Month: January 2023

05JAN2023 – Just a Regular Old Thursday.  The Calendar’s full of Them

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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.

The Power of No

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It never occurred to me that maybe the anti-McCarthy coup might actually have a chance to succeed but what if they did dig their heels in for a few weeks?  Maybe the rest of the House Republicans might start wondering if maybe there were a few more candidates that almost everyone could easily agree on.

It’s so pleasant to dream about what might happen if our elected “leaders” somehow developed backbone and started acting like leaders.  Of course, in reality most of them are either completely useless or worse.  They vary from hacks and grifters to actual sociopaths.  But maybe there are a few that want to do the right thing.  And if they show some resolve and take advantage of a rare situation where the actions of a few can impact a whole institution like the present situation in the House, then maybe something unexpected and positive might result.

Just for the sake of argument, suppose after a couple of weeks of yelling at each other behind closed doors, it occurs to some of the more moderate representatives that a more productive way of solving this problem would be asking each member to provide a list of names that they absolutely would refuse to vote for.  Taking everybody’s lists, they could then add up the negatives and disqualify anyone who had more than four no-votes against it.  Whoever is left would constitute a pool of names that had the potential to be approved.  Then after a couple of test ballots using that pool of names as the source, they could pretty quickly come up with the four or five names with the largest support and begin to do some horse trading to see who could become the Speaker.

Obviously, my idea would require that most of the Republican House members were reasonable human beings.  And we already know that’s not true.  I suspect at least half of them are nitwits.  But I’m sure that the more intelligent members of the group could persuade their more cognitively challenged brothers and sisters to follow some simple instructions.  Surely there are three or four Republican representatives who are both competent and haven’t sold their souls to Mephistopheles yet.  Jim Jordan is one name that has come up often.  Maybe there are some others.

The point is the MAGA wing of the party has found a silver lining to the 2022 mid-term meltdown.  Their 20-member coalition can wreck the Uniparty’s party.  Short of the GOP establishment letting a Democrat become Speaker, their backs are to the wall.  And if they did elect a Dem then the whole charade would be exposed and the Uniparty would be truly unmasked for all to see.  And from my point of view that would be almost as good as Jordan getting the Speaker’s gavel.

Now, this is all nonsense.  None of this will happen.  McCarthy will whine and hector the dissidents and they will be threatened by the donors who paid for their campaigns and eventually they’ll vote for good old Kevin.  But for just a day or two they did give me something to cheer about.  Listening to all of those politicians screeching apoplectically about irresponsibility and the storied history of the “People’s House” gave me a good laugh.

And who knows?  Miracles do happen.  Very rarely.  But not never.

03JAN2023 – Observations on Happenings in Washington

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The House Republicans are busy beclowning themselves but I’m happy at least there’s something of a pretense being made of demanding accountability from the leadership.  Making McCarthy sweat a little before he’s coronated Speaker of the House is healthy.  I don’t believe he’ll enact that rule change to allow the Speaker to be voted out based on a single rep motioning for it.  After all, after he’s Speaker he’s untouchable.  Why would he honor a promise he made while he was still just a mere mortal?  I guess the only reason would be because it would be such a clear proof to the electorate of his dishonesty.  But then again, they’ve already embarrassed him.  Maybe all bets are already off.  We’ll see.

My view is that the Republican House should use their majority to hold the line on everything.  They should produce a budget.  If the Senate doesn’t want to bargain then say too bad.  No continuing resolution, no nothing.  Shut down the government and let the Democrats sweat.  It’s their Senate and President.  Let them vilify the House but it’ll be two years before there will be any way to change the power structure.  Even if the American public sweeps them out of office for turning off the endless flow of entitlements the Republican House majority will have done what they were supposed to do, legislate and create a budget for this runaway bureaucracy.  What happens in 2024 is just another page in this fake script we’re trapped in.  At least they will have shown some honesty, which is in very, very short supply.  Let the Democrats have the whole federal government and let them bring this whole charade crashing down around their ears.

Without a brake on the actions of Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries we’ll be looking at hyperinflation and double-digit unemployment very soon.  And that’s what the American people voted for last year.  Or at least that’s what the poll results that we saw indicated.  It’s important that they get every last drop of the result they chose.  It should be clear as day what was selected; sky high energy and transportation costs, unreliable infrastructure and dead-end jobs for most of the population.  If that truly is what people want, it’s better for those of us who don’t share that vision to get it through our thick skulls that that is the future.  That way we can look for something better.

And as we head down that road, we’ll be able to at least enjoy the comedy that’s on full display from our elected officials.  An hilarious cavalcade of grifters, congenital idiots and just plain criminals who are busy selling off chunks of their country to the highest bidder.  And it just goes to show that individual honest men are completely defenseless against a government that has transformed itself into an organized crime syndicate.  It’s our version of the Baath Party with a revolving door full of Saddam Husseins switching out every four or eight years.  And who knows maybe even that charade will be dispensed with soon.

But while it holds out, I intend to savor every bit of the bathos and buffoonery.  Let’s hope Dementia Joe gets to finish out his term in January 2029.  By then both he and the country should be about the same; a gelatinous puddle of goo.  How could I ask for more than that?