When the tinfoil fits just right- The Lagrange Point Vol. I, Iss. 11

Welcome to issue #11 of The Lagrange Point! You'll notice I haven't yet implemented any changes like I talked about in issue 10. This is because I hadn't received feedback yet. And I hadn't received feedback because I set the "reply to" email address on the e-newsletter wrong.

YAY. So if you have thoughts on the ideas I talked about in Issue 10, please please please send them. And if you sent them already, please send them again. ONWARD.

In This Issue

Distant Early Warnings

• Toys, art, and more

Crafter's Corner

• Bonsai blowup

Rantables

• When the tinfoil fits just right

Toys, art, and more! Canada's geeks, rejoice!

Victoria's Ultimate Toy & Hobby Fair is back again at the Pearkes Arena. Sponsored by local geek toy store Cherry Bomb Toys, the fair brings out a lot of vintage toy dealers, along with a ton of Lego re-sellers and other folks with toy collections cluttering up their storage. It's a fun little event with door prizes and the odd cosplayer to boot, on from Sept. 21 to 22.

Calgary's festival collision of Art and Science, Beakerhead, is back for its 11th year, from Sept. 20 to 22. Reviews of last year's show point to it being somewhat underwhelming, and this year, they've moved the whole shebang entirely into Telus SPARK. It will probably make it easier to find and navigate, but I can't help feel like it loses something taking it from the streets of Calgary to an indoor venue.

In Toronto, The ArQuives is hosting a book launch September 27 for Criminalized Lives: HIV and Legal Violence. The book is a collaboration between author Alexander McClelland and illustrator Eric Kostiuk Williams, with a foreword by Robert Suttle, and looks at firsthand accounts from people who have been criminalized due to their status as HIV positive individuals. Kostiuk Williams has previously drawn comics like his original series, Hungry Bottom Comics, and Babybel Wax Bodysuit. Criminalized Lives: HIV and Legal Violence is already out from Rutgers UNiversity Press, but this event launches it in Toronto!

And lastly, Gems of Iridescia, a nifty new board game, is up on Kickstarter. The creator behind the game is Roberto Panetta, an independent game maker from Greenfield Park, Quebec. According to his Kickstarter, Gems of Iridescia is his first title, and he involved his wife and children in the design process, testing it out around the kitchen table. Panetta hired human artists for Gems of Iridescia, which earns him an automatic pass for not succumbing to the temptation of AI. Check it out!

I am not a creature of grace. So it seems inevitable that I knocked over my bonsai the other day, utterly destroying it.

This left me pretty bummed. I was sure I'd just have to buy a new one.

But after literally picking up the pieces, I thought to myself: why can't I just put this together again myself?

And that's precisely what I did.

I'm sharing this because I think it's a neat little story of not falling for the modern tendency to replace broken things with new things, but rather, to attempt to repair something on your own.

I did, at minimum, need a new base for the whole thing, so I popped out to the garden store and found a clay tray for $5. From there, it was a simple matter to re-glue the rocks back to it...

...which mainly involved a lot of careful balancing and wedging things here and there. But once a careful and judicious amount of superglue was applied, I found they stuck on quite well. I also reasoned that a healthy amount of soil would prop them up nicely.

Salvaging the actual plant part of the bonsai was the real tricky part. I temporarily transferred the little plants into a spare pot on my balcony while I worked, then tucked them back into their new home once the cement had fully cured around the stones.

Et voila! Good as new. What might have been a $40-50 replacement plant instead became a $5 fix and a simple DIY project. I'm encouraged to keep this mentality of "fix, don't replace" in more things in my life.

In the wee hours of a cold November morning in 1953, a man went out the window of the 10th story of the Statler Hotel, plummeting to his death.

Even before the full circumstances of the man's identity, history, and background became clear, it was a strange circumstance.

“In all my years in the hotel business,” the night manager said, “I never encountered a case where someone got up in the middle of the night, ran across a dark room in his underwear, avoiding two beds, and dove through a closed window with the shade and curtains drawn.”

But that is, indeed, the story that the police and authorities stuck with when it came time to confront the family of Frank Olson, the man who had fallen. And the family would accept it for over two decades, until 1975, when a bombshell report from a commission investigating activities of the CIA was published, followed by a frenzy of media interest into alleged victims of said activities.

One such victim was Frank Olson.

The commission, struck by President Gerald Ford, revealed that the CIA had been illegally surveilling domestic groups protesting the Vietnam War, but even more shockingly, had engaged in illegal experiments on unwitting human test subjects, including American, Canadian and Danish citizens, as well as detainees at foreign sites — a project known as MKUltra.

And Frank Olson was involved.

As a bacteriologist, Olson, a former military man, was discharged from the army in 1944 and worked at Camp Detrick on civilian contract, where he was eventually assigned to the Special Operations Division (SOD), a covert chemical weapons research facility.

In the early 50's, according to friends and colleagues, Olson became disaffected with his work, and was convinced that the United States had used chemical weapons in the Korean War. This led his superiors at SOD to conclude he was a security risk.

What is known now, with declassified documents, is that Olson was drugged with LSD as a "truth serum" mere days before his death. It is also known, from an autopsy his son had conducted on his body in the 90's, that he suffered a blow to the head prior to exiting the hotel room, which strongly suggests that he was struck and then forced out the window.

It is also known that his family settled out of court with the US government following the revelations of MKUltra, and therefore was unable to subsequently sue for wrongful death, meaning we won't know for sure if Olson was murdered.

But we do know now that the CIA did, indeed, make it a habit to kill those it deemed a threat, and it experimented on people foreign and domestic without their consent, and it did numerous other horrible things, including overthrowing governments, assassinating leaders, and worse.

Which brings us, by way of a long introduction, to the alleged second assassination attempt of Donald Trump.

Look. Is it very likely that some wingnut (especially in Florida, of all places) just randomly tried, again, to shoot at Trump? Probably. But the fact is, precedent has been established: the government can and will lie to you. Shadowy, rogue organizations like the CIA can and will lie to you.

The problem with dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand is that the well of "trust, but verify," has truly been tainted. Trust in American institutions is subterranean at this point.

It's easy to place the rise of Trump at the feet of hatred and bigotry, but littered in and amongst there is a terrible sliver of alienation that is, at least in part, well earned by the systematic erosion of truth by successive US governments.

In 1953, Olson's family took the word of the police, the CIA, and political leaders that Frank died by suicide. And it took decades for even part of the truth — not all of it — to come out, and that was only because of the persistence of journalists and other critics.

We need those journalists. We need those critics. But most of all, we need a brave, bold, and courageous renewal of commitment to transparency and truth.

Otherwise, one can reasonably ask, after a loathsome candidate plummets in the polls, only to have a sudden "rally around the flag" incident puts wind in his campaign sails: in all our years, have we ever encountered a case like this?

That wraps up issue #11 of The Lagrange Point! If you enjoyed this little e-newsletter, please consider subscribing, or, if you're already subscribed, sharing it with a friend or family member!

I can't grow this e-newsletter alone. I need lots of mouths spreading lots of words about why people should read The Lagrange Point.

Until next Monday, thank you for reading!

-Tim