The delusional voting block

Almost 11 million people have voted for Donald Trump.  This is millions more than his closest GOP rivals. I can understand this as his last rivals left standing were not satisfactory choices; even compared to him, but there were at least a couple “not-horrific” choices eliminated early on. Jeb Busch even had money; lots of it. There is something going on.

11 million people is a lot of people to believe in something as outrageous as a Trump presidency.

 Of course surveys have shown that:

• As many as 19 million Americans believe in Unicorns.
• 114 million Americans believe in UFOs.
• 144 million Americans believe in Angels.
• 45 million Americans believe the threat of a Zombie Apocalypse is credible.
• 80 million Americans believe that the sun revolves around the earth.
• 38 million Americans believe Bigfoot is wandering abut the Pacific Northwest.

Before you dismiss this belief salad as simply interesting noise it is worthwhile to point out that 64 million Americans believe that President Obama was born someplace outside the US – like Kenya. Donald Trump famously pressured Obama for a detailed copy of his birth certificate, and still “questions” the place of President Obama’s birth.

To put this in perspective the idea is that a single mother living in Hawaii in 1962 could, or would even want to, spend over 60 hours in the air (also refueling 4 times) in order to get to a place with much less developed obstetric care to have her baby, and then do the same trip to get home. The idea is that a woman who was just putting together enough to get by could afford a huge expense like a trip halfway around the world days before she gave birth. The idea is that there was any reason at all to do this. The idea is that the conspiracy needed to do this would overlook how to forge birth record.  In summary the idea is not only incongruous with reality it is incongruous with itself.  It is nuttier than squirrel poo.

Donald trump succeeded in getting less than 20% of the people that believe in this birther nonsense to vote for him, and that was enough to win him the GOP nomination. In other words there are enough people firmly convinced of utter nonsense to sway the election of POTUS.

Truthers are another untapped resource of motivated paranoid voters.

• 22 million Americans believe that Israel attacked the WTC.
• 45 million Americans think that their own government was responsible.
• 80 million Americans “don’t know” who was responsible.

This confusion exists despite the fact that the Al-Qaeda took responsibility, was investigated, and found to be fully responsible. All the attackers were Al-Qaeda, and … well … it is just difficult to imagine how one could decide that it was not Al-Qaeda.

Donald Trump will be able to say something like “I don’t know” in his aggressive form of ignorance that plays well with the paranoid.

Is the delusional-paranoid vote enough to elect a POTUS? In the 2012 election Barak Obama was elected by a sizeable landslide, but only got 65 million votes to Mitt Romney’s 60 million votes. If Trump is able to motivate the delusional voting base he could become president by an even larger landslide.

Broken Chain

I spend a little time each day looking for, I call it “hunting for”, metaphors. Metaphor is the stuff humans use to build god(s), and so it is infinite, terrible, and resonates with the human condition. Taking down a trophy metaphor can be like bagging a god. Writing about it is a taxidermy of the atheist experience.

Broken Chain

“Broken chain” is a great name for a metaphor. By itself it conjures twangy country songs about “unbroken chains”. One can picture chains binding a slave, and the broken chain showing that slave their path to freedom. I, of course, mean a bicycle chain; the bicycle chain delivers power from the action of the cyclist (pedals) to the desired impact on the world (bike moving forward), and so is a great species of chain metaphor. However, the title of a metaphor is not where the process starts for the hunter.

The hunt begins with experience. Fertile hunting ground can be found in events that impact the hunter in emotional ways, but where there is a respite of contemplation afterwards for the details of the event to become mixed with whatever else the hunter is contemplating.

I recently went on a short ride. Before the ride I had replaced the chain on my Kestrel as it had stretched to the point that it was interfering with shifting. I put a new SRAM 1051 chain, and used the powerlock™ to complete it. After twisting a few adjuster barrels the Kestrel shifted like new. My head was full of unfinished emotions and so I was raring to go out and take both my head and the bike for a spin. Although the day’s weather report featured constant waves of drizzle and rain there was a momentary letup, and I leapt out the door. I shot downhill for the first mile as gravity nudged me out of my sedentary thoughts. I took a right and headed up a canyon that mercilessly winds for miles uphill before it crosses a steep mountain pass and lands in the Salt Lake Valley. I only ground up the grade part way before turning back into a light sprinkle and pedaling in pursuit of the speed gravity promised. It was a left, and then a left again before I hit a short 12% grade section of the ride home. A car ahead of me turned so slowly right onto the grade that I had to stop and lose any momentum my excitement had gifted me. I shifted, and then stood on the pedals to gain leverage, and … then …. SNAP. The powerlock™ had uncoupled. The chain flew into the spokes of the rear wheel, and I was given the contemplative time needed to capture a metaphor in the form of a long walk home in clicky-clacky bike shoes.

Two very good potential metaphors pop out of this event. I chose the “broken chain” since it allows me to infer the second “weak link”, and is almost a two-in-one metaphor.

Literally I was pedaling to move the bike forward, but I was moving the bike forward to get out of some thoughts in my head. The new chain was put on to make that process operate more smoothly. The break occurred when the chain reached maximum stress, and could not take it anymore. The break was independent of my efforts; an externality that halted the planned excursion. Each of these observations can be used to map the chain breaking onto other events. I can describe what is really going on in my head with what really went on in my world. Once that is done the metaphor is captured.

Did I kill god with this metaphor? No.

There were many aspects of a trophy metaphor here, but what was lacking was the perspective of the hunter. I was caught up in some less universally interesting mental ping-pong. If I had opened my mind to the nature of life, or the universe, or everything, then I may have bagged a trophy worthy of at least a minor deity.

Instead I found out a new way of saying something important to myself. I have that metaphor hanging on the wall of my mind. It will get dusty in time, but I think it is a nice enough one to clean off and admire for a long time to come.

Hope won't leave

Illnesses are defined by cause and symptoms. Those with just symptoms are often called syndromes. On the other hand “unspecified” is sometimes a good enough cause to turn a potential syndrome into an illness.

Over the past week I’ve been suffering from what should be called an illness since the cause remains unspecified in discussions about it like this one. I’ve been unable to sleep for going on five days, and I can only take in a few mouthfuls of food every once in a while. On the plus side I’ve lost 10 pounds, and I can imagine getting into some of my old jeans in a few more weeks. I don’t know where the sleep has gone since I just feel a little loopy instead of severely exhausted. If this keeps up I will learn to be productive at night instead of just lying in bed waiting for sleep till dawn. This could be the best thing to happen to me ever!

The big problem is hope. Seeing hope in patterns of the random backdrop of life is easy. There isn’t any for those things I wish for so there is an infinite assemblage of patterned hints to rely on instead.  I've had extended internal conversations about just letting go my handhold on the fantastic so I could fall ... fall.. fall into sleep.

The mind works like that. If you want to do something like have a sandwich you might say to yourself: “I would like a sandwich”. The person you are talking to in your head knows you want the sandwich because they ARE you. If it is a complex enough sandwich you might even discus condiments and side drinks in your mind. Internal dialogs can be comforting. They can give the appearance of helping things fit. Ultimately, however, it makes no real sense that the thought process jumps out into speech in order to become known.

It is possible to give the voices in one’s head the personalities of people you are dealing with. In the absence of direct communication these avatars can act out the “what ifs”.

Too often the play acting in my head re-runs highlights of events. They can run a particular partially-heard word through a million variations until it may mean something with importance far outshining the original intent.

If I continue without sleep for a while longer I will be much more productive if I can figure out what to do with these conversations. I get stuck on them telling me how much of a failure I’ve been lately. They sound like my father often. Dad calling me a looser again, “yay”. I would hope that I had heard it enough growing up that I would have grown tired of it, but it is a favorite refrain for my head’s more nasty voices.

If I stayed up at night working on stuff I could potentially find other things to talk about. I am a bit too loopy right now to carry on actual conversations with actual people, but I could easily chatter on for hours about specific wiring layouts and the awesomeness of little projects. I could also garden at night by headlamp; weeds can be spoken of at length, and my garden is full of them.

Perhaps my mind is trying to destabilize itself enough to warp the fringes of reality. There are things I want so very much, but they are incompatible with physical laws, or making them manifest would require tweaking the physical constants governing forces like gravity, and the Earth would go plunging into the sun. Enough sleep deprivation might make anything possible. I need to learn how to hope rather than act on the questionable advice my mind is dredging up.

The cure to the illness is to become properly hopeless. Give up on the patterns, and embrace the random. The waning moon is supposed to be a time to rid oneself of illness or for discarding stuff that is not working in one’s life. This Friday’s new moon promises a fresh start that may find me happily without hope. Hopelessness never looked so good.

Pandora couldn’t use her box to store knick-knacks until that last remaining hope finally flew away.

The French philosopher Bruno Latour was once asked a question so profound he wrote an entire book about hope in order to address it (Pandora’s Hope IBSN: 978-0674653368). The question was: “Croyez-vous en réalité ?" ("Do you believe in Reality ?"). I suppose it is not too strange then to have the reality-altering symptoms of my illness cause me to think about hope.