Hard Habit To Break by Chicago is pretty straightforward, but I liked it on the radio as a kid because it’s peppy and has an orchestra.

Decades later I get access to music service libraries and give it a listen.

I was a jerk and you left me, and now you’re with another guy. I’m not sorry. I’m not going to do better. But I have an orchestra!

I still like it, but have perspective now.

And match the red on the poster!

< James Bond Opening Boilerplate Sting >

Voting for Trump (or for any Republican candidate for elected office) is voting for one-party autocracy. Even if the individual is ethical, they will be pressured into serving the party (or removed for a more loyalist alternative). Not voting for a Democrat when there’s a Republican candidate is not voting against one party autocracy.

Trump is not Hitler. He’s the Secret Hitler of this election. Even if he’s less bright than Hitler and less charismatic than Hitler, he’s fulfilling the same role, and the outcome will be the same, a one-party autocracy propped up by fascist enemy-within rhetoric and a massive deportation effort that will ultimately turn into a massive evacuation effort. (That is, evacuation into mass graves, or even an ash pit).

We are on the precipice. Do not fuck around. Do not think otherwise. Do not let anyone else think otherwise. If Trump wins, the world is going to hold America’s beer while it works to enact a holocaust that dwarfs the Holocaust… unless the resistance is really good (it’s probably not) or the Allies overrun Washington (not in time).

The short tl;dr answer is, we don’t. For me, it’s something I contended with around 2003-2004 when my father stood with most staunch Republicans in advocating for extrajudicial torture of POWs and eventually of civilians including Americans who were mistaken for terrorist agents.

On the other hand, the same event drove me to study moral philosophy so I could explain at length why torture was wrong; he didn’t care, which was the gaze into the abyss moment. I saw who my dad was in the dark.

Cut to 2024, and even if Harris wins (and any coup d’etat attempts are put down) we are a long, long way from the scare being over. This has been reviewed at length by CIA and we’ve heard from experts on civil wars, how they erupt and historically what must happen to prevent social unrest from turning violent to the degree that it overwhelms responders.

The universal panacea is the restoration of power to the people. So that’s not to say we can merely preserve elections in the US. Our election system is corrupt and relies on FPTP voting models (one person, one vote) which means third parties cannot be competitive. It also means the two principal parties don’t have to be very public-serving to stay in power.

This means Harris not only needs a cooperative Congress (and cooperative state populations) but also the impetus to operate against the interests of her party for the good of the public, and we all struggle to discard the One Ring. She’ll also have pressure from establishment politicians, as well as progressives who are not progressive enough to go the distance and let power be diffused to a wider body of persons and interests.

What we can expect are some shorter-term measures, maybe some social safety nets, some relief for people caught in the debt crisis or homeless crisis, even some labor reform so that most of us aren’t one crisis away from homelessness and a ruined life. But this will kick the can down the line, and allow the Republican party (whose only trick now is election subversion and procedural coup d’etat when not violent coup d’etat) to persist as it is (and has been at least since Reagan).

Election reform would force the Republican party to reconsider its far-right-wing position and actually offer a platform worth voting for. But so long as we don’t get that, they still have viable pathways to seizing power.

All this said, some people will come to their senses as the precarity lets up. Some people will realize they can afford to be less afraid, and that a public-serving society is something worth fighting for. But that is a long, and personal process for each of them, and usually they’re pretty repentant when they realize what they had become.

University of Missouri, I believe. (Sent to me from there.)

Ty Warner (creator of Beanie Babies) demonstrates excellent billionaire conduct by intentionally staying off of social media, according to a bio on the You’re Wrong About podcast. This isn’t to say he’s a jerk that shamelessly stole the ideas of other people. He did a whole bunch of that. It’s just once he got his riches, he shut up and ran his company.

As Elon Musk was considering buying Twitter, a lot of tech wonks examined the situation and came to the same conclusion: to retain his company value, Musk needed to let Twitter do its thing without changing its policy and if possible without commenting from his account. It was already doing the best it could.

Musk didn’t and now X / Twitter is worth very much less.

Clarification: The Mouse as in Disney Corporation not as in the thing you use to move your pointer.

More crime is committed in the making of media than in pirating it.

Also more wrongdoing against society and the public that the justice department couldn’t be bothered with (so doesn’t count as crime).

Pirate it all or don’t watch it.

I pronounced it like cayenne pepper until someone corrected me. But I learn a lot of words from reading them before hearing them. HEJeeMOHnee.

Related, Celtics (soft C) are a basketball team, Celts are a ethnic demographic and a Selt is an ancient kind of knife.

Until I was 24 or 25 I believed that women were disinterested in sex, and that sexual relationships were wholly transactional. I also thought I was hidiously undatable.

Nope. Wrong on all counts.

The ownership class will tremble before a communist revolution! We have nothing to lose but our chains! <Bolshevik chorus swells>

Present.

Taarna

Temporary or straw restrictions. The EU has even more byzantine IP laws as the US and they’re just as draconian. Our societies teem with rent-seeking grifts and billionaires who will commit genocide to get their way.

What tools are these? As someone who has frequently been evaluated, I’ve found I get different results depending on the bias of the evaluator, ranging from, functional: able to work to a danger to themselves or others, should be supervised or committed.

Now I totally agree that there is a problem with elected officials when Feinstein is still a senator when she is no longer coherent. Or when Trump’s lawyers and principal staff see he has diminished capacity (the finale of Fear: Trump In the White House by Bob Woodward) they leave him in place because he remains a useful idiot. But I know our psych assessment methods are not yet able to yield consistent results, and it would be easy for political interests to game the system to keep those they like, and flunk those who are too much of a nuisance (say, those who actually want to serve the public).

(President Wilson had a stroke, and spend the end of his tenure in bed with his wife faking his signature. The US is no stranger to staffers faking it when elected officials were to incapacitated to function. )

Sadly in 20-fucking-24, mental illness remains enough of a stigma that anyone who relies on public approval just won’t take the test if they can opt out.

There’s actually footage of Jar Jar using Jedi Mind Trick in TPM. He gave up on it by Attack of the Clones, even through Jar Jar was still capable of facilitating the fall of the empire.

The short answer, I don’t know.

But from my own observation there were a lot more general key changes in 1980s-era rock, which may have been the result of fewer other ways to escalate a song for the final chorus and outro, which is to say, yes, new tech (mostly sampling, looping and higher-fidelity recording) reduced the need for creativity much the way that movies had a lot more stage effects before they just filmed actors in green-screen and added everything with CGI.

Last year I went to a SGMC concert of mostly Queen, and was noticing how much their tunes bounced around, often having two or three key-changes per verse+chorus.

Note that with rare exceptions, creators are not supported by your purchases. Rather the studios, labels and publishers wh cheat creators are.

If you want to support the creators, pay them directly, or go to one of their performances / signings / functions. But still pirate their work.

Public domain and abandonware and forgotten media are regarded by the media companies as a threat to their business model, since it is possible you can be entertained by them rather than their own for-cost offerings. It is no longer enough for them to control what you consume media, but insist on controlling whether you consume.

And the courts regard them as persons and members of the public as not. We don’t count as invested parties.

According to the US and the EU we common folk don’t figure.

It is now more ethical to pirate (or simply not consume it at all) than it is to obtain legitimate licenses.