavlovian tactics on mass scale? Well, the answer is both - you can't easily get people to deny themselves unless they're horridly drugged. But you can give them false positives to reinforce both mistaken and reasonable beliefs, and let them push themselves to a new corner.

Doesn't work on everyone necessarily, but this is a game of odds - just have to have enough numbers. Out of millions of votes cast in Michigan, they just had to make a few 10's of thousands - say 1 out of 40 to either get out and vote against their own best interests or stay home. In Catalonia, they just needed a few videos of a few hundred protesters and the police dragging them out - they could have offered protesters martinis and shoeshines and there would have been headlines of police brutality and Madrid fascism - it was pre-written. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, maybe a bit of both - can we tell? Are we even looking?

I got the news re: the Vegas shooting, and a few things spurred my suspicions - the "shooter's" brother says he wasn't a gun guy at all (so how did this inventive capacity to pull of a modernized Day of the Jackal come about?) and the guy was conveniently dead when police showed up. He was largely a loner (with missing wife), so no one much to confirm with so our imaginations can run wild. And hey, his father was a con (though not murderer) - bonus points!!!

In 1999 a funny string of apartment bombings in Moscow seemed to confirm that all Chechnyans, maybe even all immigrants were terrorists - and launched the political career of a little-known FSB agent, Vlad Putin, to take the growingly unpopular and alcholic Yeltsin's place. Lately a funny string of deaths of well-known, but not particularly endeared to Putin, Russian personalities leads to some similar conclusions. The merging of Russian and American worldviews and politics and social media interference and oligarchy cronyism isn't something to take calmly and passively, even though we're programmed to dismiss conspiracies as just mere fantasies.

People do conspire, they do undermine, they do distort the truth and manipulate people, and they even kill or cause the death and suffering of others - through malicious inactions, neglect, or simply rolling over those in the way of their goals. We've been mythologized into believing we're somehow exceptional, immune to these base causes or that we always pull up at the right time, but our history gives countless examples where we didn't.

Homage to Catalonia is Orwell's take on the Spanish Civil War (which even he got a bit wrong), a European tragedy that predicted and led to WWII, a split between two rapacious factions with insatiable own world views, which is somewhere we're at, a bloody virtual civil war that's taken casualties this week with hundreds (not "16") in Puerto Rico and Las Vegas and elsewhere, though our side has yet to be as persistent and focused on what's important, while the other side's been quite determined and extensive in its wide reach if not the coherency of its message - a coherency that we now know doesn't need to exist except in naïve Poli Sci classes and DNC planning sessions. Instead we're more influenced by Orwell's doublethink and prolefeed and upsub.

Each day confirms the worst, that things are way beyond our control, that we're finally grasping a year or two after the fact that the robbers cleaned out everything in the most improbable manner, though in this day and age, analytics allows improbability to be much more likely. And our slow awakening means this tragedy isn't near over - we're slowly glancing over the signs of a huge crime spree still trying to get some consensus that there wasn't a crime. Worse, like in The Departed, we don't even know who among the investigative team is part of and in collusion with the original spree. Administration? Congress? Political Party? FBI? Media? Russia? Political opposition? all indicted to some extent. As is the public at large. More people are worried about kneeling for the anthem than police beatings in the street or a calamity and growing number of preventable deaths in Puerto Rico. We have somehow been captured by an ideology and a method of control that keeps us predictably plodding forward slower than the forces that control and inspire and enrage and fool us.

Last Trip with Mary Jane? Let's hope not.