Category: Scarred Brain murmurings

When you leave.

I’ve been following along with the news, especially the backlash retailers are experiencing with “Pride,” loosely after my apartment was flooded again at 0230EDT last Thursday morning.

I think things are kinda-sorta getting back together. We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’ve got to have hauled out, but we’re back home since Wednesday. Big thanks to my MIL for coming up to help with the cleanup and reorganization.

In amongst the chaos at home, I did watch the last episode of Vice News Tonight. I will have trouble missing it. They didn’t really say anything about that being the last episode. The episode, itself, focused on some guy who died in Mississippi under suspicious circumstances. Was he lynched? Um…he was not hanged publicly for the public to see. Nobody quite understands the circumstances of his death. But, that the Podunk law enforcement agencies haven’t spent considerable time and effort trying to find who lynched him means that he was killed like it’s still 1963. Nothing’s changed. (And that’s why it’s important that the cheerleaders for the party of Jim Eastland must come down to set things straight….)

I was more bummed about Kennedy’s departure from FOX Business. It was fascinating to see her transition from the token Republican on MTV to a Libertarian stalwart. In spite of her too-frequent dalliances with the NeoHips, I will miss her show.

Maybe I’d find something else. Maybe not. Whatever.

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But back to the not paying too-close attention to the news, there’s been a bit of controversy over Twitter’s brief cancellation of What IS A Woman?. While I’m happy Elon Musk overrode his employees’ inclination to bury it, it’s still something I really just don’t care to watch.

Without the burial, there’s nothing subversive about trying to find it. I simply don’t care about the movie, or its producer.

But with the controversies about what Target has done with transgender swimwear, too, it’s something I care very little about. While I think what they’ve done is a bad business decision, there’s very little for me to do about it aside from shopping there even less than I do now.

If that makes me a bigot, great. What was your name again? Where do you like do you work? Where to you like to shop? Great. I’ll make sure I avoid those places, too.

But that’s about all I’m going to say about it.

See the title. I have the right not to participate. I have the right to deny you my business.

I’m not going to proclaim loudly either of those choices.

If you think that makes me a bad person, again, Whatever.

Probably because I didn’t work yesterday.

I’ve been listening to things on Substack this morning. I do really appreciate the text-to-speech feature. Reading things is very difficult with my vision the way it is

Latest listen? Justin Amash’s birthday wish to F.A. Hayek. I appreciate the sentiments, but it doesn’t square well at all with the MiCaucs; laws are just to be ignored when they don’t suit whatever whim you’ve got at the moment.

And this is why the Libertarian Party of Virginia is gone.

Working within the system of laws is too mard, for Morans, we won, so GTFO.

.

If a law, or regulation tracing to it, is unjust change it. You can’t just ignore it.

Okay, CATO, we get that the Jones Act is stupid. Help someone on the Hill to pass a bill to repeal it. (Full disclosure on this — I do donate money to CATO…)

But beyond the justification of laws and regulations, the permanence is the problem.

Like the blessed Assault Weapons Ban, or the Bush Tax Cuts, sunset them. They address a particular problem for a fixed amount of time. If they’re still needed, pass a new law that does the same thing.

Been thinking a lot lately about Eddie Willers. (Cliffs Notes version…)

I started down this line of thinking after listening to an episode of Your Welcome where the guest posited that every single person can be best at one thing, and that it’s a good thing to promote that.

Mmm….not sure I agree. Can you be proficient enough at one thing to make yourself useful to someone else in furtherance of another goal? It Doesn’t Take A Hero. (Yes, the sorts of high school side reading that stem from being the son of an Army officer…)

Your abilities also change over time. Mine have been significantly affected (negatively) by my medical condition. So maybe I’m not what I was meant to be, what I’m best at, but I can still do various things, and derive a sense of accomplishment from doing those things that maybe aren’t my forte. But no matter what you end up doing, do it as well as you can, nad get the rewards from that.

And try to enjoy those rewards. (One of the places I really fall down; I beat myself for accolades…)

Back to Eddie, however — he’s not one of the bad guys, even if it’s not one of the incredible protagonists. He’s not stupid. I mean, in the early aughts, he might have driven a Dodge Stratus.

But that’s not the temperament he had in the book, or the movie(s).

He was always loyal to a goal set by someone else. I think there’s something admirable about that…even if he wasn’t doing the single thing at which he was best.

Last few days has been spent watching the fallout from the Libertarian Party’s epic rally next weekend in DC. The new chairwoman, who I sort of supported heading into the LP convention last summer has, and continues, to oversee the entire party drifting past the point of embarrassing its members to embarrassing everyone who’s ever associated with them.

But one of the featured speakers, who’s since bowed out, is a dude who was trying to pick up young teenage girls on Yahoo Messenger. LMGTFY isn’t working anymore, but considering how old the story is, I’ll link the BBC story directly.

What can you do?

You can leave.

I try to stop paying attention, but things drift across my attention from time to time, and I dig in more.

One of the people I’ve been paying attention to lately is Kyle Orton. No, not the former NFL Quarterback, and inspiration for my college friend’s fantasy team name, “Orton hears a boo.”

More information about the Russian Orthodox church.

Have a bunch of confused people been convinced by former-KGB into joining a religion that’s really there to serve whatever oligarch is running Russia?

I don’t know.

But it’s a disturbing thought.

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.