"I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell".

~ Bruce Dickinson aka Christopher Walken

Four more days. Four more days of the overtly loud and incessant drone of cowbell in our ears.

Imagine, if you will:

An overweight American media, gut hanging out over a strained belt line, with disregard for the consequences of their ululations and stomach jiggling gyrations, calls out in multi point harmony for a more divergent version of a well known sound track. A track about "The Reaper", replete with fear of "the other", and with overtones of cataclysmic repercussions of a miscast vote in the most important election of all time, immemorial.

A "fevered" uniparty studio producer driven by an expedient need to subvert the arrangement of a score laid down long ago, from a different time and a different place, proclaims with a wink and a nod to the duopoly: "Don't be burdened by what has been, let us make cowbell great again" as his lips flutter and twist while talking from both sides of his mouth. His job, besides his bank account's bottom line, is choreographing your thoughts into a leitmotif of fascist and nazi symbolism. Like a conductor he points his baton to the left and then to the right which results in a discordant cacophony of noise that rises above the signal as it crescendos into a chorus of hatred towards one another.

The American polity, divided by a classic standard gone awry, are split into camps that want to leave the song as they remember it and those that want to embellish its rhythmic aspects, in an oppositional dichotomy of status quo versus change. The cowbell represents a new normal, an instrument of change. It's a producer's tool. Its purpose is not so much to change the song as it is to bend the will of the listener. And to keep the listeners divided, like a two channel stereo output, ultimately, combined into a singular monophonic output source.

And the cowbell drones on.

Tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink, tink.

This is my last open thread before the 2024 election.

I've stated in the past that I believe that whoever wins the election, be it Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, that she or he will call for unity and reconciliation with their supporters and the opposition. I still believe that will be the case, but I'm hedging my bets on whether the public itself will stay cool, calm and collected. The propaganda (or "more cowbell" as I call it above the fold), has been so thick and pervasive that it's not unthinkable that there will be unrest and possible violence across the country. If there's one thing I've learned in the last five years is there's no limit to the crazy. This very well may be one of the most dangerous periods in this nation's history and the next few weeks may be a bumpy ride.

One strong possibility is there will be mass censorship and a lockdown on communications and information. If this site goes dark please know that I will do everything in my power to bring it back online. There are already numerous examples of censorship and sites disappearing across the web. We've managed to stay lit up without any censorship because of two major reasons:

• We are an independent site, we use an open source software platform that has no ties to any third party affiliates, so we have no overlords above us that can shut us down other than our web host and so far we've had zero problems with them. Sites that use third party software such as Blogger or Wordpress have to walk on eggshells. So far we do not. That's not to say that things could change in the future, but so far we are good to go.
• We have no advertisers to pressure us into censoring our content by cancelling any ads.

These are uncertain times and uncertain things may happen. I'm hoping for the best.

See you on the other side.

I'll close with a sign off from an old friend of ours that I wish was still with us to give us his insight: