Blaise's superstition

I know your compulsion but what is mine. Thank you for being so brave as to write it. There is no better feedback one can receive that will also help to improve focus than to be reminded of the stakes on such a personal level. 

 

Yes, there are those in the profession who are not only hardly adequate to the task, but moreover wield cruelty and authority as a teaching mechanism. They imagine that without their authority all will be chaos but fail to recognize the chaos they create with such cruelty.

 

It is you who deserve thanks for the privilege and joy. You justify a belief in empathy and understanding with your words. The least one can do now is to strive to be worthy of those words.

 

May your presence continue to bring joy to yourself and others.

in conderation of too tiny shoo droppings...

There's a viewpoint that believes there's a rent-seeking corporate model that leaves no stone unturned. I cite as evidence to the contrary my existence under a heavy stone. At least I think it's heavy. Either it's too heavy to lift or best left unturned in order to keep the likes of me in their place.

 

In the interest of exposition, I first cite evidence of the existence of the aforementioned model in the form of an apple and a window:

 

Consumers be hungry. To eat a window is to know the pane of existence. Those consumers who have recognized the pane for the pain it is have chosen to eat each day (and all day) the proverbial fruit that grows from the labor of people they must think (at least somewhere deep in their underawareness in order for their awareness to live with whatever is left of it) are nary but trolls toiling happily for the fruits of their labor, roots and grubworms, and that they otherwise feel no pain and suffer no uncertainty. Am I certain this is not the case?

 

The proprietor of this daily and day long fruit owns the apple and the seed. And so does this Johnny Appleseed wield a quasi solitary influence over his laborers and consumers, the latter of which occasionally enough express a feeling of being coerced while demonstrating their loyalty to their marketplace master. For many have otherwise known the pain of regularly renewed shard consumption.

 

Johnny Appleseed leaves no stone unturned in seeking profit, as if down to the final minted nickel, "There's five cents left in his pocket!" 

 

He has his contrivers continually re-engineer both apple and seed so that just in time for the quarterly greet-ups he can announce that his consumers will be needing a lip and tooth and belly and bowel enhancement to keep up with the marvels of modern digestibles.

 

Leaving aside the technological elephant you didn't used to need to eat, let alone feel compelled by its eye candy conveying quality you can't look away from, I return to my original point that it's not always done this way and cite as an example my subscribed-to enabler of this form of communication:

 

He/She/It/They started, as the tale often goes, as the upstart eager to jump into the market. Let's call them Malice.

 

Malice built a loyal following doling out data rates and rock bottom prices, only to cash in and cash out when someone with global level naming rights, let's call them GoTo, swallowed them like the snack you get before the pilot says you're getting ready to land.

 

It would be normal as a customer in this scenario to expect to get screwed. There is no way in hell my something-nine ninety-nine per monthly ransom would not be going up. Yet here it is, decades accrued, and not a nickel more.

 

Sure, over the years that followed I'd been strangled occasionally, followed uncannily by a robocop offering me a cigarette before the strangler returns, i.e. respite from future threat, but even that dissipated.

 

Don't get me wrong. I don't mean to suggest I am being rewarded for my loyalty. Alternative reasoning would consider a business school approach whereby all newcomers pay an ever more punitive price for membership, and the oldies are left alone, lest they be lost to someone they know they can't quite swallow. Yet.

 

In other words, somehow they haven't managed to monopolize the market à la the democratic apple in the republic of windows, where the fruit functions as resistance to anything better and its host pummels what's left into asphalt paste.

 

My guess is there are few enough of my variety to make the tiniest bump on a chart that charts bumps in behemoth boardrooms. Because for a giant that large, the stone would be so easy to turn.  

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.

 

__ 

 

 

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

 

 

 __

 

 

Happy New Year, everybody!

Let's make 20 26 a thing.. .