The End of the Republic, and Our Cat Box Quit Working

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming

We're finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio

Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down

Should have been done long ago

What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground

How can you run when you know?

-Neil Young

Still reeling over the week we've endured, and the murder in Minneapolis two days ago.

At least they've identified the murderer. Hope you and your family don't get a peaceful night's sleep for whatever remains of your time on earth, asshole.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot a 37-year-old woman in Minneapolis on Jan. 7 is Jonathan Ross, the same officer who was dragged and injured by a fleeing driver in a separate incident last year, according to a person with knowledge of the case and verified by court documents.

Little public information is available about Ross, 43, described only by federal officials as “an experienced” officer with more than 10 years at ICE. It’s not immediately clear which field office Ross is based out of.

On Wednesday morning, Ross was embedded with a group of federal agents on a targeted crackdown in south Minneapolis when Renee Nicole Good was shot. A photo of Ross’ face has since circulated on social media, as online sleuths have attempted to identify him.

As it turns out, this is simply the first publicly known state murder of someone for being a libtard, under an executive order I'd never heard of until this morning. At first I thought this couldn't be real after reading about it on a blog, but as it turns out DJT quietly declared war on all of us Unreliables after Charlie Kirk's assassination gave him his Reichstag fire excuse.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/

The whole enemies list is right there:

Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

And the order directs law enforcement task forces around the country to go after these people not for anything they've done, but for articulating a thought that identifies them as non-MAGA.

Ms. Good is just the start. And our lapdog Congress will do nothing about it.

Meanwhile, our Litter Robot has had a nervous breakdown.

In theory, this R2D2 exists so the cats can walk in there and defecate in its mouth (I'm sure there's a fetish for that somewhere), and it responds by mechanically swirling the turds into a holding pan to be removed and thrown in the trash by your author.

In theory, that is. Now it randomly rotates in response to nothing in particular, and will leave boulders of clumping cat litter in there for hours at a time. When it starts its cycle it overshoots dead level, catches itself, goes back the other way, then stops askew, leaving poor Dean and Slane squatting at a precarious angle as they take their morning constitutionals.

Because it's 2026 and we buy everything online, there is no department store service desk to which to return the thing, no one in town advertising themselves as Litter Robot technicians. We've gone back to the model of 1886 on the prairie, when some gadget from the Montgomery Ward catalog would arrive by Wells Fargo stagecoach at the farm, and if something went wrong Pa had to take it apart and figure out a fix. Didn't you ever wonder why your great-grandparents were so handy?

Peg and I are not, by any measure, handy. But the Litter Robot is about to force us to develop that knack.