#secrecy — Public Fediverse posts

Mojtaba Khamenei in undisclosed location, tough to reach as peace process continues: Report

ANI | Updated: May 25, 2026 09:13 IST Washington DC [US], May 25 (ANI): Iran’s Supreme Leader, Mojtaba…
#Israel #News #Iraniangovernment #Latency #limitedaccess #MojtabaKhamenei #secrecy #supremeleader #Undisclosedlocation #USintelligence #usirantalks
https://www.europesays.com/3015602/

The Rainbow Warrior Affair
#Nuclear #Power, State #Secrecy, and the Slow Machinery of #Truth

On the night of July 10, 1985, the #harbor of #Auckland, New Zealand, looked calm. The water reflected the city lights. Crew members aboard the #Greenpeace ship #Rainbow Warrior were asleep after a long day of preparations. Nothing suggested that a Western #democracy was about to launch a covert #military #operation against a civilian vessel.

Then the #explosions came.

Within minutes, the #ship sank into the dark harbor water. One man died: photographer Fernando #Pereira. What initially looked like #sabotage soon evolved into one of the most revealing #intelligence #scandals of the Cold #War.

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was not only an #attack on a ship. It was an attack on visibility itself. Greenpeace wanted to bring cameras, journalists, and public attention to French nuclear testing in the #Pacific. #France wanted silence.

The #conflict between those two goals shaped everything that followed.

The Nuclear #Logic of the Cold War
To understand act of #terrorism, one must first understand the political #psychology of nuclear powers during the Cold War.

After the United States used atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, nuclear weapons became symbols of strategic prestige and geopolitical survival. Possessing the bomb meant entering an exclusive club of global influence. France joined that club in 1960 under President Charles de Gaulle.

For French political elites, nuclear independence was not merely military policy. It became part of national identity. France viewed its nuclear deterrent — the force de frappe — as proof that the country remained a sovereign world power independent from both #Washington and #Moscow.

But nuclear #weapons require testing.

France first conducted tests in colonial #Algeria. After Algerian independence in 1962, Paris moved its testing program to French #Polynesia, especially the #Mururoa and #Fangataufa #atolls in the Pacific #Ocean.

To #Paris, these remote islands seemed strategically ideal.

To environmental activists, they became symbols of colonial #arrogance and ecological #violence.

Greenpeace emerged directly from this historical moment. Founded in #Vancouver in 1971, the #organization pioneered a new form of political #activism: media-centered confrontation. Instead of fighting states militarily, Greenpeace used images, ships, and public spectacle. Activists understood that modern #politics increasingly depended on #television and emotional #symbolism.

In this sense, the Rainbow Warrior was more than a ship. It was a floating camera and cameras threaten secrecy.

Why France Saw Greenpeace as a Strategic #Threat
By 1985, Greenpeace planned to protest French nuclear testing directly at Mururoa Atoll. The Rainbow Warrior was expected to transport activists and assist Pacific #island communities opposing the tests.

French intelligence services feared international humiliation.

This fear is important. Governments rarely conduct covert operations because they are physically weak. They do so because they fear symbolic weakness. Nuclear powers depend heavily on credibility, prestige, and deterrence. In the logic of Cold War #geopolitics, allowing activists to disrupt military testing risked projecting vulnerability.

The French external intelligence service, the #DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), therefore received orders to neutralize the ship.

The operation was given the #codename Opération Satanique.

The name itself reveals the strange theatricality often surrounding covert operations. Intelligence agencies frequently cloak violence in bureaucratic language, technical terminology, or symbolic code names. Such language creates psychological distance between planners and consequences.

It transforms people into “targets.” Ships into “objectives.” Deaths into “collateral effects.”

The Architecture of a Covert Operation
The attack on the Rainbow Warrior was sophisticated but not flawless.

French agents entered New Zealand under false identities. Combat divers secretly attached limpet mines to the hull of the ship while undercover operatives monitored the harbor area. Another agent, Christine #Cabon, infiltrated Greenpeace itself months before the bombing. Posing as a volunteer, she gathered internal information and transmitted it to Paris.

The operation reveals four classic mechanisms of covert state power:

1. #Infiltration
Intelligence agencies often penetrate organizations by exploiting openness and trust. Greenpeace depended heavily on volunteers. That #vulnerability allowed Cabon to enter the group with relative ease.

The strategy resembles modern #cyberwarfare. Instead of hacking computers, intelligence services inserted a human being into the system.

2. Plausible Deniability
Operations are designed so political leaders can deny direct involvement. Orders are often transmitted orally. Written evidence remains minimal.

This structure creates distance between decision-makers and operational violence.

In public, leaders appear uninvolved. In private, command chains remain understood.

3. Controlled Narratives
After the bombing, French officials denied responsibility. #Defense Minister Charles #Hernu publicly insisted that no French service had carried out the attack.

The first official investigations minimized state involvement.

Such reactions are common after intelligence scandals. Governments initially attempt to control information flow long enough to stabilize political damage. Historians repeatedly encounter this pattern across different countries and eras.

4. Sacrificial Containment
When #evidence becomes overwhelming, lower-ranking officials are often sacrificed to protect higher political #authority.

In the Rainbow Warrior #affair, DGSE chief Pierre #Lacoste and Defense Minister Hernu lost their positions. President François #Mitterrand, however, remained politically untouched and won reelection in 1988.

The structure resembles a firewall in computer systems: expendable layers absorb damage before it reaches the center.

The #Mistake That #Broke the #Operation
Despite careful planning, the operation failed because of an almost banal #error.

Witnesses observed suspicious activity near a rented van and noted its license plate number. This small #observation enabled New Zealand investigators to identify two French operatives: Alain #Mafart and Dominique #Prieur.

Their arrest transformed the bombing from #rumor into #international #crisis.

New Zealand reacted with unusual determination. Prime Minister David Lange rejected French attempts to frame the affair as a regrettable misunderstanding. He insisted that state #terrorism had occurred on New Zealand soil.

His response mattered historically because it challenged a powerful Western ally publicly and directly. Small states rarely confront nuclear powers successfully. New Zealand did.

The Long Silence Around François Mitterrand
The central mystery persisted for years:

Did #President François Mitterrand personally #authorize the operation?

For a long time, the answer remained hidden behind silence.

Mitterrand refused detailed public discussion of the affair. This #silence itself became politically effective. Modern #media systems often reward emotional immediacy. But silence can outlast outrage. News cycles move on. Public attention fragments.

Mitterrand understood this dynamic well. He remained silent until his death.

Only years later did former DGSE director Pierre Lacoste reveal critical details in his memoir Un Amiral au Secret. Lacoste stated that he had received presidential approval for the operation during a meeting with Mitterrand in May 1985.

This delayed revelation illustrates a central challenge in intelligence history:

Truth often emerges only after institutions lose control over memory.

Retired officials write memoirs. Classified archives slowly open. Participants age. Political loyalties weaken.

#History is frequently reconstructed backward, fragment by fragment, like archaeologists rebuilding a shattered statue from scattered pieces.

Fernando Pereira and the Politics of #Witnessing
At the #moral center of the story stands Fernando Pereira.

His #death transformed the operation from sabotage into #tragedy.

Pereira returned below deck to recover his photographic equipment after the first explosion. In doing so, he demonstrated a principle central to both journalism and activism: evidence matters.

Without documentation, suffering becomes abstract. Without images, distant violence remains politically invisible.

This explains why authoritarian systems and covert operations so often target journalists, photographers, and witnesses. Cameras challenge monopoly over #narrative.

The Rainbow Warrior affair therefore was never simply about one ship. It was about who controls #reality in the public #imagination.

Greenpeace sought exposure. The French state sought containment.

One side used cameras. The other used #explosives.

Why the Affair Still Matters
The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior remains historically significant because it exposed uncomfortable truths about democratic governments and covert violence.

The affair demonstrated that even liberal democracies can authorize illegal operations when strategic interests feel threatened. It revealed how intelligence agencies rely on secrecy, infiltration, deniability, and narrative management. It also showed how difficult accountability becomes once national #security enters political discourse.

Most importantly, the case demonstrated that truth emerges slowly.

Not in dramatic cinematic revelations. Not through a single leaked document. But through decades of persistence by investigators, journalists, historians, witnesses, and former participants.

The Rainbow Warrior sank in #Auckland Harbor in 1985. But the deeper story surfaced much later.

#conspiracy #press #journalism #terror #military #crime #justice #democracy #fail #guilty

The Rainbow Warrior Affair
#Nuclear #Power, State #Secrecy, and the Slow Machinery of #Truth

On the night of July 10, 1985, the #harbor of #Auckland, New Zealand, looked calm. The water reflected the city lights. Crew members aboard the #Greenpeace ship #Rainbow Warrior were asleep after a long day of preparations. Nothing suggested that a Western #democracy was about to launch a covert #military #operation against a civilian vessel.

Then the #explosions came.

Within minutes, the #ship sank into the dark harbor water. One man died: photographer Fernando #Pereira. What initially looked like #sabotage soon evolved into one of the most revealing #intelligence #scandals of the Cold #War.

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was not only an #attack on a ship. It was an attack on visibility itself. Greenpeace wanted to bring cameras, journalists, and public attention to French nuclear testing in the #Pacific. #France wanted silence.

The #conflict between those two goals shaped everything that followed.

The Nuclear #Logic of the Cold War
To understand act of #terrorism, one must first understand the political #psychology of nuclear powers during the Cold War.

After the United States used atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, nuclear weapons became symbols of strategic prestige and geopolitical survival. Possessing the bomb meant entering an exclusive club of global influence. France joined that club in 1960 under President Charles de Gaulle.

For French political elites, nuclear independence was not merely military policy. It became part of national identity. France viewed its nuclear deterrent — the force de frappe — as proof that the country remained a sovereign world power independent from both #Washington and #Moscow.

But nuclear #weapons require testing.

France first conducted tests in colonial #Algeria. After Algerian independence in 1962, Paris moved its testing program to French #Polynesia, especially the #Mururoa and #Fangataufa #atolls in the Pacific #Ocean.

To #Paris, these remote islands seemed strategically ideal.

To environmental activists, they became symbols of colonial #arrogance and ecological #violence.

Greenpeace emerged directly from this historical moment. Founded in #Vancouver in 1971, the #organization pioneered a new form of political #activism: media-centered confrontation. Instead of fighting states militarily, Greenpeace used images, ships, and public spectacle. Activists understood that modern #politics increasingly depended on #television and emotional #symbolism.

In this sense, the Rainbow Warrior was more than a ship. It was a floating camera and cameras threaten secrecy.

Why France Saw Greenpeace as a Strategic #Threat
By 1985, Greenpeace planned to protest French nuclear testing directly at Mururoa Atoll. The Rainbow Warrior was expected to transport activists and assist Pacific #island communities opposing the tests.

French intelligence services feared international humiliation.

This fear is important. Governments rarely conduct covert operations because they are physically weak. They do so because they fear symbolic weakness. Nuclear powers depend heavily on credibility, prestige, and deterrence. In the logic of Cold War #geopolitics, allowing activists to disrupt military testing risked projecting vulnerability.

The French external intelligence service, the #DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), therefore received orders to neutralize the ship.

The operation was given the #codename Opération Satanique.

The name itself reveals the strange theatricality often surrounding covert operations. Intelligence agencies frequently cloak violence in bureaucratic language, technical terminology, or symbolic code names. Such language creates psychological distance between planners and consequences.

It transforms people into “targets.” Ships into “objectives.” Deaths into “collateral effects.”

The Architecture of a Covert Operation
The attack on the Rainbow Warrior was sophisticated but not flawless.

French agents entered New Zealand under false identities. Combat divers secretly attached limpet mines to the hull of the ship while undercover operatives monitored the harbor area. Another agent, Christine #Cabon, infiltrated Greenpeace itself months before the bombing. Posing as a volunteer, she gathered internal information and transmitted it to Paris.

The operation reveals four classic mechanisms of covert state power:

1. #Infiltration
Intelligence agencies often penetrate organizations by exploiting openness and trust. Greenpeace depended heavily on volunteers. That #vulnerability allowed Cabon to enter the group with relative ease.

The strategy resembles modern #cyberwarfare. Instead of hacking computers, intelligence services inserted a human being into the system.

2. Plausible Deniability
Operations are designed so political leaders can deny direct involvement. Orders are often transmitted orally. Written evidence remains minimal.

This structure creates distance between decision-makers and operational violence.

In public, leaders appear uninvolved. In private, command chains remain understood.

3. Controlled Narratives
After the bombing, French officials denied responsibility. #Defense Minister Charles #Hernu publicly insisted that no French service had carried out the attack.

The first official investigations minimized state involvement.

Such reactions are common after intelligence scandals. Governments initially attempt to control information flow long enough to stabilize political damage. Historians repeatedly encounter this pattern across different countries and eras.

4. Sacrificial Containment
When #evidence becomes overwhelming, lower-ranking officials are often sacrificed to protect higher political #authority.

In the Rainbow Warrior #affair, DGSE chief Pierre #Lacoste and Defense Minister Hernu lost their positions. President François #Mitterrand, however, remained politically untouched and won reelection in 1988.

The structure resembles a firewall in computer systems: expendable layers absorb damage before it reaches the center.

The #Mistake That #Broke the #Operation
Despite careful planning, the operation failed because of an almost banal #error.

Witnesses observed suspicious activity near a rented van and noted its license plate number. This small #observation enabled New Zealand investigators to identify two French operatives: Alain #Mafart and Dominique #Prieur.

Their arrest transformed the bombing from #rumor into #international #crisis.

New Zealand reacted with unusual determination. Prime Minister David Lange rejected French attempts to frame the affair as a regrettable misunderstanding. He insisted that state #terrorism had occurred on New Zealand soil.

His response mattered historically because it challenged a powerful Western ally publicly and directly. Small states rarely confront nuclear powers successfully. New Zealand did.

The Long Silence Around François Mitterrand
The central mystery persisted for years:

Did #President François Mitterrand personally #authorize the operation?

For a long time, the answer remained hidden behind silence.

Mitterrand refused detailed public discussion of the affair. This #silence itself became politically effective. Modern #media systems often reward emotional immediacy. But silence can outlast outrage. News cycles move on. Public attention fragments.

Mitterrand understood this dynamic well. He remained silent until his death.

Only years later did former DGSE director Pierre Lacoste reveal critical details in his memoir Un Amiral au Secret. Lacoste stated that he had received presidential approval for the operation during a meeting with Mitterrand in May 1985.

This delayed revelation illustrates a central challenge in intelligence history:

Truth often emerges only after institutions lose control over memory.

Retired officials write memoirs. Classified archives slowly open. Participants age. Political loyalties weaken.

#History is frequently reconstructed backward, fragment by fragment, like archaeologists rebuilding a shattered statue from scattered pieces.

Fernando Pereira and the Politics of #Witnessing
At the #moral center of the story stands Fernando Pereira.

His #death transformed the operation from sabotage into #tragedy.

Pereira returned below deck to recover his photographic equipment after the first explosion. In doing so, he demonstrated a principle central to both journalism and activism: evidence matters.

Without documentation, suffering becomes abstract. Without images, distant violence remains politically invisible.

This explains why authoritarian systems and covert operations so often target journalists, photographers, and witnesses. Cameras challenge monopoly over #narrative.

The Rainbow Warrior affair therefore was never simply about one ship. It was about who controls #reality in the public #imagination.

Greenpeace sought exposure. The French state sought containment.

One side used cameras. The other used #explosives.

Why the Affair Still Matters
The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior remains historically significant because it exposed uncomfortable truths about democratic governments and covert violence.

The affair demonstrated that even liberal democracies can authorize illegal operations when strategic interests feel threatened. It revealed how intelligence agencies rely on secrecy, infiltration, deniability, and narrative management. It also showed how difficult accountability becomes once national #security enters political discourse.

Most importantly, the case demonstrated that truth emerges slowly.

Not in dramatic cinematic revelations. Not through a single leaked document. But through decades of persistence by investigators, journalists, historians, witnesses, and former participants.

The Rainbow Warrior sank in #Auckland Harbor in 1985. But the deeper story surfaced much later.

#conspiracy #press #journalism #terror #military #crime #justice #democracy #fail #guilty

The Rainbow Warrior Affair
#Nuclear #Power, State #Secrecy, and the Slow Machinery of #Truth

On the night of July 10, 1985, the #harbor of #Auckland, New Zealand, looked calm. The water reflected the city lights. Crew members aboard the #Greenpeace ship #Rainbow Warrior were asleep after a long day of preparations. Nothing suggested that a Western #democracy was about to launch a covert #military #operation against a civilian vessel.

Then the #explosions came.

Within minutes, the #ship sank into the dark harbor water. One man died: photographer Fernando #Pereira. What initially looked like #sabotage soon evolved into one of the most revealing #intelligence #scandals of the Cold #War.

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior was not only an #attack on a ship. It was an attack on visibility itself. Greenpeace wanted to bring cameras, journalists, and public attention to French nuclear testing in the #Pacific. #France wanted silence.

The #conflict between those two goals shaped everything that followed.

The Nuclear #Logic of the Cold War
To understand act of #terrorism, one must first understand the political #psychology of nuclear powers during the Cold War.

After the United States used atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, nuclear weapons became symbols of strategic prestige and geopolitical survival. Possessing the bomb meant entering an exclusive club of global influence. France joined that club in 1960 under President Charles de Gaulle.

For French political elites, nuclear independence was not merely military policy. It became part of national identity. France viewed its nuclear deterrent — the force de frappe — as proof that the country remained a sovereign world power independent from both #Washington and #Moscow.

But nuclear #weapons require testing.

France first conducted tests in colonial #Algeria. After Algerian independence in 1962, Paris moved its testing program to French #Polynesia, especially the #Mururoa and #Fangataufa #atolls in the Pacific #Ocean.

To #Paris, these remote islands seemed strategically ideal.

To environmental activists, they became symbols of colonial #arrogance and ecological #violence.

Greenpeace emerged directly from this historical moment. Founded in #Vancouver in 1971, the #organization pioneered a new form of political #activism: media-centered confrontation. Instead of fighting states militarily, Greenpeace used images, ships, and public spectacle. Activists understood that modern #politics increasingly depended on #television and emotional #symbolism.

In this sense, the Rainbow Warrior was more than a ship. It was a floating camera and cameras threaten secrecy.

Why France Saw Greenpeace as a Strategic #Threat
By 1985, Greenpeace planned to protest French nuclear testing directly at Mururoa Atoll. The Rainbow Warrior was expected to transport activists and assist Pacific #island communities opposing the tests.

French intelligence services feared international humiliation.

This fear is important. Governments rarely conduct covert operations because they are physically weak. They do so because they fear symbolic weakness. Nuclear powers depend heavily on credibility, prestige, and deterrence. In the logic of Cold War #geopolitics, allowing activists to disrupt military testing risked projecting vulnerability.

The French external intelligence service, the #DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), therefore received orders to neutralize the ship.

The operation was given the #codename Opération Satanique.

The name itself reveals the strange theatricality often surrounding covert operations. Intelligence agencies frequently cloak violence in bureaucratic language, technical terminology, or symbolic code names. Such language creates psychological distance between planners and consequences.

It transforms people into “targets.” Ships into “objectives.” Deaths into “collateral effects.”

The Architecture of a Covert Operation
The attack on the Rainbow Warrior was sophisticated but not flawless.

French agents entered New Zealand under false identities. Combat divers secretly attached limpet mines to the hull of the ship while undercover operatives monitored the harbor area. Another agent, Christine #Cabon, infiltrated Greenpeace itself months before the bombing. Posing as a volunteer, she gathered internal information and transmitted it to Paris.

The operation reveals four classic mechanisms of covert state power:

1. #Infiltration
Intelligence agencies often penetrate organizations by exploiting openness and trust. Greenpeace depended heavily on volunteers. That #vulnerability allowed Cabon to enter the group with relative ease.

The strategy resembles modern #cyberwarfare. Instead of hacking computers, intelligence services inserted a human being into the system.

2. Plausible Deniability
Operations are designed so political leaders can deny direct involvement. Orders are often transmitted orally. Written evidence remains minimal.

This structure creates distance between decision-makers and operational violence.

In public, leaders appear uninvolved. In private, command chains remain understood.

3. Controlled Narratives
After the bombing, French officials denied responsibility. #Defense Minister Charles #Hernu publicly insisted that no French service had carried out the attack.

The first official investigations minimized state involvement.

Such reactions are common after intelligence scandals. Governments initially attempt to control information flow long enough to stabilize political damage. Historians repeatedly encounter this pattern across different countries and eras.

4. Sacrificial Containment
When #evidence becomes overwhelming, lower-ranking officials are often sacrificed to protect higher political #authority.

In the Rainbow Warrior #affair, DGSE chief Pierre #Lacoste and Defense Minister Hernu lost their positions. President François #Mitterrand, however, remained politically untouched and won reelection in 1988.

The structure resembles a firewall in computer systems: expendable layers absorb damage before it reaches the center.

The #Mistake That #Broke the #Operation
Despite careful planning, the operation failed because of an almost banal #error.

Witnesses observed suspicious activity near a rented van and noted its license plate number. This small #observation enabled New Zealand investigators to identify two French operatives: Alain #Mafart and Dominique #Prieur.

Their arrest transformed the bombing from #rumor into #international #crisis.

New Zealand reacted with unusual determination. Prime Minister David Lange rejected French attempts to frame the affair as a regrettable misunderstanding. He insisted that state #terrorism had occurred on New Zealand soil.

His response mattered historically because it challenged a powerful Western ally publicly and directly. Small states rarely confront nuclear powers successfully. New Zealand did.

The Long Silence Around François Mitterrand
The central mystery persisted for years:

Did #President François Mitterrand personally #authorize the operation?

For a long time, the answer remained hidden behind silence.

Mitterrand refused detailed public discussion of the affair. This #silence itself became politically effective. Modern #media systems often reward emotional immediacy. But silence can outlast outrage. News cycles move on. Public attention fragments.

Mitterrand understood this dynamic well. He remained silent until his death.

Only years later did former DGSE director Pierre Lacoste reveal critical details in his memoir Un Amiral au Secret. Lacoste stated that he had received presidential approval for the operation during a meeting with Mitterrand in May 1985.

This delayed revelation illustrates a central challenge in intelligence history:

Truth often emerges only after institutions lose control over memory.

Retired officials write memoirs. Classified archives slowly open. Participants age. Political loyalties weaken.

#History is frequently reconstructed backward, fragment by fragment, like archaeologists rebuilding a shattered statue from scattered pieces.

Fernando Pereira and the Politics of #Witnessing
At the #moral center of the story stands Fernando Pereira.

His #death transformed the operation from sabotage into #tragedy.

Pereira returned below deck to recover his photographic equipment after the first explosion. In doing so, he demonstrated a principle central to both journalism and activism: evidence matters.

Without documentation, suffering becomes abstract. Without images, distant violence remains politically invisible.

This explains why authoritarian systems and covert operations so often target journalists, photographers, and witnesses. Cameras challenge monopoly over #narrative.

The Rainbow Warrior affair therefore was never simply about one ship. It was about who controls #reality in the public #imagination.

Greenpeace sought exposure. The French state sought containment.

One side used cameras. The other used #explosives.

Why the Affair Still Matters
The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior remains historically significant because it exposed uncomfortable truths about democratic governments and covert violence.

The affair demonstrated that even liberal democracies can authorize illegal operations when strategic interests feel threatened. It revealed how intelligence agencies rely on secrecy, infiltration, deniability, and narrative management. It also showed how difficult accountability becomes once national #security enters political discourse.

Most importantly, the case demonstrated that truth emerges slowly.

Not in dramatic cinematic revelations. Not through a single leaked document. But through decades of persistence by investigators, journalists, historians, witnesses, and former participants.

The Rainbow Warrior sank in #Auckland Harbor in 1985. But the deeper story surfaced much later.

#conspiracy #press #journalism #terror #military #crime #justice #democracy #fail #guilty

#Georgia #DataCenter Secretly Used 29 Million Gallons of Water, Exposed by Residents’ Low Water Pressure

By Staff Writer
May 11, 2026

#FayettevilleGA — "A major #datacenter campus in Fayette County, Georgia, drew nearly 30 million gallons of water through unmetered connections before the issue surfaced due to complaints of low water pressure from nearby homeowners, county officials said.

"The discovery, first reported by Politico, centers on the sprawling 615-acre #QTSDataCenter development located about 20 miles south of #Atlanta. #QualityTechnologyServices (QTS), owned by #Blackstone, operates the site, which is one of the largest data center projects in the United States.

"Fayette County investigators found that the campus had been pulling water through two connections the county was unaware of and had not properly billed. As a result, QTS was issued retroactive charges totaling $147,474. County officials estimated the unmetered usage covered roughly four months, while the company maintained the period was between nine and 15 months.

"Vanessa Tigert, director of the Fayette County Water System, attributed the oversight to an administrative error that occurred during the county’s transition to smart meters. [I call BULLSHIT!]

" 'Fayette County is a suburb, it’s mostly residential, and we don’t have much commercial meters in our system anyway,' Tigert said. 'And so we didn’t realize our connection point wasn’t working.'

"A QTS spokesperson confirmed the company paid the retroactive charges immediately upon notification and said the unmetered usage stemmed from the county’s meter system upgrade.

"No fines were issued. County officials emphasized they are maintaining a cooperative relationship with the developer.

"The Fayetteville campus currently includes 13 buildings encompassing approximately 6.2 million square feet. It is part of a larger planned development that could eventually include up to 16 buildings.

"The incident highlights growing tensions nationwide over the resource demands of data centers. Communities across the U.S. have become increasingly vocal about the strain these facilities place on local water supplies and electrical grids, leading to heightened opposition to new projects.

"In a separate but related development, an Indianapolis City-County Council member’s home was shot at in April shortly after he supported rezoning for a data center project. The attack on Ron Gibson came days after a 6–2 vote approving the nearly 14-acre facility in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood."

Source:
https://www.georgiarecord.com/business-ga/2026/05/11/georgia-data-center-secretly-used-29-million-gallons-of-water-exposed-by-residents-low-water-pressure/

#ResistDatacenters #Datacenters #WaterIsLife #AISucks #DatacentersSuck #EnergyHogs #NoisePollution #WaterConsumption #Secrecy

“The #Epstein revelations are symptoms of a deeper crisis: a political #economy that rewards extraction over creation and concentrates #power in ever fewer hands.”
#Inequality #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Finance #Corruption #Secrecy #banksters

Extreme inequality created the world Epstein exploited
https://www.socialeurope.eu/extreme-inequality-created-the-world-jeffrey-epstein-exploited

“The #Epstein revelations are symptoms of a deeper crisis: a political #economy that rewards extraction over creation and concentrates #power in ever fewer hands.”
#Inequality #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Finance #Corruption #Secrecy #banksters

Extreme inequality created the world Epstein exploited
https://www.socialeurope.eu/extreme-inequality-created-the-world-jeffrey-epstein-exploited

“The #Epstein revelations are symptoms of a deeper crisis: a political #economy that rewards extraction over creation and concentrates #power in ever fewer hands.”
#Inequality #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Finance #Corruption #Secrecy #banksters

Extreme inequality created the world Epstein exploited
https://www.socialeurope.eu/extreme-inequality-created-the-world-jeffrey-epstein-exploited

“The #Epstein revelations are symptoms of a deeper crisis: a political #economy that rewards extraction over creation and concentrates #power in ever fewer hands.”
#Inequality #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Finance #Corruption #Secrecy #banksters

Extreme inequality created the world Epstein exploited
https://www.socialeurope.eu/extreme-inequality-created-the-world-jeffrey-epstein-exploited

“The #Epstein revelations are symptoms of a deeper crisis: a political #economy that rewards extraction over creation and concentrates #power in ever fewer hands.”
#Inequality #Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Finance #Corruption #Secrecy #banksters

Extreme inequality created the world Epstein exploited
https://www.socialeurope.eu/extreme-inequality-created-the-world-jeffrey-epstein-exploited

Too dangerous or just too expensive? The real reason Anthropic is hiding Mythos

https://kingy.ai/ai/too-dangerous-to-release-or-just-too-expensive-the-real-reason-anthropic-is-hiding-its-most-powerful-ai/

#HackerNews #Anthropic #Mythos #AI #danger #cost #secrecy

Too dangerous or just too expensive? The real reason Anthropic is hiding Mythos

https://kingy.ai/ai/too-dangerous-to-release-or-just-too-expensive-the-real-reason-anthropic-is-hiding-its-most-powerful-ai/

#HackerNews #Anthropic #Mythos #AI #danger #cost #secrecy

Too dangerous or just too expensive? The real reason Anthropic is hiding Mythos

https://kingy.ai/ai/too-dangerous-to-release-or-just-too-expensive-the-real-reason-anthropic-is-hiding-its-most-powerful-ai/

#HackerNews #Anthropic #Mythos #AI #danger #cost #secrecy

Too dangerous or just too expensive? The real reason Anthropic is hiding Mythos

https://kingy.ai/ai/too-dangerous-to-release-or-just-too-expensive-the-real-reason-anthropic-is-hiding-its-most-powerful-ai/

#HackerNews #Anthropic #Mythos #AI #danger #cost #secrecy

Too dangerous or just too expensive? The real reason Anthropic is hiding Mythos

https://kingy.ai/ai/too-dangerous-to-release-or-just-too-expensive-the-real-reason-anthropic-is-hiding-its-most-powerful-ai/

#HackerNews #Anthropic #Mythos #AI #danger #cost #secrecy

Financial #secrecy and #banks are the source of societal demise
#corruption #Politics #TooBigToJail #capitalism
https://youtu.be/9ILvvxS8foo?is=iJSaIppJzNjGA4OJ

#secrecy : the state or quality of being hidden

- French: clandestinité

- German: die Geheimhaltung

- Italian: clandestinità

- Portuguese: segredo

- Spanish: clandestinidad

------------

Fill in missing or incorrect translations @ https://wordofthehour.org/r/translations

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/05/wednesday-may-13-2026/

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/05/wednesday-may-13-2026/

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/05/wednesday-may-13-2026/

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/05/wednesday-may-13-2026/

This is the #4Corners program that revealed the #Bluetooth vulnerability of #Axon policing products (#Taser and #BodyCams). Aside from the taser-caused death allegations and the vigorous means by which the Axon company defends their products, I am also concerned about the bodycams our armed forces wear on deployments. Are they also #hackable?

Watching S2026 Taser Tactics in iview
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2026/video/NC2603H012S00

#NSWPolice #DeathInCustody #TasingDeaths #Secrecy

This is the #4Corners program that revealed the #Bluetooth vulnerability of #Axon policing products (#Taser and #BodyCams). Aside from the taser-caused death allegations and the vigorous means by which the Axon company defends their products, I am also concerned about the bodycams our armed forces wear on deployments. Are they also #hackable?

Watching S2026 Taser Tactics in iview
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2026/video/NC2603H012S00

#NSWPolice #DeathInCustody #TasingDeaths #Secrecy

This is the #4Corners program that revealed the #Bluetooth vulnerability of #Axon policing products (#Taser and #BodyCams). Aside from the taser-caused death allegations and the vigorous means by which the Axon company defends their products, I am also concerned about the bodycams our armed forces wear on deployments. Are they also #hackable?

Watching S2026 Taser Tactics in iview
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2026/video/NC2603H012S00

#NSWPolice #DeathInCustody #TasingDeaths #Secrecy

This is the #4Corners program that revealed the #Bluetooth vulnerability of #Axon policing products (#Taser and #BodyCams). Aside from the taser-caused death allegations and the vigorous means by which the Axon company defends their products, I am also concerned about the bodycams our armed forces wear on deployments. Are they also #hackable?

Watching S2026 Taser Tactics in iview
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2026/video/NC2603H012S00

#NSWPolice #DeathInCustody #TasingDeaths #Secrecy

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.

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.

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.

https://www.europesays.com/people/55000/ The Zionist Regimes Secrecy Regarding Netanyahus Health Crisis #a #again #and #Benjamin #BenjaminNetanyahu #but #calculated #Crisis #delayed #demonstrated #engineering #governing #has #health #in #is #Islam #medical #Netanyahu #not #of #once #opinion #principle #public #rather #Regarding #regime #release #Report #s #secrecy #service #structure #survival #that #the #Times #tool #truth #within #Zionist

"Like most #authoritarians Ford is only focused on increasing his power and control. Like Trump, Ford is only “getting it done” for his wealthy friends. " https://rabble.ca/politics/canadian-politics/ford-is-a-dangerous-authoritarian/

#Ontario #onpoli #cdnpoli #secrecy #authoritarianism #cdnpoli

"Like most #authoritarians Ford is only focused on increasing his power and control. Like Trump, Ford is only “getting it done” for his wealthy friends. " https://rabble.ca/politics/canadian-politics/ford-is-a-dangerous-authoritarian/

#Ontario #onpoli #cdnpoli #secrecy #authoritarianism #cdnpoli

"Like most #authoritarians Ford is only focused on increasing his power and control. Like Trump, Ford is only “getting it done” for his wealthy friends. " https://rabble.ca/politics/canadian-politics/ford-is-a-dangerous-authoritarian/

#Ontario #onpoli #cdnpoli #secrecy #authoritarianism #cdnpoli

"Like most #authoritarians Ford is only focused on increasing his power and control. Like Trump, Ford is only “getting it done” for his wealthy friends. " https://rabble.ca/politics/canadian-politics/ford-is-a-dangerous-authoritarian/

#Ontario #onpoli #cdnpoli #secrecy #authoritarianism #cdnpoli

"Like most #authoritarians Ford is only focused on increasing his power and control. Like Trump, Ford is only “getting it done” for his wealthy friends. " https://rabble.ca/politics/canadian-politics/ford-is-a-dangerous-authoritarian/

#Ontario #onpoli #cdnpoli #secrecy #authoritarianism #cdnpoli

How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres' environmental toll

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/big-tech-data-centres-secrecy-eu-law-environment-footprint

#HackerNews #BigTech #Secrecy #EU #Law #DataCentres #EnvironmentalImpact

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Incognitim/116419026099990886

I thought Governments were meant to be FOR the people? What the hell is this BS?
#Secrecy
#ClimateCriminals

'Former independent senator Rex Patrick this week obtained the partially redacted report after a freedom of information battle that lasted more than two years.' TWO YEARS! So much for Labor government accountability and transparency! #australia #ausgov #anthonyalbanese #mikepezzullo #rexpatrick #corruption #secrecy #auspol https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/04/confidential-report-found-former-home-affairs-boss-michael-pezzullo-was-reckless-in-engagement-with-liberal-powerbroker

'Former independent senator Rex Patrick this week obtained the partially redacted report after a freedom of information battle that lasted more than two years.' TWO YEARS! So much for Labor government accountability and transparency! #australia #ausgov #anthonyalbanese #mikepezzullo #rexpatrick #corruption #secrecy #auspol https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/04/confidential-report-found-former-home-affairs-boss-michael-pezzullo-was-reckless-in-engagement-with-liberal-powerbroker

'Former independent senator Rex Patrick this week obtained the partially redacted report after a freedom of information battle that lasted more than two years.' TWO YEARS! So much for Labor government accountability and transparency! #australia #ausgov #anthonyalbanese #mikepezzullo #rexpatrick #corruption #secrecy #auspol https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/04/confidential-report-found-former-home-affairs-boss-michael-pezzullo-was-reckless-in-engagement-with-liberal-powerbroker

'Former independent senator Rex Patrick this week obtained the partially redacted report after a freedom of information battle that lasted more than two years.' TWO YEARS! So much for Labor government accountability and transparency! #australia #ausgov #anthonyalbanese #mikepezzullo #rexpatrick #corruption #secrecy #auspol https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/04/confidential-report-found-former-home-affairs-boss-michael-pezzullo-was-reckless-in-engagement-with-liberal-powerbroker

'Former independent senator Rex Patrick this week obtained the partially redacted report after a freedom of information battle that lasted more than two years.' TWO YEARS! So much for Labor government accountability and transparency! #australia #ausgov #anthonyalbanese #mikepezzullo #rexpatrick #corruption #secrecy #auspol https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/apr/04/confidential-report-found-former-home-affairs-boss-michael-pezzullo-was-reckless-in-engagement-with-liberal-powerbroker

#Secrecy seems to be the hallmark of both #DetentionCenters and #Datacenters! Sneaky, sneaky...!

Mystery surrounds #RichmondVA-area home tied to firm behind $1.2B Army #Texas tent-camp contract

By: The Associated Press
Posted 3:36 PM, Aug 28, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — "When President Donald Trump's administration last month awarded a contract worth up to $1.2 billion to build and operate what it says will become the nation’s largest immigration detention complex, it didn’t turn to a large government contractor or even a firm that specializes in private prisons.

Instead, it handed the project on a military base to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a small business that has no listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer."
https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/mystery-surrounds-richmond-area-home-aug-28-2025

#USPol #HistoryRepeats #TrumpSucks #ICESucks #AbolishICE #AbolishCBP #AbolishDHS #Shameful #Fascism #DetentionCenters #HumanRights #WeKnowWhereYouLive #InternmentCamp #CampEastMontana #Texas #ICE #ICEDetention

#Secrecy seems to be the hallmark of both #DetentionCenters and #Datacenters! Sneaky, sneaky...!

Mystery surrounds #RichmondVA-area home tied to firm behind $1.2B Army #Texas tent-camp contract

By: The Associated Press
Posted 3:36 PM, Aug 28, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — "When President Donald Trump's administration last month awarded a contract worth up to $1.2 billion to build and operate what it says will become the nation’s largest immigration detention complex, it didn’t turn to a large government contractor or even a firm that specializes in private prisons.

Instead, it handed the project on a military base to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a small business that has no listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer."
https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/mystery-surrounds-richmond-area-home-aug-28-2025

#USPol #HistoryRepeats #TrumpSucks #ICESucks #AbolishICE #AbolishCBP #AbolishDHS #Shameful #Fascism #DetentionCenters #HumanRights #WeKnowWhereYouLive #InternmentCamp #CampEastMontana #Texas #ICE #ICEDetention

#Secrecy seems to be the hallmark of both #DetentionCenters and #Datacenters! Sneaky, sneaky...!

Mystery surrounds #RichmondVA-area home tied to firm behind $1.2B Army #Texas tent-camp contract

By: The Associated Press
Posted 3:36 PM, Aug 28, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — "When President Donald Trump's administration last month awarded a contract worth up to $1.2 billion to build and operate what it says will become the nation’s largest immigration detention complex, it didn’t turn to a large government contractor or even a firm that specializes in private prisons.

Instead, it handed the project on a military base to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a small business that has no listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer."
https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/mystery-surrounds-richmond-area-home-aug-28-2025

#USPol #HistoryRepeats #TrumpSucks #ICESucks #AbolishICE #AbolishCBP #AbolishDHS #Shameful #Fascism #DetentionCenters #HumanRights #WeKnowWhereYouLive #InternmentCamp #CampEastMontana #Texas #ICE #ICEDetention

#Secrecy seems to be the hallmark of both #DetentionCenters and #Datacenters! Sneaky, sneaky...!

Mystery surrounds #RichmondVA-area home tied to firm behind $1.2B Army #Texas tent-camp contract

By: The Associated Press
Posted 3:36 PM, Aug 28, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — "When President Donald Trump's administration last month awarded a contract worth up to $1.2 billion to build and operate what it says will become the nation’s largest immigration detention complex, it didn’t turn to a large government contractor or even a firm that specializes in private prisons.

Instead, it handed the project on a military base to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a small business that has no listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer."
https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/mystery-surrounds-richmond-area-home-aug-28-2025

#USPol #HistoryRepeats #TrumpSucks #ICESucks #AbolishICE #AbolishCBP #AbolishDHS #Shameful #Fascism #DetentionCenters #HumanRights #WeKnowWhereYouLive #InternmentCamp #CampEastMontana #Texas #ICE #ICEDetention

#Secrecy seems to be the hallmark of both #DetentionCenters and #Datacenters! Sneaky, sneaky...!

Mystery surrounds #RichmondVA-area home tied to firm behind $1.2B Army #Texas tent-camp contract

By: The Associated Press
Posted 3:36 PM, Aug 28, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — "When President Donald Trump's administration last month awarded a contract worth up to $1.2 billion to build and operate what it says will become the nation’s largest immigration detention complex, it didn’t turn to a large government contractor or even a firm that specializes in private prisons.

Instead, it handed the project on a military base to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a small business that has no listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer."
https://www.wtvr.com/news/local-news/mystery-surrounds-richmond-area-home-aug-28-2025

#USPol #HistoryRepeats #TrumpSucks #ICESucks #AbolishICE #AbolishCBP #AbolishDHS #Shameful #Fascism #DetentionCenters #HumanRights #WeKnowWhereYouLive #InternmentCamp #CampEastMontana #Texas #ICE #ICEDetention

Funnily enough this does not seem to be covered by most of the MSM

http://archive.today/2026.02.15-080901/https://www.thenational.scot/news/25854472.major-leak-highland-nuclear-site-triggers-hunt-mystery-bunkers/

#Pollution #Environment #Scotland #Nuclear #NewsBlackout #Secrecy