Tootfinder

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
.
.
.
I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

"Self-hosting DNS for no fun, but a little profit!" – Morten Linderud
https://linderud.dev/blog/self-hosting-dns-for-no-fun-but-a-little-profit/

New work laptop. I don't want to sign it into my #Apple account for obvious reasons.
Connect my Apple trackpad to the new work machine and it works fine.
Try to reconnect the trackpad to my personal Mac so I can do some homelab stuff over the weekend, not so fine. It shows up in the BT menu, but won't actually connect until I have the laptop forget the device.
Ok, I think, I'll just connect it wired since I only use the trackpad at my desk at home anyway.
That doesn't work because why would you want to be able to plug in a device with a wire and have it Just Work when instead you could get to fuck around with Bluetooth.
And of course I get to do the forget device bullshit again in order to use it with my work laptop today

Just one of the reasons I will not use #Meta products.
And why I am so disappointed in the number of good people - people I know and respect, people who are outraged at this #censorship- who still use #Instagram

Just one of the reasons I will not use #Meta products.
And why I am so disappointed in the number of good people - people I know and respect, people who are outraged at this #censorship- who still use #Instagram