All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Today is Princess Sack-of-Potatoes’ birthday party here at the Compound and there will be about thirty people and I’ve been elected to grill duty. After a day of heavy rain and wind we’ve been blessed with sun mild temperatures and a light breeze so everything looks good.
So stay tuned. I’ll be back with some things to say later on.
Now that I’ve almost entirely recovered from the fatigue, fascination and horror of Election Day I’ve had a chance to reflect a little on what I saw and learned.
First off, it really was a fascinating experience. Coming into direct contact with four or five thousand people, even if only briefly is stimulating and highly interesting. Even if you’re for the most part only asking and answering questions you get a flavor for each soul you collide with.
And I would say the negative contacts were only in the range of a tenth of a percent. I could count them all on the fingers of one hand. And that’s a remarkably low percentage. Possibly the majority of the participants were enjoying the experience. Or maybe they picked up on my energy. Because despite how exhausted I was by the fifteenth hour of my shift I was still energized by the whole thing. My feet weren’t energized but my mind was. It was fun.
However, that all ended when the doors were closed and the tabulation began. Everything about the process of counting the votes is painful, annoying and subject to the vicissitudes of badly designed and easily malfunctioning equipment. But at least in the case of the election team I worked with everyone went way above and beyond the call of duty to get the numbers accurately and expeditiously relayed to the Secretary of State’s office. So, kudos to us.
Now I’ll apply what I learned on Tuesday to what is going on across the country now several days after the election in places like Arizona and Nevada. The delays they are experiencing are on account of the mail in ballots. Either they are waiting for a certain number of days for ballots mailed in on Tuesday to reach them (which seems idiotic) or they only started processing them after they finished the count of the normal ballots.
In either case this is either rank stupidity or an excuse to fabricate ballots to offset shortfalls by the candidate that’s supposed to win. If it weren’t then there would be a requirement that all mail in ballots be mailed in a month before the election. That way all of them would be received and processed before the election. The fact that these states are allowing their elections to be dragged out for a week or more is malfeasance that necessarily robs the process of legitimacy in the minds of the voters. By my way of looking at things this is hastening the break down of national cohesion. This year, more than half of Americans already believed that the 2020 elections were illegally tampered with. 2022 won’t improve on things.
So, I’m struck by the paradox. Here we have a population of people who expend time and emotional energy to vote in the hope that it influences how their government works. And yet more than half of those people think that to some extent the selection of federal representatives is rigged. How can that be reconciled?
Maybe it can’t be reconciled. And maybe in the not-too-distant future something is going to change. What’s the old saying? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Maybe we’re getting tired of acting crazy.
The ZMan walks the talk in that he supports some dissident friendly businesses on his website. In this week’s podcast he expounds on why this is going to be more important as the gulf between progressive America and non-progressive people becomes insurmountable..
The quote I liked was:
“For dissidents, the only way forward is to develop a counter-culture, which means politicizing our own lives fully. How you spend your money, where you spend your money and on whom you spend your money must be political. How you live, where you live and with whom you live is political. In order to build a counterculture, the dissident must become a fully political animal.”
Election Day was my first day at my new gig as Dunwich Deputy Election Scourge. My job was to apply a gigavolt prod to the Great Old One voters to keep them moving in the chutes. To some people this might seem a little odd. Well, most towns don’t have Great Old Ones (GOO) as a component of the voting population. These must be given their own separate line and voting booths and kept under tight control or they would escape the line and begin eating the humans.
Things went very well all morning and at 4 pm I was starting to think we’d get through the day without any trouble but at 4:20 pm we had our first incident. One of the high school ballot checkers foolishly leaned up against the steel sides of the chute while drinking a Diet Pepsi. A tentacle wrapped around her ankles and dragged most of her through the space between the steel guard rails. Four nearby scourges began firing on the GOO with their prods while the Chief Scourge shouted in an Australian accent, “Shoot her, shoot her.” But it was all for naught. The ballot checker had long since disappeared into the florescent green maw of the GOO, never to be seen again. All that remained of her was a dismembered hand with shiny blue nail polish still holding a bottle of Diet Pepsi. The clean up crew kept carefully outside of the safety lines that surrounded the chute. Needless to say, morale amongst the election checkers plummeted. Buffy had been a popular member of the team and would be missed at the high school senior prom.
But we redoubled our vigilance and kept a close watch on the younger volunteers to prevent another regrettable incident. When it was 7:50 I began to think we were out of the woods. But in the final minutes, disaster struck again. A final GOO entered the chute and headed for the checker area. When the Checker went through the list there was no record of Azathoth (sometimes referred to as the “Blind Idiot God”) ever having registered in Dunwich. This was not well received by that symbol of primordial chaos. But before the checker had a chance to state that same day registration was now a reality in Dunwich, the monstrous nuclear chaos from beyond angled space punched a ten-foot hole through the hardened titanium wall and flattened the unfortunate checker into the concrete floor with an invisible limb. It then began pulsing energy in all directions, preparatory to collapsing time-space and thereby forcing Earth through a singularity.
Before we retreated out the rathole I punched the upload button to preserve the ballot data. Then I hit the timer for the tactical nuke and released the goat blood into the floor trough to distract the GOO and give us a chance to escape. One minute later the bunker we had entered was buffeted by the fifty-kiloton detonation. A few minutes later we exited by another tunnel that opened about five miles from ground zero and we proceeded above ground to election HQ to fill out the paperwork and tally the votes.
An irate state election rep who had received a complaint from Cthulhu called to officially chastise the town for gross discrimination against a protected class (GOOs), levy a fine and strip us of our status as a sanctuary city. We absorbed this abuse, finished up the election tally, submitted it to the state and to the press, licked our wounds and headed home for a very late dinner. Well at least Azathoth didn’t get to vote. That bugger is a well known progressive and it was already a pretty bad night for the Right so every little bit helps. Some of the Republican Town Committee tried to blame this on Trump. You can’t please some people.
Politics sucks. Next year I’m hoping to get on the town road crew instead. It doesn’t pay as well but they don’t have to wear radiation badges and necklaces of garlic and wolfsbane. So you have to take that into consideration.
Progressives really are monsters when it comes right down to it.
I emerge from my election induced isolation to view the political state of the country in a shambles. The Red Wave evaporated through some combination of fraud and partisan destiny. The full horror is not yet on display due to the new absentee and vote by mail fraud options that have been put in place. But more than enough is known to confirm that Republicans will no longer be able to win strong majorities in the Congress. I say this because as I’ve stated many times before in 2022, they were running with the strongest conditions in their favor they could possibly hope for. Runaway inflation, the recent memory of COVID fascism, obvious military incompetence, shortages of foods and essential consumer products along with a president whose favorability rating was running around 40% was a perfect storm that should have guaranteed a tidal wave of congressional gains in the mid-term elections. This did not occur.
When the dust settles it looks like they’ll take over the House. The Senate will probably remain with the Democrats or at best will have a one-seat Republican majority. By my calculus this means the political balance is now shifted to the Democrats for the foreseeable future. I now acknowledge the dissident right’s mantra, “We’re not going to vote our way out of this.”
Admitting this is not an easy thing to do. It limits the options for the future and leaves a lot of poor choices as the best-case scenarios. But being honest about the reality of the world we live in is the smartest choice and in the long run the choice that will provide the best outcome for me. So, there it is.
This is just the beginning of the morning after analysis. I’ll wait for the dust to settle before going into any detailed analysis of whether it was fraud or partisan advantage. It’ll take a while for the fraud machines in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia to print out all those fake ballots and tabulate them. And that’s fine. It doesn’t much matter how the breakdown turns out. It might be interesting to know the details but it won’t change anything substantive. But it will provide some additional information on the system in place.
And it will take additional time for me to begin analyzing how this new reality affects my plans for the future. What it means is that all my options involve evaluating different local conditions and the way they’ll be affected by the Democrats permanently dominating the federal government. This will be the trickiest part of the calculus. After all, what does a man such as Ron DeSantis do with his local authority in Florida? Does he openly defy the federal government when they go after his challenges to their social justice agenda? Or does he hunker down and play ball with the feds?
Well, it’s a bleak morning. I won’t pretend it isn’t. But as it is written, “the truth shall make you free.” And truth is what we need in copious quantities. No more false hopes, no more rose-tinted glasses. The harsh, daylight of the ugly morning after. Bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.
So today I was at the election setup from early morning till night. Coming home by the light of the bright full moon I was decidedly overwhelmed at the prospect of another thirty hours of this relentless marathon. I’ll be very glad when it’s in the past.
Posting today and tomorrow will be by necessity minimal. But after tomorrow and a good night’s sleep things will return to normal and I’ll have something to say about the results of the election and what that means to us all.
So bear with me and we’ll get back together soon.
Today is a family get together. Lots of quality time (and store bought pizza!) with the grandkids. So an interesting mix of family fun and indigestion. I expect it won’t be a late day because tomorrow is school for the kids. Which means I’ll post something later. I ahve another rmovie review. I bought this book on gangster movies and I’ve trying out some of the picks. It’s definitely a mixed lot but I intend to soldier on for a while. Next up is In Bruges.
The news items continue to indicate that the Dems are going to get their butts handed to them on Tuesday. Surprisingly I expect to be the least plugged into the elections I’ve ever been because I’ll be … working on the election! Maybe this will provide a different perspective for me on what these events tell us about our country. We’ll see.
So, stay tuned and I’ll try to maintain some semblance of continuity on the site as I become flotsam in the Dunwich election tsunami.
The polls seem to indicate that the Democratic Party is going to receive the equivalent of a good stiff knee to the groin on Tuesday night. Of course, that’s wonderful news and no surprise. But analyzing the reason why is important too. If this is completely explained by the double-digit inflation and the skyrocketing crime wave engulfing the cities then it’s still good news. But I hope it’s more than that.
What I’m hoping is that it is partially explained by a large chunk of independent voters reacting to the Democrats’ behavior during the lockdowns. Being bullied for two years and then finding out that the bullying was all for nothing should have a lot of people really angry. And now that more people are realizing how dangerous the side effects from these unnecessary and ineffective drugs are I can imagine that adding to the anger and the desire to get some payback.
You might ask why it matters if it’s more than just a reflex action by people unhappy about inflation and crime. It’s simple. If there’s any hope of this country returning things to sanity (never mind normalcy) it will depend on a solid majority rejecting the Democrat party categorically. They have to stop seeing the two parties as legitimate alternatives. We’ll only start fixing things when the Democrats can be kept out of power for a couple of cycles. Enough time has to pass that laws can be passed to repair the damage that’s been done to the institutions of government. All vestiges of the programs and policies that the Democrats have promulgated must be flushed down the drain and reasonable policies adopted. And that will only happen when a stable majority that rejects their madness has emerged.
Of course, that assumes that such a majority exists. I often wonder whether there are enough sane people among the Millennials and their younger brethren to allow this country to recover. I think it’s far from certain that there are that many normal people in the next generation. But we’ll get a chance to find out starting Tuesday. And we’ll need to run the table from now on until things improve. 2022, 2024, 2026, 2028, 20230, 2032. That’s a really long time to hold onto power in Washington. The last time that happened was during the Reagan era. The Republicans held the White House for twelve years. Of course, Bush Senior was a RINO who single-handedly handed the country over to the Clintons by lousing everything up.
It would take an extraordinarily savvy politician to manage the fickle American electorate for that amount of time. Basically, it’ll take a miracle. And the Stupid Party doesn’t do miracles. They do stupid. But stranger things have happened. The exact right man may appear at the exact right time and save us from the miserable fate that seems to be pursuing us.
But one thing’s for sure. We’ll never have a more compelling case for kicking the Democrats out of power than we have right now. Inflation, recession, crime, culture war madness, COVID fascism, you name it. What happens after that is a matter of political savvy and determination. And of course, a large dollop of luck.
I read this long emotionally fraught article about Republicans using election advertising on crime as a dishonest but very effective tactic against Democrats in the mid-term elections. So, it went into all of the reasons why voters are swayed by this type of ad. They mentioned how crime is a visceral subject that elicits fear. And fear is very powerful. They admitted that all the large cities actually are experiencing enormous upticks in all crime since 2020. They even admit that the Democrat candidates are easily linked to things like cashless bail and policies advocating releasing convicted criminals for even offenses like murder. But finally at the end of the article it fell back on the old refrain that using crime as an election issue is RACIST! They even went all the way back to 1988 and dug up the Willie Horton ads that Bush Senior used against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis during the presidential election. And they lament how racist that was. After all Willie Horton was black. He was also a murderer who was furloughed on his own recognizance from prison by Dukakis’s program only to flee and then commit rape and other crimes. But mentioning such crimes is by the Left’s definition racist.
Well, I guess if they claim that black voters are racists because they want to reduce crime then maybe that is a defensible position. After all New York City voters elected Mayor Eric Adams, a black former police officer, who ran as the law-and-order candidate, because they were alarmed by the skyrocketing violent crime wave that had engulfed the city during and after the George Floyd riots. Were the majority non-white residents secret white supremacists? Is Eric Adams a white supremacist because he embraces the dog whistle term “law and order?” It seems difficult to imagine.
I think what the article was trying to say is that calling it racist is the only hope the Democrats have of defeating the tactic of using crime as a weapon against them. If they can frighten the Republicans away from using crime then they will deprive them of a very potent weapon.
Back in June the media tried to use gaslighting by claiming that all their research showed that the potent issues in the 2022 elections would be abortion and threats to democracy. Basically they were telling the Republicans that those were the only acceptable election topics they could use. Finally, a few months ago they admitted that inflation would be the biggest negative for them but they still contended that crime was a very minor issue.
Well, here we are a week out from election and they’ve finally faced the facts. Crime is the second biggest issue. And in some areas, like the suburbs around the most dangerous cities it might be the biggest. And in a roundabout way this article sort of admits that there’s no way to deflect these attacks because basically they’re true. And with nothing they can do about those facts all they can do is claim that pointing out those facts is racist.
Very well, reality is racist. But reality has a habit of rearing its racist head when people who depend on make believe can least afford it to. If you have district attorneys releasing hardened criminals in cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia and those criminals then commit murders and assaults, it’s not surprising if voters decide to punish your party.
When even cobalt blue New York state might elect a Republican governor then we know that something has gone profoundly wrong. Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one in the “Empire State.” Nothing but fear can account for this ideological shift. And nothing but fear can account for the magazine Vox admitting the truth; that they own the crime problem and it’s going to do them in this year at the polls. Sucks being them.
I’m back, I’m back! I was in election jail. I was being trained. Oh, the horror, the horror. Please pity me. I will live to regret getting involved in this flying circus. No power in the ‘Verse will be able to make this turn out right. But I’m committed and the wheels are in motion.
That was last night. Today I was out of state and helping out a friend. It involved travelling through rush hour traffic on an alternate route with too many lights and not enough lanes. Just my luck the main highway had a major accident and copious amounts of traffic spilled onto the road I was on. I watched in horror as my remaining time and gasoline trickled away into history as I sat in crawling traffic. The magical E mark on the gas gage and the digital clock on my dashboard competed for my attention. Finally, the gas gage won and I exited into a station. Imagine my horror when the gas pump refused to work! It would deliver about eleven cents worth of gas and then the valve would bang shut. Like some pre-technological savage, I mumbled some kind of incantation to the gods of petroleum and performed mysterious wrist turns to put the gas nozzle at some undefined angle to align the earth and the flow mechanism to ensure a sacred resonance that would grant me more gas. After ninety-nine cents of gas had been delivered (or more likely, had been falsely charged) I gave up. As a beaten man I returned to the road and its molasses-like flow.
My anger was increased when I observed that there had been no increase in the remaining milage in my tank according to the gage’s wisdom, none at all. Those eleven cents-es were completely false. If any of the people on the road were watching me at that point, they would have seen someone screaming to himself and gesticulating like a demented idiot at his dashboard and this witness might have been tempted to call the police for my own good.
When I finally reached my destination, I was a half hour late and below E on the gage. Luckily, the time limit turned out to be either incorrect or a ruse to get me there sooner. This caused very mixed feelings in my soul. But eventually I saw the humor (somewhat). And once the race was over the rest of the errand became suddenly stress free and enjoyable. It was another one of those beautiful fall days that inexplicably appear out of the teeth of typical drab New England clammy cold. It was sunny and in the mid-sixties. I had a nice snack and very good cup of coffee before heading home and at the next Mobil station I filled the tank with no other pain than the usual financial outrage that is now the standard reaction to life in Creepy Uncle Joe’s America. Now with the needle on the right side of the F, I drove with a smile in my heart and a country song on my car’s music system. It was Tobey Keith’s “Red Solo Cup.” And in my new-found joy I sang along with Tobey and suddenly I hadn’t a care in the world.
When I got home Camera Girl saw what a good mood I was in so she told me to empty the mouse bucket traps in the sheds. Well, that brought me back to reality. Nothing like bloated soggy rodents to put things in perspective. But still. It was a bright warm day and the crows looked happy to see my dead mice down by the swamp. The circle of life, and all that. And I saw some good comments on the site and I was reminded that Senator Murkowski is about to be fired in favor of someone on our side of the fence. And that cheered me up quite a bit. And tonight, is split pea and sausage soup which is a very hearty and savory delight. So even though the day was interrupted, I feel that life provided the right ingredients for a successful foray into the world. Life is good.