Moon Day Thing 11/21/22 Part 2: Eclectic Baboon Loo

Let's get topical

Pictured here: Eclectic Baboon Loo

For about a week now, you’ve probably encountered me lurking in the comment threads of your (other) favorite substacks. Yes, it’s okay that you have other favorites, baby: we both know this is a good-time thing. Anyway, you’ve probably been seeing me throwing bombs here and there and wondering “isn’t she supposed to be in bed?” or “where does she get off wasting time reading other stacks and getting into flame wars with people instead of entertaining me like I don’t pay her to?”¹

And the truth is, I’ve been easing myself back into Substack because for a while, due to a combination of sleeping insane amounts of the day away, pain meds, and pain, my attention span was awful. But on the days that I couldn’t do anything but stay in bed and occasionally crawl to the bathroom to do Just Stop Oil protests, I pretty much read non-stop, because there wasn’t anything else to do that didn’t require any movement at all besides lay there and think- which I did tons of, too.

Hours and hours of reading, meditating, and staring at the wall thinking, in between getting knocked out by pills. And considering what I had to read and think about in the past few weeks, there was a lot of ground to cover.

The truth is, I probably could have come back to writing this almost a full week ago, if I worked in sprints. But I wasn’t ready to, because I truthfully didn’t know what to say. I seriously considered, for a couple of days, shutting the whole thing down- writing a short or long goodbye post and packing it in. (I had already stopped people’s payments for subs, so I wouldn’t be leaving anyone in the lurch money-wise). I thought about maybe never logging into substack again, either as a writer or a reader, or reading but never commenting so I never had to answer anyone “why did you quit The Gutter?” and so I could just… go away.

I kind of reached a critical mass while I was lying around with nothing to do but read and think, and I began to make a strong case to myself that there was really nothing left worth saying, even by people with far more substantial things to say than me.

Fortunately for me but unfortunately for my eventual autobiography, my major life choices have always tended to be very carefully considered, so I gave myself a few days to sleep on it and think. One of the very few good effects oxy has on me is that it allows me to sleep wonderfully, a pleasure I am usually denied even when I am in good health: I take hours to fall asleep, usually sleep fitfully and never enough, and when I do recall dreams they are awful things. Oxy reliably puts me to sleep in 45 minutes, with a process so gentle and predictable I can feel every increment of it; I am treated to vivid, lucid dreams all night long, sleep exactly 8 hours, and wake up feeling reborn. I am mildly worried I will want more of it when my scrip runs out, even if I’m not in pain from the surgical wounds anymore; I would gladly pay to sleep this well every night for the rest of my life.

So, after a few days of sleeping on withdrawing from what last shred of online social interaction I still maintain, I decided the problem wasn’t dreading having to write it all down or to share it with people, it was just that I still hadn’t processed the sheer enormity of everything I had thought and felt in the last two weeks.

It is unlikely that large groups of people will consider the month of November 2022 to have been unusually historically important to the history of the US and possibly the world order, but when taken in aggregate, I believe the events of the past two weeks or so represent such a thorough, violent, dramatic crash of key systems of western society- especially as relates to the implosion of the US federal government as an effective representative of a global power.

I don’t just say “in aggregate” because of their sum impact, but because I believe a lot of what has happened over the past month represent linked and related systems failing (or exploding) together.

I enjoy “superforecasting” as a very casual hobby, and I’m proud to say that while I am nowhere near the kind of hyperfocused cognitive freaks that aren’t able to spend their time doing anything else, my internal batting average is very good, especially in recent years. I don’t claim the kind of specialized training or subject knowledge that people who are justifiably well-paid to perform detailed analyses on the how and why of various systems they predict well; I’m merely good at intuitive, highly granular prediction, and can come up with good post hoc explanations of my reasoning after the fact when proven right or wrong.

I say all this as a prelude because for every single event I’m going to touch on in this post, there’s a highly qualified person out there who has published an article on their substack that covers the particular issue with expert subject knowledge. I am not attempting to directly contest other people’s analyses.

What follows is purely my hot take, my intuitive predictions, or my victory lap for things I saw coming.

I’ll start in order of how I was thinking of things while lying around sick.

1. Elections.

I voted, and I’ll call it a heroic effort- I was less than 24 hours out of surgery, was on a walker/crutches, and could barely stay conscious for more than a few hours at a time.

It is probably the last time I will vote with anything approaching seriousness. I have finally been fully redpilled on the complete joke and ritualistic farce that popular voting has become in the United States.

This an especial dick in the face for people in PA, like me, where we saw a literally brain-damaged person who showed greater cognitive challenge than Brandon in responding to people win an allegedly serious election.

Among other sober conclusions I came to during my few days of simply sitting quietly, not reading any more news, and thinking about what this all meant to me, I decided I’m not at all afraid of the consequences of any of my speech any more, so here goes: election fraud is and has been wholesale in the US for at least the last 20 years, and the only thing that has changed is it has dramatically escalated in the past two presidential cycles to the point where it is outstripping its ability to be lost in the white noise of all the other stupid shit that swings elections.

We have also gotten to a point where the country is nearly perfectly divided down the middle into red and blue voters with a meaningless “independent” portion that still votes predictably red or blue. This means that in elections where there is anything like similar numbers in voter turnout, the results will be predictably marginal such that cheating doesn’t require more than a bump in most places anymore, even in many of the vaunted “red wave incoming” midterms that happened this month.

I think the stalled “red wave” was the product of two main things, in a proportion I’m not sure of:

• Cheating. We had “malfunctioning” voting machines, counting machines, computers, toilets, and air conditioners in every battleground election. The excuses were complete and utter bullshit of the sort used by people that know they can slap you in the face with their dick because you’re tied to a stake. A high school student government could run and count a simple popular election that was apparently unmanageable by adults. There were plenty of anecdotes across the country about mail-in ballots found here, there, and everywhere, in a box and with a fox, at an old folks’ spa and from your dead grandma. Everyone fucking knows it at this point, and you can tell because of the near obsession the media has with demonizing any expression of skepticism or doubt about election integrity: for fun, do a news search for ‘election denier’ for the past month and look at the sheer breadth of topics, issues, and events blamed on ‘election deniers.’ We have arrived at a point in The Discourse where “questioning the outcome of elections” has become solely and exclusively synonymous with “a right-wing zealot angry about Democrat hegemony who is thus a threat to national security.” This kind of near-total certainty that “anyone who questions election integrity is stupid, crazy, and evil all at once” would be a pretty dumb groove to lay down if you ever imagined the shoe being on the other foot: quite probably, they don’t.

  • tl:dr: there was big and small cheating in most midterm elections, and there will be more and bigger cheating going forward. Anyone who questions election integrity on any grounds will be harshly demonized.

  • Bonus Prediction: There will be a push (I can’t yet predict whether or not it will be successful) to criminalize certain forms of “election denying” on the grounds that it “undermines democracy” and is vaguely a threat to domestic whatever.

• Weak Republican candidates and platform rigidity. Republican overconfidence drove their candidates too far right and cost them too many of the very realistically plausible “moderate defectors” among normally blue-voting Dems and independents, mainly regarding abortion. I think this will continue to hurt Republican candidates in state elections, especially abortion, now that the matter has been kicked back to states where it belongs.

  • tl;dr: There were too many Repubs saying intense, “far right talking points” that scared off people that might have been voting red for the first time.

  • Bonus Prediction: Republicans won’t learn from this and will not moderate their positions on especially abortion because they fear losing the evangelical vote more than they desire gaining swing voters (and let’s be clear, that’s the real reason). I’m not going to predict how this will specifically play out in 2024 yet (there are other big factors emerging that I have to digest a little more, especially Trump).

2. Twitter (and Big Tech in general)

I had pinned no religious hopes and dreams on Musk’s Twitter buyout: I’m not on Twitter, and never will be. I maintain after years of directly and indirectly-related professional experience with the impact of social on human brains that Twitter is like cigarettes: there is no healthy way to consume it, simply choices that can minimize harm while never being “good for you.”

I did not imagine that Musk’s reforms would revolutionize Twitter in any enormous way: I was just amused, let’s even say exuberantly so, about how much the idea of it deeply upset people that I find deeply ridiculous and awful and enjoy imagining them suffering mental anguish. He’s rich enough to have done it purely for the lulz. Lacking some of the predatory instincts of a truly great capitalist, were I in Musk’s shoes, I would have bought Twitter and creatively demolished it over the course of a year or so just to agonize as many people as possible, and then sold it for scrap.

• Bonus Prediction: It is possible (53% certainty) that Musk will, indeed, do this, minus the silly trolling part: I predict in a year or so (but definitely before 2024) Musk may announce “the Twitter buyout was a noble but failed adventure” and resell it. This depends entirely on whether the FTX fallout crashes his plans to leverage Twitter for a crypto-powered transaction hub. If this happens, Twitter will be truly dead: it will be bought for its massive data stores and either run halfheartedly and become MySpace or just die quietly.

But I began reading up on exactly how Twitter made money before Musk, how Musk was likely to make money on it, read a little about Meta and a few other social-fueled projects, for some reason found myself thinking back to the WeWork implosion from when I was still in marketing, revisited some stuff about Theranos, and…

I came to the conclusion that the vast, overwhelming majority of “Big Tech,” as experienced by the market, is complete bullshit, to wit: billions if not trillions of dollars of the worth of Big Tech are not real- they are hype dollars that don’t actually reflect the profitability of any of the brands they are attached to which are often completely unprofitable if not anti-profitable.

This was a red pill for me, but the more I thought it over, the more certain I felt and feel about it: the majority of market-facing Big Tech (I’ll explain this constant qualifier in a moment) isn’t actually real: it’s a cardboard box with computer dials and screens drawn on it in crayon with “PROTOTYPE” or “MVP” written on the top that has an insane assigned value because of huge money interests wanting to move money around for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual profitability of the thing their money sits in.

Calvin and Hobbes is © Bill Watterson. Used here with slavish devotion and love.

Or even worse, in quite a few cases, it doesn’t even say “PROTOTYPE” on the cardboard box, there is no box, it’s just a dude standing in a parking lot with a bunch of angel investors and a Few Other Men (I’ll get to them in a moment) with a piece of empty blacktop and a piece of looseleaf paper with “Coming Soon: Magical Instant Blood Tests” sitting there under a rock.

But successful capitalists aren’t stupid, and they don’t stay rich (not forever, anyway) by being stupid over and over: what’s really going on is that Big Tech is simply not playing the game we intuitively think they are.

Twitter has never been profitable selling ads. 85% of its userbase (at least) are fake bots. Facebook has never been profitable selling ads and is almost as artificially inflated as Twitter. Imaginary bullshit like Theranos and exaggerated bullshit like WeWork never intended to actually offer the products they represented.

There are other things going on, and you’re not invited:

• The Shell (Corporation) Game. Money that gets sunk into huge brands that chug along for years without anyone noticing or seeming to care that they aren’t actually solvent or profitable isn’t being solely invested against the profitability of the project. It’s being laundered and essentially donated to entities on both sides of the ledger as part of preexisting implied or explicit kickbacks or pays-to-play. It’s probably also being sunk into other more likely profitable investments or gambles like crypto.

• Welcome to Beautiful Potemkin Village. Remember when I mentioned The Men standing in the parking lot with the VCs while you showed them an imaginary product? One of those guys is from the DoD. Another one is from the NSA. We don’t know where the third guy is from, but we keep inviting him back, because we forgot one time and Alice’s mom died of cancer over the course of one weekend. Crazy, bizarre cancer where your brain literally turns inside out and goes out your anus. What was crazy was it happened while we were all sitting in a boardroom and she got a phone call and said she hoped it was finally Verizon calling her back about the weird stuff her phone’s GPS was doing.

  • This will bump up against the next bit about FTX, but who cares. The market-facing brands of Big Tech are often little more than thin veneers over huge public-private enterprises on behalf of the intelligence community, the military, and (overwhelmingly mostly) the Democrat party. They exist to gather massive amounts of data about US citizens to be able to track, predict, and kill them, and win elections or make it look more believable that they did. If they happen to also be marginally profitable on ad clicks or other bullshit, hey, that’s nice, and it keeps the Pycrete battleship afloat longer, but who cares. If you can have 10,000 bots tweet the same carefully-misspelled message and make stupid people scared Trump is going to, I don’t know, crop-dust bleach on their kids’ schools to cure them of COVID because he absolutely said that, that kind of population control is priceless. The capital that’s sunk into these kamikaze business models has already been dogeared for lobbying, election financing, black funds and slush funds, cushy no-show jobs, and so on. Best of all, YOU’RE paying for a lot of it- that whole floor of Twitter that the CIA owned? Taxpayer. You think they sold cookies?

Ukraine

Pictured here: Kiev, daytime aerial photo

I don’t have a huge ton to say here except:

• When this first started heating up, I predicted and maintained that the entire US foundational US interest in Ukraine is that Ukraine has been Ground Zero for federal dirty laundry for several decades, from wholesale money laundering by the Democrat party to illegal biolabs to a whole lot more. Like anyone in his position, Zelenskyyyyyy has saved all the receipts in one form or another, because it’s the only way to protect yourself (for a little while longer anyway) from getting a Clinton Surprise© behind the ear. Then Russia showed up babbling something about historical boundaries and NATO encirclement and some other shit, but importantly, began stomping around flipping over mattresses with DNC porno collections under them. The faction in the federal government who was at most danger of being really destructively exposed if Russia occupied enough of Ukraine to start really showing off and broadcasting these receipts (which Putin 100% would; Ukraine has viciously and sometimes lethally cracked down on critical journalism for years, probably because some of these receipts have already leaked into the imaginations of ‘conspiracy theorists’ and citizen investigators).

The “dirty laundry” faction then began badgering, bullying, threatening, and calling in markers with military and foreign policy and intelligence people who could be convinced there was something in it for them, too, to make this thing happen.

• My first response to the RUSSIAN MISSILE ATTACK ON POLANDS!1!!!11 was “false flag.” I am still about 60% certain that it was, and that they simply backtracked on their story because (like all the crisis acting so far) they fucked up the forensics on it too badly.

  Yep. Ukrainian defensive missile off course. In Poland. Ups.

  • The media’s completely incorrect story was completely incorrect BECAUSE THEY ALREADY HAD IT TEED UP. The only thing that went “wrong” was someone either called an audible on World War 3 at the last minute, or they realized quickly enough that the setup was too sloppy and would fall apart within a day or two (like it did).

• Absolutely nothing will stop the fed from sinking money- OUR money- into Ukraine until something forces it to stop. If the war ends tomorrow, it will be relief money instead of defense funding and still go on for years. Its purpose is the same as it was in pre-war Ukraine- launder that shit into Democrat pockets and Democrat friends while destroying the domestic economy to break the American people.

FTX

I have less to say about FTX for a few reasons: it began unfolding as I was coming out of my sick leave so I didn’t have a super long time to meditate on it. Second, many of the moving parts are deep, complex, and multisystemic and really deserve an educational take with greater nuance than I care to do here. Mathew Crawford’s incredibly important A Grand Unified Theory of the FTX Disaster is a long, dense, and extremely valuable read if you want to genuinely understand this. I’m not going to retread the same ground because Crawford does it better and because I’m going to assume by the time you’re reading this you already know all you care to about the practical aspects of it; I will, therefore, confine this topic line to my hot takes and predictions.

Pretty much everything I said up in the Big Tech section applies here, anyway.

• Take a really good look at SBF in all the pictures he appears in: look at his eyes, look at where they’re focused, look at what he does with his hands, look at how he’s dressed. I believe SBF is a second-generation (at least) pedophile, and his handlers that installed him in FTX were likely his abusers or facilitated his abusers ala Epstein. (The symbolism on his T-shirt has already been observed.)

• One place where I depart from Crawford’s interpretation is this: while I agree that FTX was a Potemkin Village created to usher in a global financial network and unified currency, I present the wholly unqualified conspiracy theory that it was only designed to do this indirectly because it was built to fail.

  • Bonus “Prediction”: FTX was a Reichstag Fire whose PRIMARY purpose was to justify a crackdown by national government(s) on “independent” crypto- and, eventually and indirectly, create their own lame-o global coin. I predict they will still try to do the first half UNLESS the forensics on the FTX autopsy reveal SO much direct, explicit government collusion that they can’t concern-troll their way into a Crypto Bureau Of Revenue and Investigation. Or they’ll just do it anyway. I’m not gonna lay odds on this one; I mainly want to assert my belief that FTX was never intended to succeed, it was a Reichstag fire to concern-troll crypto in general.

• If enough of this is pored over while it’s still hot, before the shredders really get going, the FTX failure will probably reveal tentacles of every single topic line in this entire article as all being related and all originating from the Democrat/deep state. This is why I say that while the dots remain unconnected, and some may never be explicitly connected in polite company, the events of this month have the potential to be more history-changing than nearly anything in recent years that isn’t already part of the same hideous hairy shit ball.

So. taking all of this in, kind of all at once, while laying in bed with nothing to to but think about it was big, big enough that I began to feel like thinking and talking about it are pointless, futile exercises in despair and that this is so huge, so late in the game, that we are so powerless and so far below the moving parts that “resisting” or “fighting back” is about as meaningful as an ant revolution would mean to a pod of humpback whales.

But as I look at this unravel, I see the seeds of it really, truly falling apart under its own weight, incompetence, and infighting. Even if the vast majority of us remain pathetically blind, stupid, and uncaring, they just keep fucking up on their own.

One of the red pills I finally, genuinely swallowed this month that I had been hiding under my tongue for a while now was this: there is no truly going back. We will not Make America Great Again in the sense that anyone who says it means it. We will never “reclaim” any better version of life as we knew it- we weren’t wrong, we weren’t nostalgic, we weren’t delusional, we just can’t get it back. Even if things get better, even if we somehow(?) Make America Great Again, we will not Make America What It Was. It will be something else, and it’s better to accept that because it’s something you can actually have.

Everything is going to have to break, and a lot of people are going to lose when “it” breaks, because the vast majority of people are dependent, often through no fault of their own, on “it” for their very lives.

For those of us with the luck, grit, and will to survive, though, it will eventually be a very exciting time, albeit one marked by wreckage, ashes, and graves.

Coming soon:

• The next On Supremacy essay, which should have really been Part One

• A (semi-paywalled) draft chapter of To You, Who Will Be My Daughter

• A (semi-paywalled) short story about dads, starring an unpleasant Viking teenager.

1. Note to readers from the future: I suspended paid sub during my sick leave.