All over the mudflats ringing San Francisco Bay, now built up with homes and stores... fire. I count a dozen smoke plumes. Several form a line, suggesting someone's driving around and setting fire after fire. Yet other people don't see the pattern, don't even scan, just see the nearest one, or at most two; a news reporter just mouths platitudes like "global warming is causing more fires."

False. No high winds, no drought, no extreme heat. This is arson. And on this scale, organized and synchronized, it's no individual nut. Looks to me like political sabotage--Russian or Chinese or home-grown saboteurs.

I say so, and people just look at me funny. Too polite to call me paranoid, but it's what they think. But then, they only see one or two fires each--ignoring a sky full of black plumes. Sure, paranoia's the signature madness of our age; but willful blindness is just as deadly.

• Arson: the city of Lahaina just burned to the ground. As usual, the fatcats are pleading ignorance. "No one could predict this!" That's a lie. Activists warned for years that developers and Big Ag were stealing water and drying up Maui's west coast. Just needed a wind and a spark. Did global warming worsen it? Sure. Did it cause it? Nope.
• People blind to the obvious pattern: in Black Swan, Nassim Taleb argues that humans don't see some patterns, tending to treat rare events as nonexistent events; AND they see patterns where there are none--in noise.
• I do see the pattern: I'm autistic. My senses are different than yours, and my attention's on different things. Seeing human biases from outside has forced me to be skeptical of others' truths; my first thought is to check if the humans are all just repeating each others' slogans and platitudes. Sadly, they often are.
• Political sabotage: I take this literally. Our inflamed politics is, in my dreams' view, no mere vague 'social malaise'. It's organized and intentional. Right-wing nut jobs get fed propaganda--whether from Putin and Xi or Trump, or their backers who want plutocracy or worse--theocracy.

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