I don't mean to say I told you so, but I told you so. Back in March.
I don't feel good about that. But this has happened enough times now, that a pattern is emerging. Not the pattern of making predictions and seeing them come true. The pattern of this pattern accelerating.
When the blatantly obvious is so bad as to be worth writing about, it's not really much of a prognostication. But this stuff is so unusual that one has to say something. The trouble is that the trouble is speeding up. So a forewarning isn't any use when the dreaded event comes down before the analysis even goes to print.
To put this another way. Steven Wolfram, in an edge.org talk, points out that there are some calculations that are so complicated we can't do them as fast as the Universe is doing them. In other words, if math allows us to predict something that follows some logical order, that's fine, but it doesn't work when doing the math takes longer than the phenomenon we're trying to predict.
Taking that as yet another phenomenon of our times that needs to be addressed, what can we expect in the next few months? If this pattern holds, it will be futile to guess, because so much that happens will happen all at once. We'll be left to wait and see, which is one of the President's frequent answers to the most troubling questions about just what the hell he thinks he's up to. The point here is, maybe he is one of those inherently insoluble problems, an Irreducibility.
(No: he is merely an psychopathic attention addict who is immensely useful to the oligarchs who are now raking in about three billion a day. But that alone may be enough to reach escape-velocity.)
The Virus suddenly spiked to 27 deaths in Wisconsin the last day of September. Officials were talking about installing field hospitals to take up the load of new cases expected. The President is staging packed rallies. The typical setup, as the President himself explained to a reporter, seems to keep him at a distance from his admiring fans, so he's out of danger.
The election is now expected to bring chaos and violence starting Election Day, lasting at least until Inauguration Day. The FBI released a dire report on white supremacist "militias" just as the President was speaking directly from the "debate" to one of the most notoriously violent of these fringe groups, clearly, as they have now confirmed, telling them to "get ready for a war." Did the President mean it? The violent wackos say so, so what's the difference?
The public is arguing or the media are arguing over who "won" the "debate." I'm listing this as one of the accelerating phenomena because it is so patently stupid, with maybe three positions predominating as to (a) whether it was a debate at all, (2) whether it matters, or (*) that it just goes to show you. There are supposed to be two more of these spectacles. This method of choosing a leader is testing the wrong skillset. Like having a boxing match between two brain-surgeons to decide which one is going to extract your tumor.
The campaign to deflect, lose, erase, purge, invalidate, intimidate, and defraud democratic, African-American, Latinx, Asian votes is roaring furiously across the nation, using so many vile, underhanded, or just plain dumb tricks it will never be known how all of it was done, or which scam tipped the balance. But almost nothing about the procedure will be free, much less fair, or remotely honest. And if it were, who would believe it?
How to convey this? Maybe if I omit paragraphs, or punctuation, or the spaces between words, it might show how the information becomes denser and more tangled as it comes more and more rapidly across our brain-pans. There are-so-many-cracks-in-the-foundations,andsomanythingsonfire,andsomanypeopleinblind,screamingpanic,andsomanyheavy-caliberfirearms,andsomanyurgentneedstodosomanyterriblethingstootherpeople,andsomuchterrorIdon'tseeafutureatall.
Could we maybe slow this down somehow? Maybe an old-fashioned general strike would help right about now. This can't end well.
