Delayed Off-Grid Reaction

Greetings from your (intermittently) off grid blogger. This is a post I wrote a few days ago.

Let’s start with a few responses to IRL (in real life) comments.

First, I applaud respectful disagreement but stand firm in my belief that Zima is gross. The Millennial Snowflake’s Powerlifting Contest of beers, Zima is for twerps who haven’t learned to put vodka in their ginger ale. Living in a dimension of time and space that includes Zima is unfortunate. It’s a wine cooler that’s more sugary than a wine cooler, beer that’s weaker than Bud Light, and water that’s less refreshing than water. Also, if you want clear alcohol, drink Vodka; as God intended. Of course, my tastes are mature. If I were an underaged pre-pubescent dipshit I might sip cotton candy, think I’m getting buzzed, and Zima-fy my world. Thank God those days (if they ever existed for me) are long past.

Second; Dr. Mingo, I see your point and will cogitate. Perhaps the shit really is hitting the fan there and it’s smoother sailing here. My mistake may be conflating here and there into a single whole. I’ll work on a “spectrum” theory next time I tell folks to chill out.

Now on to news which has most certainly  been  beaten to death before this post goes live (I told ya’ I was off grid!). The “most important mid-term election in human history until the next one” is over. My after action summary, with the added benefit of distance (fish cannot see the water in which they swim), is that the mid-term was pleasantly average. Sometimes boring is good!

I knew all along “blue wave” was propaganda. So did most of us. Ignoring blue wave blovations, I initially expected the usual mid-term result. The opposing party (regardless of which one) makes minor gains in both the House and the Senate. This the Democrats would gain a few dozen House seats and maybe the majority and surely squeak out a majority in the Senate. After a mathematically unimpressive performance they’d claim a “blue wave” victory of historic proportions; as if the most brutal, hard hitting, party in the nation was a frail underdog that bravely spoke truth to power and took out literally-Hitler/Goliath/Cheeto-Jesus with nothing but the power of love… love and shitloads of money. Bwa ha ha ha!

Counterintuitively, I bet in PredictIt on the longshot that the Dems would fail to gain the House (and in some markets) the Senate. I was lured in by the high payoff. A risky bet for high payoff sometimes makes sense; especially in a volatile market.

As the election drew near I traveled through America’s heartland and ignored the ‘net and TV. I tried to get a sense of things. Unlike 2016, where the writing was on the wall (or yard signs), all I could glean in 2018 was that Americans have become circumspect. Between the east coast and the left coast, where unabashedly socialist politics stew the populace in groupthink, everyone else has started playing their cards close to the vest. It makes sense. After all, retribution for any thoughts to the right of Lenin may steamroll you at work, job, or social media. The attacks are swift, unpredictable, one sided, and Soviet like. Everybody and their dog knows it and watching the internet reenact the French Revolution is a clue. Everyone acts accordingly. Even lefties are getting nervous; you can say the right things one day and be literally Hitler the next day. It’s a scary world out there.

Several places I traveled went unexpectedly red in the election but nobody was sayin’ nothing about anything. You could’ve heard a pin drop in the days before the vote.

Lesson learned? The secret ballot must be kept secret. I predict this will be a new line of attack. (When the fist set of personally identified votes is leaked you heard it here first. “Jim Smit voted Republican in 2020, you can’t hire a jerk like that!” Tell me that ‘aint a likely situation.)

Corollary lesson is that, in an evenly split nation, one side has driven the other not extinct but underground. There’s nothing I can do about it and I’m not in the business of shouldering responsibilities that aren’t mine so I only mention the observation in passing.

Meanwhile, America’s Pravda (NPR), had countless “stories” that explained polling was not an attempt to predict anything and Americans needed to understand that discussing future election scenarios was utterly unrelated to prognostication about future election results. What. The. Fuck?

This gold plated bullshit made think they expected a crushing defeat. Had their “blue wave” propaganda (and the Kavanaugh event) backfired that badly? Their insistence that  “two plus two means we win even if we lose” made me wonder about a “red wave”.

I also noticed that “blue wave” (a phrase invented around February and uttered ad nauseam) had faded.”Red wave” (a phrase that appeared much closer to the election) began to seep into discussions.

I pulled off the road and used a truck stop’s wifi to double my bets from the initial pittance.

A few days later, I’d lost two pittances.

Damn!

I’d wagered roughly a six pack’s worth of coin on an outlier election. But it was completely unremarkable and everything I tried to suss from media or the things they carefully wouldn’t discuss was irrelevant. I’d bet on accumulated election numbers and lost by 4 out of 435 House elections. As I type this (long before I post it) the Dems had flipped about 30 House seats. I bet on <= 22. Damn.

So, it was totally average. Google tells me the average “flip” for mid-term elections since WW2 is 26. 30 is right in the middle of the distribution. I’d overestimated volatility and in retrospect I know why. Clinton and Obama had 2 of the 3 worst mid-terms since WW2. (-54 House and -63 House respectively.) With Clinton’s beating in recent memory, it hadn’t sunk into my head that Obama’s “shellacking” was literally the worst performance in 70 years. It was so bad as to be unlikely to be repeated even in a century. (Regardless of direction, I like volatility in high risk bets.)

This year’s 30 seats ranks about 13th of 26 elections. Basically a mathematical median. Which, NPR explained, is math and therefore it’s too hard to worry our pretty little heads about it.

Note: I’m fairly unplugged from news. If there are 400+ elections I expect a few are very close. Whenever there are close elections there will be tainted recount after tainted recount until the “desired” (i.e. Dem) answer is obtained. (I call this “the Hanging Chad effect” and there’s no way in God’s green earth the recounts are sound if they almost always go one way.) Since biased endless recounts nearly always go Democratic and they happen maybe on 1% of all elections. I suppose there will be four more seats for the future Al Frankens of the Nation? So maybe the count of “Dems win 30” will be recounted Soviet style until it’s something like “Dems win 34”?

Yep, I lost that bet hard.

The Senate, last I knew, was something like 52 in favor of Republicans. Modest gains for the Orange menace but nothing too exciting. Unfortunately, I paired my House and Senate bets so it was a wash. I don’t know if the 1% “Recount Until We Win” effect is happening in the Senate. I sure hope not. Cheating is wrong and if the Evil party recounts until they change a majority(!) that’s bad juju. I wish the gutless Stupid party would grow a pair, take the gloves off, and stop playing Calvinball!

As far as I can tell, both sides declared victory and that’s pretty normal too. I like normal!

I think (?) it was a peaceful election. I didn’t hear reports of people wearing symbolic genitalia on their heads or riding pre-paid buses to DC to smash windows. Maybe it’s happening and I’m missing the “news”. Like I was saying to Dr. Mingo, I live in a America that’s somewhat less sanity-impaired than others. The squawking shittorms of Facebook and TV report things I’m not seeing with my own two eyes so, like many, I’ve tuned out the rage monkeys. It just doesn’t seem real.

For example, Godzilla could be skull fucking San Francisco into the ground and all I’d have was a vague interest in the odds of a cholera outbreak from people shitting in the streets. Would that be transmissible to where sane people live?

For that matter, DC has the feel of a zoo cage. Maybe that’s a silver lining? Every society needs a good place to warehouse incompetent and scheming whack jobs. Maybe Portland for the “earthy ones” and DC for the ones who shower and wear suits? What else do you do with people who can’t be trusted with important tasks?

Like this: “This new job hire is so dumb he/she/zim/zer/it couldn’t start the bulldozer. Then they walked into a telephone pole and blamed racism. Right now they’re painting their face green, wearing no shoes, and organizing a protest about straws in the break room. Lets send ’em to DC where they won’t be around sharp objects and heavy machinery.”

I could be wrong. That’s just how it feels. Pull out of the propaganda stream and things seem a little less heady. Good luck y’all.

A.C.

P.S. I’m vague on the details so help me out. Did someone who married her(?) brother(!) win an election(!!!)? Since when is incest (or would it be bigamy) legal? Regardless, how did a nation get the vapors over Roy Moore’s old school “courting” and subsequently elect someone who’s literally doing shit that’ll tie the gene pool in a knot? Have I misheard this?

P.S.2. Also did someone lose to a dead legal brothel owner? (That’s gotta’ be Nevada?) Did I mishear that too? Is it a “Weekend at Bernie’s” real life adventure. If so, is Ginsberg invited? (OK, I know… low blow. Sorry. But Robert Byrd is finally gone and someone has to fill his geriatric shoes as the geezer punchline du jour. Ask Keith Richards about it.) My radio is mostly NPR and they’ve clammed up; which tends to indicate those things really happened. Finally, how the hell am I to write satire if brother marrying, dead pimp, elections really happen?