"What We Can Learn From The French Revolution: The Vendée"

"What We Can Learn From The French Revolution:

The Vendée"

By John Wilder

“There was nothing spooky about the French Revolution. People lopped off with the heads of thousands of aristocrats and carted them away in straw baskets, then turned the blades on themselves and killed thousands more. Just another segment of Western History.” – Kolchak, "The Night Stalker"

"The French Revolution was the first major Leftist revolution in the world. The ideology of the Revolution was stunning in its scope. Not only was every single structure of the country to be changed, but even its history. Nothing was sacred – especially the churches and clergy. Notre Dame was renamed the Temple of Reason, though recently it was a really hot tourist attraction.

Additionally, something as simple as the calendar wasn’t exempt. 1792 was proclaimed as year one. Each day was 10 hours long. Each hour was 100 minutes long. And each minute was 100 seconds long. Of course, the week wasn’t spared – each month consisted of three 10 day weeks. Yeah, they renamed the days of the week, too, and managed to eliminate both Friday and Saturday. Bogus.

The names of the months were changed, too. There were still 12, since the French could not figure out how to change the amount of time it took for the world to revolve around the Sun. My favorite French month? Ventôse, or the “month of wind” which lasted between February 19 to March 20. The Ventôse Decrees (I assume issued during this “month”) legalized confiscation of everything counterrevolutionaries owned and redistribution to “needy” people. One would assume that the leadership was just as “needy” as the Biden family.

This was also the time when the Republic decided that the old way of measuring things needed to be chucked, too. So out went feet and gallons and pounds and in came meters and liters and kilograms. So, if you ever hear me talk about communist units, well, here’s the reason. The metric system was just another part of the Leftists attempting to subvert all of history.

Oh, and they pulled down statues, too. It’s as if there’s something familiar with what I’m seeing with the woke crowd in the United States. Hmm. Whatever could it be?

Regardless, there are some other events that happened during the French Revolution that are less known. The item that’s the subject of today’s post? The Vendée. The Vendée is an area of France. The French have lots of names for these areas, many of which sound like Joe Biden clearing his throat before a speech. Let’s just stick with area or region, that’s close enough.

Not long after the French Revolution, the people running France realized that they were surrounded by hostile countries that were headed by Kings. When King Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793, the people who ran the French Republic were pretty freaked out and worried that they were going to be invaded by groups of Kings that weren’t fond of the whole, “kill your leader because it’s Tuesday” concept.

That’s when they decided to have a general draft to build a French army with 300,000 new additional recruits. Many areas fought back against this draft, since, outside of Paris, the whole, “kill the King, destroy religion, and start a war” policy of the Commies in charge of Paris wasn’t especially popular.

One area, though, was really good at fighting back. The Vendée. It’s on the western shore of France, and is notable for making that invisible rope that French mimes use as the primary regional product. Like I said, they fought back well – they wanted to be left alone and to reopen their churches. The army that was formed, the “Catholic and Royal Army” was initially very successful for several months in spring and summer of 1793.

From a military viewpoint, they were very successful, at first. Early in May they captured over 5,000 Republican troops. They asked them to leave and promise not to fight against them anymore. And then released the Republican troops. This may have been a mistake. Again, through May and June they kept winning, capturing lots of Republican cannons, powder and supplies. Until they lost. The Republicans captured quite a few folks from the Vendée Army. And shot them or put them in boats and drowned them.

By October of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety in Paris decided that the solution to the Vendée was complete physical destruction. After the defeat of the Vendée army in December, the revenge started. The Republicans were not shy about what they wanted. When one commander asked what he should do about women and children, the response was simple, “if it was necessary, to pass them all by the sword”. The women were of particular interest, since they would be carrying anti-revolutionary babies. Yeah. Dark.

The Vendée folks paroled their prisoners. The Leftists? Murdered them. For the people in the Vendée, it got worse. Some people from the Vendée got together with the British and the British funded and supplied a really lame invasion of France. It failed. Spectacularly. The French might not like each other, but one thing was for certain – the French, I mean, all the French, hate the British. This didn’t help the Vendée with the rest of the French. Public relations level? Disaster.

The Vendée had about 800,000 folks living in it prior to the French Revolution. The Leftists killed, for the sake of ideological reasons, between (best sources I can find) 250,000 to 400,000. This is about 1.5% of the population of France at that time. That’s proportionately like losing half the population of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, New Jersey, or Virginia.

This proves, once again, that the only people that the French can beat in a war is the French. It also proves, once again, that when Leftists run a country, the first priority of business is to kill their own people who aren’t on board with the Left. Regardless, this didn’t stop the people from the Vendée. They kept fighting, and were even a thorn in the side of Napoleon in 1814.

The Vendée made me think of the United States today. It is easy to see the parallels – the full attack on every value. The attempt to destroy everything from the past is in full force now. The removal of the statues is part of the playbook. The vilification of the values and heritage people? Also part of the playbook.

Where is the Vendée in the United States? Oklahoma? Ohio? Missouri? It is clear that the values of the Left do not match values of many. What happens when a line is crossed? When the gun confiscation comes in? If the Vendée acts alone, it fails. If it’s not alone? It wins. You are not alone. Nor is Oklahoma, or Missouri, or Ohio, or Texas, or Idaho. This isn’t 1793, and we don’t cotton to the metric system. Me? I’ll never accept the metric system because I don’t want a foreign ruler."

- https://wilderwealthywise.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Against the Tide"

"Against the Tide"

by Jim Kunstler

“These days, when they say something is ‘very unlikely,’ that is wokecabulary for, ‘it’s almost certainly true’.” - Jeff Childers (the Coffee with Covid blog)

"So many calamities, quandaries, and mysteries swirl in the zeitgeist these days that life in the USA feels like swimming against a rising tide of poisoned guacamole. Nothing has been able to stop that green spewage from the political Left, especially as it desecrates our very language to turn everything up, down, and everything inside, outside. You end up drowning the consensus about reality under the muck. Now, there are political forces opposing all this deliberate malice and deceit and they will need something like a fire-hose to clean the joint up.

The outstanding feature of this political illness is the utter lack of accountability for gross insults against the public interest - that is, things that really matter. As Congresswoman Ilhan Omar once put it so obliquely, “some people did some things.” Yes, people are at the bottom of all this mischief against the country and none of them have had to answer for any of it yet. Will it matter if they do? It may not correct all the disasters of recent past years, but it may prevent more disasters ahead as the nation struggles with epic changes to the business model for running everything in this land. Some people will have to do a lot of things to straighten out our agenda.

Everyone is aware by now that the new Congress is assembling several committees to attempt just that. One is the panel on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. That’s an excellent name for it because the officials running the engines of state have carried out a war against the people. It is, after all, supposed to be a government of, by, and for the people, not a government against the people. Where to even start?

Former US attorney and chief-of-staff to the SecDef, Kash Patel, had a good idea: start with the latest insult to the country. Haul in the newly-appointed special counsel assigned to the “Joe Biden” purloined document scandal. His name is Robert Hur. He was a top aide to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the height of RussiaGate, and liaison to the Robert Mueller operation. Mr. Hur participated in filing falsified warrants based on Steele Dossier nonsense to the FISA court. He should have been accountable for that. He’s not fit to serve as any sort of legal arbiter in a national scandal. He was not appointed to shed any light on the issue, but to bury it under a load of procedural horse-shit, in particular, the dodge that questions about “ongoing investigations” can’t be answered. Let’s disarm that weapon from the get-go. And why not appoint Mr. Patel chief counsel to the Weaponization of Government Committee?

Another person who must answer right away is CDC Director Rochelle Walensky because her agency is still aggressively pushing mRNA shots strongly implicated in causing injury and death among the American people. There are no more obvious weapons against the people than these deadly products retailed by Pfizer and Moderna. The government’s “vaccination” crusade has to stop ASAP. Not one more dose of the stuff should be given to anybody. An audit needs to be run on the CDC’s data base to determine exactly how it was manipulated to hide the facts about “vaccine” injuries and deaths.

The public should also hear why Ms. Walensky’s CDC promoted “incentive payments” to hospitals for each patient who died testing positive for Covid-19 (not necessarily from Covid-19). The payments per patient ranged wildly, state by state from $18,000 (NJ) to $471,000 (WVa). Why was that? The payments amounted to a bonanza for hospital administrators, who were incentivized to let people die on ventilators.

The Weaponization of Government Committee might also subpoena FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf and his two predecessors during the Covid-19 event, Janet Woodcock and Stephen Hahn. The country needs to hear what they knew about the operation that produced the “vaccines” with such astonishing speed - as if these products were somehow in development before Covid-19 even appeared on the scene. They also need to answer about the shenanigans behind the following: the fudged and expedited “vaccine” trials; the demonization and virtual outlawing of existing safe and effective FDA-approved drugs for early treatment, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and other meds; the promotion of toxic remdesivir as a primary therapy for C-19; and the initiation and extension (for three years) of an emergency use authorization that shielded the drug companies from liability while injuries and deaths mounted.

Obviously, there are many other channels of inquiry waiting to be explored in the government’s war against the people, especially the lingering questions about election interference and the official censorship of news. The excellent writer who goes by Sundance at The Last Refuge website made some capital suggestions for going forward with these inquiries: one is to rely primarily on witness testimony rather than on documents that federal officials will surely do everything possible to hide. Don’t turn this into a futile battle over the docs. Let’s just hear what the people-in-charge have to say. Secondly - and this may be hard for many angry, injured people to swallow - immunize witnesses against prosecution, to give them no incentive to hide what they know, what actions they carried out, and who told them to do it. Give them this immunity, Sundance wrote, in the interest of maximum transparency - because punishment of these characters is less important than showing the people of this country how far off the rails we have gone. It may not be optimally satisfying, but it’s an argument worth pondering."

- https://kunstler.com/

"Alas..."

“Alas, regardless of their doom, the little victims play!

No sense have they of ills to come, nor care beyond today.”

- Thomas Gray,

“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than 

sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Martin Luther King Day 2023"

Have a safe, happy and thoughtful holiday folks.

"20 Signs That Middle Class Families Are Being Wiped Out"

Full screen recommended.

"20 Signs That Middle Class Families Are Being Wiped Out"

by Epic Economist

"We have one of the fastest declining middle-classes in the entire globe. That's right, amongst developed nations, we're only behind Japan. And that's quite controversial considering that the United States is the top economic superpower of the world. It doesn't help that the living expenses are now costing more than ever before while credit conditions haven't been this tight in almost 15 years. Today, middle-income Americans suffer from issues that would be unimaginable to the middle class of the 70s, 80s, or 90s. We can barely afford our homes.

Our children have to take on insane levels of debt if they want to go to college. Finding a job that supports middle-class life has become a hurdle. We're more indebted than at any other moment in history. And a job loss or unexpected health expense can push us right down the income ladder. The truth is that it's never been harder to be a part of the middle-class in America. And once you get there, the problems do not stop coming.

It's hard to admit, but today's middle class is looking a lot like the working and lower classes of past generations. If a middle-class American from the 1980s traveled to the future and saw what 2023's middle-class families look like, without a doubt, they would be shocked. Back then, the average college student paid $9,438 in tuition to get a degree. Now, students are having to pay almost $30,000 to be able to get their degree. The median home price was $47,200 in 1980. Today, if you want your dream home, you'll have to disburse $385,000. While a new car would cost you $7,000 at that time, we just hit a new record for the price of a new car last month: $49,507!

The cost of living has ballooned, but wages have not. And that's contributing to the historic decline of what once was one of the greatest middle classes on the planet. People from other nations used to look up to us and our way of living. But by now, all they can see is that we're struggling to afford even the most basic necessities. The middle class has already shrunk by 11%, falling from 61% of the U.S. population to just 50%, and one of the main contributors to that was the Great Recession, which led many people to lose their jobs, their homes, and their comfortable lifestyles almost overnight.

With another recession gaining steam, the future is looking very scary. Economic uncertainty continues to spread across the nation, and the warnings that say this may be the worse downturn we have ever witnessed are incredibly chilling. No matter what happens, the middle class is in danger, and it is likely to be disproportionally impacted by the coming crisis. We will continue to watch it disintegrating right in front of us as our economy breaks down on a systemic level. We're headed to a tumultuous year, and the reckoning day starts now. That's why in today's video, we decided to gather 20 signs that show the U.S. middle class is falling to pieces all around us."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com/

"It’s Your Story to Tell"

Full screen recommended,

Dan, iAllegedly 1/15/23:

"It’s Your Story to Tell"

"I got so much mail that I need to share with you all the great stories that people have sent me over the last couple of weeks. It’s mail bag time."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"My Warning To America: Time Is Running Out; Massive Retail Closures Continue"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, 1/15/23:

"My Warning To America: Time Is Running Out; 

Massive Retail Closures Continue"

"My warning to America is to prepare now, do not rely on hope as we are heading into a massive economic collapse in which millions of people will be wiped out. Time is of the essence, prepare with security, food, water, gold and silver, get into better physical shape, and most of all get in the best spiritual shape you can and walk close to God."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Chuck Wild, Liquid Mind, “Dream Ten”

Chuck Wild, Liquid Mind, “Dream Ten”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“It is the largest and most complex star forming region in the entire galactic neighborhood. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy orbiting our Milky Way galaxy, the region's spidery appearance is responsible for its popular name, the Tarantula nebula. This tarantula, however, is about 1,000 light-years across. Were it placed at the distance of Milky Way's Orion Nebula, only 1,500 light-years distant and the nearest stellar nursery to Earth, it would appear to cover about 30 degrees (60 full moons) on the sky. Intriguing details of the nebula are visible in the below image shown in scientific colors. 

The spindly arms of the Tarantula nebula surround NGC 2070, a star cluster that contains some of the brightest, most massive stars known, visible in blue on the right. Since massive stars live fast and die young, it is not so surprising that the cosmic Tarantula also lies near the site of the closest recent supernova.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110111.html

"The Level Of Intelligence..."

"If man were relieved of all superstition, and all prejudice, and had replaced these with a keen sensitivity to his real environment, and moreover had achieved a level of communication so simplified that one syllable could express his every thought, then he would have achieved the level of intelligence already achieved by his dog."

  - Robert Brault

“In Denial, On the Road to Extinction?”

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard,"

 I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"

 - Sydney Harris

“In Denial, On the Road to Extinction?”

by Robert Jensen

"Put simply: We're in trouble, on all fronts, and the trouble is wider and deeper than most of us have been willing to acknowledge. We should struggle to build a road on which we can walk through those troubles - if such a road is possible - but I doubt it's going to look like any path we had previously envisioned, nor is it likely to lead anywhere close to where most of us thought we were going.

I have been talking about multiple crises without naming them in detail. As I have been speaking, I suspect you all have been cataloging them for yourself. For me, they are political (the absence of meaningful democracy in large-scale political units such as the modern nation-state), economic (the brutal inequalities that exist internal to all capitalist systems and between countries in a world dominated by that predatory capitalism), and ecological (the unsustainable nature of our systems and the lifestyles that arise from them). Beyond that, I am most disturbed by a cultural and spiritual crisis, a condition that goes to the core of how we understand what it means to be human.

Add all this up and it's pretty clear: We're in trouble. Big trouble. Based on my political activism and my general sense of the state of the world, I have come to the following conclusions about political and cultural change in my society:

• It's almost certain that no significant political change will happen in the United States because the culture is not ready to face these questions. That suggests this is a time not to propose all-encompassing solutions but to sharpen our analysis in ongoing conversation about these crises. As activists we should continue to act, but there also is a time and place to analyze.

• It's probable that no mass movements will emerge in the United States that will force leaders and institutions to face these questions. Many believe that until conditions in the First World get dramatically worse, most people will be stuck in the inertia created by privilege. That suggests that this is a time to expand our connections with like-minded people and create small-scale institutions and networks that can react quickly when political conditions change.

• It's plausible that the systems in place cannot be changed peacefully and that forces set in motion by patriarchy, white supremacy, nationalism and capitalism cannot be reversed without serious ruptures. That suggests that as we plan political strategies for the best-case scenarios, we not forget to prepare ourselves for something much worse.

• Finally, it's worth considering the possibility that our species - the human with the big brain - is an evolutionary dead end. I say that not to be depressing but, again, to be realistic. If that's the case, it doesn't mean we should give up. No matter how much time we humans have left on the planet, we can do what is possible to make that time meaningful.

Realistically, we need to get on a new road if we want there to be a future. The old future, the road we imagined we could travel, is gone - it is part of the delusion. Unless one accepts an irrational technological fundamentalism (the idea that we will always be able to find high-energy/advanced-technology fixes for problems), there are no easy solutions to these ecological and human problems. The solutions, if there are to be any, will come through a significant shift in how we live and a dramatic downscaling of the level at which we live. I say "if" because there is no guarantee that there are solutions. History does not owe us a chance to correct our mistakes just because we may want such a chance.

I think this argues for a joyful embrace of the truly awful place we find ourselves. That may seem counterintuitive, perhaps even a bit psychotic. Invoking joy in response to awful circumstances? For me, this is simply to recognize who I am and where I live. I am part of that species out of context, saddled with the mistakes of human history and no small number of my own tragic errors, but still alive in the world. I am aware of my limits but eager to test them. I try to retain an intellectual humility, the awareness that I may be wrong, while knowing I must act in the world even though I can't be certain. Whatever the case and whatever is possible, I want to be as fully alive as possible, which means struggling joyfully as part of movements that search for the road to a more just and sustainable world.

In this quest, I am often tired and afraid. To borrow a phrase from my friend Jim Koplin, I live daily with "a profound sense of grief." And yet every day that I can remember in recent years - in the period during which I have come to this analysis - I have experienced some kind of joy. Often that joy comes with the awareness that I live in a creation that I can never comprehend, that the complexity of the world dwarfs me. That does not lead me to fear my insignificance, but sends me off in an endlessly fascinating search for the significant.To put it in a bumper-sticker phrase for contemporary pop culture, "The world sucks/it's great to be alive."

- http://carolynbaker.net/

Free Download: R.D. Laing: "The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"

"The Divided Self: 

An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"

by R.D. Laing

"Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left.”

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing

"First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world.”

Freely download “The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness”,

by R.D. Laing, here:

- https://www.curezone.org/upload/PDF/laing_the_divided_self.pdf

◆

"Insights Of R.D. Laing"

"Decades ago, psychiatrist R.D. Laing developed three rules by which he believed a pathological family (one suffering from abuse, alcoholism, etc.) can keep its pathology hidden from even its own family members. Adherence to these three rules allows perpetrators, victims, and observers to maintain the fantasy that they are all one big, happy family. The rules are: 

Rule A: Don't talk about the problems and abject conditions; 

Rule A1: Rule A does not exist; 

Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A1, and/or A2."

“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.”

“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.”

“We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”

“Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

“We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.”

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

"Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower: Rilke’s Timeless Spell for Living Through Difficult Times"

- http://deanetr.com/

"Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower: 

Rilke’s Timeless Spell for Living Through Difficult Times"

By Maria Popova

There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration - the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light.

A century ago, Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) extended a timeless invitation to listening for the light in his poem “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower,” translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows in their altogether indispensable book "In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus" (public library).

I read it here accompanied by another patron saint of turning darkness into light - Bach, and his Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor, performed by Colin Carr:

 - https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/rilke-darkness

"Let This Darkness Be A Bell Tower"

"Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am."

Complement with the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through dark times, Emily Dickinson’s darkness-inspired ode to resilience, and Rebecca Solnit on hope in the dark, then revisit Rilke on the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity, the lonely patience of creative work, and the difficult art of giving space in love."

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

The Daily "Near You?"

Holly, Michigan, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Douglas Macgregor, "Major Escalation By Russians!"

Full screen recommended.

Douglas Macgregor, 1/15/23:

"Major Escalation By Russians!

 Each Missile Costs Around 6-7 Million Dollars"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Yet Now..."

“Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it?”

- Arthur C. Clarke, “Glide Path”

"The Great Decentralization, Part II"

"The Great Decentralization, Part II"

Tolstoy's theory of history, Heraclitus' 

opposing forces and Napoleon's dinghy...

by Joel Bowman

"Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Welcome to another Sunday Session, dear reader... that time of the week when we step away from the Monday-Friday war of attrition and take a moment to contemplate the bigger picture, such as we can...all with the animating assistance of a glass or two of high-altitude Malbec...

When we left you this time last week, we were ruminating over a theory of cycles, large and small. This is not a novel musing. In fact, greater thinkers have been puzzling over the subject for millennia, at least as far back as the ancient Greeks.

It was that clever ol’ Ephesian, Heraclitus, who believed in the universal concept of enantiodromia (later taken up by Nietzsche and Jung) – the idea that everything is at all times in the process of becoming its opposite; hot things cool, wet things dry, etc. One might consider this with regards to centralization vs. decentralization, top down control by the few vs. bottom up “spontaneous order” of the many, growth vs. value, life giving way to death...

The pendulum swings from one extreme to another, the emergent membrane between the two akin to that undefinable moment where one thing morphs into the other, when an edgy band becomes mainstream, when the politics of liberation becomes the politics of oppression, or when a young man looks in the mirror one day and sees an old man staring back at him.

In political terms, we think of peace giving way to war... then, once the parched earth is soaked in the blood of young men, yielding to peace once again. “Great armies rise,” as Bill observed during the week, “and then – under the weight of their own booty, bureaucracy and brass – they fall.” Today we continue our series on the nature of cycles with a look at how we view history itself. Please enjoy..."

"The Great Decentralization, Part II"

By Joel Bowman

“History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.”

~ Leo Tolstoy

"In some ways, all history is fiction. We don't mean to suggest that the past did not happen (how could we know?)... only that the retelling of it is, necessarily, flawed. We're interested in this point because we're trying to reckon out a theory about cycles, both great and small, and how they shape the world around us over time.

Dear readers will recall from our last musing a pithy, inexhaustive list of historical undulations... from the minute, barely perceptible news and fashion cycles... through to the slightly longer election and stock market cycles... to the longer still natural resource and bond market super-cycles...And, standing back from our cracked lens a little further, the vast rhythms showing the centralization and decentralization of political power over the ages. To put these cycles in some kind of context, we first need to take a quick look at history itself... and how we've come to understand it.

The primary problem with history, it seems to us, is the storyteller. Humans recount events selectively. Which is to say, at least with regard to objective reality, poorly. We do so with an eye - whether consciously or not - to our own personal biases. Politics... love... family... money... religion... our own puny egos, yearning for something more; many and varied are the compromising, corrupting influences on our ability to recall the past. And that's just our day-to-day recollections.

Whether trawling through primary sources or scouring dusty, hand-me-down secondary documents, most historians come to "misimagine" history. At least, that's how Leo Tolstoy saw it. The Russian-born writer set out to explain his thinking in the second epilogue to his momentous work War and Peace, itself an impressionistic, largely fictionalized retelling of the Napoleonic Wars.

Instead of grappling with the nature of cycles within our immediate focus, Tolstoy complained, academics tend instead to ascribe meaning where there is none, to conflate cause and effect and to generally make a mess of things. Historians give credit where it is not due, he argued, endowing certain actors - Napoleon, for example - with near Godlike powers to impact the course of history.

This is hardly surprising. Humans are, after all, painfully self-aware creatures; creatures that have fashioned many gods in their own image. It should be little wonder then that we would, looking back over our own sordid affair, imbue our kin with history-altering omnipotence... to deify, glorify and vilify our ancestors... and, by extension, ourselves.

Tolstoy, a self-described "spiritual anarchist," explained the arc of history as similar to the course of a giant ship, stretching out across an enormous ocean of time. Whereas most historians favored placing human actors – again we'll take Napoleon as our example – in the mighty tugboat up front, pulling the hulking ship through the swells, Tolstoy had the Little Corsican in the lifeboat behind, tossed about by forces both beyond his control and indifferent to his rapidly worsening circumstances.

Replacing the ship with the Grande Armée itself, the genius of Tolstoy's observation starts to take shape. When Napoleon first crossed the Niémen on his eastward march, he did so with 422,000 troops under his command. By the time he returned, lurching homeward from the opposite direction, his number had dwindled to barely 12,000...

Click image for larger size.

(Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. The graphic is notable for its representation in two dimensions of six types of data: the number of Napoleon's troops; distance; temperature; the latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates. Source: Public Domain.)

Everything that could go wrong, seemed to do just that. But how? Tolstoy understood that no army this size could possibly fall under the direction of one man. Even if every last troop wanted to obey his general's orders (doubtful, given the practice of "levée en masse" – mass conscription – popular at the time), the sheer logistical undertaking of command from on high rendered uniform obedience next to impossible. The problem with top-down organization, Tolstoy realized, was not only behavioral... but also informational.

Let us imagine for a moment that Napoleon has issued a directive for his cavalry to move into a position he considered, for whatever reason, advantageous. (This is a wildly oversimplified order, a fiction conscripted in service of a point that should soon become obvious.) At first blush, this might appear a reasonably basic request, especially given Napoleon's famed brilliance for military strategy and the Grande Armeé's (shall we posit?) unwavering discipline and dedication to its fearless leader.

Alas, even this small order proves to be no easy task. To begin with, the cavalry is composed of both heavy and light divisions. In turn, each division may be further split into three subunits - the Carabiniers-à-Cheval (Horse Carabiniers), Dragoons (Mounted Infantry) and Cuirassiers in the former and the Hussars (Hussards), Chasseurs-à-Cheval (Mounted Hunters) and Lanciers (Lancers) in the latter.

That's a lot of moving parts, both human and equine, allowing plenty of room for error. Moreover, each of these divisions consists of numerous individual regiments... often made up of soldiers from different national and cultural backgrounds, including those from conquered lands who don't always share a common language. The Chasseurs-à-Cheval, for example, had 32 different regiments in 1811, six of which were composed of non-French-speaking Belgians, Swiss, Italians and Germans.

Further complicating matters, each has its own chain of command... internal squabbles... politicking... alliances and petty jealousies. Dispatches, such as our comically rudimentary "Cavalry proceed from A to B" example, were conveyed via horseback, usually by one of the brave Hussars. Provided our young individual is not wounded or captured en route... assuming he does not lose his nerve along the way... supposing his message is not in some other way compromised or corrupted... allowing that the intended recipient is still in one piece when he arrives... imagining a million other possible – perhaps even probable? – outcomes do not eventuate, the young fellow might be able to deliver his message...

Just in time for the spontaneous order of events already in motion to have materially changed... along with his capricious general's all-too-human frame of mind...If Napoleon, arguably one of history's greatest generals, cannot even get a timely message to his own front line... what then do we make of his supposedly pivotal role in the wars that bear his name?

And yet, believing their research accurate, their knowledge beyond doubt or question and their understanding of events long since transpired unassailable, historians assign lynchpin importance to the directives of one mere mortal or another. A supposition stacked on an assumption built on a guess tied up in an imaginary fantasy... thus is history, as we "know" it, authored.

(The Grande Armeé also made use of homing pigeons and observation balloons. The reader is invited to imagine the manifold and unknowable variables that must have arisen using such communication technologies...)

Suffice to say, society is complex. Information – both its dissemination and reception – is often nonlinear. Perfect knowledge, and therefore central planning, is untenable. Why is it important to understand these points? And what does it have to do with the theory at hand?

For one thing, it helps disabuse us of the misapprehension that any one man or woman or governing committee is truly capable of directing the grand cycles of history. It relieves us of the strange but common urge to over-assign historical agency to an Obama or a Trump or a Biden or, worse still, some mysterious man behind the curtain, pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. For another, it hints at the flailing impotence of top-down command systems...And critically, it dovetails neatly with a point we'll revisit later in this little series: that of distributed systems and their indispensable role in the Great Decentralization. More, next week..."

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

o

Part I of "The Great Decentralization" is here:

- https://coyoteprimeblog2.blogspot.com/

"If You Look..."

"We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy. It's only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight of the human race it could well tip you into despair, so you have to be very strong."

- Robert James Brown

"They Promised 'Safe And Effective'; We Got 'Sudden And Unexpected'" (Excerpt)

We’re one tragedy away from pitchforks & torches…

"They Promised 'Safe And Effective'; 

We Got 'Sudden And Unexpected'"

by Mark Jeftovic

Excerpt: “No one must ever ask where another rabbit was, and anyone who asked ‘Where?’ – must be silenced.”

"In the story "Watership Down" a group of rabbits flee their home warren of Sandleford, ahead of its imminent destruction at the hands of real estate developers. They set out looking for a safe, new home and among their adventures they encounter another warren called Cowslip. There, all the rabbits are uncharacteristically large, affable and seemingly well fed. For awhile, the Sandleford rabbits think they’ve found a safe haven.

There’s only one problem: every once in awhile one of the the rabbits goes missing. It turns out the entire warren is on a farmer’s land who feeds and otherwise takes care of them, but then sets out snares and traps them from time to time for their pelts. There is only one rule at Cowslip’s Warren, nobody is allowed to ask or talk about any of the missing rabbits.

I want everybody reading this to think of two numbers from asking you two questions:

Question #1) How many people do you know who died of COVID?

Question #2) How many people do you know who died “suddenly and unexpectedly” over the last 18 months?"

The full, highly recommended article is here:

- https://bombthrower.com/

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

o

Related:

"Multiple Young Athletes And Former 

Athletes Died Suddenly This Past Month"

o

"If you've taken the "vaccine" at least understand how and why you and your loved ones will die, much sooner than later, quite intentionally. God help you...

"We Must Have The Truth"

"Unthinkable Thoughts"

o

Freely download "Watership Down", by Richard Adams, here:

- https://www.pdfdrive.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Major Price Increases At Aldi!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 1/15/23:

"Major Price Increases At Aldi! This Is Ridiculous! What's Next!?"

"In today's vlog we are at Aldi and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"When..."

Musical Interlude: Genesis, "Land of Confusion"

Genesis, "Land of Confusion"

The Poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”

“Ulysses”

"There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me -

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

o

Procol Harum, "A Salty Dog"

"The War Against Will"

"The War Against Will"

by Paul Rosenberg

"The modern world will allow you to join any of a thousand collectives, but it will punish you for standing on your own, as a self-willed entity. People who commit this crime understand that they are outlaws in the present world. And if at first they don’t understand that, the world makes sure they know.

The world as it is, then, is the enemy of will. This is nothing new, of course, governments have been at war against will since they began: How else can you get people to blindly obey you, to hand over half their income, and to thank you for it? People who possess a full and active will must be convinced to do things, and governments couldn’t function if they had to do that.

The present world is built around the restraint of will, and not just on the government level. Advertising, for example, is more or less devoted to implanting subconscious desires and subverting the will with them. In dysfunctional families, manipulating one another – whether by guilt, ridicule, being left out of Papa’s will or whatever – is the currency of the realm.

And so obedience, consumption and acquiescence have become cardinal virtues, and the avoidance of immediate pain the prime directive. As we might paraphrase an old apostle, this world’s God is the belly.

The Willful, For Whom Heaven And Earth Were Created: All human creativity functions on individual will. Everyone interested in creativity knows this, and here are just a couple of passages to make the point:

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is

created by the individual who can labor in freedom."

- Albert Einstein

"This I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the

individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."

- John Steinbeck

It is the active will of individuals that has created everything good in this world. Really, life comes down to a choice between creativity and entropy:

• The world (the realm of officialdom, acquiescence and so on) is an incarnation of entropy, winding down and collapsing once the fuel left to it by creative men and women of the past is burned out.

• The creatives, who are willing to take blows in defense of their willfulness, and who bless the world in myriad ways

The willful, then, are creativity incarnate; the universe is and ought to be dedicated to beings of their type. It should also be populated by beings of their type, and I think someday shall be. This is not to say that entropic people can’t make their way out of entropy and join the creatives; in fact they can, and do, on a daily basis. Still, it is a gulf that must be crossed, and the only way across is to act on one’s own will, alone, and for purely self-generated reasons. That is the price.

The Automated War On Will: The great threat of the modern world is a system I call Descartes’ Demon, the Big Data/AI personalized manipulation system that is already in daily use. I held back talking about this for years, seeing that it was too much for people to bear, but the beast has progressed so far that I can’t see holding back any further.

The Matrix, as it turns out, was all too true, and its world is now the world of Facebook, Twitter and especially Google. The real-life version of The Matrix is functional, right now. (See here for explanation, or here for illustration.) What personalized manipulation is really all about is the subversion of individual will. And if you don’t think it’s happening, pull up YouTube on your smart phone, then ask your friend to pull it up on his or hers: You’re already receiving personalized pages. The world is deeply committed to passing this off as trivial and ridiculing those that don’t. But it isn’t trivial; it’s a present and actual war against free will.

We Are Inherently Creative: Humans are inherently creative beings. We cannot create matter out of nothing, but we can mold it to an infinite number and variety of uses. We are the fountains of new and beneficial action in the universe. And we ought to function that way.

I’ll leave you with a few words from Albert Schweitzer: "Civilization can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it… It is only an ethical movement which can rescue us from the slough of barbarism, and the ethical comes into existence only in individuals." This is what we need… and we need it now."

- https://freemansperspective.com/

•

Full screen recommended.

"They Live"

•

"It Is Common To Assume..."

"It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge."

- H. L. Mencken, 1929

○

"It is extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut,

 with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; 

and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes

 life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome."

-Joseph Conrad, "Lord Jim"