As the tragicomedy of Kevin McCarthy continues to unfold in the Emerald City of Oz, I was tasked with filling out and presenting my documents to Cthulhu’s minions inside the precincts of the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh. Well maybe it was the Dunwich town hall. But there was definitely a lot of eldritch horror somewhere close by I can assure you.
My hand was a virtual claw from having to sign my illegible signature hundreds of times to the various documents. I was made aware of the 11 billion separate types of discrimination that Dunwich recognizes and prosecutes along with the blessings of diversity, equity and inclusion that seem to seep out of every document that I was forced to read. It was inspiring.
It was a particularly dreary day weatherwise, drizzling and forty degrees, but I was kind of happy to foray out into the world just to convince myself it was actually still out there. Apparently not having a Speaker of the House hasn’t managed to disrupt the space-time continuum. And the zombies wandering around town looked neither more nor less mindless and homicidal than usual. So, all’s right with the world.
Maybe I’m becoming acclimated to the present levels of dysfunction and unreality in the world around me. I noticed it didn’t rankle me as much as it used to. Of course, that could mean I’m becoming zombified myself. But whatever the cause it eased the pain while moving around town.
I read a post by Curtis Yarvin on his Substack that referenced Heinlein’s story Waldo. Now Yarvin is a neo-monarchist who is mostly interested in the political situation we find ourselves in. But he’s also a technologist and here he hypothesizes that one of the more promising areas of technological progress could be in providing human/machine interfaces that allow humans to utilize their manual dexterity at different scales and remotely. So, he sees a sort of virtual reality setup where a surgeon could utilize microscopic equipment as if he were the size of the miniaturized characters in “Fantastic Voyage.” Or a gigantic machine hundreds of feet long could be controlled by a human with the point of view of a giant. His premise is that human intelligence and dexterity after proper training is much more responsible and skilled than an AI. After reading about some of the failures of self-driving cars he may be correct. I never thought Robert Heinlein and Curtis Yarvin would intersect in this version of the multiverse. But there it is.
Will Cain did an interview of Tucker Carlson. What I found interesting was Carlson’s answer to what had red-pilled him. He described his mindset as we went through the Iraq War (from 1:36 to 3:19 in the video) and I found myself remembering a very similar evolution. I went from believing that we were there to make America safer to eventual disillusionment and a sense of absolute betrayal by the Republican establishment. And Carlson echoed that. I didn’t watch the whole thing yet because it’s too long but that little snippet stuck in my mind. Millions of people in this country feel totally betrayed by the Republican party and will never forget that. And that is the reality that gives me hope. If people as different from each other as Tucker Carlson is from me can both come to essentially the same point of view about our political system then it must be the truth. And if it is the truth then I’m finally working from correct assumptions. And that is what I’ve been trying to achieve all these years. It’s not that the truth guarantees that things will work out. It’s that basing your actions on false assumptions guarantees failure.
As this was finishing up I se that McCarthy is still furiously negotiating to buy off his enemies with committee seats and promises of accountability. Ah, what a circus. We really should require all of Congress to wear the red nose, baggy pants and size 20 shoes. And the Speaker should always arrive at the podium in a tiny car. As I said in a comment on the last post, we must be terrible people to be sentenced to leaders this atrocious. Robespierre and Caligula were paragons of sanity compared to the bozos we’ve got working for us today.
Well, that’s enough.