#collusion — Public Fediverse posts

This day - 10 years ago - on Slashdot:

Trump Calls For Russia To Cyber-Invade the United States To Find Clinton's 'Missing' Emails

https://politics.slashdot.org/story/16/07/27/1627250/trump-calls-for-russia-to-cyber-invade-the-united-states-to-find-clintons-missing-emails?sbsrc=thisday

#worldnews #news #election #cybersecurity #russia #collusion #WashingtonDC #DC #politics #technews #tech

This day - 10 years ago - on Slashdot:

Trump Calls For Russia To Cyber-Invade the United States To Find Clinton's 'Missing' Emails

https://politics.slashdot.org/story/16/07/27/1627250/trump-calls-for-russia-to-cyber-invade-the-united-states-to-find-clintons-missing-emails?sbsrc=thisday

#worldnews #news #election #cybersecurity #russia #collusion #WashingtonDC #DC #politics #technews #tech

Senator #DickDurbin met with #ToddBlanche for more than 30 minutes Tuesday evening & didn’t come away impressed that the nominee would serve as a check on #Trump. “I don’t know that he’s made any promise or any suggestion that he is trying to change this president’s methods or purpose,” #Durbin told reporters.

#law #LegalEthics #DOJ #corruption #collusion #MafiaState #OrganizedCrime

Senator #DickDurbin met with #ToddBlanche for more than 30 minutes Tuesday evening & didn’t come away impressed that the nominee would serve as a check on #Trump. “I don’t know that he’s made any promise or any suggestion that he is trying to change this president’s methods or purpose,” #Durbin told reporters.

#law #LegalEthics #DOJ #corruption #collusion #MafiaState #OrganizedCrime

RE: https://flipboard.com/@engadget/apple-35g6f6ilz/-/a-zXm86YUgRXqobLdjzJ-sxA%3Aa%3A3199686-%2F0

If Apple gets to buy memory chips from a blacklisted China-based company, that means we all can, right? RIGHT?!

The only fair is #LaissezFaire!

#USGovt #BigTech #Corruption #Collusion #Anticompetitive #Monopoly #ComponentCrisis #RAMpocalypse #RAMaggedon #AI #AIDataCenter #AppleIntelligence #Apple #CXMT

RE: https://flipboard.com/@engadget/apple-35g6f6ilz/-/a-zXm86YUgRXqobLdjzJ-sxA%3Aa%3A3199686-%2F0

If Apple gets to buy memory chips from a blacklisted China-based company, that means we all can, right? RIGHT?!

The only fair is #LaissezFaire!

#USGovt #BigTech #Corruption #Collusion #Anticompetitive #Monopoly #ComponentCrisis #RAMpocalypse #RAMaggedon #AI #AIDataCenter #AppleIntelligence #Apple #CXMT

Sometime in the last 100 minutes (actually hours now that I took the time to read it) the filing happened. So here it is, Doc 89 from #Trump v. #IRS and the #Jan6 #SlushFund fake #settlement by the #ToddBlanche #DOJ.

The motion title is preposterous as you only get so many bites at the apple.

The document is signed by Alejandro Brito and Daniel Z. Epstein Trump's run-of-the-mill Florida and D.C. lawyers. Also by Richard C. Klugh, Trump's muscle lawyer for criminal defense and appellate issues. I think I have an opinion as to who wrote most of this.

On the issues of #collusion / #trueAdversity

• The suit has merit (if you ignore the gap between requested relief and the statutory cap *and* the statute of limitations since the date Trump's own lawyer made public announcements about Littlejohn's leaks) (p. 18)
• The Biden IRS issued a press release saying *Trump's IRS* failed to prevent the leak and that security was improved , again on Biden's watch. (p. 18)
• It's really adverse since *some* of the plaintiffs (being Trump's family and business holdings) aren't even in government (p. 19)
• The claims, moreover, presented genuine legal complexity, so complex that the DOJ didn't bother to show up or argue (p. 19)
• Just because all parties agreed on one legal question, doesn't mean that there wasn't #trueAdversity, just no evidence of adversity. (pp. 19–20)
• Just because 35 retired judges and the present judge think there is every appearance of collusion doesn't mean you have evidence of collusion. Where's your evidence? (p. 20)
• They ignore that it has every appearance of a manufactured fake controversy and not a real one.

Sometime in the last 100 minutes (actually hours now that I took the time to read it) the filing happened. So here it is, Doc 89 from #Trump v. #IRS and the #Jan6 #SlushFund fake #settlement by the #ToddBlanche #DOJ.

The motion title is preposterous as you only get so many bites at the apple.

The document is signed by Alejandro Brito and Daniel Z. Epstein Trump's run-of-the-mill Florida and D.C. lawyers. Also by Richard C. Klugh, Trump's muscle lawyer for criminal defense and appellate issues. I think I have an opinion as to who wrote most of this.

On the issues of #collusion / #trueAdversity

• The suit has merit (if you ignore the gap between requested relief and the statutory cap *and* the statute of limitations since the date Trump's own lawyer made public announcements about Littlejohn's leaks) (p. 18)
• The Biden IRS issued a press release saying *Trump's IRS* failed to prevent the leak and that security was improved , again on Biden's watch. (p. 18)
• It's really adverse since *some* of the plaintiffs (being Trump's family and business holdings) aren't even in government (p. 19)
• The claims, moreover, presented genuine legal complexity, so complex that the DOJ didn't bother to show up or argue (p. 19)
• Just because all parties agreed on one legal question, doesn't mean that there wasn't #trueAdversity, just no evidence of adversity. (pp. 19–20)
• Just because 35 retired judges and the present judge think there is every appearance of collusion doesn't mean you have evidence of collusion. Where's your evidence? (p. 20)
• They ignore that it has every appearance of a manufactured fake controversy and not a real one.

https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/2060549065104912487?s=20

> BREAKING: A federal judge is now signaling the Trump administration’s so-called “weaponization fund” may have emerged from collusive litigation and could potentially amount to fraud on the court.

> That is nuclear-level language from a judge.

> “Fraud on the court” is not normal criticism. It is reserved for situations....

#truth vs #TrumpVirus #fraud #nepotism #emoluments #EpsteinFiles #Jan6 #sedition #narcissism #cult #denial #collusion #War #media #sanewashing

https://x.com/allenanalysis/status/2060549065104912487?s=20

> BREAKING: A federal judge is now signaling the Trump administration’s so-called “weaponization fund” may have emerged from collusive litigation and could potentially amount to fraud on the court.

> That is nuclear-level language from a judge.

> “Fraud on the court” is not normal criticism. It is reserved for situations....

#truth vs #TrumpVirus #fraud #nepotism #emoluments #EpsteinFiles #Jan6 #sedition #narcissism #cult #denial #collusion #War #media #sanewashing

Philip Alito son of #Republican #maga #federalistSociety #leoleonard #SupremeCourt #Justice #SamuelAlito quietly working as lawyer in #Trump #Treasury Dept #Bessent. NOTUS reported Philip Alito’s position in Treasury Dept Office of #GeneralCounsel is a “closely guarded secret,” as the son of the #conservative jurist does not have a public LinkedIn profile, and the Treasury Department makes no mention of him on its official website. #corruption #collusion #SCOTUS #taxes #finance #ruleoflaw #IRS

Philip Alito son of #Republican #maga #federalistSociety #leoleonard #SupremeCourt #Justice #SamuelAlito quietly working as lawyer in #Trump #Treasury Dept #Bessent. NOTUS reported Philip Alito’s position in Treasury Dept Office of #GeneralCounsel is a “closely guarded secret,” as the son of the #conservative jurist does not have a public LinkedIn profile, and the Treasury Department makes no mention of him on its official website. #corruption #collusion #SCOTUS #taxes #finance #ruleoflaw #IRS

Venezuelan Communist Party Denounces Rodríguez Government’s Submission to U.S. Imperialism

“The Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), elected at its 16th National Congress (November 2022), categorically rejects the U.S. military air maneuvers scheduled to take place over Caracas on Saturday, May 23.

These military operations represent a dangerous escalation of imperialist interference in Venezuela and a direct affront to national sovereignty.

At a time when the country is already suffering the consequences of growing foreign domination and political subordination to U.S. interests, the presence of American military aircraft over the Venezuelan capital constitutes an unacceptable act of intimidation and provocation.

The PCV warns that these maneuvers are taking place amid the deepening of policies aimed at favoring transnational capital through the handover of strategic energy and mineral resources, the flexibilization of labor rights, administrative opacity and increasing restrictions on democratic freedoms. According to the Party, the current situation reflects an intensification of imperialist tutelage over Venezuela under the guise of “stabilization” and “security cooperation.”

The Party stresses that the Venezuelan people must reject all forms of foreign military interference and defend the country’s sovereignty, democratic rights and national independence against imperialist aggression.

The PCV also denounces the role of both domestic and international political sectors that seek to normalize the growing U.S. military and political presence in Venezuela, warning that such developments threaten to further undermine the country’s sovereignty and deepen the crisis affecting working people.

Reaffirming its anti-imperialist position, the Communist Party of Venezuela calls on workers, peasants, youth and popular sectors to remain vigilant and organized against foreign intervention, militarization and all attempts to subordinate Venezuela to the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism.”

source: In Defense of Communism

Trump’s secret settlement
https://youtube.com/shorts/_nz15A6X-hM
#USPol #Trump #ToddBlanche #Collusion #Corruption #Fraud #ReleaseOfClaims #LizOyer #LawyerOyer

Trump’s secret settlement
https://youtube.com/shorts/_nz15A6X-hM
#USPol #Trump #ToddBlanche #Collusion #Corruption #Fraud #ReleaseOfClaims #LizOyer #LawyerOyer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government will permanently drop tax claims against President Donald Trump, according to a settlement document that is part of a deal to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

As part of the settlement agreement, the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons and the Trump organization’s current tax issues, according to a one-page document posted to the DOJ website on Tuesday…⁉️OMG, he’s utterly indemnified himself and his sons FOREVER. #trump #grift #corruption #collusion

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government will permanently drop tax claims against President Donald Trump, according to a settlement document that is part of a deal to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

As part of the settlement agreement, the U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons and the Trump organization’s current tax issues, according to a one-page document posted to the DOJ website on Tuesday…⁉️OMG, he’s utterly indemnified himself and his sons FOREVER. #trump #grift #corruption #collusion

Jesus christ.

Danish police set dogs on protesters outside a Maersk building. The company routinely ships weapons to Israel.

#StopArmingIsrael #FreePalestine #Collusion

Jesus christ.

Danish police set dogs on protesters outside a Maersk building. The company routinely ships weapons to Israel.

#StopArmingIsrael #FreePalestine #Collusion

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

I need to tell you where this started, because the thirty-six years between the conception and the delivery are the form of the book, not biographical trivia.

The Steel Filing Cabinet

In the spring of 1990 I was a graduate student in the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, in the dramatic writing concentration, working on a thesis screenplay for a class taught by Grafton Nunes. Grafton had produced Kathryn Bigelow’s first feature, The Loveless, with Willem Dafoe in his first leading role. He had spent his early career at Paramount. He knew what a film script was supposed to do and he knew when one was doing it.

I wrote a screenplay called Ischia is Burning. The country I had visited once. The island I had never seen. What I had read about it concerned the Greek colonial site at Pithekoussai, the oldest western Greek settlement in the central Mediterranean, founded in the eighth century before Christ on a volcanic island twelve miles off the Bay of Naples. The island had a basin. The basin had a name. I gave the basin sixteen children and four adults, and I gave the four adults eighteen years to build an Iron Age village around the children, and I gave the village a contamination event in the groundwater that would not have happened in the Iron Age.

Grafton read the screenplay. He told me it was the best student screenplay he had ever read. With a teacher’s specificity, he named the adjustments he wanted me to make. Blockbuster was the word he reached for, as if he were predicting a weather event.

I did not make the adjustments.

I gave the screenplay to Sam Crothers at The Producer Circle. Sam read it. He told me he loved it. The cohesion problems were the second thing he raised. After that came the matter of money, which Grafton had not raised at all. The last thing Sam asked me was what I was willing to wait for. Sam got sick within the year. He retired to Florida. We did not speak again. Marty Richards, who ran the Producer Circle, died in November 2012. Sam followed him in April 2013. Neither lived to see the novel.

I put the screenplay in a steel filing cabinet in an apartment on East 13th Street. It stayed there for thirty-six years. From time to time I took it out, read the first ten pages, and put it back. The notebook in which I had written down Grafton’s adjustments was lost in a move sometime in the late 1990s, and after that I told myself for a long set of years that I could not begin the novel because I could not remember what Grafton had said, and to begin without remembering would be to disrespect what he had given me.

I see now that the unremembered adjustments were the alibi. The actual reason was simpler. At twenty-five I was not old enough to write what finding out costs a child. Nor was I old enough to write what finding out costs the adults who have spent eighteen years not telling.

The Basin on Pithekoussai

The novel opens in the autumn of 1986 in a basin on the western flank of the Italian island of Ischia, in a place called Mezzavia. Mezzavia does not exist on any map I have been able to locate, although the road of that name does run between the towns of Forio and Casamicciola Terme on the actual island. In the novel, the basin holds four adults and sixteen children. The children range in age from six to seventeen. The adults are, by training, an anthropologist, a physician, a pilot, and a linguist. They have spent eighteen years building a closed Iron Age village around the children, complete with hand-woven clothing, a small iron mill the children themselves operate, a constructed Germanic dialect rooted in Old Norse and Old High German, an invented cosmology with four gods and eight constellations, and a sky with no airplanes in it.

The children believe they are living in the Iron Age. They believe this because the four adults have withheld twenty-four years of European history from them. No radios enter the basin. No printed page betrays the year. The antibiotic that would tell a child the world contains chemistry beyond the herbal poultice does not exist there.

In September of 1986, a cesium-137 contamination event begins to appear in the basin’s groundwater. The four adults face the question they have spent eighteen years not asking, which is what to do when the constructed world you have built around children begins to poison them, and the only treatment you can offer comes from a century the children are not allowed to know exists.

The title of the book is also a transmitted phrase. A pilot speaks it into a dispatch microphone at zero four sixteen on a Thursday in September 1986, from the cockpit of a plane climbing out of the American air base at Aviano in northeastern Italy. The book takes its thirty-three chapters to answer three questions about that phrase: what is burning, who is speaking it, and where the radio signal is going.

The novel is the answer the four adults arrive at.

The Temptation

The book moves at the velocity of a thriller and the moral architecture of an inquiry, which is what keeps it from settling cleanly into either form. What it pursues is a question older than the basin and older than the Iron Age the basin pretends to be. The question is what happens when a small group of educated people, looking at a larger group of human beings, decides in private that the larger group cannot be trusted with the truth and must be administered the world on a schedule the educated group will determine.

That question runs through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, Decree 770 of the Socialist Republic of Romania, the Stanford prison experiment of 1971, the closed religious compounds of the American Southwest, and a hundred other documented projects in which one group of people decided what another group would be permitted to know. The Notes on Sources at the back of the novel walks through the historical anchors. Inside the novel itself, those anchors are kept off the page. What sits on the page is fiction. The four adults and the sixteen children of Mezzavia are inventions. What is not invented is the temptation that built them.

I am calling it temptation, and I want to be precise about the word. The four adults are educated, careful, well-spoken people who can defend every individual decision they made, which is precisely why naming them as monsters would let the reader off the hook. The novel is interested in how educated, careful, well-spoken people arrive at a project that, taken in aggregate, looks like the thing they would never have built if they had been able to see the whole shape of it from the outside. What the novel refuses to do is let them off the hook for what they built. It refuses, at the same time, the easy out of calling them monsters, because calling them monsters would close the question of how their colleagues, students, and followers found them defensible while the work was being done.

An Addendum the Way I Wrote It at Twenty-Five

The original 1990 screenplay is reproduced unaltered in the back of the book as Addendum I. The dialogue I made wince in May has been preserved exactly as I committed it in 1990, with its small infelicities and its young confidence both intact. I considered editing the screenplay. I decided against it. The point of including the screenplay at the back of the book is to show the reader the gap, in technique and in moral attention, between what I could write at twenty-five and what I could write at sixty-one, rather than to display the early version as a finished object. The story is identical across both versions, along with the four scientists, the sixteen children, the basin, and the fire. Two different writers, separated by thirty-six years, were working on the same material.

If a reader of the novel goes to the addendum and finds that the screenplay version reaches conclusions the novel does not reach, and lands its moral judgments where the novel will not land its moral judgments, that is the point. The young writer was bolder. The old writer is more careful, and more wounded, and less willing to tell the reader who the villain is.

For the Children Who Were Never Told

The dedication of the book is one sentence long. It reads, For the children who were never told.

I want to be clear about who that dedication is for. First, the sixteen fictional children of the basin on Pithekoussai, who are inventions, although the patterns of behavior they live inside are documented in places that were not inventions. Beyond them, the dedication names every reader who has ever sat across from a parent, or a doctor, or a government, and realized that the version of the world they had been given was a redacted version, edited by someone who had decided, on their behalf, what they could carry. The book is also for the adults who decided. Those four scientists in the basin can defend every individual decision they made. What the novel is interested in is why their defenses sound the way they do, and why those defenses have sounded the same way in every century in which someone has been entrusted with a knowledge that someone else has decided will not be shared.

How to Read the Book

The novel runs around 130,000 words across thirty-three chapters and a closing addendum. Paperback and Kindle edition are available now at Amazon, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com, where the full bibliography of David Boles Books is also indexed. The Foreword tells the thirty-six-year story I have only summarized here. A Notes on Sources section walks through the historical record the novel draws on. Readers who want to put the book down and argue with somebody about it will find a Reading Group Discussion Guide in the back, which is the use I would most like the book to be put to.

I will be writing about Ischia is Burning at length over the coming weeks, including a Human Meme podcast episode on the moral physics of withheld knowledge, a Prairie Voice investigative piece on the documented American history of closed communities, and a conversation series on BolesBlogs.com about the book’s relationship to the Institutional Autopsy trilogy and to the question of what fiction can do that documentary work cannot. The conversation continues. The book is the entrance into it.

Sam Crothers asked me, in 1990, what I was willing to wait for. The answer arrived thirty-six years later. The book exists.

David Boles is the founder of David Boles Books and the editor of Prairie Voice. His Institutional Autopsy trilogy was completed in March 2026 with the publication of Underwritten. He lives in New York City with the Deaf ASL educator Janna Sweenie and two British Shorthair cats.

UK’s criminalization of direct-action climate protests has counterproductive results, study says

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/uk-s-criminalization-of-direct-action-climate-protests-has-counterproductive-results-study-says/3918054

Punitive measures against nonviolent climate activists, including those who blocked roads or damaged buildings, may contribute to their radicalization…

#ClimateDefenders #Criminalization #Radicalization #ClimateJustice #Government #Collusion

UK’s criminalization of direct-action climate protests has counterproductive results, study says

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/uk-s-criminalization-of-direct-action-climate-protests-has-counterproductive-results-study-says/3918054

Punitive measures against nonviolent climate activists, including those who blocked roads or damaged buildings, may contribute to their radicalization…

#ClimateDefenders #Criminalization #Radicalization #ClimateJustice #Government #Collusion

Don't you feel better knowing the rich oil barons are profiting?

"Trading Desks Boom While Big Oil Output Stalls"

#Russia #China #USA #Security #News #Iran #Israel #War #EU #NATO #UN #Nuclear #Weapons #Politics #Pentagon #WW3 #Lebanon #WarCrimes #Incompetence #Ukraine #Corruption #Collusion

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Trading-Desks-Boom-While-Big-Oil-Output-Stalls.html

FYI: FTC sues WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu over brand safety collusion: FTC and eight states sued WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu on April 15, alleging they colluded on brand safety standards to demonetize conservative news publishers. https://ppc.land/ftc-sues-wpp-publicis-and-dentsu-over-brand-safety-collusion/ #FTC #BrandSafety #Collusion #DigitalMarketing #ConservativeMedia

FYI: FTC sues WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu over brand safety collusion: FTC and eight states sued WPP, Publicis, and Dentsu on April 15, alleging they colluded on brand safety standards to demonetize conservative news publishers. https://ppc.land/ftc-sues-wpp-publicis-and-dentsu-over-brand-safety-collusion/ #FTC #BrandSafety #Collusion #DigitalMarketing #ConservativeMedia

I guess we're all suckers.

What we can do: https://www.AuthorFreeman.com/what-we-can-do/

Reposts of strips from my first-term collection, TRUMPBERT: OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE (https://www.Trumpbert.com) most weekdays. New strips every Sunday.

#dilbert #parody #trump #satire #comic #webcomic #Putin #collusion #kleptocracy

I guess we're all suckers.

What we can do: https://www.AuthorFreeman.com/what-we-can-do/

Reposts of strips from my first-term collection, TRUMPBERT: OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE (https://www.Trumpbert.com) most weekdays. New strips every Sunday.

#dilbert #parody #trump #satire #comic #webcomic #Putin #collusion #kleptocracy

The art of the deal with the devil.

How America would look if we put a bunch of scammers in charge: https://www.AuthorFreeman.com/scammers

#dilbert #parody #trump #satire #comic #webcomic #Putin #collusion #kleptocracy

Reposts of strips from my first-term collection, TRUMPBERT: OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE (https://www.Trumpbert.com) most weekdays. New strips every Sunday.

How America would look if we put a bunch of scammers in charge: https://www.AuthorFreeman.com/scammers

#dilbert #parody #trump #satire #comic #webcomic #Putin #collusion #kleptocracy

How America would look if we put a bunch of scammers in charge: https://www.AuthorFreeman.com/scammers

Reposts of strips from my first-term collection, TRUMPBERT: OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE (https://www.Trumpbert.com) most weekdays. New strips every Sunday.

#dilbert #parody #trump #satire #comic #webcomic #Putin #collusion #kleptocracy

Pollution des camions : une fraude massive incontrôlée au Québec
🔴 "Désactiver le système antipollution d'un camion, c'est l'équivalent d'ajouter 34 camions sur les routes."
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/long-format/2239788/pollution-camions-fraude-antipollution-quebec-saaq
#Québec #pollution #camion #SAAQ #antipollution #politique #CAQ #garage #collusion #fraude #crime #santé #transport #contrôle #inspections #média #environnement

Pollution des camions : une fraude massive incontrôlée au Québec
🔴 "Désactiver le système antipollution d'un camion, c'est l'équivalent d'ajouter 34 camions sur les routes."
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/long-format/2239788/pollution-camions-fraude-antipollution-quebec-saaq
#Québec #pollution #camion #SAAQ #antipollution #politique #CAQ #garage #collusion #fraude #crime #santé #transport #contrôle #inspections #média #environnement

"New Report Examines the Role of EU Funding and Export of High-Risk AI Systems in Escalating Human Rights Violations in Palestine and the Region": https://7amleh.org/post/eu-funding-export-high-risk-ai-palestine-region-en @palestine

#complicityInGenocide #complicity #connivance #collusion #EU #EuropeIsrael #proZionism #EuropeanUnion #Europe #AI #AIWar

"New Report Examines the Role of EU Funding and Export of High-Risk AI Systems in Escalating Human Rights Violations in Palestine and the Region": https://7amleh.org/post/eu-funding-export-high-risk-ai-palestine-region-en @palestine

#complicityInGenocide #complicity #connivance #collusion #EU #EuropeIsrael #proZionism #EuropeanUnion #Europe #AI #AIWar

Comment l’UE finance et exporte de l’IA à haut risque qui viole les droits fondamentaux des Palestinien·nes et participe à leur massacre : https://agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2026/03/17/comment-lue-finance-et-exporte-de-lia-a-haut-risque-qui-viole-les-droits-fondamentaux-des-palestiniens-et-participe-a-leur-massacre/

#soutien #complicitéDeGénocide #complicité #connivence #collusion #UE #EuropeIsraël #proSionisme #UnionEuropéenne #Europe #IA

Comment l’UE finance et exporte de l’IA à haut risque qui viole les droits fondamentaux des Palestinien·nes et participe à leur massacre : https://agencemediapalestine.fr/blog/2026/03/17/comment-lue-finance-et-exporte-de-lia-a-haut-risque-qui-viole-les-droits-fondamentaux-des-palestiniens-et-participe-a-leur-massacre/

#soutien #complicitéDeGénocide #complicité #connivence #collusion #UE #EuropeIsraël #proSionisme #UnionEuropéenne #Europe #IA