Walter Murphy, "A Fifth of Beethoven"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, October 14, 2024
"A Look to the Heavens"
“This pretty, open cluster of stars, M34, is about the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Easy to appreciate in small telescopes, it lies some 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. At that distance, M34 physically spans about 15 light-years. Formed at the same time from the same cloud of dust and gas, all the stars of M34 are about 200 million years young.
But like any open star cluster orbiting in the plane of our galaxy, M34 will eventually disperse as it experiences gravitational tides and encounters with the Milky Way's interstellar clouds and other stars. Over four billion years ago, our own Sun was likely formed in a similar open star cluster.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100211.html
"To Really Ask..."
“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world – few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to a whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
- Anne Rice, “The Vampire Lestat”
"We May Know..."
“We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbor who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.”
- Fernando Pessoa
"We Have The Power..."
“Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power. What is more, those who choose not to empathize may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy. If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
– J. K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement, June 5, 2008
“Of Time, Turnings, Stars & Wars”
“Of Time, Turnings, Stars & Wars”
by Doug "Uncola" Lynn
"Like nature, history is full of processes that cannot happen in reverse. Just as the laws of entropy do not allow a bird to fly backward, or droplets to regroup at the top of a waterfall, history has no rewind button. Like the seasons of nature, it moves only forward."
- Strauss and Howe: “The Fourth Turning”
"Contemplating the concept of time can be quite confounding, to say the least. In the extreme, considering the paradoxical nature of time’s passage will stretch the mind causing thoughts to invert like taffy in a rolling machine or light yielding to the gravity of an Event Horizon before the edge of a Black Hole in deep space.
Knowing Einstein was right means time stops at the speed of light. Surely then, waves of thought must generate their own specific gravity to capture both light and sound, together. Our eyes and ears record each moment and translate events into high definition digital memories which we can recall upon demand and view as celluloid film stock in a dark room.
However, in this dimension, there is another aspect at play that comes attached to time. Space: The final frontier. These conflagrate together and then separate at any given moment never to coalesce again in quite the same way. Time can be recalled like a ghost, or a spectral hologram, on the mind’s screen, but the space will have changed and dissipated entropically like dust digested in the amorphous bellies of Stephen King’s Langoliers.
To put it another way, time changes everything. A couple of years ago one of my offspring had a milestone birthday so we went to a morning movie matinee followed by an expensive late lunch at a fine dining venue. It was there where I chewed my food and contemplated the confounding conceptual continuations of space and time.
The movie was the Star Wars flick, "Rogue One" and the state-of-the-art theater featured stadium seating and a massive UltraScreen Deluxe® with Dolby® Atmospheric Surround-sound which, according to the advertisements, offered the “ultimate moviegoing experience”. As I watched the story unfold in REAL D 3D® with my 3D glasses in place while eating my popcorn and nestled comfortably in the red leather DreamLoungerTM recliner, I thought to myself how I really am in the future. In the lobby after the movie, I checked Drudge on my smartphone and learned Carrie Fisher had died in Los Angeles.
This made me remember way back to my past when I was a preteen and first saw the original Star Wars. I watched it with several friends in an ornately vintage, and solitary, theater in my small town. Through the patina of time and the opaque looking glass of my mind’s eye, I remember hoping no one would tell my parents, or my orthodontist, that I was eating popcorn and lemon drops with new braces on my teeth. Although I was an avid reader back then with a keen appreciation for science fiction, I had not seen a film before that captivated me like the first Star Wars. The excellent storyline, superior special effects, and the characters in the film really made an impression on me.
If my current self could go back to that day, I would meet the geeky, metal-mouthed kid after the movie and tell him some things. I would also mention how, in 43 years, he will celebrate his progeny’s birthday who, at that time, will be several years older than he is now and how he will be seeing another Star Wars movie on the very same day that Princess Leia died in real life.
The ironic confluence of time and space, indeed.
I am sure the mini-me at that time would have pegged me as a brain-damaged old fool and, in turn, would have attempted to persuade me into buying him and his friends a six-pack of beer, a fifth of peppermint Schnapps, a Playboy and a can of chew. After all, according to "The Fourth Turning," by Strauss and Howe, the year 1977 was two and a half “Turnings” ago. Back then, the future wasn’t set. Or was it?
“We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted – but that’s an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we’re in deep denial.”
- Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning”
Written by the historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, “The Fourth Turning” was published in 1997 and was, at that time, boldly proclaimed by the authors to be an “American Prophecy”. The book is fascinating in that it very thoroughly documents recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras in order to predict the timing of “America’s next rendezvous with destiny”.
Processing almost like a Cliff’s Notes summary, the book identifies the timelines of historical events and matches them to specific life cycles of people in the form of generational archetypes. What is also interesting is how Strauss and Howe quantify and compare the recordings of history of multiple authors throughout the millennia to find uncanny comparisons in both historical and generational cycles. Ironically, the comparisons stand up not only to the test of time regarding recorded events in history, but the generational turnings and archetypes also translate to ancient literature and other writings as well, ranging from Homer’s Iliad to the Holy Bible.
The concept of time is discussed in the context of both circular and linear perspectives as Strauss and Howe describe what is called the “saeculum”. The saeculum represents a “long human life”, or approximately 80 to 90 years comprising of four turnings each lasting about 20 to 22 years.
Just as there are four seasons consisting of spring, summer, fall and winter, there are also four phases of a human life represented in childhood, young adulthood, middle age and old age, or elderhood. As each phase of human life represents approximately 20 years, so is each generational archetype identified within historical cycles, or turnings, as follows:
Click image for larger size.
The generational archetypes experience the historical turnings according their life stage, or age. Amazingly, history shows a consistent pattern in how the generations both cause and affect historical events. The patterns develop based upon how each generation interacts with the other and this also has documented consistencies that are delineated by the authors.
At any given “turning” during the saeculum, the set order of the generations on the age ladder is called a “constellation”. For example, during the Fourth Turning Crisis of 1929 through 1945, America experienced a financial crash, a great depression and a world war. During this period, the Prophet generation was entering Elderhood, the Nomad generation were middle-aged and the Hero generation fought WW II as young adults while the Artist generation were children during that time.
When the Crisis (Winter) era of financial hardship and war was over, the Spring of another First Turning began as the Hero generation led America into a season of unparalleled prosperity from 1946 through President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It was then the baby boomer, Prophet, generation began. As young adults, the boomers began to rock the nation with new age flower-power, feminism, guitars and free love. Thus began the Awakening that lasted through Ronald Reagan’s first term that ended in 1984. It was then the Third Turning of the Unraveling began.
In 1997, when the Fourth Turning was published, Strauss and Howe used their generational model to predict with remarkable accuracy, the start of the next Crisis in 2005: “By the middle Oh-Ohs, institutions will reach a point of maximum weakness, individualism of maximum strength, and even the simplest public task will feel beyond the ability of government. As niche walls rise ever higher, people will complain endlessly how bad all of the niches are. Wide chasms will separate rich from poor, whites from blacks, immigrants from native borns, seculars from born agains, technophiles from technophobes. America will feel more tribal. Indeed, many will be asking whether fifty states and so many dozens of ethic cultures make sense any more as a nation – and, if they do, whether that nation has a future.”
- Strauss and Howe: “The Fourth Turning”
In 1997 there was no way to foresee the sequencing of 911, the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden, government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis of 2007 – 2008, the subsequent TARP bailouts or the election of a mysterious, biracial pied piper to the presidency of the United States.
There is no way anyone could have predicted the ensuing eight years of Obama, the nationalization of healthcare, the orgy of greed hosted by Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, endless wars, unchecked immigration, the TSA, NSA, Homeland Security, the CIA versus the FBI, smart phones, drones, religious discriminations, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Alt-right, Black Lives Matter and fake news.
Given the accuracy and timing of Strauss and Howe’s predictions, perhaps there is real validity behind their generational theory after all. And, given this, then we are now within the Winter of a Fourth Turning Crisis.
Can you feel it in the air? High powers in dark places are gathering and sides are being chosen as potential treachery and intrigue lurk around every corner. A global empire stands prepared to battle with populist movements and sovereign nations across the globe while rumors of a neo American civil war abound here at home.
Captured corporate media propaganda outlets and deep state government agencies relentlessly shill for a global empire and stoke the fires of war against a free alternative media while simultaneously provoking a nuclear armed Russia.
Half of the nation’s electorate, on the brink of a financial abyss, would rather kneel before an evil empire than to support the outcome of a free election. Of course, there is no unity in America today. Those days are long gone.
“People young and old will puzzle over what it felt like for their parents and grandparents, in a distantly remembered era, to have lived in a society that felt like one national community. They will yearn to recreate this, to put America back together again. But no one will know how.”
- Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning”
Winter is here. War is coming. Battles will be waged and conflicts will rage. There will be no escape for what is coming and no guarantee as to any outcome, save one: After this Fourth Turning, there will remain only liberty or tyranny. One, but not the other. For this will be a fight unto the death.
Even so, do many Nomads now entering middle-age, and their Hero generation progeniture, actually understand what is about to befall them? Do they even care? And, for those who do understand and do care; do they know how to fight?
Truly, there are many variables to this historical cycle that were absent in the all of the previous Fourth Turnings throughout history. A few examples would include pervasive and devastating technology with the capabilities of either enslaving, or killing, entire generations of people; a global corporatocracy in control of government agencies, mass flows of information, food and resources; entirely misinformed and apathetic populations with no moral bearing, belief system, or willingness to accept truth in order to stand strong against the dark powers now encroaching; and, finally, there are so many who have been trained to embrace the utopian lie of one world under tyranny. Sadly, many of these may be the new Stormtroopers in waiting.
In the end, we must choose. And not choosing, by default, is a choice. Can a rag tag federation of freedom fighters with truth, liberty and history on their side under a flag of 13 stripes and 50 stars, with idea-fueled keyboards, a compromised internet, and semi-automatic weapons prevail against a galactic empire in control of a technocracy more powerful than any fictional Death Star?
We’re about to find out. Everything that has ever happened before has delivered us to where we are now. Hold on to that. Even more importantly, don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts and place your trays in the upright and locked position.The warp drive is about to be engaged. A new journey has begun."
"May the Force be with you."
Gregory Mannarino, "Very High Consumer Inflation Risk, Expect Stocks To Skyrocket"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 10/14/24
"Very High Consumer Inflation Risk,
Expect Stocks To Skyrocket"
Comments here:
o
o
"National Fire Sale: The Economic Cycles Of Countries"
"National Fire Sale:
The Economic Cycles Of Countries"
by Jeff Thomas
"Like waves on the ocean, countries tend to go through economic cycles. First, we have the micro cycles, which tend to rise and fall every few years, but may last a decade or more. Then we have the macro cycles, which tend to take hundreds of years.
In a macro cycle, a nation begins to thrive economically, when the people of that country adhere to a strong work ethic. They invest their money and toil into the economy, make a profit, then either save, purchase goods, reinvest, or a combination of the three. When the great majority of the people do this, the country thrives economically. The greater the economic freedom (i.e., the less governmental oversight and regulation), the more the country thrives.
But this never lasts forever. The eternal fly in the ointment is that governments seek continually to increase their control over others. First, they focus on the increased control of their own people through regulations, but invariably, they see the opportunity for broader control, through the domination of other nations. They then invade those nations.
Warfare is the costliest venture that nations enter into, and as such, it’s almost always a mistake. But the zeal to have greater power often brushes that fact aside, and leaders choose to invade other nations. In almost every instance, they fail to underestimate the resistance from the invaded nation, and very quickly, the cost of the warfare doubles and redoubles, over and over again.
Invariably, the leaders then borrow money to keep the war going. Sometimes, they achieve victory in this manner, but more often than not, they fail. They find that the day comes when they must either sell off major assets to pay their debt, or face economic collapse.
Case in point: In 1800, Spain was the dominant empire of the world, having successfully colonized South and Central America and stripped them of a fortune in gold and silver over the course of three centuries – from 1500 to 1800. But despite this, decades of war with other European powers left Spain broke. Charles III did what leaders always do – he borrowed heavily and debased the currency. He issued fiat currency in the form of paper pesos and used this currency to fund the Spanish colony of Louisiana.
This was meant to be a temporary measure, but as time dragged on, the peso steadily lost value, then became utterly worthless. Charles, with no economic wiggle-room left, sent the ship El Cazador to the Louisiana colony to pay off debts. Unfortunately, El Cazador sank in 1784 in a storm, taking 450,000 pesos in silver coins down with her.
When Carlos IV became king of Spain, there were few good options. Rather than give up his throne, he offered to sell Louisiana to France’s Napoleon. Napoleon took advantage of Spain’s national fire sale and bought Louisiana for a song. But as stated above, countries tend to rise and fall in cycles. In 1803, Napoleon found himself in similar straights, as his own warfare/debt condition was also reaching a desperate level. Napoleon offered Louisiana to US President Thomas Jefferson, and like Napoleon, Mister Jefferson was able to pick up the one million square miles of prime real estate for a song – about three cents an acre.
So, to re-cap, the last-straw event that cost Carlos IV his empire was a simple shipwreck. The final event was minor. What really condemned Spain was warfare and debt. The last-straw event that cost Napoleon his empire was the Battle of Waterloo. The final event was not the largest of battles. What really condemned France was warfare and debt.
Mister Jefferson was a far wiser man. Since the founding of the United States, he had continually warned against both warfare and debt. Although he twice dealt with war with Britain, he avoided military adventures – the invasion of other countries. Similarly, he borrowed, but always judiciously and only with the ability for repayment. Under his leadership, the US thrived and the American people reaped the benefits.
But of course, that was many micro cycles ago. The US is now at the end of its macro cycle, which can be evidenced by its involvement in what has become continual warfare. The US now invades several other countries in each presidential cycle, ensuring that, if any war winds down, there are others still steaming ahead. In recent years, the US has invaded Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Somalia and has "assisted", or invaded by proxy, in a host of other invasions. In addition, threats have been issued to North Korea, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela and others that, "Military action is not off the table," as regards future military adventures.
Along the way, warfare’s ugly twin – debt – has joined in. The US, once the world’s foremost creditor nation, is now both the world’s foremost aggressor nation and the world’s foremost debtor nation at the same time. But the US has a problem that neither Spain nor France had in the nineteenth century. It has no colonies to peddle. The US certainly can’t offer up the Louisiana territory to other nations, to pay its unmanageable debt.
In one sense, the American people can rest easy that the US will not be selling off bits of real estate in a fire sale, when the notes come due. But unfortunately, that very fact means that the only other possible outcome – economic collapse – will occur. At some point in the near future, America Inc. will almost certainly go bust.
But as always, the world will not come to an end. The assets and wealth of the world will simply change hands, as they have done since time immemorial. The grand experiment that began in 1776 will come to an end, as all once-great nations do. The US will continue to exist, but as a shadow of its former self, in the manner of the failed empires before it. When we look back, we may find that the final event that triggers collapse was in fact minor, but was the perennial 'last straw.'"
Judge Napolitano, "Ray McGovern: How Close is the US to War With Iran?"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 10/14/24
"Ray McGovern: How Close is the US to War With Iran?"
Comments here:
"Extermination Works. At First."
"Extermination Works. At First."
Israel will continue its mass killing to achieve its immediate goals,
but in the long run the blowback from its genocide will doom the Zionist state.
by Mr. Fish
"Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped - and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon - it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza and turning southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon - 2,255 people have been killed and over one million Lebanese have been displaced - in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House - Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan - are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery - we call it terrorism - what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling them “genocidal” because they represented “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.”
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s alleged attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
Will the international community continue to stand by passively and allow Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits? Or will war with Lebanon and Iran provide a smokescreen - Israel’s worst campaigns of ethnic cleansing and mass murder have always been done under the cover of war - to turn what is happening in Palestine into an updated version of the Armenian genocide?
I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Unless, as Chalmers Johnson writes in “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,” “we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence gathering to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon” we will “never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation.”
Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians. Israel is also attacking and killing international monitors, human rights organizations, aid workers and United Nations staff, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are being arrested and accused of “aiding the enemy,” while Palestinian journalists are being assassinated and their families wiped out. Israel carries out continuous assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has attacked the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where peacekeepers have been fired upon, tear gassed and wounded. This tactic replicates the Bosnian Serb attacks in July 1995, which I covered, on the U.N. Protection Force outposts in Srebrenica. The Serbs, who had cut off food deliveries to the Bosnian enclave, resulting in severe malnutrition and starvation, overran the U.N. outposts and took 30 U.N. troops hostage before massacring more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.
These initial phases are complete in Gaza. The final stage is mass death, not only from bullets and bombs, but famine and disease. No food has entered northern Gaza since the beginning of this month.
Israel has been dropping leaflets demanding everyone in the north evacuate. 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza must leave or die. It has ordered the evacuation of hospitals - Israel is also targeting hospitals in Lebanon - deployed drones to fire indiscriminately on civilians, including those attempting to take the wounded for treatment, bombed schools that serve as shelters and turned the Jabaliya refugee camp into a free fire zone. As usual, Israel continues to target journalists, including Al Jazeera’s Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition. At least 175 journalists and media workers are estimated to have been killed by Israeli troops in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that aid shipments to all of Gaza are at their lowest level in months. “People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine persists,” it notes. The total siege imposed on northern Gaza will, in the next stage, be imposed on southern Gaza. Incremental death. And the primary weapon, as in the north, will be famine.
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.
Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, in August complained openly that international pressure is preventing Israel from starving the Palestinians, “even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath - much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs - decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth - Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth - in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation. Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing,” which took eight years to make, exposes the dark psychology of a society that engages in genocide and venerates mass murderers.
We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.
Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq - what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar” - defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deterrence.
We, like Israel, as Nick Turse points out in “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam” deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children. The slaughters, Turse writes, “were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.”
Many of the Vietnamese - like Palestinians - who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse, gang rape, torture and savage beatings. They were, Turse writes, when first detained “confined to tiny barbed wire ‘cow cages’ and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.” Other detainees “were placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.” Some were “suspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called ‘the plane ride.’” They were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.” Soles of feet were beaten. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, “suffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.”
Turse found - again like Israel - that “detained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.” And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA “organized, coordinated, and paid for” a clandestine program of targeted assassinations “of specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.”
“After the war,” Turse concludes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for - and thus blot out - all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
There is no difference between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel’s bloodlust is our own. As ProPublica reported, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.” U.S. law requires the government to suspend weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over 5 million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S. into despised pariahs, and ultimately they have signed their own death warrants."
John Wilder, "Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg"
"Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg"
by John Wilder
Aesop (no, not our modern one who appears to have just emerged from his self-imposed technological monkdom by solving the riddle of Aesop’s Cables– LINK) was a storyteller who died in 564 B.C. This was long enough ago that the Greeks had yet to find the drug that stops the aging process: hemlock. To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”
But one of my favorite of Aesop’s stories is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. The story is very simple, though when I was a kid they tarted it out so that it was fifteen minutes long and they could keep us shut up while the film ran so our teachers could take smoke breaks. The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg involves a farmer and his wife. They have a goose. Each day, the goose lays a golden egg. I know this sounds like the details found on page 347 of Joe Biden’s economic plan, but bear with me. 11 year old me thought that was amazing!
Current day me? I’d sell the goose to a private equity fund for $3 billion dollars and buy myself an island and then start a podcast where I drink bourbon every week with Elon Musk and lie to our wives about when we were going to come home. We could call it Manhattans With Musk®. Elon and I would just sit back and laugh as the private equity fund clones the goose and then crashes the gold market with goose clone gold.
Or maybe the cloning process doesn’t work and the private equity fund then has 45,000 cloned geese that lay eggs made out of whatever fake metal the Chinese use (Chinesium®?) to make all those tiny metal statues of Bandersnatch Combersnoot. I mean Blandercrab Clambakehatch. Blendersnout Clumberbake? Oh, yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, that I bought on Ebay® after too many Manhattans.
But back to Aesop. In Aesop’s story, the stupid farmers couldn’t cope with getting a single, solid gold goose egg each day. Nope. An aside: How much would a golden goose egg be worth? The answer, as of October 14, at $2,651.06 per ounce, gold is $421,416.96. (For those of you playing our home game: remember to convert to troy ounces.) So, yeah, these greedy Greek peasants couldn’t just wait and have $421,416.96 a day show up out of the goose’s butt. So? They killed it.
Yes. They killed it. And when they took their pudgy stupid fingers and looked for gold? They found nothing but Greek goose guts. Oops! Instead of having a creature that slowly made them immensely wealthy, they ended up with whatever it is you eat that’s made out of goose. Pâté de foie gras? It’s okay if you want your goose...de-livered.
I bring this up, because that’s what’s happening to Western Civilization. I mean, not being made into pâté, but having the goose that gave Western Civilization our prosperity is being killed. And it really is happening. Right now.
The wonderful and amazing thing about Western Civilization is that it has produced, by far, the greatest amount of prosperity and wealth ever seen in the history of mankind. Heck, North Korea loves western rock: Sweet Child In A Mine is one of their favorite songs. They love the Guns, but said we can keep the Roses. Regardless, there has never in the history of the world been a group as amazing as Western Civilization has been. Ever.
Nearly every invention that’s worth mentioning has been invented by Western Civilization. Nearly all the wealth that’s been produced in the world, has been produced through ideas started in Western Civilization. So, we all win, right? Well, no.
I’ve heard (years ago) propaganda that claimed that every culture is equally valid. This is, of course, a Big Lie®. I’m not saying that people who live in mud huts who really know how to wok a dog must move to the suburbs and eat McDonalds®. Certainly not! If people wish to live in mud huts and eat cât-e de foie gras? That’s fine – I sincerely hope that they enjoy it. Nah, I don’t – just kitten. But they have no right to move to the suburbs in Minnesota and have people pay for their every need.
But in 2024, the idea that everyone on Earth is, somehow, entitled to live in a society that they had exactly no part in creating? Sure! Let’s call it a right. They devastated their home country, so why not let them do that in Minneapolis, too? As near as I can figure it out, the only answer as to why this happens is Leftism. Leftism is fixated on creating a world where equality of outcome is the biggest goal. That means that no person on Earth should have anything more than any other.
Except, of course, for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaires like Bill Gates and important people in Washington D.C. like the guy who writes the tax code. I sincerely hope that Leonardo DiCaprio never gets injured in a car accident on a Star Wars® movie – I would hate it if he were Han DiCaprio.
But to a Leftist, a murderer in prison is due the same physical comforts and opportunities as an upstanding member of the community that has worked 2500 hour years for decades and saved their money for retirement. Of course, the irony is that when everyone has the right to move to the United States, it ends with no one having any rights at all. Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and that guy who writes the tax code.
This is the reality of Leftism in the West: Leftists feel that prosperity comes from (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) luck. Except when they win, in which case it was completely deserved. Leftists believe that since prosperity is unequally distributed, they can just redistribute it at will because prosperity isn’t earned.
This is the same idea that led to walls around the communist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: People are the property of the state. Differences in outcomes aren’t the result of cultural differences. Differences in outcomes must be a mistake, right? According to Leftists, yes.
As I write these words, the West is facing a crossroads in every single Western country. The idea corrupting it is simple and insidious: that Western achievement is based on nothing but theft and lies, and that all men on Earth should be able to move to Western countries because everyone on Earth is owed the same lifestyle as people in Western countries have.
This, my friends, is killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg as Aesop described over 2,500 years ago. The major theme of Leftism in 2024 is that cultures exist on a pre-technological level, and that the residents of said culture should have the right to not only live in, but live in and direct the cultures of Western culture.
For whatever reason, the cultures of many nations have failed to produce a society that is capable of producing Western Civilization levels of comfort and wealth. It’s beyond this post to describe why that is. I’m sure that a culture producing wealth and prosperity is all random. Speaking of random, what’s the difference between a Leftist and a random word generator? Sometimes the random word generator tells the truth. But hey, at least we’ll still have hemlock. Right?"
"We're so frickin' doomed!" - The Mogambo Guru
"Could Be Worse..."
"I'd been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it's sort of depressing, thinking how many times I'd been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this: No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse."
- Jim Butcher
.jpeg)
Dig your way out, they said...
Familiar? If not it will be...
Dan, I Allegedly, "Next Year Will Be Much Worse"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 10/14/24
"Next Year Will Be Much Worse"
"Today we're diving deep into the harsh reality of McDonald's downfall in 2025. Brace yourselves, folks, because things are going to get much worse than 2024. Fast food prices are skyrocketing, with Big Macs hitting an unbelievable $18 in some places. McDonald's, a symbol of Americana, is struggling with declining sales and store closures looming on the horizon. And it's not just McDonald's, 7-Eleven is shutting down 444 stores amid economic turmoil."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Metal Leo, 10/13/24
"Stores Vandalized In San Francisco"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "It's Your Move... Here Comes A New Phase Of Hyper-Debt Unlike Anything Before"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 10/14/24
"It's Your Move... Here Comes A New Phase
Of Hyper-Debt Unlike Anything Before"
Comments here:
Jim Kunstler, "Lawfare is Jihad Against Our Country"
"Lawfare is Jihad Against Our Country"
Old Joke: what do you call a hundred thousand
lawyers at the bottom of the sea? Answer: A good start.
by Jim Kunstler
“The first thing we do is, let's kill all the lawyers.”
- William Shakespeare, "Henry VI," Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2.
"You think the bankers are up to no good? No band of scoundrels has brought more chaos and grief to the life of this republic than the claque that gathers darkly under the banner of “Lawfare.” Its public face is Lawfaremedia.org, run by Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings senior fellow, but that gang functions only to lend a false-front of decorum to the operations of its Democratic Party activist lawyer-army led by Field Marshal Marc Elias, architect of the ballot fraud that has caused Americans to lose faith in their elections.
Marc Elias was the original expeditor of the RussiaGate hoax in 2016 from his perch at Perkins Coie, then Hillary Clinton’s campaign law firm, which laundered payments to Christopher Steele, front-man for Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS political PR shop, which concocted the fraudulent “dossier,” and set in motion a train of DC intel blob legal shenanigans aimed at defenestrating Donald Trump from the White House - the Mueller Investigation, impeachment, etc.
While all that was going on through the Trump term, and with the Covid-19 Op providing cover, Mr. Elias engineered the 2020 changes in many states’ election laws and bylaws to permit large-scale mail-in voting, organized ballot-harvesting activities, and the use of drop-boxes for receiving bundled votes. He and his George Soros-financed staff lawyers sued states that attempted to require voter-identification, and provided legal protection for Mark Zuckerberg’s $419-million-dollar assault on election precinct staffing in swing states. When the 2020 election concluded suspiciously, Mr. Elias and his gang joined lawsuits in every case where the balloting was contested and got more than sixty of them dismissed on the basis of “standing,” without the merits of the cases being heard. This is Lawfare.
This time around, 2024, Mr. Elias has done everything possible to ensure that millions of illegal aliens stuffed into swing states will have their putative identities attached to harvested mail-in ballots from addresses such as Walmart parking lots and storage units, and has filed lawsuits wherever a state threatens to require proof of citizenship for voting. He has also filed sixty peremptory lawsuits to obstruct attempts to audit any election count after November 5 - as if it is an affront to democracy to even ask questions about official misconduct.
A parallel Lawfare scam underway is the Democratic Party-sponsored 65 Project that seeks to disbar Trump-adjacent lawyers who attempt to challenge any voting irregularities in this year’s election. It’s mission statement reads: "The 65 Project is a bipartisan effort to protect democracy from these once-and-future abuses by holding accountable Big Lie Lawyers who bring fraudulent and malicious lawsuits to overturn legitimate election results, and by working with bar associations to deter future abuses by establishing clear standards for conduct that punish lies about the conduct or results of elections."
Notice the term “Big Lie” to foreclose any inquiry at all into election fraud. That half the people in this country accept such an Orwellian con tells you the vital role played by the perversion of language in the Democratic Party’s war against the citizens of this land. Exactly who is to say, in advance of the event, that any objection to a vote count is fraudulent and malicious? Answer: the people who have maliciously committed fraud. The Democrats have been grooming the public for years with that phrase, the Big Lie, in exactly the same way that pedos groom innocent pubescents who accept the authority of any grown-up, no matter what debauchery they are subjected to.
It’s a tragic turn of fate for our country that the law, and language with it, have been turned into weapons for national suicide. The net result is a nation that can’t think straight anymore and cannot construct any coherent set of rules to live by. So we find ourselves in a society where stealing is no longer a crime, where border-jumping has been downgraded to a clerical error (“undocumented”), where little children are allowed to decide whether they are male or female, where speech that disagrees with the authorities agenda is “misinformation” subject to censorship and prosecution, where candidates for the highest office get selected “democratically” without any votes cast, and where you can be run-over and ruined financially in court by the bottomless legal resources of the Deep State for just speaking your mind.
Now I will tell you something that deeply troubles me and might trouble you. Forgive me if I throw the Overton Window wide open here. Readers may know that I am an American Jew. We have entered a new era of antisemitism. Many might say it is due to the conduct of Israel warring against its enemies. I would say it is as much due to the adoption of Jihad politics by the Marxist-Woke campaign as an instrument to promote political and social chaos in America. Lawfare is essentially jihad waged via the courts against our own disintegrating common culture and national interests.
The lineup of the leading Lawfare attorneys are Jews: Marc Elias, Norm Eisen, Benjamin Wittes, Andrew Weissmann, Michael Bromwich, Michael Sussmann, Lawrence Tribe, Daniel Goldman, Paul Rosenzweig, the exceptionally profligate serial liar Rep. Adam Schiff, and many others. I can’t say I understand exactly what motivates them to engage these antics. (Possibly to defend their Deep State clients against many previous crimes committed since 2016, especially within the FBI and DOJ.) But it’s a really bad look on top of being a nefarious agenda. They are disgracing the rest of us American Jews and putting us in danger. Shame on them. They must be defeated, and their defeat must come within the arena of the very law they work so hard to pervert."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)