Month: September 2018

https://www.infowars.com/breaking-apple-quietly-removes-infowars-official-app/

You have to ask: what is the game here?

Was there not a time when authentic Liberals yearned for press freedom everywhere?  Was there not a time when restricting it HERE would have been considered heretical, unprincipled, insane?

I remember this time.  I remember people like Norman Lear saying “I may not agree with you but this is America goddammit, so do whatever stupid shit you want and I will defend your right to do it, all while calling you a dumbass.”

But Norman Lear is gone, like Joe DiMaggio in the “Mrs. Robinson”.  I turn my lonely eyes to him.  He let me down.  I was never his ilk of Liberal, but he stood for something, for a time.  And the time passed, then he seemingly stood, stands, for nothing.

Apple stands for nothing.  Google Stands for nothing.  All these people: money, power, politics: all trump principle.  Worse: principle is not even a factor in the equation–perception is, with self perception leading the pack.  Who do they think they can be if they act in ways likely to draw cheers from preselected people and groups?  This is what is in play.  More or less literally, Apple execs, and Google execs, and Twitter and the rest of them are asking: what filter do I need to put on my personality to get more likes for my selfies?

This is what I feel.

Where did all the good people go? Where the fuck did Normal Lear go?  Where did the people who value freedom–right to assemble, right to free speech, right to religion, right to fair elections, right to fair trial, etc.–go?  We exist in a day and time where the dividing line is not between differing conceptions of freedom and justice, but between differing conceptions of the VALUE of freedom and justice, as defined conventionally.  The good people are gone.  The Liberals are gone.  Norman Lear is dead.  Meathead is dead.  Alan Alda is dead.

And its fucking Nazis, with their propaganda Luftwaffe bombing the shit out of everyone.  This is a sad, sad development, one even my cynical fucking self did not expect, a betrayal even for someone used to betrayals. 

Fuck you people.  I don’t know what the fuck happened, but I hope all die painfully tomorrow, and that your kids and grandkids have some iota of decency, human feeling, and the capacity for rational thought.

I’m working my way slowly and painfully through “Rent”.  I don’t like it. I don’t like the people.  I’m not getting their groove, although of course I have met and known many people like them.  I did go to Berkeley after all, and for a long time I thought the misfits were cool.

But I’m with the “sell-out”: there is no virtue in piss on every doorstep, and the creation of a Calcutta in a prosperous city in a prosperous nation.  That is more or less literally what Paris and San Francisco–two Bohemian paradises–have devolved into.

I just watched this bit.  Read the lyrics and compare in sentiment to Ginsberg’s Howl. [ Here follows a train wreck of getting off topic, but venting some observations I had been intending to share].  I count at least two references in there to pedophilia (“who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication”; and “who retired to Mexico to cultivate a [drug] habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys. . .”), and of course many more to his homosexuality, and did not miss his reference to Neil Cassady (“NC secret hero of these poems”, plus the references to Denver), who was nearly certainly a sociopath, more certainly Ginsbergs lover for a time, and the man to whom the poem is most dedicated.  Cassady was, to put it bluntly, a narcissistic asshole who left human wreckage everywhere he want.  And he was central to the work of both Kerouac and Ginsberg.

I am working my way through Kaddish at the moment too.  I will have more to say.

But for now, read this: http://www.metrolyrics.com/la-vie-boheme-lyrics-rent.html 

Here is one selection:
To days of inspiration
Playing hookey, making
Something out of nothing
The need to express-
To communicate,
To going against the grain,
Going insane, going mad
To loving tension, no pension
To more than one dimension,
To starving for attention,
Hating convention, hating pretension
Not to mention of course,
Hating dear old Mom and Dad
To riding your bike,
Midday past the three-piece suits
To fruits – to no absolutes-
To Absolute – to choice-
To the Village Voice-
To any passing fad
To being an us for once … instead of a them!!

Jones has now been banned from Twitter, at a time when grotesque racism, the organizing of violence, and abusiveness are routinely permitted. The double standard–the personalization and persecution of this violence through censorship–is categorically undeniable and obvious.

Here is the thing: Jones’ core contention, the one he has been making since the 1980’s, is that the world is run by organized Satanists, who ritually engage in all sorts of awful things, including child trafficking and pedophilia.

His other claims, the ones which arise from a standpoint of Constitutionalism and limiting government, and the like, are made in many other places.  Ron Paul makes them daily.  So too do many others.

Jones is unique is his focus on pedophilia and child trafficking by elites, and in his self funding.  These ideas have seemed crazy for many years, so he likely never really had the option of attracting mainstream advertising dollars.  So he sells supplements.

I will say that, after leaving it on the shelf for a “rainy day”, a true need, a period of focused intellectual work, I have started using his Brain Force, and I really do think I have more ideas, and of better quality.

Having said that, I want to focus on the original point: it is POSSIBLE that he is completely correct.  I have run into several people over the years who were pimped as children, both in very wealthy households.  One woman was sold eventually outright to an illegal brothel.  People came to her house, and took her away on a gurney.  Her parents told her to go, then abandoned her. The brothel was, if I recall correctly, in rural Pennsylvania somewhere, and frequented by very wealthy people.  One eventually took pity on her and helped her get out.  I heard this story firsthand.  She was so dissociated she told the story in the third person.  When she meant herself, she said “she”.

It is worth asking: why is Alex Jones such a target?  Yes, he has a lot of subscribers, but they only increase the subscriptions by banning him.  The only logical long term game is disappearing him from the internet outright.

Logically, if they can disappear him completely, they can disappear anyone.  Any story can be suppressed.  You could film government violence on your cell phone, watch people being dragged away by armed thugs for political dissidence, and POOF, not only can you not post the footage–that is one level of censorship, “we’re sorry your account has been blocked for ‘hate speech'”–it is gone outright, from your phone, which would be a second level of censorship.  This is all technologically quite easy.  It’s been possible for some years.

And Apple and Google are a part of all this, clearly.  They are more on the side of the Chinese fascist model than the American liberal model, as evidenced by their behavior, such as making it easier for the secret police to find people, and supporting the fascist government in their censorship  (and I am being precise, by the way: the system was Communist for a time.  It was a complete fucking disaster, so they implemented something much more like what Hitler and Mussolini did, where they tolerate large corporations, as long as everyone working for them is a wage slave, as long as the owners support them, and as long as the government controls everything in principle, even if they leave many day to day decisions up to the owners).

So it seems obvious to me that the outer level of Jones being targeted is simply that he is in some respects an unlikeable person.  He yells, he froths, he goes off on tangents, he interrupts people, he says things which most people view as crazy.  This makes him an easy target.  But it also makes him an easy test case.  As I say, whatever they do to him, they can do to anyone, including President Trump.

But I can’t help but feel that once you peel back the tech companies, and the Fortune 500, there is old money underlying many of the decisions made in this world, and I can’t help but feel that there is something to Jones’ ideas. I can’t help but feel some of these people exist.  We are being driven in an evil, totalitarian direction.  People capable of that are capable of anything, and evil is nothing more or less than sadism practiced consciously and with no conscience.  I feel Sade in all this. Cultural Sadeism was an intuitive impulse, but one based on HISTORY and observable mass psychology.

I can only hope that genuinely decent people who have been furthering all this wake the hell up soon.  Evil triumphs in the face of the STUPIDITY of good people, too.

I am struck this morning how easily evil can happen in the presence of an oppressive niceness, which is framed as tolerance, and is really a principled indifference.

The only true evil the modern Left recognizes is “Fascism” or “Nazism”.  The only criminals are fascists and Nazis.  To be labeled a fascist is to be evil, and to be evil is to be a fascist.

In other words, these words have been fully denuded of meaning, as have the principles underlying them.  They mean nothing, and they mean nothing because the people using them believe nothing.

Here is the thing: the Left is quite willing to tolerate fascist BEHAVIOR, as long as it is done under the name of something else.  Muslims can persecute, torture, kill and exile Christians, and that is fine because within the rubric of multiculturalism, we can’t judge them.

Children can dress themselves up in matching uniforms, threaten and commit violence in the streets against innocent people, for no reason, and it is forgiven as being ANTI all the things they hate.

It is acceptable to hate, as long as it is in the name of opposing hate.

For my part, I don’t understand why intelligent people–otherwise intelligent people, whose opinions you would value on most topics–fall for this lunacy, this confusion.

We cannot help but feel what we feel, but in a great many cases what we feel is in reaction to what we think.  Politics is almost entirely an abstract enterprise.  99.9999% of the people who hate Trump have never met him.  Something like 99% have never tried to have a sober, face to face conversation with a Trump supporter.  To be sure, they have yelled at us on occasion on the internet, and given up when their yelling did not work, and we somehow, for reasons they can’t fathom, but which must be evil, failed to immediately accede to their poorly constructed and factually ignorant views.

I forget who said “all that evil needs to succeed is for good people to do nothing”, but it really needs to be amended to include an alternative version: “evil succeeds best when good people support it.”, and “All that is necessary for good people to support evil is a successful lie, coupled with principled incomprehension.”

When you boil the philosophy of the Left down, there is none.  There is no structure.  There is nothing left when the propaganda organs stop talking.  There is no means of recognizing up and down, right or left.  It is all constructed in opposition, literally, to everything which has historically worked, to culture as it has evolved, to political institutions as they have evolved.

And at its root it consists in the core demand that whatever is, if it is in any way imperfect, must be torn down and replaced.  By what, they cannot say.  How, other than a dictatorship, they cannot say.  In the name of what alternative principles, they cannot say.  Why this would be better–particularly when the alternative, historically, has always been worse–they cannot say.  This is all concealed with lies, half truths, evasions, and violent attacks on their detractors.

Leftism is a mental illness.  It is also an emotional, intellectual, social, and cultural illness.  It is a cancer, a metastasizing mistake, an abomination, a repetition of everything that is wrong and evil in the history of humankind.

Good people, if they want to warrant this self understanding, have to THINK.  Fucking THINK.  Pay attention, see where the problems are, or are likely to be.  Educate yourself.  Read history and ponder it.  Why do all iterations of Communism, whatever they call themselves, always result in control by a small oligarchy?  Why do human rights wither away?

There are few crimes which cannot be committed in the name of some combination of Justice, Beauty and Truth, and few large scale crimes are ever committed in the name of anything else.

I was talking in my mind with a woman today who I know was hurt badly. I showed her where my heart was cut out, and hers was too.  I showed her the slashes from my shoulders to my feet made by sharp machetes.  She had them too.  Razors and fire everywhere on both of us.

Neither of us knew what to make of this.  We were objects, in an object world.  We looked down, and we looked up, and we parted.  Neither of us knew what to say.

There are some things which cannot be said, some pains which cannot submit to words, to expression.

The innermost kernel of horror is not an excess of emotion, but its cessation.  It is being an inert object in the mouth of a slobbering wolf.

Perhaps a new beginning is possible for me–my intellect says it is, but my heart, being absent, can neither confirm nor deny this rumor–and perhaps it is not.

What is, is, though, and seeing clearly is always a new beginning, and this is always possible.

Edit: I just found out this woman went through a severe flashback last night.  This conversation in my mind did happen, and it has only happened once. I think I felt her, because what she was feeling, and what I have felt often, were on similar wavelengths.  I know what it is like to lose everything and be ground into dust and scattered.

My feeling is that I am strongly psychic, but that so much floods in I can’t hope to control it.  I was not only under continuous psychic attack all through my childhood, but I honestly believe that attack continues.

And my wounds attract all the negative and bad things to my consciousness.  I sometimes “wake up” just a little bit, and it is like a firehose, absolutely overwhelming. I think I can grok how autistics must process the world.

I think we might think  of the “Self” itself as a down regulator, and the brain as a further step down transformer.  Infinite things and perceptions are open to us, but without being infinite, none of us can hope to reach more than an infinitesimal fraction of them.

I will add that I rarely use the word love.  In my experience, it is usually associated with pain.  I don’t like it.  And it is a word which is easily used to hypnotize people, to bamboozle them, to manipulate them.  Love exists in eyes.  It exists in gestures.  But I almost never trust words.

https://grahamhancock.com/badrinaryanb1/

Have you heard of the archeological discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay/Khambat?  I had not.

It appears a strong case can be made that a civilization roughly of the sophistication, say, of the Incas or Harappans existed 13,000 years ago, and perhaps as far back as 31,000 years ago.

You have perhaps seen the claims of pyramids off the coast of Japan.  To my mind, this makes such a thing seem more likely.  They certainly do look like constructed structures.

I read an article a year or two ago suggesting that the notion of a previously unknown, semi-global civilization has been gaining ground even among some mainstream academics in recent years.

It’s a fascinating idea.

And from a strictly theoretical standpoint, to me it conjures a thought exercise in which we can imagine a highly SPIRITUALLY advanced culture which lived in what to us might seem primitive stone buildings.  But if you are happy, you have all you want, do you not?  If you can conjure joy and fulfillment from the air, which is the point of spirituality, why build cars and skyscrapers?

And spiritually, what might they have known that we don’t, that we see as faint echoes in the best traditions of Buddhism which have survived?  Do you know that the main Buddhist library at Nalanda, which had the accumulated canon of many centuries, was burned by Muslims in 1193?

For this reason, Tibet–whose rulers had imported many Sanskritic scholars who read the Buddhist texts in their language of origin to help them translate to Tibetan–alone contains, or should I say contained, the best preserved Buddhist canon.  Many more texts, of course, were burned in the fires of Chinese Fascist nihilism.  You know, to build a better world, one where any student can torture and kill any teacher, and truth is what the Party needs it to be that day.

That link also notes the primary library for the Zoroastrians was also burnt.

History is unpleasant.  One comment, though, that I will add, is that the first burning of books at Alexandria was done by Christians.  Such, I believe, is the history.  Everything bad about Islam–or most of it anyway–they got from Christians.  Certainly Christians bequeathed them radical intolerance, violent evangelizing, and a penchant for dogmatic warfare.  Streets ran red with blood shed in the name of religion long before Muhammad was born.

I will add, though, that specific religious authorization and approval of rape, murder, pillage, slaving, and theft is unique to Islam.

There must be foam on the sea-top,
   and turbulence below.

Only far far down will you find calm
  and there dwell strange beings whose

light is used to lure lost fish to their dooms.

There is no hiding: life is in the surf, in the tide.
  Life is in the Gulf Stream, and the surging of

Schools of fish, teaching that life is movement.

If you feel lost: get used to it.

If you know what is coming, it will
  never come at all.

And whatever it is, you need it.

Berkeley, 1956.

Rather, if it had been Berkeley 1956, and if it had been Allan Ginsberg writing this, in lieu, say, of “America”, then we would all be better off.

There is a rational lunacy.  It is the root of all true progress.  Irrational lunacy, combined with intelligence, talent, effort and time is the root of most regress.

And if all this confuses you, fantastic.

There is some truth to the notion that conservatives are white supremacists.  We believe in the superiority of Liberal political ideas over all the systems of political governance created anywhere else on the planet.  Given that these ideas were created and put into action by white people, this makes us white supremacists: we believe white ideas are better.

I believe the scientific method is the best single system for testing what we think we know, and for increasing our overall knowledge in a sustained and systematic way.  The scientific method, per se, is a white idea.  No analog exists in China, which would be the best candidate for having created something analogous.  They invented gunpowder, presumably by accident, a very long time ago, but never did anything with it other than fireworks.  They had no systematic method for increasing knowledge, which is why despite their many centuries of cultural superiority, the West overtook them at a very high rate of speed, and never looked back.  They are still trying to catch up, in many ways.  They have our technology, but not our Liberal systems of government.  They inherited, to their great detriment, the Yugo of political philosophies.  It doesn’t work, can’t work, at least if the goal is generalized wealth and prosperity, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

This is really where the Left and Right get confused.  White people value our Liberal heritage.  We value the rule of law, property rights, representative and changeable government, the habit of tolerance, and the habits of hard work and personal integrity without which America would not have succeeded.

I have nothing against Africans, say, or Mexicans, applying to come here legally, using our systems of education and free markets diligently, and succeeding far beyond anything I myself have accomplished.  I laud them.  Such people are of inestimable value.  They bring hunger, ideas, energy.  They raise all of us up by reminding us what is possible.

I am not a white supremacist in that sense.  I am quite willing to judge people on the content of their characters.

I AM a white supremacist in valuing the system as a whole, as something of intrinsic value, as an engine of felicity which was created by white men, run by white people for a long time, but which will work just as well when you replace the whites with persons of color who  THINK the same ways, who also value honesty and hard work, tolerance, the rule of law, and the value of reasoned dialogue.

If we replace our system with that of, say, Mexico or China, everything good we have built goes down the toilet.  Both systems are characterized entirely by corruption, lack of opportunity for people who are not born to the right parents, cronyism, human rights abuses, and the generalization of abject poverty which all these practices make inevitable. And, to be sure, racism.  Open racism.  Party level racism.

Mexico: http://academic.udayton.edu/race/06hrights/GeoRegions/NorthAmerica/Mexico01.htm

And I should not need to tell you about the Chinese abuse of, among others, the Tibetans and the Uighurs.  Tibet is not China.  It was never China.  Chinese fascists have taken a previously poor but happy country and turned its women into whores and its men into beggars.  All in the putative name of “Liberation”.

I see all this.  It happens that Mexicans are only partly white, but it is the system I condemn.  It happens that the Chinese are Asian, but it is the system I condemn.  It is not as good as our system, and only a fool, lunatic, or crook could deny it, none of them plausibly.

It is not the white majority we are trying to defend.  It is the cultural and political heritage that goes with it.  It is this white culture, and this white political heritage–specifically the English and broadly speaking German heritage, which is what I hear implied with the phrase Anglo-Saxon–that we are trying to defend.

Without this heritage, without what white people have built, nobody would want to come here in the first place.  Nobody is knocking down the doors of Cuba or even Mexico.  Nobody is desperate to get to Brazil or Gambia, or Hungary (well, maybe Hungary), or Cambodia.

Virtually every person on the planet who wants to emigrate anywhere wants to come here.  To be sure, the welfare systems of much of Europe are better, so many might, if they were fully informed and had no intention of trying to earn their own living, choose Europe, but anyone who wants to live and breathe free, get a fair shot at making their own way: they all want to come here.  And the reason is what white people have built here.

I am proud of this.  Justly proud.  We have much to celebrate.  And our crimes–and they are many–compare accurately with those of the rest of the world across history, with the difference that we CHANGED our ways, we banned slavery–where no one else has–and we have done our best to get rid of oppressive oligarchies, rigged systems, legalized theft, and all  of those things that continue to plague most of humanity.

Progress, itself, is a white notion.  Nowhere else is there this idea that human life can and should be made better, generation after generation.  You won’t find it in any ancient culture.  You won’t find it in any tribe in any indigenous people anywhere.

And most ancient cultures valued absolute monotony, absolute consistency.  India and China had their versions of the caste system.  Egypt by design existed almost solely for the Pharaohs.  Everywhere you look, you see kings, some of whom might be good, and some much worse, but nowhere was SOCIETY thought to be capable of evolution.  This is a white people idea.

So, in sum, the Left wants people who like our system and our history to be obsessed with the fact that white people created and ran it.  Genuine Liberals–so I would style myself–like me want to point not to the whiteness of it, but the JUSTNESS, FAIRNESS, and stability of it.  We point to how well it works, and how poorly competing ideas fare in comparison.  We want to preserve our borders, to make it so the people voting have shown some respect for our system.  We want fiscal restraint, so we do not doom ourselves as so many nations have, through trying to give everyone everything all the time, for too long.

Etc.  Our culture has conquered the world.  Everyone uses our technology, our ideas, our science, our political language.  Where there are planes, trains, and automobiles, that is us.  Where people are demanding their “Rights”, that, too is us.

Ponder what has been built.  Ponder what can easily be lost, in the entropic tendency of all civilizations.

Rarely, though–I think of no examples–does a successful society seek intentionally to tear itself apart, as the Left is trying to do with the United States, and global freedom generally.

It is insanity.  Wahnsinn, as the Germans say.

The thing with propaganda is that it works best of it is subtle.  If, when you are with a person, you make a slight movement of your face in response to an idea.  If, as a journalist, you simply throw tepid water on some person or idea, while pretending that you evaluated them honestly, and simply found them wanting, although you are too generous to say so openly.

DONALD TRUMP IS HORRIBLE!!!  is really not effective propaganda.  That sentiment has been carried everywhere for two years.  It hasn’t worked.  He goes up and down in the polls a bit, but there is no real correlation, seemingly, not just between left wing media coverage (which is a virtually, but not entirely redundant phrase), which is always, every day, negative, but even actual news, like the convictions in one week of two close Trump associates.

I have in the past used the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf analogy.  There is a point where you cannot become more negative, where you cannot spend more time in the day trying to paint Trump in a negative light.

I have taken to calling this Peak Propaganda. CNN and MSNBC really can’t make their coverage of Trump more negative, or spend more time trying to trash him and everyone around him.  Perhaps it is possible–I don’t and can’t watch either network for more than a minute or two at a time–but that is my perception.  When I look at CNN in the gym, there is always some new atrocity of Trump being discussed.

Now, Jacques Ellul, who I have mentioned from time to time, although not in a while. mentions two types of propaganda: Agitation propaganda, which is designed to get people riled up and active and angry; and Integration propaganda, which is designed to make people calm and confident in the activities of their group, in their goals, in their fundamental goodness, in the fundamental value of their membership in and support of that group.

The nominal goal, I think, for the propaganda organs of the Democrat Party and their more or less open Communist–certainly Socialist, big S–sympathies, is to make ordinary Americans angry at Trump, such that the idea of voting for him or supporting him in any way is horrifying, and such that they feel the need to defy him at every step.

This aim is failing, where most Americans are concerned.  It is why Trump was elected, in spite of the most relentlessly negative press coverage I have seen in my lifetime, coverage which was shameful, and completely inconsistent with the most basic standards of journalistic integrity.

But this coverage, now, does continue to serve out the Kool-Aid for the True Believers.  It agitates them into taking to the streets, and it integrates them into the fundamental idea of the inherent superiority of the Democrat cause.

But this process, inherently, only applies to people already in the fold.  It has split from any attempt to describe reality as it is, to tell true stories, to to evaluate the evidence honestly.  There is no longer even any serious pretense at objectivity, or journalistic integrity.  And this is obvious to all.  For those who share their biases, of course, they are just doing their jobs, showing how awful and terrible Trump and all his followers are. 

For anyone outside this process, though, the whole thing looks extraordinarily unattractive.  It is like watching sausages being made in a factory with glass walls and glass machines, where all you can see are the unfortunate animals, and the people slaughtering and processing them.  Nothing is hidden, for anyone with anything approximating intelligence.

So we have this split in the middle of the nation, one being driven by relentless lies.  It is a split the media cannot hide, and cannot plausibly deny.  It is a split, in the end, between those who value truth telling, and those who don’t.  Between those who value integrity and true public mindedness, and those who don’t.

It is very, very hard for me to conceive how this could possibly be helping the Democrats.  In reality, it seems most likely it is causing, for now, soft damage, but damage which will over some time frame expand and eventually become irreversible, absent MAJOR changes to the party as a whole.  If we have an honest election, I think this will show clearly.

It is certainly possible they have revised and improved their systems of voting fraud.  I hope the alleged Russian meddling alone will spark new national guidelines on election integrity.  I wonder, in fact, if Trump can issue an Executive Order requiring all States to demand valid ID to vote, and if there is any way to refuse to seat people from places like San Francisco, where they have openly given the right to vote–in patent violation of national law–to people here illegally, and thus ineligible to vote.

Where voting is concerned, it does seem to me the national government has a right and vested interest in ensuring that national laws are followed.  I tend to be leary of the national government stepping into State affairs.  Where State legislatures and officials are concerned, it categorically should not. 

But our national assemblies, our House and Senate, create laws which affect all Americans.  It is the right of all Americans to know that the people elected to those offices were elected fairly, and by people legally eligible to vote.  Representatives from California, for example–which I believe to be our most populous State–could easily swing legislation one way or another.  Is it fair to people in Oklahoma or Nebraska to have laws inflicted on them which were passed through majorities created by people elected illegally–who were put in office by Mexicans who want open borders, for example?

This is an important question.  Perhaps I should have dealt with it in a separate post, but I will leave it here.