Monkeying with Travel Plans

Well it looks like the Powers-that-Be are rolling out the next installment of their Bond Villain Seize-the-World plans. Nice timing. 

Certainly it is probably ahead of their intended schedule. Yes, we were supposed to be rolled up under their dominion by 2030, but this seems to rushed for them. Just last fall they were warning the world about exactly this scenario, with the same animal p@x name, and here it appears right when we are ready to get back to normal.

The elite are not what they used to be. No doubt most people who used to be my friend will fall for the same scams. They want to fall for them. Falling for the scams is how they keep alive their minds the already destroyed worldview that has driven them into insanity by denying reality on many levels. I have no expectation that this one will cause them to wake up. Anyone who has still not gotten in the lifeboats is probably going to go down with the ship, with means eventually sitting in the corner of the room whimpering with helplessly in some form of psychosis.

What many of us have warned about for years is upon us in full measure. I don't mean any biologic agent. I mean the mind virus that caused them to attach themselves to the wrong reality picture, because it was seductive, most of all because it allowed them to righteously hate the people they already hate. It was brilliant to brand the biggest hate movement of all time as "anti-hate." It worked for a while. But like all demonic inversions, it eventually collapses in spectacular fashion (unlike the righteous who must be beaten down continuously to keep them from popping back up). 

Countering Blasphemy in Physics

 The question on the top of my mind right now is: of what significance is the paper by Peter Higgs in 1964 that established the need for a scalar field to account for the symmetry breaking massive bosons implied by the weak interaction of beta decay?

That original 1964 paper by Higgs is what established the need for the so-called blasphemously-named "God Particle." The topic of my talk next month in Prague is going to be essentially: why physics be absorbed for seventy years in the minutiae of beta decay, all the while pretending it is seeking out the fundamental laws of the universe? The room might be throwing tomatoes at me by the end of the talk. At least I'll have fresh fruit for dinner.

Witness of Truth

 When my friend I mentioned in the previous post asked me directly if I thought the 2020 Presidential election had been stolen, I took a breath and paused. while before responding, then asked him, "what do you mean by stolen?" 

After that we got into particulars, and when pressed by him, I was able to tell him in. plain terms why I believed that it was, according to what he put forth as definitions, indeed stolen. 

We had a fruitful discussion for a few moments after that, which made the phone call good. But I let things go on from there, and thats when we got into the particulars about Donald Trump, and he simply cannot abide any talk about the man which isn't is the strongest terms of denunciation of him. OK, fine. No problem with that. 

From now I'm going to talk about the stolen election, which I witnessed first hand, the way I also witnessed other great events in my lifetime, that have come to be shrouded with doubt and mystery. God directs my attention, and when I let him, he makes me a witness of Truth.

"Who is Donald Trump?", explained to Old Friends and New

 A couple days ago I had to disengage from my last "normie" friend. We've known each other in high school, but became good friends only within the last fifteen years. I've been following the growth of his kids since they were boys and we played the video game Rock Band together as a quartet. It was great fun.

He calls me from time to time just to chat--one of my last "phone" friends. We've had great visits and calls. But the last three times he's called and we talked, it has degenerated into the same thing, which is him shotgunning angry questions at me as to why I support Donald Trump. 

I love him like a brother, and it's tough to take these questions. I don't mind discussing this topic, and even arguing over it, in good faith. But every interaction I've had with old friends who hate Trump degenerates into their being very angry at me, with emotion in their voices as if I just ran over their dog and laughed about it afterwards.

Through hard experience, I know when a person enters this phase of conversation, there is no going back. In most cases, the best thing to do is end the conversation as quickly as possible.

My good friend is a good guy, and I would love to talk with him more often. He asks questions of me in good faith, and I try to respond, but inevitably my explanation as to "why I support Trump" comes around to the issue that separates us, which is that he and I see Trump in completely different terms. It's like we're not talking about the same person. I try to convey this idea, that this is what separates us, but in each case it has lead him to the angry phase. Real anger. 

For the good of our friendship, I have to put some distance between us emotionally. We keep coming right up to the edge of this issue, and I've seen it go too far, when words can't be unsaid, and I wind up seeing the other person in a completely different light. For years I've been pre-emptively distancing myself from people I've known, because I can't bear to see them like this. This is why I got off Facebook, leading up to the 2016 election, and disabled my account. I knew if I kept following my friends, that I would see this ugly side of them, the part where they allow themselves to hate other people, and feel righteous about it. Disengaging with them was like putting our friendships into suspended animation, with hopes they can be revived at some point in the future, when the war is over.

It's easy for people on our side to say "just stop talking to normies," or "screw your friends, let them go," but that's like saying that a hundred year old tree has a limb that is blocking your view so just cut it down and grow a new tree. I have friendships of thirty and forty years. If I make new friends now, even if I live forty more years, then they will never have seen me go through the phases of life that are rapid and dynamic in one's childhood and in one's youth, as one gropes with learning how the world works.  All of these friendships are like jewels to me. An old friend, resurrected from long ago--perhaps someone who was only an acquaintance--is like a treasure.

At the same time one must make new friends. I made some at Threadfest. I don't always get the idea that everyone in our community who is already established with an online following is a fan of me and my work. I get a lukewarm ambiguity from some of them. A lot of people assume I made up my name, since I use my real name. Thankfully there are some who like my work. I am generally a fan of all of them, to some degree.

But at the conference, I found brand new people who loved my work. Some have become instant friends, including one young man from Pennsylvania who had made his first real road trip by coming to the conference. It made me sad, to think he had gotten as old as he was without such an experience--which I had so many times--but on the other hand, I was super thankful that he texted me as he drove home, every couple hours. He wanted to share his trip without someone, a person he knew would appreciate it. I did very much. I could pass on a little of that appreciation to him.

I'm already hard at work on my next video, which is intended as the first in a series about an American historical figure. It involves lots of research with online newspapers from many decades ago. Go with your best pitch. The perfect is the enemy of the good.  The half-assed is also the enemy of the good.

I am thinking August for a premier of this video. That should give me plenty of time to finish it. I thought it would be ten minutes, but I'm looking at more like a half hour to tell the story. It turns out there is more story to tell than I thought. A lot more.

Anyone who appreciates my work can be my friend. As for my old friend I mentioned at the start of this article, I am thinking about making a video just for him, which is basically "Who is Donald Trump?".

Hard Pivot to Physics

 As wonderful as Threadfest was, I have to put the experience behind me for the time being and switch my brain over to physics mode. Next month I'll be attending the biennial conference of a physics organization that I've been part of since 1998. We tried to have our conference two years ago in Prague, but like so much of the world, we had to have a virtual conference through Zoom.

This year we are having a real conference, this time in Prague as well. I wasn't sure I'd be able to go until last month, because the Czech Republic entrance requirements legally prevented me from entering (you can probably guess the reason). About a month ago, the requirements were relaxed and now I can enter, so, as I promised, I made the decision to go.

That means I have to prepare a real talk, my first real in-person physics talk in many years. The subject of my talk is going to be quite controversial. People may be yelling at me by the end of it. But I can take it.

I'm also planning to make this trip to Europe about seeing some friends as well. I'm arriving a few days early from the conference and landing in Zurich, to meet some friends in Switzerland. As part of the physics theme, I may be visiting CERN, the particle collider facility near Geneva.

There's so such to do in the next two weeks before I leave. Meanwhile I am so fired up about the next video project I have in mind--a dramatic historical miniseries--and it's hard to break away my creativity from that. 

Death and Life in Nashville

 Things are moving quickly. For the moment it feels like an ice jam that is breaking up on river.

When I was in Nashville for Threadfest, I told folks that the last time I visited the city (except for a brief swing through ten years ago), was when I was 23 years old and that I almost lost my life in a car accident. I said I was determined to get through this visit without the same thing happening. I had to remind myself of this several times during the visit, as the hotel where we held the conference in the Opryland district was not particularly well suited for walkability. Even at the crosswalks, the cars were somewhat menacing as we navigated on foot towards the restaurants that were nearby, and where much of the "fun" conference conversations were taking place.

But it a way, I embraced the concept of a "death" there. In some ways I wanted my old self to die--the one that has been mostly passive in this broader fight, and has wondered what I'm supposed to be doing besides writing little software programs for other people which mostly never do anything, and only occasionally do anything helpful.  

At the start of his rallies, President Trump has lately taken to showing a clip from the movie Patton in 1970, which George C. Scott in the title show. It's the famous clip of Patton standing in front of a giant American flag in uniform, addressing his troops. He tells them they will indeed have the stomach for battle once they get on the battlefield, as that is what Americans are. Years from now, he tells them, you won't have to tell your grandchildren that you spent the war "shoveling shit in Louisiana." Patrick Gunnels, the organizer of the conference, loves that line, and do many other people. Up until now, to be honest, I've felt like that's what I've been doing. But somebody has to do that, I guess.

I no longer feel that way. I've joked that I've drafted myself into the Entertainment Corps of the New Media, that I felt like Bob Hope telling jokes at the USO. Perhaps my better role model for Threadfest as co-emcee was Dan Rowan, from the old television show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, from the late 1960s. I remember watching it as a young child. It's a comedy skit show with some light political humor. It's the show where Richard Nixon famously said the show's iconic line "Sock it to me!" while running for president in 1968. Some say it humanized him enough to help him with the election. Goldie Hawn got her start in that show telling sketch jokes wearing a miniskirt.

I read a little bit about Dan Rowan, the pipe-smoking straight man of that comedy team. He was born in Oklahoma in the 1920s. His mother and father were traveling entertainers with a carnival. Back then it was far easier for common folk to eke out a living in theater entertainment, as we needed many more people for that, before television centralized all of theater into broadcast centers. Rowan was orphaned at ten during the Depression. Then during World War II he was a fighter pilot who was shot down over New Guinea. After the war, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles and worked in the mailroom of Paramount Pictures until he could ingratiate himself with the studio head.

Like so many men of that era, they didn't make a big deal out of their wartime badassery when they got back to civilian life. It was just something they had done, and the normal lives they were living after the war were exactly what the whole point of the war had been for them--that we as a nation and a people could do those things again.

It reminds me so much of my own grandparent who was in the Army in North Africa in the war. He barely told any stories to me and his other grandchildren about the war. He didn't talk about it much, until he retired in Florida and lived next to a Wehrmacht soldier. They had lots to talk about, no doubt. 

One of the few stories I remember him telling me was about meeting the playwright Thornton Wilder on a tarmac in Algeria. Wilder was touring the American bases putting on productions of his play Our Town, which was a nostalgic look at American life earlier in the century.  Only a few months after he told me that, I had a chance to be in that play as a high school student. One of the best parts about it was feeling connected to my grandfather's wartime service in some roundabout way. I knew growing up that we had it so good, compared to his upbringing as a poor kid barely scraping by in Indiana during the Depression.

Since getting back from Nashville my life has been busy. While at the conference I was downright embarrassed when I had well-known influencers in our group telling me, "I loved your talk, do you have a website or a Youtube channel?" and I would have to tell them I didn't. I knew it was time to fix that. My biggest priority on return was to start such a channel and to make a video version of my talk, which many people had requested and had followed-up with emails afterwards, asking me, "hey is it online yet, I want to share it?"

How could I not answer that call to duty? I even went forward and cut the parody song I prepared for the conference, and performed only in rehearsal. It took fourteen takes to get a version that I was at least partially satisfied with. The perfect is the enemy of the good, they say. But the half-assed is also the enemy of the good. You have to find that balance.

My goal going into Nashville was to give the conference a "show" feeling, which is what Patrick had said he wanted. I was a pit bull for that during the two days we were on stage, pulling out all my theater chops going back to Our Town when I was sixteen, and also watching the great entertainers of television since the days of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, and I guess it worked.  People loved it. Patrick already wants to do another one in six months (!). 

And now I've got a "channel." Of course I've always had this blog, which started as a movie blog writing about narrative and how it works, while also narrating my own life like a story. In a way everything I'm doing now is the fruit of this long effort at writing. I can't imagine not writing here, as it is my private thoughts that I share publicly, if that makes sense at all, and I write here often directed at a couple individuals who once read my blog, and whom I keep in mind as I write. Now I'll have a more public version of it.

I'm already hard at work on my next project, and I am egged on by people I met there, who seem to want to help me. The next big project is going to be something akin to a homemade Netflix miniseries, with "episodes" and will be dramatic instead of a lecture format. 

As I've been telling everyone, Hollywood is dead, and with it has gone storytelling in our culture (because they centralized it so well years ago). They have given the remaining levers of production over to youthful cultural barbarians only interested in destroying. So we have to build our own from scratch, and that's what I intend to do. I told myself to be patient and take time--several years if necessary, but it's certainly off to a big start. I have more on my plate at the moment than I could possibly do.

And also, for the moment, a day job writing software for someone. I got to get to that. At least it's not a corporate gig. It's rebuilding a database web application for a woman in Washington State who runs a tour booking agency for comedians and musicians, including some ones you've probably heard of. Just by building it, I've gotten to learn a lot about how the contracts work, and also the industry as a whole. Fascinating. It's almost like some kind of synchronicity is happening.

Nashville Was a Grand Slam Home Run

 It's been over two weeks since I got back from Threadfest in Nashville. I can finally sit down and write about because it feels as if the whole experience is winding down.

Yesterday was a big day. After much delay I uploaded the video I made of my talk in Nashville, called "Nashville and Narrative." I got way more positive response from it than I possibly could have imagined. Many people, including several big influencers of our group, approached me and all but demanded that I put up a version of my talk online, so they could share it with others.

I was blown away. I was just hoping that I wouldn't bore the audience. My talk was early on the first day so I had the rest of the conference to bask in the appreciation I was getting. It was a challenge to keep my ego in check. There were people at the conference who already "knew me" from Patrick reading my writings on Reading Epic Threads. It was strange for me, to be "famous" even in the tiniest sense. It gave me insight into what it must be like to be recognized by strangers, who express spontaneous appreciation for what you've done. After my talk, I was even more "famous" and every I went there were attendees who wanted to chat with me. As part of the speakers group, it was my job to interact with them. I had thought this would be difficult, a tax on my energy, but instead I found it refreshing and joyful.

Still, when the second full day was finally over, I went out into the atrium of the hotel and sat on the staircase. I could hear attendees nearby busy in a conversation about the conference. As I listened to them I felt like my fictional alter ego, Julian Marsh, at the end of 42nd Street,(1933) sitting on the fire escape listening to the theater goers exit the premiere, unaware that he is listening to them.  It had been my intention to supply all the "theater" needed to make the conference feel like a "show." Together with a couple other experienced people who had the same idea, we managed to pull it off.  Patrick adapted very naturally to being on stage in person. It felt like a 100% success rate. By the end of it everyone was looking forward to the next one, which is already scheduled for November 11-14 in Southlake, Texas, which is a suburb of Fort Worth. 

It was actually Jessica (Ginger) and I who told Patrick that we were lobbying for "the most overlooked city in Texas---Fort Worth." In part it because of the Cowboy Channel, a media outlet that is based there, and also because it has a nicer downtown than Dallas. I started a whisper campaign for Fort Worth, and by the end of it, Patrick asked us, "what do you guys think about Fort Worth for the next one?" I didn't mention that we had been the ones to suggest it. Jessica told me that you know you have influence when other people start taking credit for your idea.

The big thing that happened yesterday, that finally let me relax, was the uploading of my recorded slide show video of my talk from the conference. It took quite a bit of effort to bring the live talk to a recorded version. The way I made my animated slides made it difficult to manipulate them while recording at the same time. So it took several solid days of recording in our "studio" (which is Ginger's closet with a Yeti microphone on a stand) to get all the material. Editing it together wasn't as hard as I thought.

So this marks the official debut of me as a content creator. This is my new thing. I'm going to embrace it. I've got a lot of ideas. I feel free.

In a lot of ways I was inspired by Brian Cates at the conference, who started on Twitter and now writes for Epoch Times. He was urging everyone who was inclined to become "the new media." Cates is a hard core old style reporter--putting together facts to tell the straight truth. It turns out that I'm more in the "Entertainment Corps" of this fight. I'm crawling out of the rubble to help create the new "Entertainment Ecology".  All these years I've been writing a movie blog, about "narrative", and marveling at the history of the studio system. Now, in my own little way, I am becoming the studio. I didn't dream my first production was a feature-length video (83 minutes).

I was quite nervous launching this. I contacted all the folks who said they'd "signal boost" my channel when I went online. They came through. Patrick is going to use my video as his show on Saturday night. That means I'll reach a huge audience. I'm already working on my next project, which is my own "Netflix-style" series.

PS If you want to hear my sing, there's also a three and half minute video on my Rumble Channel. It was a parody piece I worked up for Threadfest, and I practiced it on stage in front of a few people, and got a great response, but there wasn't a great place to put it in the show. The show comes first! So I recorded it at home and uploaded it.  I wanted to do this because I wanted in part to prove to myself that I can humiliate myself on stage and not let my ego get in the way.  Probably my one and only piece like that.