The Opera Failure, Playing Out of the Rough

 When Patrick asked me to be co-emcee of the event, I wasn't sure what that meant. It could be anything from standing beside the stage pushing buttons for Powerpoint shows, or carrying the three day weekend by myself, like Jerry Lewis at the telethon. I figured I had better psychologically prepare for those two scenarios, or anything in between. The challenge would be to keep my ego in check in case, as it often happens, my intended contributions were not needed after all. Humility is necessary. It is easier to grasp this if one focuses on the needs of the show above all else.

As the time approaches, it becomes apparent that I may have more opportunity than I imagined to extemp on stage, or fill gaps with material that gives it a show feeling. Along those lines I have come up with what is perhaps my stupidest idea of all time. Patrick is opening the show/conference on Saturday morning at 9. He sent around the event schedule. I put in a few things like time to bring the house lights partially down, etc., and down the minute introduction (which of course will go out the window because breakfast will run late, but that's ok. The important thing is to have a schedule at all.)

My stupid idea is to introduce Patrick with a musical comedy number which I wrote and which I will personally perform. Why wouldn't I want the challenge of singing on stage at Nashville. The last time I visited that town, I came within a whisker of being pulverized by a furniture truck. There's not much worse I can do that almost dying, so why not go for it?

The song I wrote is a parody of a well-known country and western song, one that most people will know the words too. Except my words will be different--a parody, and they will partially poke fun at ourselves with a humorous background on how the community developed and how the conference came into being.

In college in Oregon I chickened out singing on stage in an opera. Looking back I'm ashamed at my cowardice and ego, especially since bailing on it meant they had to find someone else who could step in. I didn't realize at the time that such things can leave a mark on one's soul, and that at some point you find up having to make up for it in some way. It wasn't a big deal in the scheme of the world, or even my life, but it was a chance to push something forward and I failed at that, and let people down. It didn't take me long in life after that to realize that if nothing else, one should do everything possible to follow through on one's commitments to others like that.

Thus the confusion I feel at the moment regarding how much I should put into Threadfest planning is partially due, I believe, to that earlier failure, and to other earlier failures in my life. I didn't learn the lesson, and when you get a second chance, you usually start in a hole, in the rough, and you have to play your way out of it with the extra effort you failed to give in the earlier situation.

The good part is that if you do it right, and are sterling this time around, you can recover the lost ground and more (like this).

Prepping for Nashville, and Lessons on Being a Showman

Yesterday I was doing something I rarely do, which is go back through my blog history looking for specific posts, in particular images I uploaded that were screenshots of Twitter feeds. It's part of the prep I'm doing for Threadfest 2022.

I noticed that I have a tendency to use cute and clever titles for my posts, which was annoying in my research, because I didn't know what my own posts were about just from the archive index of titles. It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time when I wrote about movies I saw in theaters, I made a strict habit of using just the title of the movie. It worked well until I gave up going to movies and never looked back. It's been at least three four years I think, since I was in a theater. The last movie I saw was the one about PT Barnum, "The Greatest Showman", which was gawdawful and of course super Woke.

Speaking of showmen, that is essentially what I am doing.  A couple months back Patrick asked me to help make Threadfest into a "live documentary" about Devolution (see previous post), and it would include dramatic performances. He implied we could put it together before the show. It struck me as odd at that time, as what he described seemed to imply something that would take weeks of writing, and then weeks of rehearsal in order to pull it off. I scratched my head and figured, "we'll see how things go." I loved the idea, but I couldn't conceptualize how we'd make it happen.

As it happens, Patrick, by own admission, has no experience in theater. Now it all makes sense.  We are less than two weeks out, so we are at the stage where anything that is going to come together has to come together soon.

The key, I told him, was giving me the authority to do things. The number one problem I run into in my line of work (tech consulting) is people want to give you responsibility without authority. I've gotten to the point where unless I get authority to do what I need to do, then forget it. It's pointless to try to do anything.

Fortunately Patrick understands that. He has pretty much delegated the stage presentation part of the event to yours truly and to a woman who lives in New Hampshire, who has a live performance venue in her barn, and who has a long-standing radio show throughout New England on public radio stations. I'm supposed to talk to her in about an hour. I think we can pull this together well. 

Devolution, or Why Neither Biden nor Trump is Legally President at the Moment

 If there is a unifying theme for the conference in Nashville, it is the idea of Devolution, the standard reference is the Devolution series on substack written by a guy named John from North Dakota who goes under the name Patel Patriot. The Patel part is in honor Kash Patel, who is considered a key figure in the theories of most Devolutionist theorists. John is one of the headliners at Threadfest 2022. The other headliner is Patrick, who created the Reading Epic Threads Youtube channel in 2017, and which I started following soon after that, and even posted about here on my blog. 

One of the key aspects of Devolution theory is that there may exist, and likely does exist, depending on whom you ask, a form of Government in Exile in the United States that was established by Trump through executive orders in the last weeks of his Presidency, and which is in operation at the moment. It doesn't mean that Trump is still President. Everyone agrees his isn't because his legal term expired at noon on January 20, 2017.  It means instead that Trump, having declared that an Act of War had occurred against the United States that compromised certain critical functions of the government and especially our elections system, legally invoked procedures dating in part back to the Eisenhower Administration that allowed for the government to be "devolved" in its authority outside the capital (due to nuclear attack) but especially to certain key agencies and designated officials who were to keep the government going until it could be reconstituted. 

The theory depends on Trump having caught the election stealers red handed on Election night of 2018, but then used that information without busting them to set them up for the mother of all sting operations during the 2020 Election. The election traffic of the theft was observed in real time through video surveillance and cyber surveillance by the U.S. military, and was an indisputable Act of War against the United States, supported by internal traitors, which including members of the media who were both explicitly complicit and also many dupes. 

The theory also depends on a vision of who Donald Trump is that differs drastically from the one in mainstream media, and also in the mind of much of the "normie" public, who sees a persona called "The Donald", which is a theatrical role that Trump created for himself in the 1970s, as a way to manipulate the media to give him unlimited attention, all the while being able to use it as a cover to penetrate the elite without contaminated by their vices. Trump's superpower is in part his ability to let people slander him in his character and simply go forward without a bruise to his ego. His entire adult life has a reality theater project. In secret he is a straight arrow with an iron will of masculinity to resist the vices that were constantly offered him. He could penetrate the realms of power because his persona fooled the public and the elite into believing he was already a basket case.

What I just described is probably the attitude of most people who will be at Threadfest in Nashville. We are aware that we are currently in the minority, even among Normie Republicans. Most of us are in no hurry to convince the masses. We believe that God willing, Trump will do that, in time. This will be the hardest lump to swallow of all, for many normies, that they were so wrong about who Trump is. We understand it is hard. The Narrative War is brutal. Once people lock into a belief about the heroes and villains of a story, then like it to remain consistent. Heroes can be overthrown, but villains are always villains to the end, redeemed perhaps only in their dying breath in which they regret their entire lives, but damned nevertheless. Arguably it is the nature of the human psyche that demands this consistency, for anthropological and evolutionary reasons.

By the way, did you know the tv show Hee Haw was filmed in downtown Nashville, and then moved to Opryland, where we are going to be meeting for our conference? Just something I learned. If you're going to do Nashville, you gotta learn to do it right.

On The Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

My late mother was a big fan of Von Franz. 

I love Locals. Very cozy like the old days, when Patrick could read our individual comments. He just got kicked off Twitch for wrong think, we are fully over the way into Locals and Rumble. No looking back.

The Pickett's Charge of Wokeness

 A week after the Hollywood incident last week has pushed it to "old news" on my Youtube feed. If one is going to make a video about it, it now requires a catchy phrase and a unique angle that hasn't been hashed to death already.

We seem to have made it through the phase of deciding collectively whether the assaulter was in the right or the wrong, whether he should be praised or condemned. The decision, after some handwringing and hemming-and-hawing, was finally on the side of saying the now Oscar-winning actor was in the wrong and should be condemned.  When he wife, Jezebel incarnate, went against him then his fate was sealed, since one could rally around the aggrieved Dark Feminine with delicious righteousness for defending m'lady's sacred honor. 

The public debate was significant because such discussions effectively have taken the place of the ancient procedure of Common Law in regard to the "lawfulness" of personal actions. That is, in this incident, we as a society had to make a decision on the rightness-or-wrongness for this particular circumstance, and this should apply across our society. Individuals must take their cue for their own behavior from this decision. If the assaulter was in the right, then it sets a precedent as such. Likewise if he was in the wrong.

As I said, what the elite wanted to say is that such actions as described are righteous if done by a famous actor of color, but are not righteous if undertaken by mere plebes in the hinterland. They came close to saying this, but it is still unacceptable to say this aloud.  The implications of saying it was "ok" for him to have done what he did was too huge. What might it unleash, to endorse his violence. Being unable to parse the situation based on fame and race, as they wanted, they had to retreat (with wife Jezebel's endorsement) into condemnation of the man in question. Now begins his spiral downward, as the marginal wafflers can now pile onto him, and condemn with the fury, knowing their condemnations will be cheered on by the peers on social media.

My final take for now is that the whole incident is remarkable in showing that Hollywood still has the ability to entertain us and distract us from such big events as an ongoing war. The war, for a few days, was pushed off the headlines, and people stumble back towards the newsfeed filled with outrage-producing snippets designed to channel our hate towards the correct targets, the emotions don't have quite the same punch-in-the-face effect that they did just two weeks ago. Already we are tired of the war. We got our righteousness fix out of it. It isn't going like we want. Honeyputin don't care about your tears and protests. You have no power over him. 

The attention of public debate has swung hard towards the proposed legislation in Florida that would ban schoolteachers from initiating secret, private discussions with their students about the fun that can be had via genital stimulation.  Surprisingly this seems to be the hill that the entire Woke Revolution is going to die on, its massive all-out Rainbow Flag Pickett's Charge. Thus of us who were clued in have known for years that all of this will eventually boil down to the insistent demand on their part to have sex with children. That is the Unholy Grail, and always has been. At this point, they see it within sight. They can almost taste the cursed forbidden wine within it.

As I see the entire "movement" of the Left struggle to rally around a boycott of Florida, I am cheered by knowing that the End of their revolution must be in sight. They cannot retreat from this, as the fragility of their entire paradigm from a historical point of view--genderfluidity and all that--means that any compromise on their part with the forces of reactionary anti-Rainbowism is, by their own standards, a form of hate.

Pity them. There is nowhere for them to go but off the cliff into oblivion. They Big Turning Point is almost here. We are already seeing young women refusing to compete against males in their sports competitions. Young women are the most sentimental segment of society, susceptible to the most weepy forms of Wokism against perceived "victims", however self-proclaimed they are, and despite any horrible concomitant effects on society, which is the kind of reasoning young people, especially young women, are not capable of following. The feelings of the immediate moment must always prevail, and moreover, all must be in agreement. The force of the feminine is always towards enforcing a consensus. We say this in the commmunist front Black Lives Matter protests that forced young women down on one knee during the national anthem. How brave were the one who stood. Being a young woman who goes against the female consensus takes a great deal of strength, much more than for a young man, who often relish being against the consensus of their peers. Most young women rebel only against their elders, never their peers.

At some point,  almost overnight, nearly all the young women in sports will refuse to compete against men. The consensus among them will flip like a magnetic field. When it does, the Woke Movement can be declared dead. They cannot recover from this moment which is inevitable and perhaps sooner than we think. From that moment forward, every aspect of the issue of the Rainbow movement will have to evaluated on a case-by-case basis, rather than getting the blanket automatic endorsement of righteousness.  Woke cannot survive this case-by-case scrutiny. It needs victory without thought. It has gotten used to that, of always getting its way no matter what, simply by labeling its opponents as haters. 

I pity the Woke. How miserable they are going to be going forward. Nothing has satisfied them even in their victories, because the only thing that matters is that their opponents go silent or simply die. Their opponents have refused to be silent or die. Now the Woke will no longer even have their victories. Much whining and tears are coming their way, and there is nothing they can do about it.