SWTOR Tracker 4/29/22

I've got a lot of movies to edit and post of playing that I've done recently. I'll try to do some of that this afternoon. Before that, though--I have a slow work afternoon with no meetings and few urgent tasks; an unusual situation in itself, but that's coupled with cool but bright, sunny weather, which is also rare in my neck of the woods (I read somewhere that we're the 5th cloudiest state in the Union. I don't know if that's really true, but it certainly seems believable.) So first, I'll probably take a slightly longer than normal "lunch break" and go for a walk in the neighborhood, and then edit some videos on the side while completing some less urgent but still nice to get done work tasks. And then I'll have to mow the lawn for the first time this season this evening too. Also; first year with no teenagers at home. I'm glad I didn't have more and heavier snow to shovel this winter. It was certainly cold enough and long enough. 

Anyway, I think it's important to keep a running tracker of my progress so I don't "slip up" and do something screwy with my characters. First off, I have a number of "finished" characters, and by finished, I mean that they've finished their class stories and with one exception, they are all max level and wearing the 320 level conquest gear. This doesn't mean that I don't play them anymore; all of them are useful for various grinding exercises, and all of them are crafters or at least gatherers of one sort or another. I'll not mention them. This includes J'ohhn, M'aar'k, M'at Thew, Lu'ukke, Galat'ion, Graggory and Phillip'ion.

I also have a few characters that I'm not done with their class story (in one case, haven't even started) but I don't intend to track their progress or record it, so it doesn't matter. This includes Hutran Thanatos and Embric Stane.

So of the characters who are left still, where are they and who's next?

• Vant Galaide, bounty hunter (mercenary): Recently finished Dromund Kaas with him and picked up his space ship. 
• Anstal Tane, smuggler (scoundrel): Somewhat less recently finished Coruscant with him, so he's in exactly the same place as Vant.
• Revecca Arden, sith inquisitor (sorcerer) just finished Black Talon and arrived on Dromund Kaas. The most recently done, so I'm ready to rotate her to the back burner for a couple of weeks, probably.
• Elemer Kell, Jedi Knight (Sentinel) same place as Vant and Anstal, but he arrived there first, so he'll come up "due" sooner.
• Taul Kajak, also Jedi Knight (Sentinel) but he's just arrived on Coruscant, so he's further behind. Even though he started first.
• Vash Galaide, agent (powertech) the first of my "mismatched" origin and mechanics characters, and the most advanced; he's just arrived on Dromund Kaas
• Haul Romund, although I'm doing a smuggler story with Anstal, I've also created this guy, using the mercenary mechanics, so he's another "mismatch." Really haven't started him, although I've done some running around grinding before starting, so he's already level 11. 
• Wulf Hengest is in the exact same position as Haul, although he's a bounty hunter story using the vanguard mechanics and a bowcaster as his signature weapon.
• TBD Sith Warrior, probably Juggernaut class. I haven't yet created this character, because I didn't like the Sith Warrior that I did create and start, Phovos Mal. I might see if I can't re-use that name, or one very similar for him, though. I had also started a Jedi consular, Codon Veile, and a vanguard trooper, Osan Galaide (yes, I used that last name again) although I deleted them too and don't think I care about doing either of those classes anytime soon, because I enjoy those stories a bit less than the others.

My avowed goal is to rotate between them fairly regularly so that nobody goes for too long without some attention, and so that they all travel together "as a pack" through the planets. However, a few of them have gotten a little ahead, and in one case, I have a character that I deleted and have not yet even replaced. So what does that mean next?

First, Vant Galaide, Anstal Tane and Elemer Kell will need to continue their breaks for a bit longer, because I was inattentive to the details of meeting my avowed goal. Having finished Planet 2, they need to wait before wading in to Planet 3, which is still different at this stage depending on faction; Taris for the Republic and Balmorra for the Empire. Althoughh creating and playing Planet 1 for my TBD Sith Warrior would seem like the first priority, I just did a Sith Inquisitor, so I want a little break from Korriban and the Force for a while. I'm thinking I'll take my created but not really yet started Haul and Wulf and do their Planet 1s and the flashpoint in between Planet 1 and 2, and then do the Sith Warrior. 

After that, I'll turn to Taul Kajak and Vash Galaide and get them done with Planet 2. Elemer, Vant and Anstal will have waited quite some time, but Vash and Taul will be caught up with them.

And then, I'll take Haul, Wulf and TBD and get them to the same point. Only then will be able to return to Elemer, Anstal and Vant, in that order, on Planet 3. After that, I'll keep them more caught up with each other, I think.

Although it does occur to me that after Planet 3, most of the characters will be on the same planet, regardless of faction, at the same time, which may mean that I get a bit burned out of that planet. It does behoove me to keep them, maybe a little bit staggered going forward so I can have some more planetary variety in my playthroughs. But I never want to let anyone advance beyond two planets ahead, which is why Elemer, Anstal and Vant must now wait for everyone to catch up.  I may change my mind and let those three move on after I get Wulf, Haul and TBD to Planet 2, though. In fact, for the issue I just mentioned, it might be a good idea. Although, again, I'll point out that Planet 3 is different per faction, so it's not remarkably different than Planet 2 in that regard. This only happens again on Planet 7 when the Republic gets to do Balmorra and the Empire does Taris. For Imperial Taris, it's a little bit different since the lighting is different and it takes place at night, but Republic and Imperial Balmorra look exactly the same as each other; they just arrive at different places in the story progression. Anyway, I'm saying that maybe this burnout issue doesn't matter quite so much until we get to Planet 4 and beyond.

And, I still have Hutran Thanatos and my "big stars" characters who've finished the story to do other things to break up the monotony. Lu'uke is bouncing around between the Prelude to the Shadow of Revan flashpoints and needing soon to go to Rishi and needing to finish also Rise of the Hutt Cartel on Makeb, for instance. M'at Thew needs to do Ziost and start the Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne chapters. J'ohhn needs to finish Ilum, as do, I think, both my big-time bounty hunters and Phillip'ion. And although I've maxed out reputation for BBA, THORN, Oricon, and a few others, I've got some more grinding to do because I need completed bounty contracts to shop for some things, as well as needing to finish my reputation tracks for Dantooine, Makeb, Section X, Yavin IV and a few others. So I've got options to give myself a break.

Movies and Music

I don't like Steven Spielberg very much, but I have to admire his talent, and admit that he's also, when he wants to be, a well-spoken, articulate guy. Here's some of his comments on John Williams. I'll direct your attention in particular to the closing "argument" he makes: "Without John Williams, bikes don't really fly, nor do brooms in Quidditch matches, nor do men in red capes. There is no Force, dinosaurs do not walk the Earth, we do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not believe."

The Empire of Dreams documentary that came with my original Star Wars original trilogy DVD boxed set made the comment that George Lucas was disappointed with almost everything in the original movie as it developed. Everything failed to reach his vision, with one exception: John Williams' score, which exceeded his expectations in every way. And for good reason. The Williams score for Star Wars (and some of his subsequent work with movies like Raiders, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, etc.) is some of the best neoromantic classical music working today, even though it's not really considered as part of the usual classical art-music scene. Classical-sounding movie music soundtracks is a continuation of program music in a very real sense. And Williams deliberately calls back to classical/romantic music like Holst, Stravinsky and others, and that he also calls back to guys like Korngold or Steiner (who in turn called back to the same set of classical/romantic composers as well.)

In the past, I've accused Williams of "phoning in" the scores for some of the later Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies, but that's probably not really fair and has more to do with my dislike of those movies than with a fair evaluation of the music. I maintain that as disappointing as the Disney Star Wars trilogy is, the visual design and the orchestral score are still excellent. The following video, for the technical and music-theory minded, discusses a selection from each of the trilogies and explains exactly how great that piece really is. And yes, it even includes a piece from the eye-rolling climax of The Last Jedi. I've spent too long avoiding the scores for The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker because I hate those movies... I need to give more attention to their soundtracks.

As Lucas himself noted in the late 70s, I've become disappointed and disillusioned with everything about Star Wars, even the original trilogy in some ways, except for the musical score.

One thing that I kind of miss is the fact that we only really have one iconic recording/performance of the music. For classical/romantic music that I enjoy, I've got, or at least have access to, many performances with varying subtle differences of interpretation by different conductors or even arrangers. For Der Ring, for example, by Richard Wagner, I don't have any full operatic performances, but I have several instrumental arrangements. Four of them, in fact, and of one of the four, I have four separate performances by four separate orchestras and conductors. If I want to listen to Der Ring, I have seven different interpretations to choose from. Granted, there's obviously a lot of similarity between all of them, but there are differences as well. I wish we had these kinds of slightly different interpretations of the Star Wars score, but that would, of course, require divorcing it somewhat from the movies and just treating it as a piece of program music rather than as the score for a movie, which kind of freezes it in time and interpretation.

Musk's Twitter

I'm hearing of a handful of people reporting that they've been unbanned on Twitter already in the wake of the takeover, which honestly seems awfully fast. I wouldn't have expected any administrative changes to have filtered down already. Of course, these unbannings are for very mild anti-progs commenting on pop culture and entertainment more than anything else, as near as I can tell. People like Drunk 3PO and other lightweights. I still believe that Musk is very much a product of and embedded in the globalist "neo-liberal world order". It's long been my observation, as well as the observation of people smarter and more connected than me, that the "neo-liberal world order" has trailing edge gatekeepers; i.e., people who pretend to be on your side against the evil of the prog-masters of the neoliberal world order, but who really are there to gatekeep the right edge of acceptable opinion and keep out those who actually have substantive or significant points to make against it. I doubt very much that Elon Musk is really a free speech absolutist, or that Twitter will become a free speech bastion in reality. What is happening with Twitter is that the neoliberal tyrant order is losing control of the conversation on the right, because they've been bleeding out of Twitter for years into apps like Gab. They tried to come up with gatekept alternatives like Parler or Rumble. I think those weren't really taking off, however, so making Twitter less toxic so that they could lure these disaffected back into the kept-man plantation is the new strategy.

I say strategy, which implies that there's some mastermind making these decisions, but I suspect that all of this is happening much more organically. Many have pointed out that the Left is not made up of automaton minions of some all-powerful ubiquitous mastermind and is more like a school of fish. Big movers and shakers can send ripples through the school, but that kind of control is imprecise at best, and its actual execution is more organic rather than directed. A great example of this imprecision is the MeToo movement, which was meant to amplify lies and gossip about Donald Trump and discredit him, but which actually ended up canceling a whole bunch of leftists and did nothing whatsoever to Donald Trump. In fact, when too many people started to notice that somewhere between 70-80% of the MeToo canceled were either Jewish or partly Jewish and full of Jewish connections, it got remarkably quiet real fast. It's like the "shut it down, the goyim know!" meme came true on the MeToo movement in real time right before our eyes. Not having accomplished what the MeToo movement was supposed to have accomplished, the movers and shakers hunkered down and stopped amplifying the signal, letting the movement die without having accomplished anything other than taking down creepy entertainment and news people like Al Franken, Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein as targets of "friendly fire."

But I suspect that Musk may well be part of a strategy. He's no friend to the Right; he's a globalist tool and always has been. Not to imply that he isn't a very clever man who hasn't managed to make himself wealthy by providing the globalists with what the globalists want, but in a freer society, his position wouldn't be what it is. He's been propped up if not outright created by the globalist machine, and his real talent seems to be more along the lines of self-promotion and manipulation of the bureaucracy's money-milking systems than anything else. Which, again, doesn't mean that he doesn't also have a talent for other things, merely that those two talents are the most salient with regards to his success.

I like Vox Day's statement on the question (as I often do. He's not as eloquent or articulate as the Z-man, but his observations are often more piercing nonetheless. Although I think that they sometimes require "translation" by someone else into a more articulate talking point.)

Furthermore, I note that the Enlightenment value of consequence-free freedoms of speech and expression is neither a Christian moral value nor a societal virtue. Societal virtue is determined by qualitative measures, not quantitative ones.

A society or an institution that permits everything is better described as licentious, not free, while a society or an institution that bans blasphemy, obscenity, and vulgarity is fundamentally different than one that bans the existence of opinions about historical events, sexual behaviors, and certain nations.

Musk’s faction is almost certainly more libertarian and licentious than the social justice faction, but it’s entirely possible that, given his predilection for dabbling with women enamored of spiritual darkness, that it is even more deeply wicked.

Or, to put it another way, the freest of societies are those that reject Satan and his ideology. The reason for this is that the consequence of sin is always being chained and enslaved to Satan. There's no such thing as freedom from consequences, at least not in the long run. Those who preach freedom without consequences are liars, and they are laying a trap constructed by Satan himself for you.

In the case of free speech, the consequences may even be more broad than that. You may well be free to say something that is offensive to the majority of people in your society, but you are not free from the consequences of having offended the majority of people in your society, and the cost to you personally for having done that may be (and probably should be) significant, even if your comments are not sinful. The converse of that, of course, is that if the majority of society is offended by the truth, then you live in a wicked society that is ripe for destruction and you need to insulate yourself from the coming storm as best you can.

But free speech doesn't mean what either most people on the right or on the left seem to think that it means. Reading the actual Bill of Rights once again is, of course, the correct answer to understand the rights and privileges that are the inheritance of all True Americans. 

To get back to the main point of the article; why would I want to join Twitter, and who would I want to interact with on that platform? Not sure why conservatives are so eager to engage with liberals and gain their approval. As I said yesterday (or the day before, maybe) the liberal mindset and liberal philosophy is a strange and toxic blend of arrogance and self-loathing. There's little to be gained by engaging with that, even if the platform allows for it. Gab already offers everything that conservatives say that they want, with one exception: access to liberals, since by and large, liberals have avoided it because they can't handle the exposure to real conservative thought without an amenable authority being there to ban it from their sight for sending them to the hysterical fainting couch. Conservatives should check their attitudes; they seem as likely as liberals to demand access to their opponents so that they can go mess with them. Not sure why. If you want to talk politics with random people on the internet and you're not insane, just go on Gab. If you want to talk politics with minor celebrities and personalities on the internet, then Twitter may be for you, but you probably want to ask yourself why you feel the need to engage directly with such people. Do you crave approval and attention from people who aren't just "random?" If so, why? Personally, I have little interest in Gab or Twitter either one. I'll post my thoughts on my online journal; here, or more frequently on one of my other blogs that's specifically geared towards that kind of discussion about politics, social issues and especially religious issues. And if I get no engagement, or even nobody at all who reads it, that's fine, because I'm not doing it for them anyway.

I often find interacting with conservatives more tiresome than interacting with liberals. With liberals, I already anticipate some insane emotional outburst that has no content and no value. With conservatives, I'm often disappointed with the death grip with which they cling to stupid ideas that were radical liberal ideas a generation or two ago but which they now believe are the bedrock of conservative principles for some reason. Conservatives often posture about being more logical, more rational and more reasonable, but in my experience, they are often just as likely if not even moreso than liberals to cling to ideas that have been obviously disproved. If they were so logical, rational and reasonable they would have long ago abandoned them. Or at least, if they're not aware of the arguments against them, they'd go find out about it before reacting emotionally and saying something stupid. The ideas that they cling to are different than those that liberals cling to, but in some cases they aren't really more beneficial to society or more "friendly", although they are usually hostile to Western Civilization in more subtle ways than the overt hatred of liberals. But the point is that the posture of rationality and reasonableness is really more of a posture than a reality. 

And this is, in many ways, the more insidious damage done by the trailing edge of gatekeepers who pretend to be on the right but who are really just the trailing edge of the left. They've created this Pavlovian ecosystem that shuts out genuine truth in favor of some kind of kowtowing to the "moral authority" of the left. The reality is that the old labels of conservative and right-wing and Republican vs liberal and left-wing and Democrat mean very little these days, since both sides have abandoned what they claim to stand for and are wandering about unmoored from anything that anyone would recognize from a generation ago, or even just a few years ago. The Z-man's latest post describes this phenomena in detail, but the reality, as I allude to just a little bit above is that the only difference that really matters is aligning yourself with God and the Truth, or against it with Satan and the Rebellion. Everything else can be reduced to this, ultimately. It's the only divide that actually has any substance.

And how can you tell which socio-political positions are aligned with which of these two great sides? As Christ himself said, "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruits; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." (Matthew 7:15-20 KJV) By that standard, liberals are proudly on the side of Satan, because the fruits of liberalism is more sin, misery and nihilistic destruction of what was once a healthy and reasonably righteous nation. But conservatives have been tempted or fooled into being on the side of Satan too, especially as they've embraced libertarian consumerism instead of actually standing up for morality and demanding that society be moral; their embrace of permissiveness has made them unable and then ultimately unwilling to stand up for morality, and they often now embrace wickedness as the inevitable side effect of freedom. And what happens when there is no ideology that stands for Rightness and Truth and rejects Satan? I dunno, maybe we should ask the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Anyway, a selection from the Z-man:

The fact is, America, and maybe the West in general, has entered a post-ideological phase in which there is no logic behind the old labels. What passes for radicalism is nothing more than bourgeois neuroticism. There remains a vague sense of a promised land after the struggle, but that is just a carryover from the past. They never bother to describe what comes after the revolution. No one even bothers to ask them to explain the point of their agitations. There is no point.

The other side is just as lost. It is trite to say it now, but conservatives have conserved nothing and they have no desire to conserve anything. Of course, the reason they have no desire to conserve anything is there is nothing left to conserve. It goes beyond the practical, however, as you see in the National Review post. The point of politics is to shape public morality. Politics is about deciding right and wrong. If your politics leads you to abandon that debate, then you have no reason to exist.

Politics in America have become unmoored from reason. The Left is simply in favor of chaos for the sake of chaos. Post-Marx culturalism promised a new era for mankind if they seized control of the centers of cultural production. Instead, they got what the old Marxists feared came after capitalism. That is a society devoid of morality and dominated by transactionalism. The end of the cult-Marx rainbow is sterile materialism and pointless consumerism.

In such an age there is no place for a defense of order, so there is no reason for the old-style conservatism to exist. Why would any sane person want to defend this order against the violence of the Left? This is the age of post-Marx culturalism, so if they are unhappy with their creation, let them destroy it. Maybe what comes next is the chance to build anew. In other words, the alternative to the modern Left is not conservatism but culture jamming and accelerationism.

Where we find ourselves is beyond the maps of the known world. Like the first ships that went over the horizon, the old rules and lessons of Western politics are not much of a guide in navigating the present. Like the basics of sailing, the basics of politics remain the same, but the purpose is what demands the reimagination of the effort. To continue the analogy, we have not reached the new world, but we can no longer make out the old world either. We are in the great political dead space.

Black Talon

Well, the work week is over (it was short—I had post-Easter Monday off too) and I've just spent a few hours with my wife. At my age, it's getting a little bit on the later side on Friday night. My wife is going to watch some true crime shows while she does the budget for the week, and I'm down here going to do an hour or so of SWTOR before hitting the hay for the night. I think. I've been thrown off all week on sleep; maybe I'll just do this blog post and then go read and listen to some music until I get sleepy. 

Anyway, as I said last post, I finished the main rewards track of galactic season 2, but there's still some stuff to do because I'd like to get the season 2 achievements. That means getting to legendary rank on the reputation track, and getting to 100 weekly season objectives. I've got 70 done now, so it'll take me just over four weeks worth. You can do seven per week before it stops counting for the week. So I'll still do a bit of grinding, but I'll be a bit more relaxed about it, because the dailies don't help me anymore, for instance. Most weeks there's a flashpoint objective. Usually there's a choice of selected flashpoints that you get extra credit for doing. The objective will say something like "do eight flashpoints" but if you do one of the selected ones, you get four extra points. If you also beat the bonus boss, you get another three bonus points. So if you do the selected flashpoint and beat the bonus boss, you actually get eight points and therefore the entire objective just by doing it once. 

I didn't really want to  play any of the flashpoints on the list (first time for that) and I had a character who needed to do the Black Talon anyway, because he was traveling from Hutta to Dromund Kaas. I even recorded it. I had thought that I'd get the bonus boss, as well as another objective about using exploding objects to kill enemies and I'd only have to do it twice. Turns out that the bonus for the bonus sub-boss only counts if you're doing one of the selected flashpoints. Now, I could—and probably should—have come up with a better plan than just running this same flashpoint eight times in a row, but that's what I ended up doing. I did a dark side choice for my first (recorded) one, but then did the light side choice all of the other seven times, so my net effect there is a lot of lightside points gained. I also really got loads of XP; I think I went up a level at least once every time I played it. This character has only done one planet and he's already well into his 30s on level (remember that at launch, you'd play the entire story—ten planets—and top off at level 50. Even now after several expansions have raised the level cap, it's only 80. I'm almost halfway there already. It's a little crazy.) 

Anyway, doing Black Talon all those times, I obviously skipped through the cut scenes and dialogue after the first or second time to make it faster, but I was really impressed with the hypocrisy and sophistry of the Jedi and the Republic. Which, curiously, I don't believe that the writers notice, because... SJWs, most likely. Not that the Empire are really the good guys, or anything—in fact, they're often so cartoonishly, silly in their villainy that it just makes me kind of laugh. They're like the Boris Badenov and and Natasha Fatale of villains. But the Republic and the Jedi aren't the good guys either. One of the first sub-boss fights you have to do is against four Republic boarders in the hanger of your ship. While you're fighting them, they shout dialogue like "you shouldn't have attacked us." This is quite curious, because we didn't attack them. We just showed up with our ship to demand that the stolen secrets and the spy that ran off with them be returned to us, and literally within about a second or two of re-emerging from hyperspace, they somehow were already firing on us and sending boarding parties after us. They attacked us, yet had the gall to try and take the moral high ground and say that we attacked them?

After this, you get a long-distance call from Satele Shan herself. She makes a bunch of entitled and thoroughly unreasonable demands, like we need to let the spy and his stolen secrets go, because it makes people feel bad if we fight to protect ourselves from their aggression. Quite literally. She says that we're lying when I say that I know that they have a defector with stolen top secret plans on him on the ship, but of course, I'm not. They do indeed have such a defector with stolen plans, which is the whole freakin' point of the mission, to recover him. And then she threatens me, and tries to appeal to some kind of humanitarian spirit; "these skirmishes only happen because we let them. Oh, by the way I'm on my way to destroy your ship after I get done destroying these three Imperial dreadnaughts that I'm destroying, and then I'll kill you."

Sometimes the writing is a little bit clever when it broaches things that resemble modern politics and the corruption of the Republic. But most of the time, it's kind of clueless. Just like George Lucas himself seemed to be clueless most of the time (but occasionally seemed to imply otherwise) about how the Jedi and the Republic were the villains in the Prequel trilogy and that Kenobi and Yoda were both dead wrong about all of the advice that they gave Luke during the original trilogy—yet somehow they were still the heroes and the good guys, even though everything that they did made them into villains. Just because the Empire and the Sith were bad doesn't mean that the Jedi and the Republic were good. This kind of gaslighting is still with us all of the time, though. In fact, it's become one of the most prominent features of our age; the most evil people who ever lived telling us that they're good to oppress us, take away our freedoms, steal our wealth, our culture and our country from us and give it to entitled and ungrateful covetous Third World hordes, groom our children into victims of sexual predation, etc. Because that's those are all the right things to do! Good heavens, I hate Democrats sometimes. And I hate most of the Republicans who are either too stupid or too cowardly to tell them to knock it off and actually be serious about it, preening in self-righteousness even as they demonstrate grotesque evil. Er... anyway. Yeah. this is becoming one of my biggest dissatisfactions with Star Wars; that it's written as an excuse and justification for evil. It's OK to be even MORE evil than the so-called evil that you're opposing as long as you can justify it by warping morality so that you can pretend that those you're opposing are actually the evil ones and not you. And this crap goes all the way back to the original trilogy although its gotten considerably worse over the years as the creative types of Hollywood have degenerated into the most evil society that's ever been on Earth since the time of Noah.

Anyway, once you apprehend the traitor, he tries to guilt-trip you by talking about both sides planning some vaguely spacey sounding riff on the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction, but I don't see how this is supposed to work, as he can give no indication of how what he was doing makes anything better for anyone at all. He's just an evil, selfish traitor who's managed to convince himself that he's justified in doing whatever he wants to do because that's what he wants to do. Just like liberals have been doing for decades. The story is more laughably yet also infuriatingly bad the more I had to repeat it. Laughable for how ridiculous the premise of it is; infuriating because of its obvious resemblance to real life.

I finally finished my last playthrough of it earlier this afternoon, so I'm ready to actually bring this character to Dromund Kaas for good. Or, more likely, I'm ready to switch to another character actually and move him (or maybe her; I think I'd like to finish Revecca's sojourn on Korriban next) on to the next planet now.

UPDATE: Oh, and I forgot to mention; the "tough Admiral Ackbar" who says "You're talking to a Republic Special Forces Commander, meat. Show some respect!" Meat? Do you know who you're talking to? It's like the writers at BioWare went out of their way to make sure that the Republic are not only not really the good guys, but they're also not even likable guys in any way whatsoever. They're obnoxious and annoying at best; full of a toxic stew of arrogance and self-loathing at worst. Like they're liberals, or something, as written by liberals. Which, no doubt, they are.

Galactic Seasons 2

I've been recording and editing and uploading more videos from my SWTOR playthroughs. I'm getting better at making better cuts and better videos overall. But it still won't look as good as some folks, because my hardware just isn't up to snuff for lots of video editing. 

In the meantime, I've finished the Season. Sorta. I finished the rewards track, anyway, and got all of the rewards that it will offer me. However, there's still a bit more to do here. I need to get my Shadow Syndicate reputation all the way up to Legend, which will take me a few more weeks of grinding the seasonal objectives. This will also have the side-effect of giving me (most likely; I haven't done the math, but I'll make sure that I hit it if I'm a bit short) all of the seasonal achievements, which gives me a Fen Zeil customization that has a bit of a Cad Bane look. No doubt on purpose after Cad Bane was briefly the Star Wars hotness in the Book of Boba Fett show, before everyone decided that that show wasn't worth it.

Another side effect of it was the season tokens, which let me buy some stuff that I'd always kind of wanted, but didn't get back when they were available. I still didn't get everything that I would have wanted, although I'm now out of tokens, so I guess I got what I got, though. I got a pretty nifty Chiss speeder, and I got a pet or two, and two companions. All of this is in my collections.

In fact, when I start play with a new character, I now have access to six companions pretty quickly; Paxton Rall and Nico Okarr being the ones that I just bought. I already had the Shae Viszla reward and the Fen Zeil reward. If I send my new character money, I can buy HK-51 right off (part of my starting process) and as soon as I hit level 10 and/or can travel to the fleet, I also get Treek. I'm honestly not sure what to do with all of these companions, but I guess collecting them is worth something. At least one is nice at the beginning when you don't normally have a companion yet, and it's also nice to have one if the only one available to you is one that you don't really like. (Like Kaliyo.) But I didn't need to buy Nico or Paxton, when all of my starting characters already get Shae Viszla, and with a million credits (which is no longer a big deal for me) I can have HK-51 too. But sometimes I just like those two new ones better. It's nice to have lots of companions for crafting, but I don't have any reason to create new crafting characters. One of each type is enough, and I've already got those from my initial playthroughs a long time ago. Having another Armstech or Synthweaving or whatever crafter just dilutes my efforts to consolidate schematics and crafting materials in one go-to place.

Let me make a list (because I love lists) of my current crop of characters and what they are and what they do and why I still have them in my roster (as opposed to deleted. I've deleted a few characters that I finished and didn't have any reason to keep.)

First, my original characters, made during 6.x game, or even earlier.

• J'ohhn Level 80 Sniper Agent. My original agent playthrough, human. He's my cybertech crafter, and my "banker" and "broker"; i.e., the majority of my credits sit with him, so he's the one who buys on the GTN for everyone. The cybertech crafting is one of my main money-makers, although I'm very junior level on this front still, siting at about a quarter billion in credits. I use him for a lot of basic grinding of reputation and events and stuff. He also crafts mods and enhancement for my "younger" characters. I do occasionally still do post-Corellia missions with him, although I'm not even quite to Rise of the Hutt Cartel yet.
• M'aar'k Level 80 Guardian Jedi Knight. Human. My original Knight playthrough, and really my original character in many ways. The only character who's caught up completely on the expansion stories (well, I'm still waiting on the newest Legacy of the Sith stuff until the bugs are fixed and maybe more content is available) and my synthweaving crafter. Because of his position, he's also the guy who turns in Heroic crates for unlocking. That's not as cool as it used to be since you can't sell the remnant armor pieces anymore, but I still do Heroics from time to time.
• Phillip'pion Level 77 Commando Trooper. Human. My original trooper. Of my "original" characters, he's the only one who I haven't yet hit level 80 with, because I don't use him for much anymore. He is my sliced tech parts gatherer, though. That's not true crafting, but there is one gathering skill that doesn't map directly to any of the crafting skills, and someone has to be dedicated to that gathering skill for higher level crafting.
• M'at Thew Level 80 Marauder Sith Warrior. Human. My original Sith Warrior. He's also my Artifice crafter, so he makes lightsabers, hilts, and dye modules for all kinds of other characters. He's my second most advanced character in terms of expansion story, and he's ready to do Ziost and then start the two big expansion chapters. But I haven't quite pulled the trigger on those yet.
• Lu'ukke Level 80 Gunslinger Smuggler, human. My original smuggler. Also, my Armstech crafter, so he makes barrels and blasters. As soon as the weapons in outfit designer feature goes live, which is supposed to be very shortly, I'll probably make some cosmetic weapons for some characters out of the crafting pool. He's also slowly advancing through the expansion stories, like the rest of them, and he's on Makeb when I get back to that.
• Galat'ion Level 80 Powertech Bounty Hunter (Pyrotech), human. My original Bounty Hunter playthrough. He's also my Biochem crafter. I don't have a lot of interest in this particular crafting skill, but sometimes you need it for something.
• Graggory Level 80 Powertech Bounty Hunter (Advanced Prototype), human. My original original Bounty Hunter playthrough, which I stopped when I thought I'd screwed it up, but picked it up and finished it after I realized that actually I hadn't. I'd also maxed him out as my Armormech, so I'm stuck with two Powertechs from my legacy characters, I guess, unless I bring someone else up to speed on crafting Biochem or something. No big deal; I'm sure I'll just keep them both. After playing around with a lot of both specs, I've decided that I prefer the direct damage Advanced Prototype spec to the Damage Over Time pyrotech spec after all. I do still use both for some grinding of some stuff too.

The second group of characters was made in the last few months of 6.x for recording purposes, although a few of them haven't actually been recorded much, and at least one of them I actually stopped recording when I had played a bit of the story while forgetting to turn on my screen recorder. Whoops. Most of them use the other advanced class as above within the same story class, and most of them are aliens or other non-human characters. None of them have finished the story, and none of them have hit max level. I'm still actually playing these, although in some cases, very slowly. At least one I haven't done anything with at all yet except the introduction. But I'll eventually get through them all. The levels are, therefore, merely point in time and next time you were to ask me, these would mostly be at a higher level than they are now.

• Hutran Thanatos, Level 37 Operative Agent, Mirialan. Took me a while to warm up to this class, but I now quite enjoy it. I'm on the fourth planet, Nar Shaddaa. I recorded some of his early stuff, but I'm no longer recording his progress.
• Vant Galaide, Level 30 Mercenary Bounty Hunter, Human. Probably my favorite of the characters I'm actually playing right now. Love this guy. Love the class. It—again—took a while to get going on the class abilities, but I think that that's now just a feature of the 7.x environment. He's on Dromund Kaas, but almost finished there.
• Anstal Tane, Level 33 Scoundrel Smuggler, Sith Pureblood. Just finished Coruscant and is on to Taris. This is my other favorite current playthrough. I didn't think that I liked this class, but as I got into the upper 20s in terms of level, he got good enough to be fun. I like him a lot now.
• Revecca Arden, Level 11 Sith Sorcerer, Human (and girl. Currently, my only girl character.) I was a little hesitant, because I didn't love playing my assassin, but I like the sorcerer quite a bit better. Looks like I made the wrong choice with my assassin, which is now deleted. Still on Korriban, but I'm warming up to her quite a bit, and I'm thinking I want to hurry and finish her and play her a little more aggressively. Or at least make sure that she doesn't lag too far behind the wave that she's part of, ie, Anstal and Vant and the Knights below.
• Elemer Kell, Level 32 Sentinel Jedi Knight, zabrak (Imperial type.) My main Jedi Knight class story playthrough for recording. A bit of an aggressive jerk who refuses to pick the obvious "light side" choices unless they really do make the most sense. Which often, they do not, because BioWare's morality is stupid beyond all reason.
• Taul Kajak, Level 25 Sentinel Jedi Knight, Mirialan. I actually started doing the recordings on this character, but I wasn't happy with the quality, so I started with Elemer. I didn't stop recording this guy, though... although he is admittedly a little bit lower priority, since he's now kind of a backup.
• Embric Stane, Level 1 Mercenary Bounty Hunter, cyborg. I actually superseded this guy with Vant Galaide, as my recordable Mercenary playthrough. So, I haven't played him at all. However... I couldn't completely bring myself to delete him either, so he's here on the back burner, and maybe I'll play him yet. Someday.

The third group is characters I've created since the launch of 7.x, and all of them have a "mismatch" between the story class and the mechanical class, i.e., most of them have atypical weapons and mechanics. All are human males, and most haven't really been played or recorded much yet (although I did do some initial grinding to get them eligible to use Level 10 weapons or armor, which were always part of their concept.)

• Haul Romund, Level 11 Mercenary Smuggler.
• Wulf Hengest, Level 11 Vanguard Bounty Hunter.
• Vash Galaide, Level 26 Powertech Agent (I've played Hutta with this guy and am now running him through repeats of the Black Talon flashpoint before starting Dromund Kaas. The Flashpoint is a seasonal objective, but it's also nice for grinding XP for this character while I'm at it. Plus, since I screwed up the recording of Hutran Thanatos, I really wanted to get an Agent on the recording schedule, so he got "pulled ahead", so to speak. Not sure that I think he's supposed to be "related" to Vant Galaide or not, or if I just wanted a very similar name because it was easier.

Of characters that I don't have but will likely still make for recording purposes, I guess I need a new Sith Warrior, Jedi Consular, and Trooper. I'm much more excited about doing the former than the latter two, but I've got enough to do already, so I'll probably defer until some of the other recording projects get wrapped up a bit.

When I get around to these, I anticipate my Sith Warrior will be a Juggernaut, my Consular will be a Sorcerer, and my trooper will be a sniper.

Comments

I don't get a lot of comments, but that's OK; I'm mostly doing this blog as my own journaling, not to engage with the Internet per se. I know, I know... I could do it all offline if that's what I want. I actually have real journals. But I like being able to scroll through old posts, follow links, etc. 

But lately, I've had an extraordinary amount of comments (for my blog, at least) that are little more than vandalization. People wanting to argue with me, and then their arguments are nothing more than "received wisdom"; something that they heard in middle school and haven't thought much about since, but just take for granted because they're too incurious to actually find out anything at all about what they were told. I actually had one guy getting all smarmy about how the Indian homeland model of Indo-European dispersion is so obviously true, and the Pontic-Caspian steppes model has been "debunked". I know among jingoistic Indian nationalists that position is somewhat popular... somewhat... but it's scientifically absurd, and honestly always has been. And that's just one example.

I don't know if these commenters are liars or morons (or both) but I don't care to be argued with by people who are too short for this ride. It's also not my job to get you up to speed if you're not capable of having a coherent discussion about something that you disagree with me on. I'm not your tutor. If all you've got is your opinion based on stuff that you really don't know very much about, save yourself the trouble and keep your mouth shut (figurately. Unless you're dictating your comments.)  Although it seems superfluous given the small number of comments I get, I'm going on 100% comment moderation from here on out.

True Politics and Christianity

I don't believe that the Z-man is a Christian. I could be wrong. He's never said one way or another that I know of. This is just me and some others reading between the lines over many essays of his that he's written. However, this is perhaps the most important one that I remember him writing. I normally really hesitate to do this, but I'm going to quote this one nearly in full.

It is fair to say that this is the worst time for Christians and Christianity in the West since the Roman empire. In order to promote equality, liberal democracy has created protected classes of people who cannot be criticized. The other side of this are people who must me mocked and ridiculed. Christians were the first group placed in this category and remain the popular object of ridicule in the West. There is no prohibition against overt hatred of Christians in most Western countries.

We are not feeding Christian to lions in gladiatorial pits, but you can be sure some elements of the ruling class have thought about it. Back in the Obama years, much of the health care bill was designed to torment Christians. For example, forcing Catholic groups to pay for abortions and prophylactics. There was no public health reason for these provisions. They simply satisfied the demented and sadistic impulses of the people who put together the program.

In some Western countries, practicing your faith is close to illegal. Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish politician. She was charged with crimes against democracy for tweeting out a picture of a Bible and quoting it in public. She was eventually acquitted by the courts, but that was not the point. Persecution is about the process. This was true under communism and is even more true under liberal democracy. Hell is being in the control of ideological fanatics staffing a bureaucracy.

The fact is the managerial elites of the West are not irreligious. Ideology is just religion that replaces God with man. Our elites are fanatics for liberal democracy and they will murder anyone who questions it. Christianity has always been their primary target because the Christian’s first loyalty can never be to man or the institutions and ideologies he creates. Liberal democracy, of course, demands absolute obedience to the state and the people who run the state.

It is not just the secular elites that make war on the Christian. The big churches have been taken over by the ideologues. Anywhere you see a rainbow flag it is either a gay bathhouse, a public school or a Protestant church. The Pope cares more about climate change than the Catholic faith. Even the Baptists have seen their organizations taken over by far-left radicals. The great challenge for most Christians is in finding a church that is not run by a far-left lunatic.

Culture is to a great degree a trickle down affair. The hostility toward Christianity among the Cloud People has infected the Dirt People. Church attendance has been in decline for a few generations. Close to 30% of Americans have no religious identity. This means they have no experience with religion. About 40% of people who still identify as Christian no longer attend church. Overall, about 40% of Americans still belong to a church and attend services on a regular basis.

In Europe, Christianity is just about dead. Only 1.4 percent of the population of England attends Anglican services every Sunday. Fewer than one-in-ten Germans say they believe in God. For most Europeans, Christianity is as alien as Islam. They know nothing about it, other than what is taught in history class. Given the entrenched self-loathing that has been imposed by America, Christianity is part of the hated past where evil Europeans tried to enslave black bodies.

It is not all bad news for Christianity. The faithful are slowly realizing that for their faith to survive this age, it must live outside this age. Christians are reverting to what all persecuted minorities must do. They are learning to live in the shadows and think of themselves as the outsider. Traditional Catholics seek one another out and form up shadow communities. Bible study in America is becoming a private affair organized by small local communities of believers.

These defensive measures are what will form the basis of a revival. Anything that is open to everyone is valuable to no one. Christianity was at its most powerful when it was exclusive and required sacrifice from the believers. One of the main reasons for the decline of the Western churches is their success. Once it was easy to be a Christian, it stopped being a powerful force in society. Its return to a persecuted, underground movement is the only path to renewal.

This presents a challenge and an opportunity in dissident politics. Many people waving the dissident banner have yet to shed their liberal disdain for Christianity. Some have manufactured bizarre conspiracy theories about the Church. On the other hand, many sober minded dissidents have soured on their faith, due to the take over of the churches by liberal democratic fanatics. One reason many dissidents have soured on the world is they have seen what happened to their churches.

In America, this is compounded by the problem of evangelical politics. In the 1970’s, in reaction to the cultural revolution, evangelicals decided to engage directly with politics in order to get their guys in office. This was a disaster. Many of the evangelical activist groups became profitable grifts for the leaders. The pols who took advantage of the evangelical vote sold out those voters. They convinced believers that their faith required them to accept liberal degeneracy.

The debacle of Christian political activism cannot be understated. The neocons were able to take over largely with the support of evangelicals. Even now, after the disaster of the Bush years, many of these groups still care more about Israel than the condition of their own people. When the typical dissident sees stuff like this, he wants to hoist the back flag and start slitting throats. It is a reminder of just how easily these people were turned into weapons against the West.

That said, there is a slow rapprochement between the secular dissidents and the growing number of dissident Christians. The former is coming to understand the defining role not just of belief but of structured rational belief. The latter is coming to terms with the reality of their situation. For the West to survive and resurrect itself after the horrors of liberal democracy, it will need a new set of core beliefs, based in the old ways shaped by the experience of the crisis.

This is where dissident Christians can contribute the most to the cause. The sin of despair is one of the worst, because it is deliberate. One deliberately decides that salvation is impossible. It is the state immediately before suicide. The only reason to be a dissident it to maintain hope that through the struggle, reason and decency can be restored in the West. Without hope, the dissident has no reason to exist, which is why despair must become a mortal sin for dissidents.

You see more and more dissidents and dissident Christians willing to circulate in the same platforms. Gab has become the social media exchange for both dissidents and dissident Christians. Nick Fuentes and his groypers blend dissident political critiques with overt Christian beliefs. For the first time in a long time church attendance has ticked up in America. These are grim times for the defenders of civilization, but we still have hope because that is what must carry us through.

Happy Easter.

70th Anniversary

Apparently this week 70 years ago was when Singin' In the Rain was first released in theatres. I really love this movie. I watch it at least once every year. Sometimes twice. In fact, our Flashback Cinema thing was showing it with a small amount of TCM commentary in theatres yesterday. I took my daughter, who also really appreciates this movie, and saw it. (Sadly, I couldn't take my wife. She balks at any movie where people break out into song and dance. It's not realistic enough, she says. I say that clearly it's reality that needs to step it up. Literally.)

I find that I'm not very entertained by very much of what Hollywood does these days. The biggest reason for that is because most of what they produce is literally dripping with their venom, bile and hatred for anybody white, male, Christian, or normal. But that's not the only reason. Sadly, most movies are just not well made even if they avoid the toxic swamp that is wokeness. They feel overly corporatized, designed to formula by committee, and few of them are better than forgettable mindless entertainment. The recent Uncharted movie is a good example. With the exception of race-swapping the kinda sorta romantic interest in the story from a blue-eyed British girl to a horse-faced Indian girl and having this modestly athletic but mostly normal looking (except for her crazy hairstyle) black girl be a supervillain with unexplained superpowers, when in reality she looked like a few good slaps would put her back in her place, it wasn't really woke at all. It had two pretty normal white guys as a protagonist and deuteragonist, and they had pretty good charisma and chemistry between them for a budding buddy partner relationship. They were treated as movie heroes are supposed to be treated.

But the movie somehow was just mostly boring. It had plenty of by the numbers "exciting" action scenes, but they somehow always managed to equal less than the sum of their parts. I can't quite put my finger on it, other than it felt hollow and designed by committee according to some formula, rather than overseen by someone with some talent and vision. It wasn't at all offensive, but I just... didn't really care. I'd go see a sequel, I suppose. But I wouldn't be excited about it. It'd be fine, but I'd probably enjoy the popcorn as much as I would the movie. 

And that was one of the best movies of the last few years. 

So I find myself turning to tried and true movies that I've watched before, but which I know are good. Watching Singin' In the Rain in the theatre was honestly kind of magical, especially during the eponymous dance number, although "Moses Supposes", "Fit as a Fiddle" and "All I Do Is Dream of You" were nearly as good. The dream sequence is weird and always was, but I dare anyone to not be impressed by the talent and athleticism that Kelly and Cyd Charise displayed during their dance duet. I found myself just sitting in the theatre grinning in the dark for almost the entire runtime.

Even the commentary was interesting. I guess I hadn't ever realized that Debbie Reynolds was only 19 when she made this movie, and Gene Kelly was 40. What? That's almost as bad as me being a romantic lead to girls my kids' age. I'm fifty this year and my oldest son is 26. That's a little weird, although I didn't ever really think of that before. Gene Kelly looks good for his age and no doubt has plenty of make-up on to keep his skin looking smooth. It's not really that much worse than what goes on today, though, is it? I mentioned a few posts ago that I was shocked to find that Jared Leto is actually a few weeks older than me. He looked like he was in his early 30s in Morbius. I also didn't realize that Singin' came out the same year as An American in Paris. The latter movie isn't nearly as well-loved or well-remembered today. I've only seen it once years ago and barely remember it. However, when they both came out, it was the latter that sucked all of the attention out of the room. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won six of them, and that still actually meant something in the early 50s. Singin' became kind of "the other Gene Kelly movie" and suffered in terms of attention upon release. That said, quality will always out, and over time, An American in Paris is kind of a movie that only fans of old movies still remember, while Singin' in the Rain is lauded as one of the best if not the best musical comedy ever made, one of the best if not the best movie about Hollywood itself and the art of movie-making, etc. 

Good movies are somewhat timeless. The movie is nearly as old as my parents, and it's still one of my favorite movies in my collection. I was happy to go see it in theatres for $12 a piece tickets even though I've got it on DVD and watch it once or twice a year already anyway. It makes the hatred and incompetence of Hollywood today that much more intolerable. It's not like the people in this movie are great people. Gene Kelly seems a decent enough guy for a movie star, although he famously was incredibly rude to Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds herself has a tragicomic biography of terrible decisions and terrible behavior. Arthur Freed was the producer and writer of all of the songs, who infamously tried to molest Shirley Temple when she was 12 years old. If she hadn't laughed in nervous shock when he exposed himself to her and embarrassed him, he might well have raped her. Chances are there are dozens of women and girls that he did successfully molest. 

That said, just because they were terrible people then like they are now, they still had the sense to not broadcast their abject hatred for their audience, and they were competent at their craft in spite of their terrible real life personas. The current generation of Jewish Hollywood magnates who replaced Freed, like Harvey Weinstein, lack those crucial skills. 

Now, I don't mean to suggest that because they made good movies that that excuses their behavior. In a just world, Freed would have been killed by Shirley Temple's father when he saw what was happening, or at least arrested and hanged. As Christ himself said, I'm in favor of death by drowning with a millstone around his neck for child molesters and perverts like that. What I am saying, however, is that in spite of their terribleness, the movies that they made are still good. And the movies of today... aren't. 

T. rex, regina and imperator

This news is about a month old, but I'm just getting around to hearing it myself. That's what comes from mostly ignoring the news. Greg Paul and a couple of other guys I don't know just submitted a paper that proposes splitting T. rex into three species, T. rex, T. regina and T. imperator. Phil Currie also contributed, but withdrew his name from the paper, because while he thinks the analysis is helpful and interesting, he's not on board with the proposal of new species at this point. As Paul himself said, if it were any other prehistoric animal, everyone would shrug and not make a big deal out of it. He's already done so himself with other animals, including the splitting of Brachiosaurus and Giraffatitan and the splitting of Dakotadon from Iguanodon. The former has wide acceptance across the paleontological community, while the latter does (so far) not. But because it's T. rex, it's going to be controversial.

Curiously, I always thought of him as more of a lumper than a splitter, because of his Predatory Dinosaurs of the World book way back in 1988, where he proposed that both Tarbosaurus and Daspletosaurus should be lumped into the Tyrannosaurus genera as Tyrannosaurus bataar and torosus respectively. Those proposals didn't stick either.

Anyhoo, the crux of the argument is that its long been known that there are at least two "morphs" of skeletons among the known T. rex skeletons, a gracile and robust morph. The paper suggests that there is also a difference in the number and shape of the predentary teeth. It also makes the point that you can time-bound these differences, or at least find clusters, and that the length of time that T. rex lived (up to 3.6 million years) is long enough that most of its surrounding animals had at least anagenic species replacement. So, T. imperator would be the earlier part of the Maastrichtian and would represent an earlier robust animal, which later split into T. rex, a later robust animal with a different dentition, and T. regina, a gracile animal with the same different dentition. In general, the most positive response I've seen among the paleontological community is from Thomas Holtz who says that it's an interesting idea and a testable hypothesis, wherein we can see if new specimens, as they're uncovered, fit into these categories or not. Although he points out that T. lancensis would have priority over T. imperator. More's the pity; if this proposal does stand the test of time, which I think is unlikely, T. imperator is a way cooler name. 

Most, however, think that the groupings are too arbitrary, lack distinct diagnostic lines, and that the whole thing just describes normal variation within the species. But still; it's an interesting proposal, and going to the work of refuting the proposal will probably increase our knowledge of the T. rexes anyway. 

On Cynicism

On cynicism in the political elite:

American politics is deeply cynical now. Elections are viewed with disdain by the politicians. It is something they must endure so they can get on with what they view as the important parts of politics. The important part of politics is advancing an agenda that serves the narrow interests of the managerial elite. This is why elections have no bearing on public policy. The office holders may change and the parties may swap positions, but the elites never change.

That is the source of the growing hostility the political classes of the West have for the people they theoretically represent. Macron is a prime example. He is in trouble politically because he carries himself like a man who is doing the French people a favor by paying attention to them. Not long ago he said that you are not French if you do not follow his rules with regards to Covid. He joked about using the administrative state to torment those who question his policies.

There is that cynicism at the heart of politics in the modern West. No serious leader thinks such things, much less says them out loud, if he has any regard for the people he claims to lead. More important, no serious leader acts this way if he thinks the opinions of the voters matter. When the game is rigged, or at least seems that it is rigged, then it no longer makes much sense to pretend public opinion matters. [...]

This is only possible in a deeply cynical system populated with people motivated by malice toward the public. The people running the global economic war resent that they have to pretend to care about public opinion. They can barely contain their loathing for the people outside the castle walls. Shark-eyed dingbats like Jen Psaki exist because she is actually what passes for a friendly face in this system. Even she can barely conceal her contempt for the public she is addressing.

In the West today there are many would-be Marie Antoinettes who have said the modern equivalent of "let them eat cake" many, many times already and are more bold and blatant about saying it every day. Only a fool doesn't see the spectre of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror looming in the near future of most countries in the West. If the elites think that the foreign legions that they have imported will protect them, they are almost certainly wrong. Those are mostly r-strategists who have come because, hey... free American (or European, or Australian, etc.) money. When the going get's tough, they'll get going alright. Right back to where things aren't tough anymore. Even Isaiah prophesied it for the last days: "[T]hey shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land." (Isaiah 13:14 KJV)

Many of them will carry off loot taken from the West as they return home, but honestly, I doubt most people in the West will be too bothered with it by that point, except maybe the Boomers (if they were involved at Disney, should they be called the Groomers? Think about how devastating it would be if anytime anyone responded with "Don't say gay" on twitter, they got flooded with a bunch of "OK Groomer" responses? We'll just be happy to have them gone.

Dogs vs Hyenas

I've always been fascinated in the paleontological record with the stories of dynastic conflict. Y'know, the situations in which two separate animal families compete for the same niche over time. This is one of the main reasons that I find the Triassic so fascinating. In spite of the lack of big charismatic megafauna like the remainder of the Mesozoic gives us in the form of all of the famous dinosaurs, in some ways the Triassic is a more compelling story. Therapsids vs. thecodonts. Thecodonts themselves giving way to the uprising of the dinosaurs. And then the Triassic is bracketed on either end by mass extinctions. The first one, the Permian Extinction event was more about wiping the slate fairly clean and then dynasties struggling to form in a vacuum. The second one was merely one dynasty losing out and passing the baton to another. 

One dynastic struggle in the paleontological record that's a little closer to home is, as the subject line says, the dog vs hyena families. Both competed for the role of cursorial pack-hunting predators, most at home on savannas or even open grasslands, but often widely distributed in various ecosystems. In this case, both worked on their best models in isolation; the cradle of the dog family was North America, while the cradle of the hyenas was the Old World. We think today of hyenas as being an African animal, since that's almost exclusively where they live now (with one species still extant in the Middle East and India, but their origin was most likely in Eurasia, and up through the Ice Age, they roamed the northern European mammoth steppes from the Iberian peninsula to Siberia.

Before we get too far in to this, let's be clear about something. Hyenas are not scavengers, or at least are certainly not obligate scavengers, as they are often described. They are highly successful pack hunters. In reality, they are often bullied away by the much larger lions from their own kills, and then have to wait around for the lions to finish so that they can eat the scraps of what they originally killed in the first place. Because both are often largely nocturnal, these interactions weren't witnessed very often, and the erroneous assumption that hyenas just followed along eating lions' kills was perpetuated. Because the hyenas also have the capability to process much more of the carcass than most other predators, with their very strong bone-cracking teeth and jaws, this was seen as an adaptation towards scavenging in particular. In reality, that adaptation has nothing to do with scavenging, although it comes in useful when you're left without best cuts of your own kills. But its also important to note that many types of hyenas over the years have not had this adaptation at all, and many types of dogs have. In fact, the most extreme example of this adaptation is not present in a hyena, but in the Pliocine dog Borophagus diversidens. However, many paleontologists have pointed out that there is no reason to believe that Borophagus was an obligate scavenger; it was most likely one of the top predators of its age.

Dogs come in three broad genetic varieties, the early hesperocyons which were probably ancestral to the other two groups, the borophagines, which had the hyena-like jaws and skulls, and of course, modern dogs, which includes wolves, coyotes, jackals, foxes, and dogs, as well as a few other isolates like the dhole and the raccoon dog. Like I said, the borophagines had a trend towards more powerful "hyena-like" jaws and skulls, and they started waning as the climate purportedly changed to favor more open terrain. This suggests that they may not have been as cursorial as modern species, and may have needed the cover of bush or woods to sneak up on and ambush their prey much moreso than modern wolves or hyenas do. If so, that would have put them in competition with great cats once they arrived from Asia. Being squeezed between cats for ambush predator roles and modern canines for cursorial hunter roles, their importance in the megafaunal assemblages gradually faded over millions of years, with the last of them dying out near the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary.

Hyenas on the other hand, had two main lineages. The so-called "dog-like" lineage did not develop bone-cracking jaws at all. Only one such representative still exists, the aardwolf, and it has developed a more unique niche as a termite eater. However, this lineage was once much more diverse and successful, and even put out a challenge to the dogs, especially in the form of Chasmoporthetes, the "running hyena" or "hunting hyena." As Borophagus mimicked the morphology of hyenas within the dog-family, Chasmoporthetes mimicked what we consider the standard morphology of dog-like animals in some ways, although some specialists are quick to point out that it actually more resembles a cheetah than a dog, and may have lived more like those animals than like a wolf. Chasmo actually "invaded" the dog territory, and became widespread in North America for a time, living alongside Borophagus during the Blancan and Irvingtonian ages that preceded the more classic "Ice Age" Rancholabrean age. While this was a brave foray into enemy territory, it ultimately wasn't successful, and if Chasmo was more cheetah-like than dog-like, it probably was outcompeted eventually by the actual American "cheetah", Miracinonyx. The illustration below is a small pack of these animals chasing a white-tailed deer during the Pliocene.

Meanwhile, the dog invaders who crossed into enemy territory in the Old World were more successful, although they were held in check for a time. During glacial maximums in particular, much of the fresh water that we take for granted was locked up in the ice, and the continental climates were drier. This means that vast territories of northern Eurasia that we think of as covered in boreal forests today would have been cold open grassland or tundra. And this was the haunt of vast numbers of cave hyenas, a subspecies of today's spotted hyena that was considerably larger than the African group today. But invading dogs found niches; wolves haunted the more enclosed, wooded areas, various jackals mimicked the coyotes of their North American homeland as predators of small creatures as well as scavengers, and foxes were solitary, smaller hunters. As the ice retreated in just the last few thousand years or so, forests grew in size and grasslands shrank. The vast herds of grassland-dwelling animals gave way to woodland dwelling animals, and there was a shift in the megafauna herbivores. Whether it was a change in environment, a change in prey animals, or even head-to-head competition for caves and prey with people, the cave hyenas died out, leaving only their African (and middle-eastern) smaller relative to hold down the fort for the hyena dynasties, and wolves in particular took much of their place in the Old World. Curiously, wolves also invaded North America; while the dog-family was a North American native family, wolves specifically developed in the Old World and replaced the dominant large dogs in the New World, the "dire wolves" only in relatively recent years. Oddly, since we think of Africa as where the hyena dominates this niche over dog varieties, the wolf-like dog lineage is believed to have originated in Africa, and its greatest diversity is still to be found there with various types of jackals, the Ethiopian "wolf" and the Cape hunting dogs all present; although never in dominant apex predator roles.

Curiously, the "dire wolf" is now known to not be as closely related to the wolf as we once thought, due to some genetic studies done in the last year or two. Some specialists say that the dire wolf also featured bone-cracking teeth and jaws, although not as highly developed as in borophagines or hyenas. However, some specialists say the opposite, that if anything, modern wolves would have an easier time cracking bones than the dire wolf. As the dire wolf faded to be replaced by the gray wolf returning to its homeland from the Old World, significant changes in the ecology and herbivorous megafauna are believed to have occurred as well, which probably contributed to the success of the one over the other.

In any case, the modern wolf-like dogs, including jackals and coyotes, as well as the more solitary foxes, were the eventual winners, at least so far, in this dynastic struggle. The hyenas are still around, obviously, and relatively successful in Africa at least, but they've ceded much of their non-African territory to the dogs. And while one can say that in the modern environment wolves are often threatened by human activity, coyotes and jackals are still present; I've seen coyotes in urban environments, fer cryin' out loud, where they seem to thrive and resist efforts to control their numbers. And, of course, we can't forget the success of the lineages of wolf-like dogs that actually became the domestic dog.

Parallel functions

I'm not 100% sure what the solution is here, but the Z-man offers plenty of food for thought. One of my other daily dissident reads is Vox Day who has done an awful lot towards creating his own parallel structures, particularly in the arena of pop culture.

There is no solution to the problems of liberal democracy at the ballot box. Most Americans have no representation in politics as both parties are committed to destroying normal life. This fall the Republicans will win the election and everything will get worse. Whatever promises they have made will be broken on day one. They will set about giving the oligarchs whatever they want while pretending they are doing their voters a favor.

Even knowing this, people want to do something. This is even more true for dissidents who are more political than normal people. The reason you end up on this side of the great divide is you have engaged with politics and learned from it. Walking away entirely seems like quitting to most people. On the other hand, participating just empowers the people who want you dead. This is the dilemma that ruined the conservative movement and haunts the dissident right.

This leaves only one option and that is building a counter culture. Channeling activism into building a parallel society bridges the gap between ideas and activism. In a way, this is what we see globally with the alliance of non-Western powers. China, Russia and India want to create a parallel system that can challenge America. The same thing has to happen domestically. It is a bigger challenge for obvious reasons, but parallelism is the only way forward short of revolution.

This is actually very similar to the old American ideal of what freedom meant, which has been bowdlerized beyond recognition, but which now seems pretty relevant: to be beholden to no man. There are parallelisms to all kinds of problems. Food scarcity and prices? Grow gardens and keep food storage, and you'll be less affected. For instance.

I've been doing some independent research about the daily life of people in the manorial British Middle Ages, as much as its possible to do so. A low social rank, below even a serf, was a cottar, cotter, or cottager, spoken of in The Domesday Book as making up about 30% or so of the population that was surveyed (which was not the full population of England, but still... it's a data point of sorts.) Cottars lived in cottages, and the names of the two were closely related. A cottage, by definition, was a small, single-family dwelling, but it was required to be equipped with just enough land to feed a single family, about 4 acres, on average. Usually the land was fenced and had a barn as well, although cottars did not usually own horses or other draught animals. But milk cows, chickens, pigs, and small fields for single-family farming, as well as farm labor as his main occupation were what defined a cottar. While cottars were low on the Medieval social hierarchy, it seems likely that most of us are destined for an even worse standard of living and freedom than cottars enjoyed without a change in our current trajectory.

Joan Jett

I've been listening to some Joan Jett. I've known her biggest hits, like "I Love Rock N Roll" and "Bad Reputation" because I remember when they were new in the 80s. I somehow never heard "Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)" until recently, or if I had, I'd forgotten it.

It's a great song. Of course, like many Joan Jett songs, it's a cover. Something else I didn't realize even after I rediscovered it, at least for a time. And the original artist and writer was Gary Glitter and his band manager. Given that the chorus says, "Do you wanna touch? Do you wanna touch? Do you wanna touch me... there?" that's really creepy for a guy who was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for possession of child pornography and child molestation, including having a sex with a girl under the age of 13, and several other accounts of attempted rape and sexual assault. He was kicked out of Cambodia and Vietnam for child abuse. Yes, the "Me love you long time" countries kicked him out for being too perverted.

Too bad. I do like a couple of Glitter songs, but it's hard sometimes to listen to them knowing what we know now about the guy. Then again, I suspect almost all entertainers are secretly (or today, not so secretly even) absolutely terrible people. It's not like Joan Jett was a keeper either. So maybe it's a little unfair to judge him so harshly and yet let, I dunno... someone like Jared Leto have a pass. (Not to suggest that Glitter's judgement is unfair. Merely that it should also be applied to many other celebrities.)

By the way, Morbius isn't a terrible movie. It's similar to the Tom Hardy Venom. Midnight's Edge claims that to its credit it has no agenda and has no wokeness whatsoever. That's not, however, quite true. Anyone who thought that a character named Martine Bankcroft was a Hispanic woman living in an apartment that looks like it has the same interior decorator as your typical mom and pop Mexican restaurant is nuts. That's a clear case of race-swapping. Sure enough, the original character was blonde and as American as you get, as opposed to this Fake American version. The hate never stops.

But since nobody knows the Morbius characters, I suppose they thought they could get away with it and nobody would pay attention to the name, or think it odd that a population that's nearly a full standard deviation lower in IQ than the white population would produce this brilliant woman scientist. It's not impossible, just... very statistically unlikely. Then again, I suppose its statistically unlikely that a guy with a rare, unnamed terminal blood disease would turn into a vampire by taking a shot made from vampire bat DNA too.

Some minor SWTOR updates

Some minor updates. I haven't played as much as I'd have liked. I do have a bunch of raw video of Anstal Tane and Elemer Kell on Coruscant; I'm mostly done with both planets with both characters. Hutran Thanatos has also finished Balmorra, including the bonus series quest, but I quit recording him some time ago. 

I had earlier said that I didn't really like the gameplay for the Operative and Scoundrel, but the more I've done both of them, the more they've grown on me. I like the sneaking around stealthed and then ambushing someone from behind to get an early head start on killing small trash mobs. And if I don't want to kill them, I can just bypass them altogether. I've been using one of the two as a the backup class for all of my tech characters for sneaking, but it wasn't my intention to actually play with them. I'm kind of coming around to changing my mind on this, though. I've enjoyed both more than I thought. I think part of it is that I now have more abilities unlocked, though. I do really miss a good area attack, though, which are the strong points of their counterparts; the Sniper and Gunslinger. My scoundrel, Anstal Tane, is a direct damage spec, while my Operative, Hutran Thanatos, is a damage over time spec. 

I think I should go back and make sure all of my load outs for where the stealth class is in the backup spot is actually filled out and properly geared. I may end up using them much more than I had thought that I would in the future.

I've also been watching milinc's playlist for his smuggler. I'm playing my own new smuggler, of course, in the form of Anstal Tane, and I'm playing him a bit more edgy than milinc did, who automatically flirted with everyone and almost always picked the nice-guy light-side option. My impression this time around isn't as beta as I thought it was when I played it myself the first time. I suspect that I may have overstated how much of an issue that was because it had irked me an stuck out in my mind. Now, I'm feeling more charitable towards the characterization. And, of course, I can always shut down Akaavi Spar pretty hard, only kinda sorta flirt with Risha instead of pick every single flirt option (a lot of the flirt options are the worst offenders, honestly, especially in late game) and avoid flirting with the unlikable or unattractive ladies, like Marshal whats-her-name on Belsavis and the way-too-old Senator.

In general, I think the BioWare writers just weren't capable of writing a good romance except by accident, which is why only two of the eight really come across as credible and "cute" at all, although flawed even then: Kira and Mako. It's a real shame because in my opinion almost all good adventure stories need a credible romance, and lack thereof has ruined or at least stunted the potential of many an otherwise good swashbuckling action romp. 

You wanna read a good swashbuckling adventure story romance? Here's my recommendations, and then from there, adapt what you saw in these without reference to the nonsense of equity and feminism.

• Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
• Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
• The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson
• a bunch of stuff by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I'm partial to A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, but maybe The Mad King is a better example for this specific question.
• Robert E. Howard isn't really great normally at romances, but he did a pretty good job in Skull-face of having a real classic pulp romance story.