And I’m not talking about the election.

With what.cd and other sites now shut down, the information genie has now been stuffed back into the lamp never to emerge again in our lifetimes.

I haven’t used what.cd in many years, but it was often the only place to find albums that were no longer for sale at any price — even used. It was an invaluable contribution to culture and to the world, destroyed for no real reason other than control rather than any true profit motive.

I’m actually kind of impressed at the Machiavellian efficiency with which media companies and the copyright lobby have successfully made the internet into cable TV, re-possessed and sold us back at a high price our own culture, suppressed dissent and convinced the ignorant masses that DRM is a good thing or at least the only way to do things.

It turns out that humanity is just not smart enough collectively to allow such unalloyed good to exist in the world.

If I hadn’t joined the military right out of high school, I likely never would’ve had quite enough money to feel safe moving out of Lake City, FL. Probable that I’d still be there now, possibly in prison or also likely dead.

I don’t even know why I joined the military, meaning at the time that it wasn’t a fully conscious choice. It was this frenzied desire to flee at all costs, to put the expectations and pain of my youth behind me with all the haste my situation allowed me. And it cost me a lot; the army is difficult and I made it even more so by joining tough units. I’m not at all social and I don’t like being around people and of course I generally don’t like men — but the army is all of these things and more.

There’s this phrase “of two minds” that is bandied about. The only time I’ve ever really felt that way was driving to and walking into the recruiter’s office. It’s not true to say that I joined the military on a lark; however, it’s also not true to say it was a well-considered decision. It was as if I was watching myself from above signing the paperwork and getting the details, all the while with a chant echoing through my head of, “What the fuck are you doing? You will fail.”

I didn’t fail, though. Probably the single best decision I’ve ever made in my life as none of the rest of my life would’ve happened without it.

There’s no single truth, nor single path, but the passage out of where I grew up for someone like me was narrow and risky and I’m still surprised I was able to walk it.

And now Larry Lessig is attempting to start a civil war. Awesome.

It’s been supremely disappointing watching the Dems choose a bad candidate, fall behind her like snuffling puppy dogs, and then attempt to avoid the consequences of their own inadvisable and kooky choices.

The election was conducted by the candidates with the rules as laid out. If the rules and expectations had been different, both would’ve run much different campaigns. It was no mystery that we had this thing called an “Electoral College” beforehand nor why there was a really high chance that Hillary Clinton would lose there while possibly winning the popular vote. Hell, this is why I said this and many other did too before the election — her strong areas in the primaries were precisely the ones where she had little chance of winning.

I am disappointed and saddened that Trump won. He’s not someone I ever would vote for.

However, I am even more disappointed and saddened that members of the Democratic party are now just as howling at the moon delusional and redistributive of blame as the worst of the right wing conspiracy theorists. It’s been at a remove sociologically interesting to watch how the narrative has shifted in mere days to some small measure of blame-taking to “We did nothing wrong and neither did the media! It was those rednecks and misogynist Nazis, including all the Dems who did not show up to vote for the most uninspiring, neoliberal candidate since ever! Nazis all!”

This means that nothing will change.

Good luck with starting that civil war, Larry. What the fuck.

So the Democrats are going to spend all their time searching for (IMO dubious) proximate causes of Hillary’s loss and instead not face that fact that the reason they actually lost was that they nominated a candidate reviled by extremely large percentages of the population, who had historically high negatives (even among those who had voted for Obama in the previous two elections), and who was a Wall Street insider about as charismatic as a boiled lamprey. And that all of this was known well before her nomination and presumed coronation.

Fucking ridiculous. Means they will likely repeat the same mistake again in 2020 and we’ll get Trump — again.

Why Clinton was hated in this context does not matter. The fact is that the DNC and dumbo-Dems chose a bad candidate about whom many people knew the truth: she could not beat Trump and was historically weak even against such an inferior candidate.

But sure, blame it on Comey. Couldn’t have been poor decision-making, shouting down of allies, the nomination of a Wall Street toadie, the accusations of racism, misogyny and Nazism if you did not jingoistically support Clinton, nor the fact that she called roughly half of America a “basket of deplorables.”

Certainly those things had nothing to do with it!

I’ve seen this weird usage error a number of times now:

A “blimp” on the radar. The radar footprint of a blimp is enormous, so this means the opposite of what is intended.

Has “blip” become an uncommon word? I guess it is not used that often except in this idiomatic phrase.

Wait, I thought I was supposed to be blaming angry white men for Trump’s victory?

Oh, hmm, that didn’t bear out statistically. Whoopsie.

The finger pointing at everyone else is usually pointed the wrong way.

Our media — liberal or conservative — is terrible. Just pitifully bad and destructive.

Taibbi said it best, as he often does.

The Democratic Party’s failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance. The party not only spent most of the past two years ignoring the warning signs of the Trump rebellion, but vilifying anyone who tried to point them out. It denounced all rumors of its creeping unpopularity as vulgar lies and bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

How’d that work out for ya?

Apparently, Michael Moore can see the future.

This was written in July, 2016. Moore said Trump would win. And he was right. But this is particularly prescient.

I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat).

Hillary was supposed to pick up at least two of those states handily.

She didn’t. And here we are.

Moore, can I get those lottery numbers from you now?

Arrival is a good film.

I wanted it to be longer; I wanted more linguistics. I wanted more of Amy Adams, who was excellent and convincing, brave and afraid. The linguistics as presented was simplified but accurate. The film was also obviously abridged for the theater and perhaps one day there will be a director’s cut.

At the end, I could even read a little of the Heptapodian language, too. (It’s like super-Chinese with nonlinear orthography and as with Chinese no verb conjugation, relying on modifying radially-presented radicals etc.)

If you are hearing about a twist ending, there was no twist that I saw. It was obvious what was occurring but then again I am steeped in sf so even though I’ve never read the source novella I’m deep in the genre. Results may vary.

Recommended.

Didn’t need polls to see the truth.

Courtesy of Lisa Kerr. Book is Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty. From 1998.