Category: Scarred Brain murmurings

I really haven’t written much here lately. Variety of reasons for that, but there’ll probably be more to come.

After Robby Soave’s findings about what Meta (read: FB, IG) did in the early months of the Biden Administration is very, very, very disturbing. (Story in case the Tweet thread disappears…) The Livestream is here.

After listening to the livestream, I’m a bit more sanguine. My initial reaction after seeing things unfolding earlier today was to return to my frequent instinct, and just leave.

The sanguinity comes in after watching Jeremy Borin’s response to Crowder.

I’ve paid for BlazeTV for a very long time. Somewhere my MIL has a photo of Glenn hugging a very fat me at a promotion where I’d gotten his phone working after I’d left the radio stations. My replacement at the stations and I got the job done….then he and Stu caught us smoking on the loading dock on the way out of the show. To be young and healthy…

Back on topic, after the “just leave” instinct kicked in big time when I noticed the order-taking from the government (the CDC).

Big tech shouldn’t be seeking direction. Even more, however, government shouldn’t be offering it. Even more importantly, government shouldn’t be giving it.

Speaks a bit to the difference between Rawlsian positive rights, and Lockian negative rights.

But a restriction on government kind of falls into the latter category. With the conclusion that government doesn’t work, you stop looking for it to succeed or fail at anything.

It’s there. It’s always going to be there. And, aside from breaking things, and killing people, it’s not going to ever do anything well.

As a consumer, you minimize your exposure to companies who seek government-like power. As a citizen, you try to restrain government whenever, wherever you can.

And you minimize where you can’t.

Sadly, I need to use some of the commercial tools. I’ll miss IG, but it’s going in the box again. So be it.

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Tomorrow, Satureday, and Sunday, I’ll be trying to catch some talks from Shmoocon. I was really physically-exhausted after last year’s foray.

I’m also not spreading around as much cash between inflation, job uncertainty, and probably losing a not-insignificant amount of money dealing with a crypto company who’s likely reeling from FTX, etc..

But I can sit, watch, and write.

Or people just forget. Popping in on my podcast feeds lately has been Andrew Heaton’s The Political Orphanage.

Specifically, he interviewed the guests from the SoHo Forum Debate I attended last fall.

One of my randomly-consumed podcasts is The Political Orphange by Andrew Heaton.

Recently, he’s interviewed the participants in the debate. Krystol first, then Horton.

I found myself disagreeing with Krystol a lot more in Andrew’s interview. My disagreements really stem from Krystol’s view, that really is from the Cold War, that we need to have things spread all around the world in order to be effective taking out threats.

Things change. I’ve written about this in relation to the changes that have taken place on the battlefield, the Army getting rid of its MASH units.

The US can project foreign policy even without a large presence on the ground. See: Ayman al-Zawahiri or Solelimani..

(Aside: this came up in my podcast feed as I’m writing this.)

War has changed. The folks who’ve taken over the Libertarian Party are stuck in the early 1970s.

My tweet response to Heaton as I was listening to the Horton interview:

As I’ve said here before, for the AntiWar crowd, everything is still the LBJ Daisy ad. Still. Forever.

So I stared digging yesterday on some of the shit that’s come out of the NeoHippie crowd, things I’d forgotten about.

I wrote this back in 2005:

On Orkut I feel like I’m really in the minority in the American Politics community (if you don’t have an Orkut account, and want one, drop me an e-mail). There are so many confirmed Socialists…and those who sincerely believe that the United States was worse than the Soviet Union. I thought those people had really dried up. Now I’m being assaulted by quotes from that Khmer Rouge apologist, Noam Chomsky. It’s really disheartening to see that people still are busy denying what happened in the Evil Empire. Even more disturbing is that it’s still going on today.
What’s more disturbing, and perhaps this speaks to blogs, too, is what people use as evidence for their arguments. I really try to guard against using what I’d consider to be overly-biased sources, yet, these folks have no qualms about doing it. I don’t know if it’s because they are so blinded by their agendas that any evidence is fine, or if they just haven’t ever had to write scholarly papers.
All I can say is it’s really disappointing.

For reference, Orkut was Google’s first social networking site. I had a link to a New York Times article that’s gone away. (Even if the link still worked, I’m sure it’d be paywalled, so pretty much useless.

How did these people come back from the obscurity they so richly deserved?

And they’re running hte Libertarian Party now.

Maybe having a comic from New Jersey as your presidential nominee is deserved.

But the bigger issue is the same as it always was: not everything bad in the world is because of something the US did. That’s the undying principle for these experts reembraced by the LP.

I could be upset about it, but I’ll do what I tend to do, and leave.

When it comes to voting, I’ll do what I have been doing my entire adult life — vote against the worst candidate. For the past tew election cycles, that’s normally been the Libertarian. I’m less convinced that that’ll be the case in 2024. Good job. You broke it, you bought it.

Writing on Sundays is what I do.

Watching football after the Saints’ disastrous performance on Thursday night.

Still trying to figure out what I want to attack next month. I seem to have deleted my list of prompts while I was trying to free up space on Google before I chose to give them some money, so I don’t have to worry about being out of space anymore.

I should be searching the fine web to find some ideas, but I’m also tempted to look through some pas years to sample.

What can I do — I’ve been busy as hell trying to get a bunch of stuff finished by the end of the day tomorrow. I worked yesterday, even.

But I’m also occupying time watching what’s going on with politics. Not going to make any predictions about what happens in a few weeks, but I really don’t think I’ll be negatively surprised.

So I’m still taking ideas for next month. I wanted to have this all wrapped up by next weekend, but we’ll see.

Not really ready for a new week at work, but whatever. I have things that I’m behind on to accomplish, and I think I can probably get pretty far on those.

But first a Sunday of football. Since the FormskinsCommanders won on Thursday, the TV games hwere in the Beltway swamp are largely focused on a really subpar Ravents team, and whatever the big national games are.

*shrug*

Still a considerable amount of the season left. Washington is going to be going back to the ODU product under center since Wentz broke a bone in his hand.

Some big candidates for the Crystal ChandelierChris Chandler, award recently.

Otherwise, it’s been a matter of trying to figure out what I need to do early next month, and over the end of the year.

Interspersed, there, too, is following events with the world and politics.

A group of Mises Caucus members calling themselves the Libertarian Part of Virginia invited me to some rubber chicken affair in Richmond in a few weeks to modify the party bylaws.

Problem is the party dissolved itself; it doesn’t exist, legally. How the fuck do you lobby to participate in electing politicians when you haven’t followed the basic rules?

Fuck you, nerd. RON PAUL 2008!!1!

Still trying to formulate a response to their very delayed response back to me. It can wait.

With their destructiontakeover, however, there’s been a notable silence from the NeoHippies in Alabamastan about what’s been happening in Iran for a month.

Yeah, tha’ts because Mossadeq! The JCPOA would have prevented all of that if Orange Man Bad hadn’t pulled the US out of it.

Or you take a look at Twitter or some of the MSM sites that have been covering it. (I’ve been getting most of my information from the BBC, though CNN at least has covered it a little. Not sure if the silence is as deafening as the silence from the LPMC folks, but….) Good hashtags if you want to search for yourself…#IranRevolution, and search around for Evin Prison to see the video and photos.

Okay. Time for some more coffee, and football.

Kind of slept in today, but woke up to a call to the spare phone I’ve been monitoring.

The big news overnight? The Libertarian Party’s official Twitter account got 0wner3d by some NFT peddler trying to hock weird fractal artwork.

Yes, the images look kinda neat, but the whole thing shows that the LP is run by amateurs.

Infosec procedures are fucking tedious a lot of the time. I will willingly admit that, but this is the sort of thing that happens when you’re staffed by complete amateurs.

The folks in Alabamastan are reaching out hard to Rep. Amash to get him not to peel off.

I still have reservations about him, but he’d be better than anyone the edgelord kids have been floating.

Whatever.

I live in a state without a chapter.

Why? Because paying attention to procedure is difficult, so we’re going to just do whatever we want; go fuck yourself.

But we’re not going to start from scratch. We’re just going to use what do what we want with what other people put together.

*resigned shrug*

I used to find myself most closely-aligned with the Libertarian Party. I can’t say that at this moment. Am I aligned with the Republicans or Democrats? No. But I think it’s possible that either of those parties will deliver the least bad candidate going forward.

Whatever. I live in Virginia, which has largely returned to being Blue just the way the Byrd Organization intended. I’ll vote in the Democratic primaries against the worst ones out there. It wasn’t hard for me to vote against Elizabeth Warren in 2020.

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So, what else is up on this weird Hurricane Ian-remains weekend?

1. Now that’ it’s October, I probably should figure out what I’m writing about next month. If anyone has any suggestions, I’m open, hoping to have the list close to finalized by about 10/28. I am looking forward to writing, now. Might be a bit of an odd month, because I’m locked in to be out of town for a substantial trip. We’ll see how that goes. Even though I’m thinking it’s pretty useless, I think I’m going to spend a significant amount of time when I’m down there working to pay my protection racket.
2. i need to go do some stuff around the house. Writing, listening to podcasts, etc. is a kind of lame way to avoid addressing things. Get things done. But that can wait a few minutes.

So. Now that I’m on full charge for the phone, off to get on it.

A lot of my thinking lately has been related to what’s been going on with the Libertarian Party.

I will say that I thought some of the ideas that the folks running the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus were generally good ones.

As I’ve spent more time listening to them, I’ve come to a pretty uncomfortable realization — they’re lazy.

The realization came rather slowly. I remember hearing Cyprian discuss some of what he saw going on. I thought he was, maybe, going overboard with the sorts of people who were really backing one of the candidates, and his LPMC associates.

There was some really weird stuff going on with this stuff that happened in New Hampshire summer before last. Ultimately, what happened with the party there was underhanded. What happened with the LP National was similarly underhanded. But the issues were resolved, and most people moved on.

LPNH is putting out some radical things on Twitter (STFW if you’re curious; I’m not going to look at their toxic spew), but whatever. I don’t live in New Hampshire for myriad reasons. (Yes, it looks gorgeous sometimes. I’ve been to Minnesota, and could say the same of it, but I wouldn’t want to be there after the weather gets cold.)

Still, Cyprian’s criticisms, along with the wayward embrace of Ron Paul, and his antipathy towards central banking. I do give him credit, but the whole thing with the insane pandemic spending has really thrown his dogged reliance on “hard assets” into question. Here and there, I’ve been buying precious metals only to see them basically flat, despite the incredible increase of circulating money.

Milton Friedman said that price was a function of supply, demand, and available money. My own education, while I appreciated people from the “Austrian School,” was really flavored more towards the “Chicago School.” My professors really weren’t big on either the Keynesians, or the Austrians. Same goes for my father, who taught graduate students in Finance.

Even with that, I was fascinated by the same sorts of things that Rep. Paul advocated. I kind of just brushed aside things like Ben Stein’s improv’d scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

The failure of the hard assets really made me look more closely at some of the Chicago School teachings. In spite of some of the warnings against it, I’ve been using a lot of the things Harry Browne recommended in his financial writings.

The other big thing that was going on, too, was the crypto currency craze. Again, with the fixed currency supply, the price of BTC should be through the roof with all of the money printing. Yeah, about that.

So, I’ve been sticking to the Browne-inspired mix of revenue-producing assets, but making sure I have good diversification. (And I’m not going to go into my other passive income source; it’s personal.) But the folks who really are the Bitcoin Maximalists really have something in common — they hate some math that’s really not that difficult. An equation with more than one variable? No, you can’t have that!

The money supply needs to increase at roughly the same rate as economic output increases.

Even the folks at the hated Federal Reserve understand that. They’ve over-created money.

But so have the other central banks.

I really didn’t know that the Sterling was a “fiat currency.” Same for the Swiss Franc. So I assumed that those should be in good shape, but, no, they’re not backed with solid assets. The European Central Bank has created more money than the Federal Reserve has.

It’s all about the Petordollar! Nope, that doesn’t work, either. Conversions of currency are basically without fees now, and instantaneous.

If you wanted to pay me a large amount of Dogecoin, I’d accept it. The chances of it being in Dogecoin tomorrow are almost nil.

So they hate math. Okay. Got it. Whatever.

But they also hate laws. Can the Federal Reserve actually raise interest rates to where they should be? Strike that, since “Audit The Fed” has turned into “Abolish the Fed,” can the private markets set interest rates where they’re supposed to be without running afoul of various laws and regulations?

Not gonna consider that.

Over the summer, these people took over the LP.

The attitude since then has been, we took over the party, we can do whatever we want.

That’s not working, and it’s not because of the sort of chicanery that happened in New Hampshire previously. People are using various methods to keep from yielding to the new overlords.

Here in Virginia, the party’s charter is governed by laws. The people on the “outgoing” board choose to just go full President Madagascar.

Oops.

I’m reminded of a former boss whose car was stolen. The guy who stole it didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission, and blew up the engine.

Oops.

When I tweeted the story covering the things going on with the state parties rejecting the takeover, I said I shouldn’t be viewing it with bemusement.

You stole it. You broke it because you didn’t understand how to operate it. Now you’ve got nothing. Oh well.

I haven’t written since my last summer binge.

Lots and lots going on. None of it is really worth writing about publicly.

I wish I’d saved the article I saw about the economic state happening right now. Essentially, the author admitted something that it seems to be tough for many to admit. I Don’t Know.

This started with the debate over whether that US economy is in a recession after the frequently-cited two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

Change the definitions, and hope that people don’t hold it against you that you don’t know.

I don’t know.

Neither do the armchair Austrian economists.

Why are asset prices not following inflation?

I don’t know.

Oil is still very high. Why is the same not true of precious metals? For the crypto-doesn’t-have-any-use-other-than-gambling crowd, looks like Real Estate is about to crash.

Nobody fucking knows.

Even the people who proclaim themselves to be right on just about everything, and that messaging is the most important thing ever. They knew that this would totally get people on their side.

What’s tougher — admitting you don’t know, or that you were wrong?

Good question.

The site for the Notes of a Goon podcast. Back At Again – Notes Of A Goon

But after issues with the domain registrar who shall remain nameless, I’m back on the Intertubes.

But it’s another Saturday to write.

Speaking of writing, I think I’m going to do my summer sprint again this year. Why the hell not?

So I need to dig through my outstanding prompts, and more things to add to the Summer Writing category.

But things are progressing.

Looking forward to my travels at the end of the week/next weekend.

Next Saturday’s writing may be from the train. We’ll see.

Yeah, it’s a reference to an odd U2 song. I dunno.

This is where the NeoHippies are, and always will be. (I understand that it doesn’t really fit perfectly, but I’m so finished with the antiwar.com-types. Again. And more.)

That really is a callback to my days in radio, where I’d rip probably three faxes per day peddling various apologetics.

I felt much the same way about the obsessive Chomsky quoters on Orkut.

But the latest part is the “takeover.” Instead of creaking fax machines, the new delivery source is Twitter.

While I gave them some credence as I’ve been bumping through various Libertarian podcasts, and seeing them treated favorably on Kennedy, the miss on the Russian invasion of Ukraine really soured me.

Now what they’re worried about, first and foremost, is keeping the US out of a nuclear war. See the clip in the first line. Things that have happened really are irrelevant. Pay attention to this one article Harry Browne wrote in 2001. Pay attention to some of the icky things the US was involved with in South America in the 1970s and 1980s. Pay attention to the Iranian coup in 1953. (Which, yes, the early CIA helped with, but was primarily a British operation….Hitchens wrote about this after the Michael Moore trope was released in 2004.)

Hear what you want to hear, and disregard the rest…..

See? I did have Boomer professors….

(And that particular Boomer professor had actually been a counterpart of my dad’s in the Army…I’ve wondered what happened to him, but my web search skills fail….he’s got a very common first name, and a surname that’s shared with another university nearby….)

The similar thoughts that came into my head watching the debate in NYC, that the clapping section, who now define what Libertarianism is, thought one person won. See here.

What do I do if they succeed? Well, I take my own advice.

Speaking of podcasts, the most notable one I heard this week was this.

I miss the Free Beacon podcast. It was one of the things that seemed to die with the COVID lockdowns.

I could probably plunk away for hours, but I understand that basically nobody will read this. Whatever.