Month: May 2021

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.