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Wednesday, 31 December 2025

Vibing in (20 26)

Who or what you vibing with? Tell me what you feel you believe. For vibes rake plausibility into a pile of virtue.
 
So usher in them vibes, make the word plausible sound like a bell. Slow clap that plausible. Ring in the new vibes. Gather up what you'd sensed about the old, douse it with accelerant, and show Heaven what you're made of!
 
 
 
My Own Private Irony 
The first order of business is to recognize that this thing called projection is the result of all I perceive being that which dictates foremost what I think and believe and the assumption that others see what I see and therefore plausibly believe what I believe.
 
The subordinated order at hand is the perception of others' agency, and not least why my focus is on the one or other among so many, which determines expectation.
 
As a fan who recognized how overweening an attitude of supremacy fans can exude, it was dependent upon our sharing a chosen space, as opposed to their being in my space or my wandering into theirs. And this was at a time where the amount of attention would seem to be dominated by "others" and stacked against "us", until I realised mine was just a lesser level beneficiary of the same favor.
 
Not unlike as regards the religious, the question is why do they come across as so toxic? Are they really invading my space, or am I wandering into theirs looking for conflict? Is it really that hard to ignore those fandoms? Are they, like, drive-by firing at me or bombing my buildings or trying to indoctrinate the children - or is it rather that I seek out that which I find most perplexing because I also have a chip on my shoulder? That's the origin of the term fan. You'd find that thing within every fandom proportional to your finding overrated the thing of which they're fans.


 
Have I got an anecdote for you. And for you and you and you. For my anecdote remains anecdotal until its collated with others into a representative sample. No one's story alone is statistically significant. Until it is.

Be wary as well of someone's citing a study; it's only anecdotal until their story checks out.

Cool story, bro. Gotta link?

My anecdote? It's all vibes until a hard object smacks you in the face. Maybe until then. You could take the feeling in your head caused by the object's smack for just more vibes. The good vibrations knell of cognitive dissonance means you can choose avoidance, willful ignorance, or dissociation without having to choose anything at all.

Words are funny little things. And runny. The messy semantics of this language I seem to be using at the moment can spill out into a globalized formation of already appropriated anglicisms for the sake of vibe sniffing to one's tolerance in any language of one's choosing, again without having to choose.

I am thinking about the word "woke" and how anti-woke is woke on the other side of the bed. Anecdotally, encountering an overweight black woman working at the DMV who moves more slowly than you'd like automatically means some svelte white woman was discriminated against in the filling of that position. Someone just knows it's true because everywhere they look there's a black person working. Stay anti-woke!

I use this example not simply for the origin of "woke", but because the number of times my assumptions about someone's politics was challenged, it so frequently hinged upon their fixation that black people were being unfairly advantaged by way of things like affirmative action.
 
Affirmative action is to DEI what political correctness is to woke.
 
Anyway, in lieu of an actual anecdote that you should know by now is not coming, suffice it to say that American politics is not just determined by the most obvious binary, but is woven to its core with racial animosity. It's liminal, unless it's not.  


 
 
 
In preemptive self-referential service to- and in the interest of clarity, "what it means" (see below) means either, what they should say, or what truth can be gleaned from what they say by way of the curtailment and delimitation of what they say.
 
Who's "they"? I dunno. Maybe me. Maybe you. Somebody.
 
See this entry. Preemptive condolences. On that note, I begin where I left off, whereby any interpretative utterance should include "as far as I know" despite eventual superfluity, contradiction, or irony:
 
what they say = what it means
most of something = maybe a majority
9 times out of 10 = probably a majority
99% of something = gotta be a majority
99.999% = I'm talking to hear myself
People forget that... = Consider that...
People tend to forget... = Consider...
People don't realize... = I realize...
it's ironic... = it might be interesting...
Nobody is saying... = I disagree with...
kind of [+ verb] = [verb].
 
 
 
 
pop quiz
At what point does unilateral execution of executive authority, dressed in board-speak and cloaked in trade secrecy,  go from being an inconvenient consideration to unworthy of explosive disputation?
 
When should schlepping shlubs off the street and into untold cages stop being a kosher rule of law thing and be seen as simply something scary?
 
When do people of a political persuasion, when faced with the fallibility of their heroes, throw up their hands and say, "Eff it all, they're all corrupt!" without mentioning any names?
 
Answer: When the vibes are all wrong.
 
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And speaking of the sundry and variable tools in the kit of manufacturing vibes of consent, it shouldn't be a mind-numbing notion that Chomsky's in a class of controlled opposition. 
 
Not that being "in the Epstein files" is de facto that, but as Ohtarzie pointed out all those years ago, he plausibly wouldn't know it if he was compromised.
 
Or, at least the professor's default intellectual consciousness is thinking himself beyond the taint. Whether or not he has a clear conscience, i.e. all the way down, is your guess.
 
Don't forget mob rules – that sadomasochistic way of scratching each others' backs.
 
Gock got sore when I suggested I'd already considered an unspoken idea he had begun to explain: that Don Dumps In His Pants would be the beneficiary of the kompromat implied in activities of the Epstein character. This would explain to some degree how, in spite of the widespread mockery he receives from pundits in the press, he manages to get what he wants from so many he was supposed to have gotten schooled by. 
 
In fairness, Gock's irritation, I assume, was not because he wanted to be the smarter guy in the room (or only that I was interrupting his train of thought) but because the casual projection based on widespread experience would indicate one thinks oneself is erudite enough just by being aware of the blackmail aspect of the operation and leave it at that.
 
For what rings plausible to the Epstein obsessed among the Dump Resisters is apparently the president's terrified of it being revealed how he does what with his naughty bits and to whom. As if. Chalk one up to the effectiveness of the algorithm. Preaching to the choir was never so easy.
 
What doesn't fit the vibes of gleefully owning your enemies on-line (an up-vibe form of doom scrolling) is the fact that it's all transactional, and at a certain level no one is immune.
 
The people in the photos wouldn't be there if there wasn't anything in it for them. And Epstein having them there benefitted him or his clients in any number of ways.
 
Of course being in a photo with him doesn't make you a sexual predator, but his posing in a photo with you serves a purpose either way. His or their potential peccadilloes is either extracurricular, or, as unfair as it seems, a distraction.
 
Still, even if you got the ultimate kompromat, as soon as you out your ostensible opposition, you've lost your leverage. That's the point of being in the big club Carlin talked about. You can't be a beneficiary if you're ratting out your benefactor. Winning some and losing some is win-win. Or better than whatever the alternative is. Plausibly.
 
 
 
Truth Lies In Middle
Somewhere Over to Nowhere
it outlines the space
 
it defines the place
the truth lies in the middle
of all they do say
 
all the lost marbles
doled globally that-a-way
to-ward the lobby

in plain light of day
there's only one tendency
for the truth does lie

casting nothing left
but dashed center-directions
pressed
moderately
 
rubes' oligarchy
grabbed and gagged in the east wing 
re-released and based
 
it's not at the ends
where the horseshoe converges
it's in the middle*
 
*Gock told me that
 
 
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Happy New Year, everybody!
Let's make 20 26 a thing.. .