It's a cliché in fantasy: the fairies are real, and what makes crazy people crazy is that they're able to see them. Or maybe they're just plain nuts. But at least, they're a shattered mirror on reality, through which the rest of us may occasionally glimpse a fragment reflected, through a shard at an unusual angle, which we just would never see otherwise.

Jeff Wells's Rigorous Intuition has lately been my reference source for my minimum RDA of conspiracist weirdness. A sample: The rash of satanic ritual child abuse allegations from the '80s? Essentially true. UFOs are real --- but UFO conspiracy theorists are barking up the wrong tree; they come from earth. And the Pentagon military higher-ups (the same ones that keep getting cleared of torture allegations by the Pentagon's own investigators) are involved in occult conspiracies with Satanic ritual aspects. All nuts, of course. (By the way, does anyone still have a picture of the original logo for Poindexter's Total Information Awareness thingy?)

And then there's this:

There's lots of talk, as there should be these days, about Martial Law, because it's coming to America just as surely as another attack. I think we can say that safely now, if we haven't been saying it already for years. In 2003, General Tommy Franks said he doubted that the Constitution would survive a WMD attack. The doubts should have since been erased: "the US military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States.... [T]he new plans provide for the likelihood that the military will have to take charge in some situations."

But when it comes, will Americans recognize it? ...

Say "Martial Law" to people, and often their first thought is detainment: multitudes of dissenters being hauled off to FEMA camps, disappearing into an American Gulag. For others, it's soldiers in the streets. For some, military courts.

I'm not denying the essence of those fears - the Gulag is already real enough for Jose Padilla - but that's my point: the fears have already been realized. Padilla and many others have vanished. The soldiers are in the streets. A formal declaration of martial law seems almost a quaint nod to constitutional formalities, when we consider the violence these people have already done to the constitution.

And in London, the police, who already had Jean Charles de Menenzes down on the ground, pumped seven bullets into his brain anyway, and then told transparent lies about it for weeks, until reporters forced them to back it up. You just know that someone, somewhere knows just what the problem is here --- the reporters --- and is working on trying to fix it.

As I said, through shards of a cracked mirror at unusual angles, fragments.