Cinematic

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Sorry to be absent yesterday and to do this late, but yesterday was the last of the wholly dedicated days of helping family move, which is the other half of our move, and it’s been a lot over the last three months, and I kind of folded.

Then I spent three hours in the night wide-awake, which is what tells me I’m actually worried about the midterms. Yes, I know. On X, Cynical Publius, whom a friend calls “The only decent one of the Roman Statue guys” says that the whole idea the democrats will sweep the midterms is a psy-ops.

Look, he might very well be right. After all, when is the last time you heard of the GOP being “well ahead” before an election (except maybe locally.) And perhaps it is just my impression, but I think the “The GOP is losing badly” polls get more certain and exaggerated every election cycle. I mean they learned from 16 — ish. They’re no longer saying absolutely no chance but that the left takes all. But they still are, just more low key and sounding more intellectual.

So, it’s entirely possible the left is dead in the water, knows it, and is doing the “We’re totes going to win” out of reflexive attempts to demoralize the right.

The thing is, for my money, it was never an attempt to demoralize us. Look, which of you won’t vote because the left tells you all is lost? You vote harder and with an FU, right?

I think the polls and the triumphalism was ALWAYS to hide the fraud. Because if the polls were accurate and the left didn’t convince us all it was going to win anyway, people would look more carefully at the fraud.

“But Sarah, the fraud can’t be that gynormous”. If it weren’t they wouldn’t have fought so hard against the SAVE act. They wouldn’t have been so crazy as to push every state they can towards vote by mail. And coming from one of those states, let me tell the fraud was already massive before that. Now, of course, Colorado is in the grip of Sauron till the abomination of fraud by mail is defeated.

So, how reliable are the polls? Even internal ones?

I don’t know. Therefore I don’t know how much gravity to lend the story that the GOP is now running adds in locales that should be safe. I honestly have no clue.

We have things going for us, including la grande salida (this time for real) which is where people leave rather than worry about ICE. Or leave because it’s harder for them to suck the benefits teat. (It’s really not possible for them to live here, at the wages paid to illegals, without also massively imposing on the social safety net.) But that doesn’t matter much. Why not? Because the registrations of those that registered will be there, and someone will vote in their name, particularly in “loose” and vote by mail systems.

Then there is … the machine. Just the machine of fraud and deception built since Clinton passed the Motor Voter act.

How efficient is it? How much of its founding has failed? And how much will the people involved in it pay heed to all the hunting down and persecuting of those involved that has taken place more every year? I don’t know. And neither do you.

I do know that the steady drum beat of “The economy is the worst it’s ever been” is affecting the young, who at any rate for a variety of reasons, most of which are “progressive” dominance, from anti “child” labor laws to failing schools to the massive not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy loans, are finding life very difficult to get foothold on.

Is the economy bad? I don’t know. In our region, the gas is not as bad as it was under Biden, and we can afford eggs, which were once upon a time unobtanium, and which we were called “treatlers” for complaining about. (Only the democrats could make eggs too expensive to afford. Apparently the repeat of a trick first performed by FDR, at that.) Looking around I won’t say things are hopping. I don’t see the big take off we saw under Reagan. But then again, even under Reagan the take off was not instant, and I beg to note that Carter didn’t as comprehensively destroy the economy as the auto pen did. Partly because he started with a relatively stronger one.

I know that despite our town being very friendly to homeless (Grrrr) the infestation seems to be receding apace. (I wonder how many of those were illegal, or how many of the addicted-and-crazy were being ignored due to all the support going to illegals. It’s probably a “yes”.)

I also know that in this safe seat, the only ads I see are crazy — and I mean crazy — attack ads against the GOP. There are no “this is our program and it’s so much better.” There are also no GOP ads. So– Does it mean anything? I don’t know.

And what the heck is with the caravan of “migrants” (Yes, invaders) from Honduras winding towards our border? What do they thing they’re going to accomplish, when the border has been sealed since Trump took over?

Achtually I have a theory. I think the left thinks it can’t lose on that one.

First you have to remember that they drink their own ink and they’ve been going on and on about how people are very, very upset at Trump for all the deportations and sealing the border. They’re right actually. The people are very upset about the deportations being so slow. But the logistics of it always dictated they would be. Though that’s not why the left thinks we’re upset. They have seen all the movies. They’ve made all the movies. You know, about how the innocent illegals are being shot down on the street. They’ve written and read all the articles about how even citizens are being shot and deported.

They’re spitting mad and appalled. And they lack a theory of other minds, so they figure EVERYONE is mad and appalled.

So they figure they send a massive caravan at the border. If the border patrol resists the invasion, people will get shot — the left will make SURE a pregnant woman or more get shot. It’s the playbook! — and people will be furious at this administration and sweep the left into power in a wave of righteous indignation.

Or… the caravan is just turned away, they mine the sad stories, and the people are heartbroken and sweep the left into power in a wave of righteous indignation.

I’m not worried about that. In either case. It’s the left thinking in movie plots, in which “All the people” rise up in response to whatever the crazy thing is that they’ve dreamed up to be mad about.

OTOH we also think in movie plots. The post Holly shared yesterday I was surprised that I expected greater fighting and leftist violence if Trump won, despite the fraud. (And I didn’t expect him to win because of the fraud, which is why I went to bed at 3 am election night. I don’t expect the election night this year to be better.)

Now, Trump’s going after their funding sources stopped some of that. Definitely. This is why we haven’t had another Summer of Burning Love. (Though I wouldn’t put it past them to be saving for 2028.)

OTOH I was scared and I guess I too tend to think cinematically. I am, after all a story teller, and “They they gradually adapted to this as the culture slowly changed, until opposition…” is not a great plot to fit into a novel. Not even a massive novel, like No Man’s Land.

I take my fear as a picture of just how fraught things felt back then.

Which is why I would much rather not go back to it. By the time a piddly league pundit like me is worried about debanking and conceiving stratagems to get around it? Things are very fraught indeed.

Did we do enough to obviate the fraud? Who knows? Crystal ball cloudy. Ask another day. Mid November, for choice.

It’s not very cinematic, but we’re just going to have to vote against the commies (even if there’s no one to vote for in our area) and keep on keeping on.

Sursum corda. Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

In the end we win they lose. It might just take a while.

50 thoughts on “Cinematic”

  2. The one that had me rolling my eyes was “how can Vivek be losing in a state that Trump won?!?”

    Um… because Vivek is temu Trump? More exposure to him makes you trust him less? His cultural quirks are unpleasant?

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    1. I had mildly approving impressions of the guy.

      Then he came to the Iowa State Fair… then he did some of his nonsense hustle culture talking that got ears pinned back with recognition… yeah no.

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      1. Some hitch their wagon to the “I was a Tech Lord” thing, but they were really hedge fund dudes. Vivek was one of those after Hahvahd and Yale, then he eventually founded one company in biotech.

        He’s always read out to me on the “sales guy” side of the spectrum, somewhat expected from a politician, and kinda like Ted Cruz read out to me during his first POTUS run. His bailing on DOGE to do his current run did not endear him to me either.

        I mellowed on Cruz and would possibly also on Vivek were he in the Senate and fighting like Ted does, but it’s fairly clear Governor of Ohio is just a stepping stone for Vivek’s next POTUS attempt, which might be off putting to Ohio voters, and frankly does squat for the ongoing national fight.

        He’s kinda whatever in Ohio. Good luck and all that, but his race has no discernible impact on anything important that I can see.

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    2. I would rather have Vivek Ramaswamy as a university faculty than Jason Arday, I would rather have Vivek as a university president than Claudine Gay.

      There are fields of scholarship that he would be a relative credit to.

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      2. Is that supposed to be compliment or not? Because, yes, I’d rather have Ramaswamy in those positions than Arday or Gay, but I’d also rather have one of the bales of hay from the Iowa State Fair in those positions. The hay bale, at least, would be unlikely to do any harm.

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  3. The migrant caravan from Honduras doesn’t bother me. It’s whether the government does its job processing them when and if they get here. Number one, NONE of them qualify for asylum, because under the rules for requesting asylum, they can only request it from the first nation they enter after leaving their home countries. Which in this case is at least Mexico, if not some earlier nation. So, anyone who tries to process an asylum request for any of these people will be committing a felony crime of falsification of government documents and needs to go to jail.

    Number two, we’re already waaaay past the annual number of immigrants we can accept and reasonably assimilate this year. For the U.S., that number is slightly less than 1 million new immigrants.

    Number three, I doubt there’s anyone in that caravan that we want or need in this country. No doctors, no physicists, no electrical engineers, and probably no decent farmers either. Which means there’s no need to grant exceptions. Well, maybe there is a category for exceptions. How many young, single women want to marry an American guy to stay with him for the rest of her life and raise a family with him? The thought of all those feminazis howling about it brings a smile to my face.

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    1. I like a lot of foreign origin doctors of electrical engineering or physics.

      I could joke ‘some of my best friends are …’

      My dudes. My dudes.

      I’ve just decided that I should edit down my attempt to ‘vehemently express reservation, without being too unwelcoming’.

      PhDs get those from universities, which do not as a matter of custom let the physicists audit the law schools to make sure the laws schools are not being too homicidally insane.

      Last year, academics encouraged a mentally ill student to murder an outside critic. I think a lot of people inside and outside of American academia do not understand how terrible, practically speaking, the optics of that are for American academia.

      I think North Korea has physics programs, I know Iran and Russia do. The tools do not come with the America specific cultural nuance to manage things when we have a hundred year rarity or three hundred year rarity industrial accident that is especially difficult to brazen out in the United States.

      Our domestic PhDs are more than stupid and uninformed enough to not have that nuance. (Some domestic origin PhDs absolutely see and understand the problems, but also know about what the internal pressure to censorship is like. Some of them actually still do the correct thing anyway.)

      We do not need /more/ idjits who think they understand the situation here, who think that politically it just needs more pressure and the public will fold. The kind of PhDs we could use more of are those who realize that the terrorist savages are savage, and potentially a problem for the universities they are embedded in.

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      1. I think North Korea has physics programs,

        Their nuclear weapons technology came from France via Pakistan, but the information package would still require a boatload of physicists and engineers to implement. The bomb itself is quite simple; it’s the industrial infrastructure that is required to build it that takes most of the money and effort.

        Everyone knows about Los Alamos. Nothing was actually made there. A few people know about Oak Ridge, though usually just the name. Almost nobody knows about Hanford. All the actual tech was at Oak Ridge and Hanford.

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          1. And the Manhattan Project did a fabulous job in farming out every bomb component to different people and companies who didn’t know anyone else making other components. My grandfather got one of the contracts for a single component to make on his lathe and milling machines in his home workshop. Specifications, diagrams, and the stock materials were provided, and he wasn’t allowed to keep any copies afterwards.

            Logic and military security history suggest that multiple copies of the components were made by different people for redundancy and quality assurance; in addition to other components that had nothing to do with the bomb in order to confuse spies or fifth columnists who might be trying to find out what Uncle Sugar was trying to build on the downlow.

            I wonder if the records still exist for those contracts, if they’re declassified by now, and whether I could request them via the FOIA (and how much it would cost for them.)

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    3. State should hire locals to hand out flyers to the caravan detailing the SCOTUS ruling on third country deportations yesterday, asking them how much they think they’ll enjoy Rwanda or South Sudan.

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    3. Who is paying for this ‘caravan’? Anybody who’s ever been in the military, or even on a family road trip, knows how complicated and expensive it is transporting just a few people a few hundred miles. This is a pickup mob of hundreds of random-ass strangers from multiple countries traveling almost 3,000 miles through multiple international borders. They eat over a ton of food every day. Where is it coming from? They produce at least half a ton of shit every day.

      Find out, and cut off the funding.

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      1. From the last time the “caravans” were in the news, the US government, a bunch of churches that should have known better, and a bunch of semi-anonymous “charities”, probably different faces of USAID.

        Also, the government of Mexico provides them with (occasional) transport, food, water, and sometimes medical care, assisting them in their trek. As far as I’m concerned, that makes the Mexican government a direct sponsor.

        I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other countries involved as well.

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        1. I got the idea (during Trump’s first term) that Mexico was more interested in “giving the problem to the US”.

          IE: They didn’t want them and didn’t want the Bad Press of trying to stop them.

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          1. Yeah, I suspect Mexico’s thing was not wanting to deal with them when the government already has enough problems on its plate. Sending them back would have likely lead to at least dozens of men who were likely criminally inclined wandering around in the general area where the caravan was turned back. They’d have been collected eventually, but it would have taken some effort.

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            1. Worse.

              I saw a news-story during Trump’s first term where one of those caravans was at Mexico’s south border.

              The caravan “stormed the gates” into Mexico with Western reporters filming the story.

              Imagine the “fun-and-games” if the Mexican border guards had used force to keep the caravan out of Mexico. ☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

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    4. A phone call to the Mexican President should be enough – something like “Hey Claudia! Hi! Hey, know that SOCOM help you asked us for and then denied knowing about when it came out after the car crash? Yeah, just so you know, if any ‘migrant’ caravan gets past xxx degrees north, those guys are all leaving, and then I’m going to be turning the ‘Mexico’ tariff knob on this dashboard I have here. What? Oh, yeah, it definitely still works. The trade lawyers tell me we have layers and layers of tariff mechanisms we haven’t even touched yet. Okay, bye!”

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  7. The fraud can be that big.

    Yet, I am not obligated to have an opinion, or worries or stress. I know what I have done to my own life with my feelings.

    I know what I have been ordered enough to use the feelings for.

    It can be sane for me to refuse to allow myself to rile.

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  8. I’ve been noticing something up here in Michigan I don’t recall having seen in the last few election cycles (but then again, I couldn’t tell you what I had for lunch a couple days ago, either, so) Namely, lots and lots of attack ads against Rs running with no substance to them other than “so-and-so took money from / got on a committee and made money.”

    NO ads from that side of the fence saying “we’re going to do X, Y, and Z to make things better.” The CLOSEST to an ad like that is for a former prosecutor running for the House who’s mostly pushing the “I’m a mother and a prosecutor” angle. The R running for the same seat tends to push the “I’m a vet and socialism has no place in this country” angle.

    As for the R supporting ads attacking El-Sayed, they seem to be largely taking the “easy” and frankly, least likely to get them in trouble, angle of “here’s an exact quote from Mr El-Sayed,” or “here’s something Mr El-Sayed explicitly stated he supported.” The ads bringing up his association with Piker seem to have fallen off, though.

    I’m not “beer-and-skittles” about the upcoming elections in Michigan, I won’t be surprised if the D’s hold on to the Governor’s seat, if only because of the cities, but the Fed House and Senate seats I feel are up for grabs (barring the possibility of fraud. Of course, without the fraud? Yeah, got a hunch Mi would be a lot redder.)

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    1. We have a democrat getting those kind of ads, here in Iowa!

      I am actually tempted to go dig up what he’s been doing, because they’re so clearly left-wing attack ads trying to hook in to the right.

      (Only thing I know about the guy is he flipped his sign’s colors from blue last time to green now, which seems to be the “I’m not a Republican, but please don’t hate me” color.)

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    2. In my AO, no national ads at all. City elections – councilmen and mayor are both up this cycle – seem to be the whole of the advertising. Usually there are some county positions up for grabs, but they’re not advertising either.

      I’ve been surprised to find that a lot of county positions go unopposed, and it’s not all that rare for nobody to run at all, so the seat goes unfilled. Actually applying to run for any of those positions was an informational black hole, last time I looked. More than a decade ago, now. Hey, I might have been a decent Deputy Water Commissioner, and I could use a job with a government paycheck and healthcare plan.

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      1. We had to cajole a couple of new people in our GOP committee to run for County Commissioner and State Rep this year. We’ll probably get the Commissioner post, but the State Rep is a bit iffy. It’s a shame that we couldn’t get the old rep (who did a great job) to run again, but he’s done 6 two-year terms with one break in the middle, and he understandably wants to enjoy his retirement.

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  10. So, about Marble Statue Guy:

    If anyone hasn’t found this guyyet– Australian guy. A few eyerolling things, but mostly just hilarious and not infrequent good points.

    Such as the recent video on the revolutionary Navy.

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  11. “…the whole idea the democrats will sweep the midterms is a psy-op.”

    This is absolutely true. It is a -collection- of psy-ops being run by a variety of interested parties.

    One of which appears to be Canada.

    White House trade adviser Peter Navarro made the comments, which were televised on CSPAN, during a conference in Washington, D.C.

    “Do you really want to spend any time on Canada?” Navarro told the host. “Because Canada, economically, is like a rowboat; we’re an aircraft carrier. How’s that gonna end? Any Canadians here, please, if you’re on K Street, get the hell out of our country.

    “Because the problem you have is you lobby this country, you’ve been successful in the past and you think you can keep doing that. Memo to Canada: You cannot do that, OK? That game is up.”

    “If you interfere in our elections in Maine or Michigan, you will pay even more dearly,” he said.”

    That is as blunt a warning as I’ve ever heard. Generally guys like Navarro don’t say stuff like “get the hell out of our country” until they’re well and truly done, and the next thing they’re going to do is reach for a baseball bat.

    So yeah, Americans in border states, keep your eyes peeled for maple-flavored propaganda over the next couple of months.

    And remember kids, vote early, vote often. ~:D [Dear #Lefties and #FredTheFed, the smileyface indicates this is meant to be humor. Laugh, it’s funny.]

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  12. While I am alive I do not vote for Democrats, ever, they are evil plain and simple, republicans may not be much better, but they are better. That is the simple honest answer. Don’t like it Demoncrats than change your evil party. As far as the border goes, I am all for landmines, they maybe against the Geneva Convention for War but to outlaw them at the border you’d have to declare an invasion and war first.

    PS Yes I know the US didn’t sign that treaty against landmines….

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    1. Someone should develop and produce Aerial Faith Plates from Portal 2 and then we could liberally sprinkle the US-Mexico border with them, put TV cameras to watch them, and sell the pay-per-view every time a caravan tries to cross and gets launched back into Mexico…

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    2. I still like the idea of rounding up the illegals and forcing them to work in labor camps for 5 years before deportation, building a huge stone wall all along the southern border. 50 feet high, 50 feet deep into the earth, and 50 feet wide at the top, with guard towers every 600 feet. Once that’s done, if we still have an illegal alien invasion problem on the north side, do the same with our Canadian border. After all, why should China have the only Great Wall in the world? (Hadrian’s Wall doesn’t count.)

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  13. The ads here are positive and negative both. I was surprised to see positive (R) ads as well as attack ads. The (D) have been trying attack ads, but they keep going thud. The more positive ads … are less than impressive. I don’t know if they were done on a very low budget, or just badly. Paxton and the governor’s ads work better at getting a message across.

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  14. I have seen no ads here other than for the formerly golden state governors race (and all the stupid propositions) since an R guy had the utter effrontery to make the jungle-primary ballot in a D single party state.

    But the GOP spending in “safe” seats races might be a side effect of the humongous post-ActBlue imbalance in cash at the national party level, with somewhat questionable decisions along the lines of “holy cow, where else can we spend all this money?” happening in GOP buys, along with some strategery “make mistakes, confuse your enemies” stuff.

    Something similar happened out here in one of the POTUS races with GWB, where the GWB campaign put some money into ad buys in the California market, apparently to make the Dems panic that some internal polling had it in play.

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  15. Not related to anything here but it’s all over social media of Cornell University letting seven rapists off with a slap on the wrist with a wet noodle and there is predictable liberal feminist Outrage! Of this being uncovered. Because everyone knows the kind of people who run Universities are evil patriarchal misogynists and not the kind of soft-headed liberal fools who constantly refuse to punish real crime.

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    1. Cornell is a cesspool. Pretty campus, and only an hour and a quarter drive from home at the time. But I am ever so glad I decided NOT to apply to their pre-med program back in the late ’70s

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