The New York Halloween Terrorist

The streets of New York City are filled this evening with children who are going door to door with their parents “trick-or-treating” for candy on Halloween. Many wear costumes of queens or pirates or bandits or even ISIS terrorists, and some carry plastic toy weapons.

In New York City’s key borough of Manhattan, the city’s 44th annual Village Halloween Parade is proceeding up Sixth Avenue, its participants lining up between Canal Street and Spring Street, and then marching north to 16th Street. Thousands of marchers are being cheered on by tens of thousands of viewers standing on the streets and watching from windows overlooking the parade route, many dressed and made up as a variety of ballerinas, superheroes, villains, animals, and ghouls.

The LGBT community in particular turns out in large numbers both as spectators and within the march itself—some being arrayed in outlandish or risqué costumes and others simply applauding the gay community’s freedom to dress and act as scandalously and publicly as it pleases. It is traditionally a night to emulate the excesses of such festivals as Brazil’s Carnival and Mexico’s Day of the Dead. The crowds roar with approval as the most extravagantly dressed marchers pass by singing, dancing, and carrying on.

This year, however, is different in kind from previous marches because this afternoon, on a bright and brisk day in lower Manhattan, a 29-year-old Uzbek truck driver, Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who was a winner of the immigration lottery sponsored by the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program—open to participants from countries with traditionally few U.S. immigrants—went on a one-man killing spree.

Saipov’s reward for winning that lottery? A much-valued U.S. Permanent Resident Card or Green Card as it is popularly known. As one of the winners of the 2010 DIV lottery, Saipov was immediately eligible to emigrate to the United States, and he moved to the Cleveland area early in 2010, relocating over the years to Tampa, Florida, and then to Paterson, New Jersey, where he has been living with his Uzbek wife Nozima Odilova and three young children, including a new-born. His mother-in-law lives in a Brooklyn Uzbek neighborhood.

The DIV Program was established by Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, and nearly eliminated in 2013 when the Senate “Gang of Eight” proposed “sweeping bipartisan proposal[s] to revamp U.S. immigration laws” that included removing the diversity lottery. A Republican Congress blocked any changes. The DIV lottery program was established to encourage people who had traditionally not immigrated to the States to become part of the diverse American immigrant mix from all over the globe that settled in the country permanently without having to wait long years for elusive Green Card approval.

Hence, seven years ago Sayfullo Saipov of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then a moderate Muslim from a relatively prosperous family, packed his bags and came to America, his new Green Card a passport to a new life. Because of language difficulties he found work as a commercial truck driver and then as an Uber driver, and except for a series of traffic tickets, had no significant criminal record. What else he did before Halloween 2017 is being established by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in a national and international investigation.

All this has transpired because this afternoon Saipov drove a rented Home Depot flatbed pickup truck from New Jersey into Manhattan and turned south onto the Hudson River bike path on West Street near Stuyvesant High School (the most selective competitive high school in the city) where he kept on driving, barreling through that bike path for about 14 blocks during which he killed eight bike riders and pedestrians and injured eleven others before crashing into a minibus carrying disabled schoolchildren. Two of the children and two adults on the bus were also injured. The dead bikers include five Argentine friends who were celebrating their 30th polytechnic school graduation, a Belgian mother of two, a young New Yorker who lived nearby, and a man from New Jersey. A sixth Argentinian was among the injured.

The bike lane was strewn with bikers’ broken bodies—several impressed with truck tire marks—and the mangled bikes of those riders. It was a gruesome scene, anticipating in actuality what the Halloween marchers would thereafter simulate on Sixth Avenue with their skeletons and skulls and symbols of death on the march.

Saipov had driven the truck down West Street in order to practice turns prior to his Halloween attack. “He had planned to continue the attack for several more miles to the Brooklyn Bridge.”

After the unanticipated bus collision Saipov hopped out of the damaged rental truck, ran around the streets briefly, yelled “Allahu Akbar” (the ancient Islamic phrase for “God Is Great” that has become the call of choice for Islamist terrorists following the 9/11 attacks on New York City), and waived two guns.

These actions immediately attracted the attention of several New York City police officers, one of whom shot Saipov in the abdomen and brought him down. He is currently alive but intubated in a New York City hospital after undergoing surgery.

The two guns in Saipov’s possession consisted of a relatively harmless paintball weapon and a pellet gun, evidence (if more is needed) that Saipov did not expect to survive the attack alive and/or that his planning was less than sterling.

Saipov left a note in the pickup truck “claiming he committed the attack on behalf of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” He left other writings in Arabic that referenced ISIS and its goals. Notwithstanding the contents of the notes, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has initially indicated that Saipov “appeared to have acted alone,” adding that “[t]here’s no evidence to suggest a wider plot or a wider scheme. These are the actions of one individual meant to cause pain and harm and probably death.”

When Saipov was first interrogated prior to surgery (pre-counsel questioning is permissible in order to forestall potential imminent additional terrorist activities in the wake of an attack) he was defiant, smug, and proud of his actions, but provided no further information, according to law enforcement personnel. He was subsequently charged with providing material support to a terrorist group and violence and destruction of motor vehicles, “Prosecutors [alleged] that Saipov planned the attack for Halloween because he knew more people would be out on the streets.”

In the FBI’s initial investigation “agents found 90 videos and 3,800 photos on Saipov’s phone, many of which were ISIS propaganda. This included videos of ISIS fighters killing prisoners and bomb-making instructions. Agents said he was particularly taken with a video in which ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‘questioned what Muslims in the United States and elsewhere were doing to respond to the killing of Muslims in Iraq.’”

Saipov was apparently radicalized online within the U.S., and was not formally connected to the Uzbekistan extremist organization known as the IMU—the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan—which was originally affiliated with al Qaeda but in 2015 switched its allegiance to ISIS. Uzbeks have been reported as assisting ISIS and its affiliates in the combat arenas of Syria and related areas for some time, and hence the sympathies of Saipov are not unusual regardless of the fact that he was not listed on the FBI or international terrorist watch lists at the time of his attack.

No international Islamic terrorist organization has claimed credit for Saipov’s attack even though that attack “closely mirrored instructions for a vehicle attack offered in an ISIS magazine last November.”

Saipov was also undoubtedly inspired by previous “lone wolf” fatal truck attacks on pedestrians in Stockholm (by an Uzbek), Nice, Berlin, London, and Barcelona, all within the past two years. In fact, such attacks are becoming the terrorists’ “attack of choice” because they require little in the way of weapons, planning, explosives, or even manpower. Some law enforcement personnel describe Saipov’s attack as a red letter ISIS truck attack that was carried out specifically as described in Islamic social media instructions.

The death and destruction such attacks leave in their wake can be substantial. As were the death and destruction this Halloween in Manhattan, a mere five blocks from the site of the twin towers of the World Trade Center that were destroyed by Islamic terrorist airline hijackers sixteen years and fifty days earlier on September 11, 2001, killing at least 2,753 people in the towers including first responders who were attempting to rescue them. Another 224 additional innocent victims perished in the nearly simultaneous airline crashes into both the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania when the final airliner was brought down by the passengers’ revolt against their hijackers, avoiding yet a third attack on a U.S. target of importance.

America is under attack. Yet again. With no end in sight.

But as poet Maya Angelou wrote, referring to the brutal subjugation of African-Americans for centuries, “And still I rise.”

“You may write me down in history

“With your bitter, twisted lies,

“You may trod me in the very dirt

“But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”

As will the American people.

[updated November 2]

Reforming Sexual Harassment in America

The Editorial board of The New York Times today asks whether the fall of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein will finally reform men. It cites the fact that even as Weinstein was expelled from movie making for his “serial predation,” many women continue to come forward to accuse other powerful prominent men of similar conduct.

But the editorial then reminds us that no one listened to Anita Hill back in 1991, or was greatly concerned about Bill Clinton’s purported dalliances, or has made any real impact on the ambition and meteoric political rise of “Grab Them By The P____” Donald Trump.

We are reminded of a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision of 2013 (with only male justices in the majority), Vance v. Ball State University, in which a female African-American dining room server alleged sexual harassment pursuant to a series of sexist incidents (and the use of a racial epithet) that resulted in the lessoning of the plaintiff’s work opportunities initiated by co-workers, unjust discipline measures, mandatory overtime duties, and more.

On appeal, the Supreme Court held that that was insufficient evidence to prove an unsafe or hostile work environment and that, in any event, the actions of the plaintiff’s co-workers were immaterial. Only employees who had the authority to hire and fire, said the Court, were capable of the kind of employment harassment that could entitle Ms. Vance to appropriate relief. The district court decision in favor of the university had been affirmed on appeal by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals before SCOTUS finally ruled against the plaintiff.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a dissent that the decision ignored the realities of current workforce conditions and did not track the definition of sexual harassment set forth in the regulations of the EEOC—which made illegal the kinds of actions committed by the plaintiff’s co-workers, who were in a position to enable the sexual (and racial) harassment.

In California, hundreds of women are speaking out about sexual harassment in doing the state’s business as elected officials, employees, and lobbyists. Their stories are eerily similar to those told by the women who accused Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, and Roger Ailes of violating their bodily integrity and attempting to set up “business” meetings in hotel rooms and other private spaces.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, “[n]o matter the details, each story involves a man with power.” And each man assumed that he was entitled to demand sexual contact or services as the price to be paid by a woman for simply trying to do her job.

Today, showing the solidarity of women on both sides of the ocean, women and their allies under the hashtag #MeToo “took part in rallies across France . . . to protest gender-based violence and assault,” including a large rally at the fittingly named Place de la République. Women were called upon to “go on the street” to show that the protestors were ordinary women “who have to live, cushion the blow, digest it and handle often-traumatizing experiences” according to Mic.com and Le Monde. Some teenage protestors reported that men had been “rubbing against” them, assaulting them even as they protested publicly outdoors. One of many French Tweets defiantly declared that, "Quand une femme dit ‘non,’ c'est ‘non’!” (When a woman says no, it is “no”!)

Gloria Allred, the California feminist and veteran women’s rights attorney, has been providing support and legal services for hundreds of wronged women for decades, “going after rich and powerful men, including O. J. Simpson, Bill Cosby and Tiger Woods.” She is currently pursuing a legal action in New York against the Transgressor in Chief—Donald Trump—on behalf of Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos who claims that ten years ago Trump assaulted her in a hotel room.

Allred explained the importance of proceeding in the courts with legal actions against sexual harassers:

“Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination, and sex discrimination is against the law because it interferes with a woman’s right to enjoy equal employment opportunity. It puts her in a no-win situation.

“If she says no to the sexual harasser, he may go into ego shock and retaliate against her because he’s upset she has rejected his sexual advances.

“If she says yes, he may get tired of her, and also not employ her or terminate her, or in some way negatively impact her life. It’s wrong. That’s why it’s against the law and that is why we are pursuing justice for the victim because none of her daughters should have to be subjected to that.”

Jessica Valenti cogently asks in The Guardian, “What I want to know . . . is where all the men are in this. Not the men accused of wrongdoing, but the men who say that they’re as horrified as we are.”

Do you know? Do the women in your lives know? How about the men? Do they go into ego shock when they are refused sexual favors in an employment pay-for-play employment situation?

As with racial bigotry and homophobia, one cannot in good conscience straddle the margins of an issue like sexual harassment which has the potential to negatively impact a woman’s career and emotional well-being for many years, even a lifetime. One must take a stand. Timidity cannot hold people hostage on this critical issue. Either women can go about their lives without the risk of continually being threatened with sexual assault and/or imploding careers, or they must slink back into the netherworld of impotent fear and distress.

The only "sides" to this issue are a Right Side and a Wrong Side. Good and bad, kind and evil, suitable and unacceptable, virtuous and corrupt. All of us must please our “Better Angels” in the Age of Assault and the Swamp of Trumplandia.

Hence, as we ask about the future of sexual harassment in America, we must look deep within ourselves and ask if we have the courage to speak out regardless of the consequences, knowing full well in this age of ubiquitous social media that legions of men who feel affronted by the subject matter per se will counter even a total stranger who speaks out with threats of violence, strings of profanity, and sexually explicit language that might in another era make a sailor blush.

The time for blushing is past. The time for action has long been upon us. We much teach our children—the boys as well as the girls—that fairness in life includes treating both genders (and the LGBT community) with dignity, civility, and equitable treatment.

We must also zealously revitalize the art of drafting statutes and lobby members of Congress to amend existing incomplete federal civil rights acts to take into account and prohibit all forms of sexual discrimination, insidiously effective as well as blatantly obvious. Our great American experiment in democracy demands this.

And when men ignore those strictures, we must “screw [our] courage to the sticking point”—a la Lady MacBeth—and call them out in the cold hard light of day. They needn’t go so far as to commit murder at our beck and call, but they had better be ready to conduct their lives without sexually harassing women and with a spirit of protecting women from the harassment of other men. Only in this way can America’s men be reformed and liberated from the harmful constraints of their sexist perspectives in these United States. Only then can they banish "ego shock" and its ramifications from their vocabulary.

The Road to Mandalay Las Vegas Style

The City of Mandalay was the last royal capital of the country formerly known as the Republic of Burma—now known as the Republic of the Union of Myanmar—and is the second-largest city in that country after Rangoon. The city has a population of over 1 million people.

Mandalay was founded in 1857 by King Mindon of Burma at the foot of Mandalay Hill as a “metropolis of Buddhism . . . on the occasion of the 2,400th jubilee of Buddhism.” It is located on the Irrawaddy River in northern Myanmar and includes a restored Mandalay Palace surrounded by a moat dating from the Konbaung Dynasty, which took power in 1752 and lasted until England incorporated Burma into its Empire in 1885 after the third and final Anglo-Burmese War. Buddhist pagodas and statues shimmering in gold leaf established the fairytale of a Mandalay rich with promise, beauty, and treasure.

Mandalay has always functioned as Burma’s main commercial, educational, and health center, and suffered extensive damage from Japanese bombing and occupation during the Second World War, as well as a series of twentieth-century fires that ultimately led to substantial rebuilding.

Isolationist and military rule plagued the city until a few years ago, and the country was profoundly influenced by the moral leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi, co-founder and leader of the National League for Democracy and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 following her imprisonment and lengthy house arrest.

(In recent months, Myanmar has also become a hotspot for massacres of over 1 million ethnic Rohingya Muslims, who speak a language akin to Bengali, are not regarded as legitimate citizens of Myanmar, and tend to live on the western edge of the country next to the Bay of Bengal near Bangladesh. Hence, Myanmar encompasses both a long overdue rehabilitation of the official government that includes Aung San Suu Kyi as well as the horrors of barely acknowledged ethnic cleansing of the Rohingyas, which has caused at least 400,000 survivors to flee from Myanmar to crowded Bangladeshi refugee camps.)

Historically “Mandalay” has signified romance as well as golden riches. The western world took notice when the English writer Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Mandalay” was first published in 1892, describing the nostalgia of an English soldier for a Burmese girl he had once kissed:

“By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,

“There's a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;

“For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:

“ ‘Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!’

“Come you back to Mandalay,

“Where the old Flotilla lay:

“Can’t you ’ear their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?

“On the road to Mandalay,


“Where the flyin’-fishes play,


“An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay!”

The poem was partially set to music by Olie Speaks in 1907 as “On the Road to Mandalay,” becoming a best-seller in piano sheet music and being recorded by a variety of twentieth-century singers including several prominent operatic baritones, as well as Frank Sinatra in a controversial jazzy version with some changes to the lyrics.

The classic 1940 movie “Rebecca,” based on the Daphne Du Maurier novel (adapted as Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature film), is set in a towering Gothic mansion appropriately named—what else?—“Manderley.”

The movie’s first line is the narrator’s recollection that, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” The dual nature of the mansion—magnificent and richly furbished as well as a bastion of dread and sorrow—foreshadows the dramatic but ambivalent storyline.

More recently, in 2016, Burmese filmmaker Midi Z released his movie “The Road to Mandalay” featuring a pair of illegal Burmese immigrants who seek a new life in Bangkok, preserving the theme of Mandalay as a place of irreconcilable opportunities for both happiness and calamity.

Fast forward to the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in America’s Sin City, Las Vegas, the country’s quintessential gambling lure in the desert, available to enrich or bankrupt wandering souls, sometimes both in quick succession.

Enter Stephen Paddock, 64-year-old real estate speculator and compulsive gambler who spent long nights toying with fate at the tables and slot machines, as well as high-stakes video poker, and who had eventually become a millionaire of sorts, entitled to a variety of gambling perks including free accommodations and meals. He had bragged about winning or losing large sums over the years, including the weeks immediately preceding his check-in at the Mandalay Bay with its lavishly decorated rooms and common areas gaudily reminiscent of the fabled golden city of Mandalay.

Paddock grew up as the oldest of four children of Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, who began his criminal career in Illinois with auto thefts and a confidence game, graduating to bank robberies for which he was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Seven years later he escaped from federal prison and was featured on the FBI’s Top 10 list for some years, being recaptured in 1978 in Oregon where he was running a bingo parlor.

Hence, Stephen Paddock’s father was removed from his family when young Stephen was only seven years old, and apparently remained away both by circumstance and choice and, in addition, was something of a gambler himself who ran confidence games and a bingo parlor.

Benjamin Paddock, who tried to run down an FBI agent in Las Vegas in 1961 with an auto, foreshadowed the death and mayhem his son would visit upon that city fifty-six years later. When Benjamin escaped from prison the FBI described him as a “psychopath” and “extremely dangerous.”

Stephen’s younger brother Bruce Paddock has a long arrest record for criminal threats, arson, vandalism, petty theft, burglary, marijuana use, driving on a suspended license, and contempt. He was “a habitual drug user and seller” who used meth and weed and was considered “extremely erratic and unpredictable.”

Consequently, both Stephen’s father and younger brother exhibited antisocial behavioral traits that would ultimately be mirrored in Stephen’s Las Vegas massacre.

Stephen had worked as a young man for the IRS and for a predecessor of defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Two early marriages failed, one that lasted three years in the late 1970s and a second that lasted about six years in the late 1980s. Both marriages were childless, and neither former wife will provide details of her married life to the public. Stephen Paddock’s girlfriend at the time of the shootings was Marilou Danley, a petite Filippino native whose long-time marriage to an Australian ended when she began living with Stephen Paddock in 2013.

Marilou was considerably more sociable than Stephen, keeping in touch with a Filippino daughter and grandchildren in Los Angeles, and even the stepchildren of her Australian former husband of twenty-five years, Geary Danley, now a resident of Arizona. Her first husband had died. Prior to her cohabitation with Stephen Paddock, Danley had been considered to be a “chatty extrovert.” That changed significantly when Marilou began spending most of her time with Stephen.

Paddock’s influence on Danley caused the couple to tend to avoid contact with neighbors in their Mesquite, Arizona neighborhood, and Stephen was deemed to be “a loner, reclusive, [and] aggressively unfriendly.” He kept a large safe in his garage, and the two were frequently absent for months at a time. Paddock was observed to be verbally abusive and overbearing toward Marilou Danley in routine social settings, curt and intolerant. Danley was publicly subservient and obedient.

Stephen Paddock’s dark side became increasingly more evident over time. Marilou has described him as exhibiting symptoms such as lying in bed and “just moaning and screaming ‘Oh my God.’” Danley was careful not to use perfume, hair spray, or bubble bath to avoid aggravating Paddock’s allergies.

Paddock was already years into his itinerant life as a full-time gambler, spending long nights in casinos and sleeping during the daytime. He had made a small fortune in real estate and business deals and tended to drink heavily while he gambled. He also liked to take long cruises on ships which featured casinos on board, frequently taking Marilou along. The cruises included stops at ports in Spain, Italy, Greece, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. Little is known about any port stops the couple may have made during their joint cruises.

Paddock’s neighbors in the town of Mesquite, Arizona, where the couple lived when Stephen wasn’t gambling or on a cruise, observed that the shades were drawn during the day when Stephen was in residence and that he was nonresponsive to efforts to draw him into neighborhood activities. At times Paddock would open his garage door, “revealing an enormous safe the size of a refrigerator.”

Something critical occurred to Stephen Paddock in October 2016 that set him on the path to mass murder. At the time he owned seven guns. But thereafter he began buying additional handguns, rifles, and assault weapons as well as huge amounts of ammunition and the chemical ingredients for explosives (which were ultimately stored in the vehicle that Stephen parked at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino garage).

He apparently bought his weapons one at a time in a variety of gunshops in four different states, passing background checks without red flags, stashing the weapons in his Mesquite garage in the enormous safe, and eventually accumulating a total of over forty different guns by the summer of 2017.

Marilou claims to have been entirely unaware of the arsenal being amassed by her boyfriend. Whatever had triggered Stephen’s gun-buying spree the previous October was not known to her.

Paddock booked two hotel rooms in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel for early August 2017 with a “clear view” overlooking the Lollapalooza outdoor music festival in Grant Park. An estimated 100,000 people attended the festival each of the four days it was held, including the Obama daughters Malia and Sasha. Paddock eventually elected not to stay at the Blackstone.

During the summer Paddock also researched hotels near Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox, but seems to have discovered that he could only obtain an obstructed view of the ballpark from those hotels. This appears to indicate that Paddock considered planning a mass shooting of Red Sox fans during a baseball game.

Paddock also did web research on another potential Boston target, the Boston Center for the Arts, a performing arts complex in the South End of Boston with a variety of performance spaces, but apparently none that could accommodate an audience dense enough to tempt a mass shooter or were otherwise satisfactory for Paddock’s plans.

In addition, Paddock had reserved an airbnb room in the Ogden luxury apartment complex on North Las Vegas Boulevard that includes towers overlooking the late September Las Vegas festival Life Is Beautiful. The festival, which featured acts such as Gorillaz and Lorde performing on a variety of outdoor stages in downtown Las Vegas, also included food stalls, vendors, and the like. A real potpourri target for a sharpshooter. But Paddock apparently had second thoughts about those plans as well.

Eventually, Stephen Paddock purchased an airline ticket for Marilou to visit her family in the Philippines, with an apparent stopover in Hong Kong, and surprised her with the gift, urging her to make the trip. She complied. As she was leaving for abroad, Paddock wired about $100,000 into a Filippino bank account for the benefit of Marilou and her family in order to purchase a residence, surprising her and convincing her that Paddock was ending their relationship. Paddock was clearly planning for the future, and it did not include the domestic duo of Stephen and Marilou. Hence in that regard, Marilou’s suspicions were correct.

Finally Stephen Paddock checked into Room 135 and an adjoining suite on the 32d floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas on September 25, 2017, with clear sightlines to both the performance area of the Harvest Festival of country western music on Route 91 below and huge jet fuel storage tanks adjacent to the Las Vegas airport.

Paddock must have made multiple trips with a variety of pieces of luggage and equipment—perhaps including a golf bag and/or by using the freight elevator—in order to have unobtrusively transported twenty-three guns and other paraphernalia to his rooms. His weapons included military-style rifles (four Daniel Defense DDM4 rifles, three FN-15s and other rifles made by Sig Sauer), handguns, and at least one rifle that had been fitted with a “bump stock” to convert it to a fully automatic rifle that functioned like a machine gun, firing at high speed.

Paddock had apparently also attempted to purchase tracer bullets in order to observe—and correct—any future shooting trajectory in real time, but those bullets were out of stock. This circumstance probably saved lives.

Stephen Paddock spent the next seven days preparing his attack, positioning three cameras around the rooms including one in a room’s peephole and two in the hallway as police lookouts, and posting a “do not disturb” sign for at least three of those days. During Paddock’s week-long stay, no housekeepers entered the rooms to check anything. Paddock barricaded the doors to his hotel rooms as well as the stairs. He was ready for his last act.

Country singer Jason Aldean was performing on August 2, 2017, the third and final night of the Harvest Festival, before a packed Las Vegas audience of about 22,000 mostly young music lovers in the exposed outdoor space. The final act had just begun on the stage hundreds of feet below Paddock’s suite.

That evening, Stephen Paddock took his revenge against a world that had alienated him so severely that only committing as many murders as possible would sate his sick need for redress. He broke windows in two directions. He fired out those windows with semi-automatic weapons rendered fully automatic by bump stocks as if they were machine guns, spouting bullets so rapidly that he murdered fifty-eight innocent people, wounded an astonishing 546 more people, many severely by the high-caliber wounds that tore into their flesh from the windows far above them.

And all this in the space of ten minutes, triggered by an effort less than a minute earlier by an unarmed casino security guard to check an alarm on a door located on the 32d floor that had been left ajar. Stephen Paddock shot through his door at the guard—one Jesus Campos—dozens of times, wounding Campos in the leg. And then he immediately opened fire on the crowds below.

Paddock even attempted to blow up nearby airport fuel tanks with high-powered shots, landing at least one of them but failing to ignite the fuel which was stored adjacent to both the assembled concert crowd and the Las Vegas airport. A fiery apocalyptic armageddon was apparently avoided as a result.

Two weeks later, dozens of victims remain hospitalized, many in critical or serious condition. One young woman was in a coma for at least ten days, having been shot through the face and losing an eye, but still lucky to be alive.

The security guard Jesus Campos was interviewed by a variety of media but vanished a few days ago, a hired guard with an obscured license plate sitting in his vehicle in front of the Campos residence. Why Campos is in hiding, at least for the time being, is not clear.

As for Stephen Paddock, the police stormed his hotel room and found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot, a victim of his own cowardice, taking his murderous intentions to the grave.

In the end, the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino did not turn out to be a golden lure or prize for the hundreds of killed and wounded concert-goers and first responders but, rather, a lethal trap for innocent victims as well as a final resting place for the shooter himself, wrung from his unspeakable and unfathomable oxymoronic quarrel with the world.

The Fucking Moron of Trump World

Donald Trump has been a gift to writers with no end in sight.

That is, Trump’s irrelevant idiocracy of a government is a golden calf which, in the Old Testament, glittered and dazzled the followers of the prophet Moses. It is a siren call to glamorize or invent excuses to prop up a world turned on its head by a narcissistic ignoramus and pledge fealty to its purported leader—who has been publicly described as a “fucking moron” by his own Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

The editorial writers, cartoonists, satirists, serious columnists, and even fiction writers are having a field day riffing on a never-ending stream of Trumpian non sequiturs, abuse, thoughtlessness, greed, stupidity, outright fiction, cruelty, absurdity, nativism, misogyny, and racism.

Wordsmiths can’t think of enough synonyms to describe their disgust and angst with the Leader of the Free World, now set loose on the international stage to disrupt global order, economy, peace, and prosperity.

For example, The Atlantic reported that during Trump’s recent visit to Puerto Rico two weeks after the second of two catastrophic hurricanes devastated that island, Donald described residents who were isolated among roads blocked with storm debris and washed out bridges—and were in desperate need of clean water, medications, food, power, and telephone cell services—as “very proud” they hadn’t endured a “real catastrophe” like Katrina, “doing little to erase the impression that he sees hurricane relief more as a political story than a human one.”

He then proceeded to lob paper towels from a storm relief center to assembled residents of a toney San Juan suburb as if he were LeBron James casually passing basketballs.

He compared the number of known deaths in Puerto Rico—sure to rise—with the “thousands” of deaths by drowning when the dikes and levies gave way in New Orleans. The actual number of deaths sustained as Hurricane Katrina barreled through in 2005 was about 1,800, high enough but nowhere near Ignorant Donald’s characterization.

Trump did not make any attempt to survey the island’s interior with its millions of vulnerable, sweltering, frightened U.S. citizens. As San Juan’s intrepid Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz pleaded on cable news, “people are dying” and “it’s all about saving lives” in the interior, Trump reacted by doubling down on his harsh criticisms of Cruz (“Democrats must have told her to say nasty things” about him).

Trump then characterized Cruz as unable to organize or otherwise do her job even with FEMA and other help (i.e., supplies sitting mostly inaccessibly in tractor trailer units stranded on Puerto Rican docks without necessary truck drivers or diesel fuel or cleared roads or reliable communication to the interior communities in need).

Commentators from abroad are aghast. Bigly. They describe the world’s reaction as “global strategic whiplash.” And with good reason.

European diplomats agree that Trump has become “something of a laughing stock . . . at international gatherings [a] small group of diplomats play a version of word bingo whenever the president speaks because they consider his vocabulary to be so limited. ‘Everything is “great,” “very, very great,” “amazing,”’ indicated one diplomat.”

Trump, they agree, is “a serious threat to . . . peace and stability” on the international stage and in the U.S.

For example:

— He wildly threatens to nuke North Korea even as his Secretary of State is working through back channels to negotiate a reasoned approach;

— He lambasts NATO members for their purported failure to pay their “fair share” of costs even though they have been doing exactly that;

 — He refuses to visit Great Britain because that country cannot guarantee that a visit would be free from significant protests nor will it arrange for him to meet Queen Elizabeth, who appears to loathe him as much as the rest of the world;

 — He praises dictators such as (1) Russian President Vladimir Putin, who by all accounts ordered the cyber undermining of the 2016 U.S. election and continues to attempt to put a Russian authoritarian finger on the scale in favor of Trump, and (2) Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, a thug who has ordered the mass murder of at least 7,000 drug traffickers by a “campaign of extrajudicial execution” in his brutal and quixotic quest to quell a heroin epidemic;

— He wobbles back and forth on terminating NAFTA out of misinformed conclusions regarding recent trade results and conditions;

— He periodically continues to threaten to build a completely useless, expensive wall with Mexico to keep out “rapists” and other “bad persons,” although Mexican officials refuse to pay a dime, the idea is ludicrous and reminiscent of the infamous Berlin Wall, and the U.S. Congress has yet to authorize any significant funding. This along with efforts to slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, children’s health services, the EPA, HUD, HSS, the Department of Education, the State Department including USAID, and numerous other essential programs that benefit the American people and many in need located abroad.

The list goes on.

At home, Trump is often under siege from highly critical traditional media reports (“fake news”) and the worries of concerned administration officials.

Take, for example, the following comments from Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the conservative Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who had been a loyal acolyte and soldier for Trump. He has announced his intention to forego another term in the Senate and instead has indicated that Donald Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

Further, he added in an interview with The New York Times, Trump is a man-child whose threats against North Korea (and Iran) could put the country “on the path to World War III.” Moreover, said Corker, “Trump acted as if he was on his old reality-TV show” and that he concerned the senator, adding that “[h]e would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

Corker reiterated those concerns this past week by describing Gens. John Kelly and James Mattis—Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense—along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as the three individuals who “help separate our country from chaos.” Significantly, these three top administration leaders have purportedly entered into a private pact forming a sort of bulwark whereby the firing of any one of them, with Tillerson being the most likely to be sacked due to his open disagreements with Trump, would result in the resignation of the other two.

A few days later, after Trump tweeted aggressively and negatively about Corker, Senator Corker responded that, “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.” This exchange was characterized by The Guardian as “the latest undignified episode in Trump’s bizarre and fractious relationship with the Republican establishment and parts of his own administration.”

Corker’s support will be needed if Trump is to enact a budget since Corker sits on the Senate Budget Committee, and the future of the Iran agreement—supported by Corker—is in doubt as a stormy debate over that agreement’s fate looms.

Senator John McCain, terminally ill with brain cancer, has twice been pivotal in preventing the gutting of the ACA (Obamacare) on the Senate floor, and seems to see his legacy writ large in heroic opposition to a president who derided McCain’s service as a Vietnam POW as insignificant. This because McCain was captured in 1967 over Hanoi after he parachuted out of his crippled dive bomber and became a POW rather than evading North Vietnamese soldiers, and Trump—a five-time draft evader—ridiculed McCain for being unable to escape. McCain had broken three major limbs during his high-speed aerial ejection and endured considerable torture during his lengthy captivity.

The atmosphere in the White House is heavy with threats of Trump fury and rife with intimidated aides who leak more than Niagara. One former staffer apparently kept such detailed notes of his months in the Trump White House that his journals will no doubt end up in the hands of the Mueller investigatory team.

With an executive government severely understaffed and in significant part being run by inexperienced ideologues who could fairly be described as Trump bootlickers, this would leave already isolated and lonely Twitter addict Trump further adrift in the pre-dawn White House, baying to the world in contradictory and often alarming memes.