Schrödinger's Election

Scott Adams recent article points out that we are seeing two simultaneous realities presented, with one that will fall away when the election happens and we can observe the final results.

So choose your reality. If you like the reality where Trump wins, you can watch it happening live on FOX News. He’s crushing it over there. But if you hope for a Clinton win, watch CNN and see your dreams come true. She’s doing great on that network. On November 8th, one of those realities will fall away. 

Sounds like a certain cat.

While he's not entirely kind to the FOX news view of reality, there's one hell of a shiv aimed at CNN.

CNN is temporarily a comedy network because it is hilarious to watch them avoid mentioning Clinton while pretending to cover a race that allegedly involves two candidates.

LIberal Bullies

They steal yard signs because they can't stand there being so many. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame notes how they've become the bully party, as well as the party of outright theft. He, of course, "endorsed" Hillary (for, as he repeatedly noted, his personal safety and that of his family). A Democrat operative who is a convicted criminal AND nevertheless meets with the president of the United States is on video bragging about how he set up Trump supporters to get beat up, or rigged encounters to make them look violent. His presence at multiple events has been documented by several people. And on colleges Trump supporters are attacked.

In the spirit of the sign stealers, some asshole proudly defaced Trumps star on the walk of fame. When a homeless black woman decided to stand guard over it because she supported him, she was set upon and beaten.

On the reporter front Esquire Magazine shames people not even for supporting Trump, but for not "clapping hard enough" and coming out for Her(pes).

Oh, yeah, and Hillary called 1/4 of the voting public "deplorable", a bunch of sexist, racist, hateful people.

Yes, hypocrites. The same people who tell us stories of "two wolves" - an Indian tale that we all have two wolves inside us, fighting for supremacy. That one is virtue, strength, patience, justice, and the other our dark side: anger, fear,, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The one that wins is the one you feed.

I for one do not believe anger to be a bad thing, but this story is not about the nuance between anger and wrath, or hunger and gluttony. It is instead like one of the true lessons behind karma, behind the statement "who lives by the sword, dies by the sword" - your choices define the circumstances you put yourself into, define who you meet, what options are left to you. What you choose to dwell on and obsess over too much consumes you. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in the Screwtape Letters, this applies even to virtues, to the point they become sins.

It also echoes the statement that one should be careful in fighting monsters.

Watch what the left obsess over. Watch that they obsess. Many are broken: narcissists, borderlines - or much closer to those states than used to be common before the heyday of the self-esteem culture - and have nothing inside to anchor them.

I can say this for a fact from my family and circle of acquaintances. The Hillary contingent, and the NeverTrump-ers, will not bend. They cannot imagine that what Trump said on the bus was not sexual assault, or a marker for one, rather than the simple truth about groupies. The left in particular will not believe that democrat workers ripped up voter registrations on camera, or bragged about beating up Trump supporters, and if they do, well, Trump and his supporters are all nazis, so they deserve it. Or it's staged - even if some of the people are easily identifiable figures.

They are people who foam at the mouth about Sarah Palin, Trump, southerners, etc., and cannot see themselves, their anger, their viciousness, their pettiness. They literally think they are superior and that their "good" deeds and beliefs earn them some karmic right to be destructive to themselves and others they hate. I've heard it from their own mouths.

In the media they obsessively mock Trump and his supporters, and as Scott Adams has noted, give others permission to do violence. They also think we're morons who cannot be trusted with complex decisions (What's the Matter With Kansas was not an outlier...). Despite the ripping apart of registration cards, video of manufacturing fake events, wikileaks releases about collusion and coordination to favor Hillary, multiple past statements by Democrats affirming the system is rigged, and proven issues with voter registrations #coincidentally favoring Democrats, Colbert recently monologued "the country is divided between those who think Trump will lose because the system is rigged, and those who are glad he'll lose because the system isn't."

They rely on a very narrow definition of rigged.

There's a running SNL joke that Trump thinks the election is on Nov 9th.

Lady Gaga cracked a joke at the beginning of one late night show, eminently predictable once she mentioned her "little monsters", that Trump rallies were full of real monsters.

Who wouldn't do violence to stop monsters? Show them clips of Trump supporters being attacked and you get, or find online, comments that they were bullying people and so they deserved it. Or - as mentioned earlier - "how do you know the videos aren't faked, staged".

Chew on that a minute, a video of an identifiable top Democrat operative seen by multiple witnesses at some of these events bragging at length how he stages violent confrontations is "selectively edited" or "staged".

Talk about projection.

This story of the two wolves, by the way, ties in with one other thing that a recent Molyneux video covered. We can't simply be defined by what we fight against, but what we fight for. What we strive to build, to create. War is a necessity that scars, and can forge, the soul, and beginning to fight against evil is a start, but we cannot be allowed to obsess over what we hate, we must instead work to ensure the survival of what we intend to build.

Or when we are done, we will have nothing around us but ruin. And nowhere to go from there.

We become what we strive to be, what we decide to be, how we decide to act. Those we oppose revel in the moment, in destruction, and rarely build. Even their art is hollow.

I fully expect riots and unrest after Trumps election.

Take care.

Day of the Dead

No. Unlike the Didacts latest bit, this is not a well written piece on the need for tradition, etc.

Incidentally, despite the name, it also does not indulge in any form of metal, death, or otherwise.

Instead, the title is a clue to the name of the band sufficient to run a train through driven by a coked up engineer, and if you still haven't figured out I'm talking about the Grateful Dead, your loss.

Look, I get it. They're not to everyone's taste. Hell, I'm not a deadhead by any stretch, never saw them in concert, certainly never followed them around, and while I certainly skimmed off my da's liquor collection I actually could tell my Navy recruiter with a straight face that I never smoked pot.

But they have some awesome music, and one of the first CDs I ever bought was because one of the wannabe hippie crowd in college I knew recommended the album to me as one of their better studio works. Since I had liked a lot of his record collection, including Dead bootlegs, excepting the Billy Bragg, I listened to it, and bought it the next time I went to the record store.

I did mention I had odd tastes, right? Rush, Moody Blues, Yngwie Malmsteen, Satriani, Iron Maiden, The Cure, New Order, Merle Haggard, etc....

So, my favorite song off of that album, "Terrapin Station"

Fate, Courage, Groundhog Day, and the Edge of Tomorrow

This isn't precisely a review as it's got major spoilers, but I felt I really had to go deeper into the story and characters of the Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow than the short review I gave it.

I really love this movie. Frankly, I think it really is a better Groundhog Day, and that's saying a lot. Bill Murray is fucking brilliant, and nice guy/blue pill romantic elements of the script aside, his portrayal of Phil, the arrogant, jaded, and cocky weatherman is awe inspiring. You start with the realization that he - apparently - has no consequences as everything resets, but he remembers his past. He takes advantage of it, mercilessly. Then he realizes that there ultimately is a consequence - he's trapped. In desperation to escape, he tries suicide. Again, and again, and again. Even stealing the groundhog to find a way out.

Eventually, tired of being stuck in the same rut, tired of hedonism, tired of self-destruction, he decides to seek self-improvement. While those who've taken the red pill may argue with some of what is portrayed as good - being helpful to people of of genuine kindness, learning to play music, and becoming an expert at innumerable practical skills are all good things to achieve, and he had a lifetime, some say dozens, to learn them.

Once his core nature changed, he got out of the rut. It's a powerful lesson.

OK, Andie McDowell is actually pretty cute too.

So why would Edge of Tomorrow be better? It too starts with a glib charmer who is, if anything, worse. Bill Murray's Phil was competent at his job even if he was a bitter and jaded human being.  Tom Cruise's William Cage is a superficial charmer, and deeply inside, a coward. It would be easy to say "because I like SF tropes more" as a cheat.

It's because while both characters are placed on a path to virtue, where Phil is placed on a path to improve himself for his own sake, Cage not only has to overcome his debilitating cowardice, improve himself, become an expert at war despite never having a background in it, but also overcomes his personal failings in the cause of something far greater than himself. Yes, this gives him additional outside motivation, but he could have just as easily lived a life of debauchery and said "fuck you", given in to his cowardice. Where Phil's suicides were played seriously, showing how selfish they were, and how they affected everyone around him not in on the gag, the nature of the time loop is played for very dark battlefield humor in Tomorrow.  Can't train because he broke his leg? Bullet to the head.

Despite the fact he - like Phil - did not control his entry into the time loop, he too embraces it. He knowingly suffers, over and over again, to find a path out through the other side by winning this war.

In the end, Chekhov's gun is respected, and instead of escaping the loop by killing the mimics, William Cage loses his ability to loop after a blood transfusion. This is the moment of truth for his character, as he is no longer immune, so to speak, from death. If he dies, he's not only gone, but there will not be another chance to stop the aliens, to put his knowledge to use.

In the end, he sacrifices himself, and yes, the day is won.

Rush on Trump

Over the last decade a lot of the conservative radio personalities have, for me, fallen by the wayside. Hannity may have his heart in the right place but he comes across as a blowhard who doesn't know what he's talking about. Glenn Beck, aka Glenn #Cuck, well - he's a crying whiner, despite what good he's done in the past.

But Rush? Ah - and oh boy. OK, I don't listen to his show but have in the past, as well as read some of his books in the 90's. He's a flawed man, but he gets it. He has his facts right, even if he tends to get meta, or even metaphorical, in translating them (with a tendency to quote the NYT and other media outlets in full context). He's often been insightful on where problems actually lie, and while he's rallied round the republican flag holding his nose, and defending Romney and McCain from unwarranted attacks, he's also been on the front lines of conservatives taking them to task.

When it comes to character flaws and bombastic style, he actually reminds me a bit of Trump.

And he "gets" Trump. He stands nearly alone among the commentariat for that alone.

From a recent transcript, regarding Peter Thiel:

THIEL:  I don't agree with everything Donald Trump has said and done, and I don't think the millions of other people voting for him do either.  Nobody thinks his comments about women were acceptable, but I don't think the voters pull the lever in order to endorse a candidate's flaws.  It's not a lack of judgment that leads Americans to vote for Trump.  We're voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed.  This judgment has been hard to accept for some of the country's most fortunate, socially prominent people.  It's certainly been hard to accept for Silicon Valley, where many people have learned to keep quiet if they dissent from the coastal bubble.

RUSH:  Now, folks, this is right on the money.  This explains every Trump supporter.  You know, the media and a lot of nose-out-of-joint Republicans and even a lot of nose-out-of-joint conservatives are wandering around trying to figure out why this reprobate, why this coarse, this braggart, this bombastic, this rough-around-the-edges, why this guy with no character, why do so many people support him?

And Thiel nails it here, and it's true for everybody supporting Trump.  They're not endorsing Trump because of his flaws.  His flaws don't matter right now because people have judged the current leadership of the country to have failed and failed big, and they show no signs of even realizing they've failed.  The people opposing Trump both in the Republican and Democrat Party do not sense a crisis.

How many times have we discussed this?  They do not sense a country off the rails, because to them it isn't.  They do not have to live with any of the conditions their policies create.  They're not worried about the unemployment rate; it'll never affect them.  They're an worried about open borders, immigration.  It doesn't affect them.  Their kids are not gonna be around the people that commit crimes, who have crossed the border illegally, they're not gonna be confronted by it.  They live in protected enclaves, in large part.

 I've got one quibble in an otherwise excellent speech from Mr Thiel: "Nobody thinks his comments about women were acceptable"

In what context? Would I make the comments Trump has had in a family discussion around the dinner table? No.

But is what Trump said untrue? No. And as a result, they may be crude to bring up in some contexts, but they are anything but unacceptable.