I did a little bit of an experiment recently. I had lunch with my father and put my phone closer to him than me to see if my hunch that Tik-Tok can somehow read our minds might be proven.
I still have no absolute proof — don’t know how I could — but it is interesting that in the last few days I have been pushed a lot of WW2 and 60s content. It’s very interesting.
The only reason why I continue to have a lingering suspicion that Tik-Tok can read our minds is how I keep getting pushed things that simply can not be explained by the power of an algorithm. Usually it has something to do with the body. But often times, it’s just something I’ve thought really hard about in a way where I see something in my mind’s eye.
It’s all very curious.
It makes you wonder the lengths that Big Tech might go to keep such technology a secret. The idea that America’s biggest geopolitical foe has the technology — even if it’s just peer-to-peer — to read the minds of the millions of users of Tik-Tok would…probably not go over well in the halls of Congress.
I continue to drift towards my goal of finishing a novel so I can query it in the fall of 2024 — just as the so-called “Fourth Turning” is going to happen. Ugh. Anyway, I also want to have a fall back “second creative track.” As such, I’ve decided that screenwriting is going to be it.
Just as I have used Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire” as my “textbook” for the novel I’m writing, so, too, do I plan to use Charlie Kaufman’s “The Enteral Sunshine of The Spotless Mind” as my “textbook” for screenwriting. I think I’m probably going to do something similar with the Star Wars screenplay at some point soon.
I need to understand how to properly read a screenplay. I’ve already found bouncing back and forth between novel writing and screenwriting has helped my writing a lot. Something about thinking about how to structure a screenplay aids in helping me see things in a different way with the novel.
Anyway, something about the fall / winter season coming (along with a lot of more darkness) has caused me to feel a little unnerved. I’m still faraway, so close with the novel. It’s fun to just totally switch gears on a creative level and read about something completely different and new, while staying within the general writing skillset.
I hate the fact that I don’t have enough structure in my life. I have a rather idyllic situation going on at the moment and I spend way too much of my time just daydreaming and drifting towards my goal.
What’s more, I know damn well that this unusual — a great — situation that I find myself in can last for only so long. Something is going to throw everything out of whack soon enough and I’ll be smarting that I didn’t squeeze out every once of creativity I could when I had the opportunity.
I wonder what it will be. Maybe it will be The Fourth Turning, maybe it will be having to go underground when weaponized ICE agents start to hunt me down for thinking ding-dong Tyrant Trump is a fucking cocksucker.
I can be a contrarian at times and, as such, something dawned on me about the immediate future of XR and AI technology. I’m beginning to believe that Her-like AI technology (digital personal assistants) will be a far bigger service industry than any of us can possibility imagine at the moment.
Instead of a trillion dollar industry, it might be the thing that spawns a few trillion dollar industries.
I say this because I just don’t know if people really want to wear any sort of shit on their face. So, in the near term, it could be that XR technology will sound great on paper but, in reality, no one will actually do anything with it because of vanity.
This, in turn, leads me to the following scenario — rather than a Apple Vision Pro, what if you had a tiny black dot video camera you wore on your forehead over an eye combined with a earpiece that let you communicate with a Her-type digital personal assistant.
The camera would serve as the “eye” of your Her. As such, all the hard work would be done by your Her. Rather than YOU seeing the XR technology, your Her would. Her, in turn would tell you in your ear what she saw.
This kind of squares the circle, at least in the near term. I suppose once XR headsets look more like glasses as opposed to birth control devices then XR will begin to live up to its ages-old promise.
We’re now almost exactly a year away from one of the most election days in American history. At the moment, it seems, we’re careening towards a crisis not seen since 1860. This crisis could manifest itself in one of several ways.
The most obvious way is, lulz, we simply drift into autocracy with our eyes wide open and shrug as we transition from the halfway situation of being an “anocracy” to full blown autocracy. Trump is re-elected, he goes full tyrant and there’s no reaction on the part of the majority of the population. Of course, that doesn’t mention the 1 million smug Twitter liberals who will flee the country en masse as soon as it’s clear Trump is going to transition us into autocracy.
That scenario, for the time being, seems to be the most likely one.
Alas, there are some other, far darker scenarios that we have to contend with.
One scenario is Trump is re-elected, goes full tyrant and, well, he gets so absolutely bad that there is some sort of “Glorious Revolution” on the part of the populace — maybe with the help of the U.S. Military. I could see the organizers of such a coup using a novel — to say the least — interpretation of the 14th Amendment insurrection clause to kick Trump to the curb by saying he was never legitimately president to begin with.
That might be the legal fig leaf that would allow the New Patriots to get the job done and still be able to sleep at night. But there would be a spectrum with this scenario, with there being a “light touch” revolt that has the specific aim of getting rid of Trump all the way to a far more general collapse of the country because MAGA freaks out.
But, wait, there’s more.
Another situation would be Trump loses, and starts to demand a National Divorce with the specific intent of him personally avoiding going to jail. Then we have a repeat of 1860-1861 with states leave the Union one by one and a massive fucking clusterfuck.
Meanwhile, there is a small chance that rather than wait until Trump goes full tyrant, Blues freak out and do something akin to a civil war / revolution of their own starting as soon as Trump is named the winner.
But my thinking on this has evolved. I no longer think that Blues would cause a civil war. A revolution, maybe, but not a civil war. It’s just the temperament of Blues to want to start a new nation. Blues like me just want to reform and remake the nation that we have.
One last thing — never underestimate the possibility that Reds will, once Trump is in office, begin the process of calling a Constitutional Convention. I think that’s a real possibility.
Anyway. Good luck. You’ve got a year. Use it wisely.
In general, Americans are collectively pretty chill. It takes a whole lot to rile us up. We’re not French, after all. In fact, the last time we really got ornery was in the late 1960s, early 1970s in the context of the Vietnam War. Once The Draft ended, then, lulz, everyone just wanted to shake their booty and being politically engaged was a thing of the past.
A book I really enjoyed as a young man is William Safire’s “Freedom,” which is a huge tome of a novel that deals with the early days of the Civil War leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation. The book deals with what I would call “Radical Moderates.” This is epitomized by when one of the characters says, “We’re all Abolitionists now.”
The average person in 2023 has no comprehension as to how radical freeing the slaves being a war aim was in 1862. So, in a sense, if you want to know what a Radical Moderate is, just think of how President Lincoln only gradually warmed up to the idea of freeing the slaves.
ANYWAY.
The point of all that is — if Trump goes totally bonkers and full tyrant, what happens? Anything? All the signs point to Trump winning in 2024 and then, in a very, very fucking erratic manner, shoving tyranny down the throats of Americans in an unprecedented manner.
And, as an aside, remember — if Trump does happen to lose, there’s really good chance that he will single-handedly provoke a civil war in an effort to avoid going to jail. Let that sink in.
This is where I note that general macro political trends are for the United States to drift (peacefully) into autocracy. It’s a gimmie at this point. Now, in late 2023, the United States is an “anocracy” or even, maybe, an autocracy without an autocrat.
So, if any other Republican was in Trump’s position, we would simply wake up on day 20 years from now — or less — and wonder why the United States is invading Canada to free it from the “woke mind virus.” But this is Trump we’re talking about.
He’s so stupid, lazy and idiotic that what should be a historical gimmie, could turn into a massive fucking clusterfuck. But, again, this all raises the question — how tyrannical can Trump get before there’s some sort of “Glorious Revolution” lead by Radical Moderates?
And, remember, pushing things to the limit is kind of Trump’s thing. The man has been a one man stress test to our entire political system, ranging from the courts to the election process itself. So, yeah, I could see Trump going stark raving mad and tyrannical at some point in his second term to the point that, say, there’s a General Strike of some sort that might bring the nation to its knees.
This, of course, raises an interesting idea — might the U.S. Military step in? I don’t think so. And, yet, if Trump was running around demanding the U.S. Military to do things to the domestic population that were clearly illegal and un Constitutional….maybe they would step in?
An interesting way that Trump might be deposed is the an novel use of the 14th Amendment. Remember, the Radical Republicans of Reconstruction were able to fuck with the South for a few years by saying the did not have a “republican form of government.” As such, if Trump went crazy and started to do things that the U.S. Military simply could not brook, it’s at least possible that the legal fig leaf that would be used would be that Trump was illegally in office to begin with because he was in violation of the 14th Amendment.
But all of that is just a speculative daydream at the moment. I think that while Trump is likely to go full bonkers tyrant the moment he’s in office again, that, in the end, he’ll solve all his problems with the U.S. Military by demanding a Constitutional Convention that rewrites the Constitution in the likeliness of MAGA.
If that happens, may God have mercery on all our souls.
I have no special insight into anything, but I was alive in 2016. And Republicans made it clear in the days leading up to the 2016 Election that lulz, they were fully prepared to simply not allow ANYONE to fill a SCOTUS vacancy unless they were MAGA.
As such, Twitter liberals need to shut the fuck up about “Oh, if only Hillary Clinton had won in 2016.” Trump is nothing more than a symptom of some severe macro problems in the American political system that would have caused SOMEONE like him to become president starting early as 2016 and no later than 2024.
In some respects, you can’t even “blame” Obama for Trump. The forces that allowed Bill Clinton to win in 1992 also caused Trump to come into being. In general, America’s fucked because of the forces that bring down all empires sooner or later.
The only question in my mind at the moment is are we going to somehow pull off a third hat trick and — after some turbulence starting in late 2024, early 2025 — renew our democratic traditions and grow even stronger. Or are we going to slouch into a MAGA autocracy. Or, worse yet, we bomb ourselves into oblivion without any clear endgame.
But the point remains — Twitter liberals are being crybabies to pine for some alternative universe where Hillary Clinton won in 2016. I remember the passion that the Trump Train had behind it in 2016. If he had lost, we wouldn’t know what a horrible president he would be and he would definitely win in 2020. So, all the horrible shit that happened in 2017 – 2021 would just have been punted down the road four years.
The thing about Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson is the more I learn about him, the more I know my conservative relatives — whom I love dearly — will love, love love him. I would even go so far as to suggest that they will soon be chomping at the bit for malignant ding-dong Trump to name the Speaker his 2024 veep choice.
The thing about MAGA Mike is he’s pretty much just your typical modern MAGA person. A solid 38% of the electorate loooooooves what he has to say on the culture wars and the “vibes” that are tearing the country at the moment.
After much, much, much, much time brooding over what the fuck is going wrong with America on a systemic basis, I think I may have it figured out. A combination of growing income inequality, the browning of America and women’s economic agency is tearing the country apart on an existential basis.
The browning of America is really key to America’s instability because it feeds into a white identity politics narrative. America is zooming towards a tipping point where we’re kind of like South Africa in the sense that a minority of the country controls a majority of the political and economic power. This is a very fucked up situation, no matter which nation it happens to occur in.
Anyway, we’re reaching a moment in time when Americans collectively figure out what our future will be for generations to come. Do we become an autocratic MAGA state of blood and soil, or do we allow things like the browning of America and women becoming economic equals happen as they should?
I have a fear, of course, that we’re going to “take it to the streets,” if you will. We’re going to have at it against each other in our struggle to figure out what type of America we want to be. If Trump becomes POTUS again in 2025, the possibility of a Blue “Glorious Revolution” and a reactionary counter-revolution on the part of MAGA grows by leaps and bounds.
But if it’s NOT Trump who is our MAGA POTUS, then I think we simply shrug and become an autocratic white Christian ethnostate with a thin gloss of lingering 1st Amendment rights.
“Pres Biden walked back into WH at 6:58 after nearly 90 min handing out candy. It was chilly 58 degrees & he was likely soaked from nonstop rain. Even those with umbrellas on the lawn were drenched & cold. No aides brought out an umbrella for their almost 81-yo.”
Steven Nelson
I saw a headline from a Voice Of America correspondent that suggested President Biden left his handing out of Halloween candy tonight drenched from a hours-long cold rain.
William Henry Harrison This makes me extremely uneasy because, well, you know. He’s 80 years old and that’s just the type of dumb decision that fell William Henry Harrison. This has long been a concern of mine. And it only gets worse because of how the new Speaker of The House is known as “MAGA Mike.”
Something wicked, this way comes. If, God forbid, something happens to Biden, and if those blind items about a Harris sex tape are real and it comes out…then, well, we got President MAGA Mike on our hands.
I don’t REALLY believe Tik-Tok (and Big Tech in general) can read my mind, but sometimes…eerie things happen. Take, for instance something I noticed today.
I spent a few hours right next to my elderly, wheelchair bound father. It was only when I came home and started to use Tik-Tok that I noticed something….weird. I was being pushed a number of Band of Brothers videos all of a sudden. Now, that really isn’t as big a deal as it might seen because, lulz, that happens to me all the time.
It was something else that happened with Tik-Tok that made me sit up and take notice — I was also pushed a number of Kelly’s Hero’s clips that featured Donald Sutherland as “Oddball.” I struggled to think of why this was the case, then I thought how I sat right next to my dad earlier in the day and started to wonder — did Tik-Tok read my dad’s mind? Does my dad think I’m an Oddball type character?
There are two reasons this kind of spooks me. One, if that’s what’s happening, then I have some insight into my cypher of a father that I’ve never had before. And, what’s more, if you could prove Tik-Tok (and Big Tech) and read our minds, wouldn’t they have a responsibility to, say, notify the police if some crazed would-be mass shooter’s mind was being monitored by Tik-Tok and they knew what he was thinking about doing?
But I don’t believe Tik-Tik, or anyone else, can read our minds. Yet….it is curious. All very curious.
Because of how, collectively, Americans are a pretty laid back bunch, I struggle to imagine a situation where there might be any sort of mass revolt against Tyrant Trump should he win a second term. Because of his age, Trump will be seen as a transitional figure, with the result being whomever his successor is being the person who finally throttles our dying democracy.
And, really, much like how Augustus was able to transition the Roman Republic into an Empire, as long as Trump and his immediate successor don’t touch the First Amendment, they should be fine. Even if elections are meaningless, as along as Americans feel as though they can bitch and moan about what’s going on around them, there won’t be any problems in the streets.
But this is Trump we’re talking about.
Trump loves, loves, loves, to besmirch anything and everything that is considered sacred, so it may be almost inevitable that soon enough, Trump will start to attack some pretty basic Constitutional rights. Ironically enough, as long as he doesn’t touch the Second Amendment, his supporters will lulz our descent into a Russian-style autocracy.
But we have to accept that Trump’s second term will not only be one based on revenge, but also will take all the parts we hated about the first term to the next level. So much so, that the entire post-WW2 global liberal order will be thrown up in the air to the point that a full blown WW3 might break out because America pulls out of NATO and South Korea. What’s more, as all of this is happening, a good 1 million smug wealthy liberals will flee the country — at a minimum.
I still, however, struggle to imagine a scenario whereby there might some sort of Glorious Revolution on the part of Blues that might involve a General Strike and that kind of thing. Americans are just too complacent to do such a thing.
The only reason why I even keep writing about this issue is there are some macro trends at work that are extremely alarming. One of America’s two major political parties is now fascist and only see elections as valid if they win them. But I can’t predict the future. Maybe “Mueller, She Wrote” is right and somehow MAGA will evaporate into the mists of political history and everything will work out because some court ruling saves us from ourselves.
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