The 2024 presidential election throws a number of mini or micro stories to jump in and out of or follow. I guess the Biden Zombie campaign is over and done with, and watching the post debate Biden campaign had an appeal all its own — points of desperation, telling into a void, politicians flaking away. I do stand amused a story that Jill Biden warns that the Biden will not remember the Democrats who orchestrated his ouster — which, a similar story about the Clintons following 2008 has its meaningfulness — watch out in post 2010 redistricting primary battles with Obama endorsing Democrats — but in terms of Biden… Yeah, Pelosi and Axelrod are shaking in their boots.

Another story keeping an eye on, and I did drop out of looking at the National Review sensing a pointlessness because they were pontificating on a scene that you knew was about to change, is people who I some level know the follows of Trump and do see Authoritarianism in him, but are talking their way right back into voting for him. Here Biden offered a convenient back-way: would vote for the Democrat against Trump, but he is old, frail, and doddering into senility and forgetfulness, so it is Trump. If the Democrats had gone with literally someone, anyone else. And now watch a line change. Would vote for the Democrat over Trump, even a dead rock like Biden, but now we have (litany of liberal crimes) supporter Kamala Harris — so no thanks on that! The game continues.

Item three, and this gets a little hard. I want to take a look see on JD Vance fanboy Rod Dreher as the wider public pours over Vance. And this is going to get illuminating.

The battle over “normie” status continues unabated, a man who decried the decadence of American culture to the point where he fled to Hungary cries out over the implications on this term. I will go ahead and say that some Democratic Party discourse leaves me flat and dead — something I noted in Biden’s state of the union address as it moved to its litany stage, and something I saw in presumed Democratic Vice Presidential pick Josh Shapiro (The announcement has made that she is going to announce the pick at a Pittsburg event on Tuesday — I can do the math and read the tea leaves)’s stump speech for Harris. There is a blind spot, one a Republican in the Virginia gubernatorial race will waltz right in on, in this framing as they catapult through the list of “freedom”s the nasty Trumpists and Republicans under away of Agenda 2025 want to destroy — “the right for children to read what they want”. Yeah, I know, Tipper Gore has long left the stage — as much as you may mock the old “Parental Advisory” labels as “greatest promotional tool ever” for the albums, they did serve as useful guidelines for parents to know that — at the very least, the kids are listening to some things now — should steer them to some fuller understanding on meanings. We are past an era on v-chip arguments. The “TV-7” ratings I never knew what it meant. Perhaps the right now hates these things and thinks it is coddling “trigger warning” adjacency. But you stare at the easy line from Governor Shapiro and see it falls into the line of books accepted and not accepted into school libraries — and I don’t want to stuck crying “censorship!” because a school library has dropped a graphic novel coming of age memoir from a gender non-comformist expressing graphic lust regarding illustrated genitalia.

But it is that thing where The Moral Majority was founded, with assumptions inherent in its name, and then as they progressed they had to share down at the reality that — they weren’t in the majority. And the fight for normalcy continues, unwinnable by anyone, as it should be.

Jimmy Carter was blasted away with a “weirdness factor” question. In some part, I guess Dreher ought relate to that. America was not used to vote for born again Christian, as I guess they aren’t Catholics – – or church going Catholics such as our elderly president who I see in other tweets I can see Dreher mocking away at in terms of the terms of his Catholicism. It figures. I am almost giving JD Vance too much credit is placing it into some cultural points of what a same conservative parent might object to in current liberal assumptions. Because when he asked about the great “unmarried cat lady” policies, and spit-balling notions that parents ought get extra votes for children they have — the line he took went to economic and tax policy, the sane point where we actually do make way for parental burden which does do some of the “ought tax the childless more” idea — the child tax deduction. He lied and said Harris opposed this, sought its removal. At this point I almost feel like the man no longer deserves my defense and call out of his inane and stupid the couch thing is — and it is further exasperated that the man at the top of the ticket wants to move to a nineteenth century system of financing by tariff anyways.

I don’t know who the man on the lower left is. This clip has thehost, upper left, turning to Allan Lichtman at the lower right, he of the “13 Keys”. James Carville in the upper left can not hide a certain disdain,Though he sits silently and lets him ramble on. Carville has long been of the opinion the Democrats need to get a new candidate for 2024 and let Biden retire, Lichthman believes they have just thrown away one of the keys. To be sure, he still sees the Democrats as holding the correct number of keys.

I imagine Obama’s endorsement is of zero significance. It would be significant only if he didn’t, or he endorsed Trump or Jill Stein.

At the moment and for the rest of the election JD Vance has bestowed upon the Republican a “weirdness” factor, a repellent toward normies, swimming in a pool of odd sub-cultural squares that speak a language middle America does not understand. Should Harris win the election, and should the Republicans clean themselves up even a tad, and makes some kind of breaking retiring Trump from their active roster, it is worth marking a ride turning. Looking over to the next Hunter Bidens —

An entrepreneur and social media influencer, I suppose. It is a misnomer to say that the Democrats have won all the elections in the past four years. They did lose the Virginia gubernatorial election, on issues that burble into people’s lives — education policy — and have some cultural clashing undercurrents in it, one side gets a little smug in its perception of where the normies are at.

Reportedly Manchin, not a Democrat, called Donna Brazille, not an official with the DNC, on how to run in the post Biden world. A wacky asterisk if there ever was one.

The Internet has lots of opinions. Though are they any more insightful than the Old Media figures?

A step down from Trump’s previous tendency to call all the Dems “marxist”s.

I want to tell everyone to knock it off on the couch thing. I don’t even really understand it. It is not true, verifiably not the case — supposedly in the book and look in the book and it is not there — and if it were the case that it is in there, would be a thing that is… I don’t know… Humanizing the jackass? Kind of? At the very least hanging it over him leads to more risk-taking in book writing — see too why Obama’s first book is an actual book and after winning any election nothing he puts out reads as anything worth reading. I can’t even see how this idea gets at some “hypocrisy” angle — it is a weird dunking of a political foe which when it evaporates muddied the water for things that are legitimate — an escape clause to point to immature lies the liberals are promulgating and justify their own distortions with a “whatabout”ism. I hope to find out that the source of it was apolitical and “in it for the lulz”, because this meme is just kind of annoying.

The “childless cat ladies” thing is a lot serious in part because it is not a one-off, there is — as everyone is finding out now — a good deal of policy proposals spouted off off of this frame of mind. (Some of which, in some variant, championed as mildly liberal politicians, or if you want to propose an expansion of the child income tax credot, go at it, cause “it takes a village” after all.) And I am not the person who posited this thought but — I pity the Democratic OPPO worker who are now having to sit through right wing podcast interviews with Vance, and ensure the thoughts of variants of trad Catholics and neo-paleo con whatevers. Vance emerges as a bizarro-version of the problems that inflicted the lot of 2020 Deocratic presidential aspirants in 2019: forgetting that the Internet is not the realworld. Or, in his case, thinking he can bum-rush the world y amassing these podcasters.

There is one thing more that strikes as I in a very second hand fashion reassess his once broadly touted book. The cat ladies comment can essentially be taken as another version in that “basketful of deplorables” comment that oh so doomed Hillary Clinton. But, taking another gander at what I understand on his book — he basically took that line as well. Fled the area and declared them all drug addicted laggards. Coming and going! The most Elitist of Populists!

This assessment: Good at pandering up, but not down.

Peter Thiel is getting all the attention relation to the selection of JD Vance, and as a matter of actual policy implications he probably ought to. The cultural debris will land with a thud. But the Silicon Valley Crypto Currency design could work it’s way in through its sheer degrees of separation from mass understanding. Still. I do come right back to Rod Dreher, sitting and it has been a while since I read the stimulating and varied comments section under his not much interesting (or sometimes too damned interesting) blog column at the American Conservative, wandering away when the comments section went away, then of course completely as he headed off to Hungary under his favored leader Viktor Orban. Dreher considers himself a man instrumental to Vance’s rise, promoting his “at one time universally” or largely so “praised book”, praised before he took that step into electioneering and you you had fuller reason to interrogate his politics and concern yourself with more than just passing input on his book. And we see him, alongside Thiel, in “the seven intellectual forces behind JD Vance” politico article. He heard the speech. Thrilled to it, I guess.

I think the phrase is “playing to the base”. You can take it as an amusing anecdote and eccentricity. Or you can ask if we really want to be that turbo-paranoid.

You have to pay for his substack, or get a free week, but i do see he spent the last week on the JD Vance train, posting old photographs of him next to him. A title, “Reagan of the Milennials”. And I am not wholly sure of the Vanity Fair article, seeing that he now is in charge of “The European Conservative”, where we find Dreher chomping at the bit on behalf of Vance, and explaining that he hated Trump too but then that Covington Kid thing happened. And then changed everything. Not mentioned in the article, but from my reading it changed again on January 6. But then there was a book in a school library somewhere that has a drawing of a penis, and that changed that. The penis book is more important than January 6.

It is interesting that The Nation magazine has an article up which pulls the latest found epithet on “childless cat ladies” — a category which includes step-parents such as Kamala Harris and gay men such as Peter Buttigieg — back to Rod Dreher, because I was thinking about this independent from The Nation. I am not even dipping far into fullest explications, but I do recall Dreher tossing the phrase about here and there — a jeering reference to jezebel-ish publication article excerpt that a litmus question in a relationship should be asking your would-be partner what the legal state on sex workers should be. “How to secure ‘Cat Lady’ status”. I would be one to think you make up what litmuses work for you. Beyond this, I am curious to see how he treats the misinformation about JD Vance and his couch — “lust in your heart?” – – but have a pretty good idea that he thinks on the rest, pontificating wildly on divorce and abortion laws and extra parental voting to subdue these cat ladies — just clueless liberals that don’t get the real America, or have closed their minds to new ideas. Or, as I see, a “and you???” , long held outrage on the big “mostly peaceful protests” — interesting diversion, cultural cross current battle. It will be worth poking at Twitter for this all.

Interesting the swerves of politics. Michael Steger and Hulk Hogan are on the same team, campaigning for the same candidate. And okay, someone like Bill Kristol is in company he never thought he would be in as well. Still. We are watching the aesthetics on the Promethean battle for the high cultural standards on Donald Trump with these things.

II. Exciting news about Helga Zepp Larouche! THE just-concluded third plenary session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee has planned forward an economic development blueprint that lays the foundation for increased productivity and technological breakthroughs, thus ensuring a continued success of China’s economic miracle in the years to come, even as the international environment will likely become increasingly complex and volatile, foreign scholars told the Global Times. Valuable insight from a trustworthy third party source!

III. Harley Schlanger discusses the murder attempt on Trump. (Don’t call it an assassination attempt, as it really isn’t.) “We still don’t know what brought (guy’s name) to fire at former President Trump last week. But we do know that the line assassin theory, which the fbi says it is operating on the basis of that, that this is a fraud.”. Or, in other words, he claims to know what brought the man to fire at former President Trump. I gather it has something to do the preceding statement on how The Order are targeting up coups and things.

IV. Jeffrey Goldberg set up with the question that throws you that “Debs and Larouche” answer.

V. Comments on Promethean Action’s … I think we can say “Agenda 47″… Which is Trump’s… But this Larouche squad will run it anyway.

Trust the Plan! (Cool with qanon then?)

And the extreme irony of your statement is that modernity and liberal revolutions were heavily inspired by the occult — freemasonry. It was the Fascist countries that outlawed lodges: Romania, Spain, Italy, etc. Any post-world war occultism was purely circumstantial as Fascism after that point was co-opted by the CIA.

VI. Confusion reigns on Promethean Action in the disambiguation side of things! What is Promethean Action, people are asking. Looking it up on Internet search engines, and you run right up against the book by Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising. Into the news, and we learn that Leonardo DeCaprio and Jane Goodell are involved with Promethean Pictures to create a new movie about wolves. How can Barbara Boyd and crew possibly compete against this? Answer: they can’t.

VII. We have some “interventions” in the New York area, but I have lost sight of things. The most notable — of sorts — is campaigning against Congressman Jamaal Bowman as he campaigned in a primary race, Alexandria Ocasio and the DSA doing their best for him, the likes of Jose Vega and Diane Sare rallying against. The man was a jackass in Congress, pulling a fire alarm which is not anything that is the mark of seriousness whatever your politics. Upon losing, the squad and supporters harped on AIPAC contributions. By most reports these went to ads focused on domestic issues — he voted against the big Infrastrure Bill, opposed from.a left wing plank. In theory this is the positioning of the Larouche Org, as is his opposition to Israel’s military actions. Yet. Of all the 435 members of Congress. This is the guy they were publicly opposing.

VIII. Okay, so Drew is anti-abortion. And he is going to troll Maine’s governor by throwing the early 90s Larouche anti-Virus book at her. That will show them!

Hm. Zeusian? Just as Mr. LaRouche was imprisoned for not keeping his mouth shut, right. The entire world has suffered for these Zeusian crimes against truth. Another good point — his friendship is growing! Off the charts! Hundred fifty or thereabouts right now for this one. People just can’t get enough of his traveling monolouge!

IX. I have no strong opinion on Kamala Harris — mixed record as always if anyone cares, but “she’ll do”. I see Jose Vega reposts him shouting at her. And Kamala Harris did a good job with him — a pint of a point for her.

X. The news feed keeps recirculation old stories and showing them as “3 days old”. Jeremiah Duggan’s suicide was staged, expert tells inquest.

XI. But I do like how he frames madness with classical references. Some Napoleons have quality foil hats!

That weird dynamic where I watch a badly delivered mostly boiler plate White House … concession the right word… speech from Biden and then turn to the cohorts of MSNBC talk this up as historic and grandeur-ous, pulling apart each sentence as though it was a paradigm of wisdom and as though this will go down as — oh, something that will replace the Gettysburg Address as a speech my 6th grade teacher will assign writing out for punishment (double with each and every back-talk.). Lawrence O’Donnell then starts his show on the same foot, and we get an overview of the Biden political history, and his four runs for the presidency. What is hilarious is the white-washing of his 1988, with more to the point I am fairly certain an actual inaccuracy as opposed to obvious elision in staying he dropped out after Iowa, as he showed the man give his speech dropping out (1987 I do believe) with no mention on the plagiarism and resume enhancement scandal that doomed his bid.

I do wish there were a way to get more circumstances of the sort that pluck Harris into the light — ie, the 100 day sprint. Like, next time out can both parties set their candidates up like this — so it gets us like every other Democratic nation does it? The somewhat cheery mood of Democratic politics gives me a few senses of dread. Hollywood and show biz pulls in for a show of support, and good for your Beyonces of the world. The hipness dries out, though, and this is a double edged sword. We have ginned up youth for a 59 year old woman barely known — unreliable voters who need to stay ginned. Meantime the reliable old white men and their wives out in the rust belt and Sun belt and never say at the cool kids table in high school so traded in for their own bunch of celebrities are being informed that “Kamala Harris. Is More Liberal than Bernie Sanders”. Yeah, I heard that one before. That was John Kerry in 2004 as opposed to Ted Kennedy. And with that, you roll the dreary 2019 primary campaign footage of a bunch of Democrats who forgot that internet social media is not real life. I suppose the good news as against 2004 the youth were never going to flood the zone for Kerry, and see too Biden. But as the likes of James Carville and Stephen Colbert get distracted into mocking the war on plastic straws or JD Vance and his promotion of that “Diet Mountain Dew” song (Hey! I like that song!), I have the sense that we do not have the eye on the ball here. Hopefully Kamala does.

It becomes somewhat clear on Alan Lichtman that the quick message to him from — when I looked the name up it was a “former” Biden advisor –that “he’s staying in” was a last ditch point of desperation, line up all the allies you got. But how much is he aligned? Lichtman’s magical “keys” insist Biden resign so that Harris can maintain that “incumbency” key off of 100 days of office. The good news at the moment is that just about everyone is rolling with the great “who will Harris pick as vice president?”, a matter that the likes of Licthman believe is irrelevant. My vote, just for giggles, is John Fetterman — we can move from one off-voice to another, and a man who recovered from a stroke and had enough of a period of visible shaking to convince the National Review crowd and on to Fix News of cognitive decline. How will this work against JD Vance at the vice-president debate? Hilariously.

The bad news is that there are still need reports surfacing about — “who will be challenging for the Democratic nomination?”. Yeah, sure. Damned if Harris isn’t losing another one of those keys! A nomination fight! Let’s see if Tulsi Gabbard takes the fight to the convention, and looking her name up I see she is on Fox News pissing all over Harris right now, because – – why not?

The disappointing thing, I guess, is if Biden — in his lame duck presidency– brokers a cease fire in Israel. Harris will not pick up that key. And everything goes for naught.

The Biden campaign is apparently enthralled in Alan Lictman’s magical “14 Keys”. Or so goes the quicker-YouTube snippet he dropped, some Biden figure dropped him a message ending in a “all hail the 13 keys” (sic). Though there are things to mock with it — the road map is not the terrain — there is one essential element in his tight construction that points back to Biden — even as it is all of the Democrats making. There I go over to two people and their presentations out of connections with elected Democrats’ behind the scenes yammerings. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and Joe Walsh. Narrative wise and stylistically they have entirely different approaches here, yet the core is the same. The problem with these Democrats is that they hold to dropping Biden and dropping Harris — which is the one thing you can say on Lichtman — completely bonkers — there is no path out of Biden or Harris, if it is not Biden It is Harris, and any other path is convoluted and destructive. But the reason they can do so is in their own self interest and a maybe losing any interest in the 2024 presidential election — a look ahead at their 2026 Senate election with the standard party dynamics of a midterm election or ahead to the 2028 presidential election where they want to shuffle Harris away. I am mostly indifferent on who is helming the Democratic ticket — I always hoped there was a way Biden could bow out and declare his one term a success — but if this is the attitude amongst the Democratic office holders, stick with him. He is down in the polls? Of course he is –the Democrats have been running against him for the last three weeks. In a very passive-aggressive manner, which to be sure gets him to worst results than if it were aggressive – aggressive. All the while I have seen the worst of him and the best of him — that debate (which, needs to be pointed out, Trump was just as awful performative-wise) and the NATO summit press conference (on the headline of “One Adequate Press Conference Does Not Change Things”, I am pondering the question ” Yeah, but what about an exceptionally good one? “) Now, if everyone there were on that same page of — “if it is not Biden, it is Harris” — then the grand “burn it down and tear him out” game would at least make sense.

I watched that Hulk Hogan rnc speech. I had listened a couple times in the last few years of old broadcasts of a radio host who was commenting on the “idiocracy” element when candidates Obama, Hillary, and McCain dropped in to run a “vote outreach” on wwe. And now here we are even further into the muck. I am, by way of jumping around on commentary, somewhat assured that I need to watch Tucker Carlson’s speech, understanding that it is pure fascism. The term has kind of lost most meaning, and the best I can suggest in an academic frame is that Mussolini lays down what is closest to pure definition and everything else (including Hitler) is a derivation from it, but broad strokes are acceptable here. I did not watch Trump’s speech — and do not know how to approach it — but understand enough to see that the headlines along the lines of “Trump calls for Unity Before Pivoting to Familiar Attacks” are b.s. — or, if I am now your annoying Biden-stan, “malarky”. The actual headlines ought be “Trump Heaps Praise for Hannibal Lector” (a key part in his stump speech) and, if we go to dip into policy and substance — “Trump Calls for Re-Implementation of ‘Operation Wetback’ Program”.

And to be sure, you are walking on eggshells on Biden. There is a bit of a Trump 2016 that will occur — which saw Paul Ryan stumping for Republicans, mostly hoping to keep the down ballot up — by encouraging all the Republicans to “Vote for Pence”. Which is fine here, because old white people in the Rust Belt not all that enthralled with Hulk Hogan and wanting to keep NATO will be to Biden above Harris. You would like to think there are a few Pence / Trump voters, but we will see won’t we?

There is a number of haunting dilemmas that abound.

In some roundabout way, the ideal outcome for a Biden Presidency and its 2024 Democratic candidacy appears to be in the offing. The problem is enough dust has to be blown up into the air to make its positive outcome moot. Biden did indeed run through the hoops of a re-election bid set up, necessary to have an effective term 1 in a presidency in our ossified system. And so he was carry it to term without the drawbacks of the dreaded “lame duck” status. The bid gets handed over to Kamala Harris, who — well, a better possibility than Stacey Abrams, probably his only other option in 2020 as looking at her Abrams has fewer escapes into broader appeal — and at least a chunk of the political campaign machinery for 2024 does not need to be uprooted. I trust that even right this minute the DNC campaign workers have their vaulted workers at the grindstone in those seven states across the rustbelt and sunbelt, able to nimbly pull down the Biden poster and stick up the Harris one.

It also avoids the nature of a party nomination process in the age of social media, which looking at the 2020 process of 2019 — and maybe some things will move off kilter here — is not a trustworthy process. Kicks off a lot of dust and candidates lose their message by way of staff’s social media fights. The ideal on that is the 2007 — 2008 campaign, which by “campaigning in all 57 states” (not really — he slipped West Virginia, for instance) did aid Obama. But 2024 is a looooong way from 2008.

The writing is on the wall. The Democratic bigwigs have decided, rightly or wrongly I cannot say, that it is not worth keeping from damaging Biden in efforts to displace him, because they cannot move forward with him anyways. Pelosi is not subtle when she says he will allow Biden to make the right decision, after Biden insists there is no decision. There is no way to massage a Hillary Clinton statement about taking the keys from grandpa. And I am skipping back to a gut level sensation in the outcome of election 2020 as it became clear we were just waiting for votes to get tallied, and before Trump carried through his long seeded plan of a Plan B in case he lost the election — a bad feeling — something that careful observers of the 1976 Carter victory had to feel — which was, this was a coalition hard to hold. The “he’s too old, but” will easily slide to dropping before the comma. Old white men in the rust belt apt to stumble to The Republicans off of trans athletes, urban crime shots on social media, and high prices. The stupidly comical thing is that the Democrats benefited from him being out of sight in the interim, not the full definition of the party as Trump is the Republican Party right now, thus a massive overperformance of expectations — a thing that always kept Biden in hold. because of the fickleness of the two party system, there is that special place in Hell for Mitch McConnell on his post January 6th cynicism, even though ironically he had showered down on him by the RNC Trumpistas. He kept the man politically alive.

Random observation from an x (twitter) er:

If the United States loses its democracy, it’ll be the dumbest slide into authoritarianism in history.
Others cases had mass unemployment, a major war, something.
None have done it with low unemployment, rising real wages, declining crime, and no troops fighting in foreign wars.

Yeah. Well.

Marjorie Taylor Greene takes the stage at the END convention. This is where I reference Elvis Costello and a single phrase for a song referencing the appearance of Oswald Mosley in British tv news interviews. Things mean less than zero.

JD Vance. Once wrote a book. May or may not have been worthwhile. Probably not, but at least you would get . He was first popularized and brought to attention by a man who fell in love with Victor Orban and so emigrated to Hungary, Rod Dreher. It was also written by a guy who wondered if Trump was Hitler or Nixon, and who said he was taking the “white working class” into a “very dark place”, so the author is no more anyways. Wanting to follow anything except watch a Republican convention that Marjorie Taylor Greene sets a tone for, I freeze at an interview clip between Vance and… Some guy… Asking, “who the Hell is This freak?”

To Wikipedia with it! American manosphere internet personality, writer, podcast host, and wellness guru.

Okay, and the list of luminaries on his show.

hosted Republican politicians, conservative pundits, and manosphere internet personalities. Some of his guests included Aleksandr Dugin, Joe Kent, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, Dave Rubin, and Bronze Age Pervert. Murphy hosted around 2 shows a month, from November 2018 to June 2022, when he stopped producing new episodes altogether.

Somehow the two names that pop out are the first and last. Aleksandar Dugin is the man in Russia Steve Bannon wants to be in America. I don’t know who Bronze Age Pervert is, but he has successfully branded himself with a name as someone I wouldn’t wish to inquire for an answer. I suppose we should welcome the notion of politicians going to any and all sources for interviews, but shake this one loose and this is where a lot of this group will be holed, tending their bases of support, so now you are obliged to poke at the archives of a “manosphere” guy.

The show ended and he he moved on to a couple cons.

founded the online organization, The Liminal Order.[9] The group is men-only and costs $99 a month to join.[5] The organization is marketed as a way for men to cultivate “healthy masculinity”, help members network, and build generational wealth.[10] Murphy’s website claims a membership of 500.

launched a wellness alliance called Rebel Health Alliance.[12] The website boasts that it delivers a customized, ground up care plan that begins with your DNA and ends up with you feeling your best. It claims to be able to find the exercises, food, and sleep protocols that are specific to your DNA. This is not possible and does not appear to be founded in actual research.

Editorializing there, I guess. Or not lying a lie pass unabetted.

This is your one degree of separation. Frees me from looking at the zero degrees of separation, which mostly just throws me to Ten Years After’s song, and leaves me mentally frozen and camotose.