Category: Scarred Brain murmurings

Background music for this morning.

(And, just now I’m worried that I should write out what this was a link to so it’ll persist after the didn’t-used-to-do-evil company’s vide site goes away… Wake Up by XTC)

Good chat last night with the PF folks last night. Discussion of one of the things that really bothers me, “intellectual property,” I learned that I’m a Fed (how’d I miss that??!?), catfish (my experience is that they’re the fish eating whatever you toss over at the marina as you’re cleaning your deep sea catch…ick, but there’s people who have a eaten it) . We also talked a bit about my dilemma lately about what to do with the Virginia election.

I have no idea who the LP is going to run. I’ve been not terribly impressed with some of the answers about most things, but I will use my chance-of-winning threshold. If an election is within roughly ten percent, based on RCP polling, I’ll vote for the Republican. The Democrats are having a primary; I’ll vote in it, because there are incredibly bad candidates running there, just to vote against those terrible candidates.

One of the candidates is running TV ads talking about women in the workforce; how that they’re not re-entering the workforce, and there’s disparities when they do.

Because of that, Virginia needs to implement policies to ensure that there’s pay equity. Umm, okay.

So you can leave. Companies are doing that.

And with the surge in the use of telework, some companies are just refusing to hire people in states that have the sorts of regulations this guy is campaigning on.

People do just leave to get away from bad government policy. So that has to be stopped globally.

Old and busted: think globally, act locally. New hotness: ignore locally, dominate globally.

So, again, I find myself in the situation where the response, is “what can I do?” Sort of circles back to where I was when I wrote last fall about How I Fount Freedom In An Unfree World.

What’s on tap for this week? Hmm. This is when I’d planned to not care about health stuff/exercise, diet, but I’m just so in to the mode of paying attention to it that I’m finding it difficult to not do the things that have become habit.

I want to be slovenly. I want to eat bad food. I want to drink. But doing those things doesn’t bring me a lot of pleasure at this point.

What to do…?

Other than stop writing for the day. There’s not a lot of direction here, and there’s not a lot of inspiration.

I started listening to this during a discussion of awards shows on one of the podcasts I was listening to. I reject that. There can be many places where there’s no ultimate winner. Obligatory UDict. (My mother used to watch that all the time….wasn’t my thing)

But more of it was listening to a discussion among these folks. Bryan and Thad were talking about things that happened in the South during the Jim Crow era, where people would just do things to provide for/sell to each other in spite of whatever ways an authoritarian government, or other racist denizens wanted.

No. They just did their own thing. Because of that, they were attacked either by the thugs with badges, or hoods.

Is there really that big a difference?

So there was a big push to be number one in the approved economy. That led to the awards shows, and the like. Bubuhbut Oscars So White!!1! That problem’s been solved, and the audiences continues to shrink.

The Intertubes have given people a way to narrowcast, and people aren’t consuming things the same way they used to. So your product ends up as “number one,” but does that really matter when your cumulative audience is smaller than the number ones from the past when there were less people around to consume?

There is an older segment of the population who really still care about that stuff; it was the thing not terribly long ago.

The people worried about those things are the ones driving the news cycle. They’ll continue crowing about it until their audience shrinks to the point when there isn’t anybody left watching/listening.

I can’t bring myself to be upset about this…and that’s part of why I’m a bad person.

But the same thing applies to the political parties. Narrow down options, hope that people are okay with just one choice to make.

Nope.

People will stop paying attention.

That they’ve got the guns might dissuade people, but I’m wondering, really, if it does. Even under the threat of death, I’d probably just choose to not participate. Oh well.

Obligatory when you’re talking about The Smiths.

I’m listening to the discussion between Dave Smith and Joshua Smith on Part Of The Problem.

This is sort of on the heels of Dave’s debate with Eric Brakey a few weeks ago.

What Eric is doing is within the Republican Party. Eric is trying to work within the duopoly.

But will it even matter if HR 1 is passed by Senate trickery? The Clearly Canadian Texas Senator, Ted Cruz, calls it the “Corrupt Politicians Act.” (Maybe he took that from Heritage….but that’s what turned up in my first DDG search…)

In the state where I reside, the Democrats have turned the Commonwealth blue, just as the Byrd Organization intended.

So, for many people in many places, will a takeover of a small portion of a party legally-prohibited from winning even matter?

Do I agree with many of the things the folks in the Mieses caucus are saying? Certainly. Should I spend any significant time on it? If I’m living in a place where a Democrat is always going to be elected with a plurality, does it matter?

So, what can I do?

Exercise my Generation X indoctrination, and Just Say No.

Virginia has “open” primaries. Much of my adult life, I’ve lived in a locality where there is zero chance where my party affiliation would actually affect who gets elected.

In Norfolk, essentially whoever won the Democratic Primary in May was going to win the general election in November. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

So. I find myself in a situation where I vote in one of the duopoly’s primaries just to prevent a certain candidate from winning.

In the Presidential elections in 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2020, I voted intentionally against one of the duopoly’s eventual nominees.

I can’t think of a single duopoly candidate I voted for during the primary who got my vote in November.

Just Say No.

So does it even matter what happens?

Hmm.

Other reax from the episode, and a lot of what’s been going on….

I do like most of the organizations specifically on the unwritten enemies list from the folks in the Mieses Caucus.

Maybe someone there disagrees with part of the messaging, but they generally do agree with you. I agree with taking on the woke brigade who aren’t at all concerned with any principles.

If that means I have to vote in the Party of the Klan/Jim Crow/The Tuskegee Experiments/School Segregation/implementation of a South Asian caste system in the name of equity, so be it.

To terrible candidates, I will Just Say No.

As for the LP, no, Dr. J, the party doesn’t need to be anti-racist. No, I don’t agree with a private company exercising the same sorts of tyrannical decision-making as a government might.

But they’re not the government. I can get a chuckle out of The Hoteps. I can buy their wares if they’re of interest to me.

If someone is using government to enforce whatever standards they’ve adopted that I might find to be misguided, I can just not spend any of my money with them.

I’m not going to evangelize to you about it. I’m just going to choose something different.

It’s not that difficult. It’s kind of what Harry Browne was writing about before I was born.

Kinda like Loveboy.

Long week behind me, but I made it through.

Today I hit my two weeks since getting my second COVID-19 shot. I shared a meme, presumably made with this, with the two options being “wear a mask to show my virtue,” and “remove my mask to show I’m vaccinated.”

I have some ideas about what to do with that. Maybe I’ve been listening to/reading too much John McWhorter lately. There is something there, and I’m not sure exactly how, yet, to consolidate it, but there’s a Hyper-Calvinist thing that’s been going on for several years now. Prove you’re not a part of the portion of the population who saw to it that Donald Trump was elected. Prove that you’re on the right side of All The Things.

My wife and I got into a disagreement the other night after seeing the stuff out of Loudoun County, Virginia, in reaction to the instruction of Critical Race Theory.

In spite of the Byrd Organization, the Loudoun County Public Schools weren’t of an explicitly-racist formulation. Watch a movie from nearly forty years ago, and you’ll see that there was basically nothing out there.

Where was the innate racism? Behind which cornstalk, exactly?

Most of what’s out there has been erected in the past twenty years. Everything is modern. You’d have to go a long way to support the contention that the whole thing is based on racism. But the late-thirties women teaching in these schools who can’t afford any of the houses in the neighborhoods, aren’t at all interested in hearing any of it.

But I think the bigger lesson of it is that you have a group of people who believe they have The Answer^tm to just about everything under the sun.

If it takes flexing your small political plurality to force people to think exactly the way that you think today is disturbing.

There is more than a little of the Hyper-Calvinist spirit in that.

Leave people alone. Don’t worry about how others live their lives. Live your own life the best way that you can, and, maybe someone will want to use you as an example. If they have something you want, trade with them peacefully.

I’m listening this afternoon to an episode of Unregistered with Thaddeus Russell. For whatever reason, searching for the ep isn’t working very well, but searching with the episode number works. 153.

So. Other stuff. Realization last night, with all of the states removing their mask requirements, was that this is something of a head fake after their gas shortage, on top of the really bad job numbers.

Let’s get people out of their houses, let the small businesses that haven’t failed reopen, and hope things look better when the June numbers come out.

I would be happy to go enjoy a day without a mask next week, perhaps support a local business, but about the only place I’m supposed to go is the hospital on Friday to get my next infusion.

Oh well.

I need to take vacation.

Spent much of the day yesterday getting passed in and out of an MRI tube. Naturally, I went and looked at the results this morning, and, with my novice reading of the results, there’s nothing going on in my head. Unfortunately, there may be an active lesion in my back.

I’m not completely surprised by this. What it means, I don’t know. It’ll be something to discuss with my neurologist the next time we have an appointment.

I guess I had a phone conversation with my mom after the procedure, but I actually don’t remember it. I guess the sedatives did exactly what they’re supposed to do. She’s off dealing with a death in the family.

(She may have been COVID, but I’m not sure there’d be a lot of sense in looking thoroughly at it. This particular person I’d “met” several times, but I’m not sure she was even really aware of who I am. Not going to add a lot more beyond that, but she’d been in a care facility pretty much my whole life…)

I also got my second Phizer COVID-19 vaccine does on Saturday. Aside from the expected sore arm day of the shot, nothing notable the first day. That night, however, the side-effects hit me pretty hard.

Though I didn’t have a fever, I was shivering pretty heavily that night. I emailed my boss, and said I was going to take Monday off.

By the end of Sunday, after finally eating something sort of substantial, I was feeling better. I still decided to take Monday “off,” which meant I’d only end up working part of the day. Sign on at my normal time, check that everything is up, nap, catch the weekly staff meeting, nap/chill out for the rest of the day, then do a routine nighttime operation.

Three pretty intensive days of work in the middle of the week, and then “off” for Friday to do my MRIs.

So that was the week that was. This evening, I’m supposed to go have dinner with my oldest friend, where we’ll eat more Muffalettas. Something I’m actually a bit looking forward to.

We’ll see how it goes.

My sleep schedule is completely out-of-whack between the shot, and the MRI yesterday.

Maybe I can get things squared away.

So what I’m listening to this morning. Right now, Peddling Fiction. Before that, The Fifth Column. Interspersed/interrupted by random Tory Amos earworm.

Don’t ask me; I’m the one with the scarred brain.

Other tings…

The list of reasons of to live where I do keeps dwindling.

*gets distracted running numbers*

We’ll see what happens.

That was the word that came to mind for what I’m doing to myself for the next week.

I’ve been doing a horrible job adhering to this. (Interestingly enough, the DDG search turned up something from the Army, not the Air War College, which is what I used to get with the totes-didn’t-used-to-do-evil engine…) Would that word be too complex?

Somehow I got on a word-of-the-day email list. I have no idea what happened to cause that, and I’ve been hesitant to unsubscribe. Finding the precise word to describe something is completely correct for whatever I’m trying to convey.

In the background is this….

I made it through this week. It was actually somewhat uneventful, actually. I get my next COVID-preventer next Saturday. What I’m doing actually has some things running incredibly smoothly.

Just move forward, and understand that everything gets deleted, eventually. What I’m doing now will eventually be replaced.

And I’m okay with this.

---

And I got distracted there for about an hour. It happens. Responsibilities.

News. Obviously, the conviction of the cop in Minneapolis was the big story of the week. I’m surprised that there wasn’t rioting, there, despite the guilty verdicts. There was something I watched, which had a very disjointed flow chart where

I’m confused about Minnesota law, where he was convicted of the lesser-included charges.

I do wonder if at least some of the convictions will be overturned by the judge not sequestering the jury; if they don’t convict, everything will burn. *shrug* But things are still on fire in Oregon, where you might have to wear a mask forever.

If they existed, a permanent mask mandate might be a good thing for Antifa.

Other stuff. Permanent expanded unemployment benefits. Sit, UBI, Sit! Good Dog!

If you’re younger, didn’t watch TV in the 80s, you probably don’t understand that. Whatever. /GenX

It’s noon, so I’m going to stop. I’ll look for something in the themes of the week later on.

And take your money elsewhere.

I meant to write a bit about this earlier, but I forgot. Instead of editing the previous post, I’ll give this its own.

You might have heard or seen a brief mention that the effort to unionize a plant in Alabamastan failed.

A couple of stories about how Amazon “won,” but very little good analysis, in my opinion.

I also marvel at the deafening silence from Vice News. Not sure if that’s as embarrassing as Katie Hill, but it’s close.

You don’t like how Amazon treats its workers?

Don’t buy from them. I try to avoid that, myself. Sometimes I’ll even go out of my way to avoid giving them money.

It’s really not that difficult.

The Microsoft spell check says that that title is misspelled.

Maybe it is, but I really don’t care. I think it fits.

A lot of what I’ve been working on the past few years is trying to rebuild what i let fall by the wayside for several years.

But I do know how to do these things. Maybe they’re not the new hotness(tm), but they do work.

And I do them because I’ve seen that they do work.

There were some interesting things that came up in one of my social groups last night. We ended up discussing some of what came up in some of what I wrote about recently from an OD writing prompt. It also plays in to some of what Harry Browne wrote about in How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World. There are things that you do that may not bring you any particular joy, but they do help you perform later.

Those suicide drills don’t help you block or tackle.

Running them until you puke doesn’t have any immediately-apparent benefit. And, as a player, when you’re dealing with the pain involved with running them, you hate the person who made you run them.

Then you finally get to the point when you can play. The hatred is gone.

I think in adulthood, one of the troubles is figuring out something you can do to challenge yourself.

One of the podcasts I routinely consume talked about the mechanics of writing a book. Committing to write 2,000 words per day? Yeah, I can do that.

It wasn’t particularly long ago that I would have thought that that was completely impossible.

The big thing is figuring out what you want to be able to do, and the tedious things you’ll need to do to be able to do them.

If you’d told me in 2011 that, in the same week, I’d get an injection on Saturday, then an infusion the following Friday, I would have told you that that you’re nuts.

*steps away to look at how long this entry is*

Yeah, getting close to that point, already.

It’s taken me maybe an hour, total, to write that.

So, yeah, there is something about comes from adherence to something ritualized that helps you progress as a person.

Back on the discussion last night, part of what I’m fascinated by lately, too, is the role of religion in human life.

When I was young, kind of a Randroid, I was more than a little skeptical of religion. I’ve heard Vin Armani on a few different podcasts recently. *DDGs it* I hate linking to Reddit, but this is one of the first things that came up.

The secularities among various separate religions is fascinating. Even things like the vibrations induced by chanting are virtually identical.

So what is that?

Maybe there’s something else going on.

Bouncing back to the writing — I need ideas for something longer to write about.

Suggestions wanted.

Accomplished this weekend, other than getting the first part of my two-part vaccine.

Just a paper where they wrote the date of the dose.

No, you may not see it, and I will not show it willingly.

I won’t carry it.

If you refuse to sell to me because I will not present it, that may or may not be okay. I’m really not going to be terribly upset about you refusing to sell to me.

You’ve lost a sale, and I will tell my friends and family why they shouldn’t buy from you in the future.

That kind of ties in to the woke MLB All-Star game move.

Because Georgia passed a law that institutes the sorts of restrictions on voting that many other states have, you have to move the game to perhaps the whitest city in the league.

Um.

So I stop consuming. I do it by my choice. Blocked and Reported, if you will. Except, maybe, I’m not reporting. I’m just blocking.

I will take my attention, and money elsewhere.

Next injection scheduled. Mayday. Somehow that seems appropriate.

Listening to Robbie right now.

I will get the first dose of the Phizer vaccine later this week. After checking to see if there were any negative contradictions to my disease modifying therapy, I’ve cleared it with my neurologist. If private denial of service isn’t a violation of this, then I will simply refuse to give them my business.

I get overly concerned about these things, but that wanes over time.