Clusterfuck Nation
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I was interviewing a couple of homesteaders on an island north of Seattle at twilight last night when they noticed that the twelve-year-old family dog, name of Lacy, had not come home for dinner as ever and always at that hour. A search ensued and they soon found her dead in the meadow a hundred feet behind the house with two big puncture wounds in her body. Nobody had heard a gunshot. We’d just been talking inside and a nearby window was open. They suspect the dog met up with a black-tailed deer buck out there and was gored to death. We hadn’t heard a yelp, or anything. A week ago, an eagle got one of their geese, and some land-based monster got its companion just the other day.
Nature is what it is, of course, and it’s natural for human beings to think of its random operations as malevolent. That aspersion probably inclines us to think of ourselves as beings apart from nature (some of us, anyway). We at least recognize the tragic side of this condition we’re immersed in, and would wish that encounters between its denizens might end differently — like maybe that two sovereign creatures meeting up by sheer chance on a mild spring evening would exchange pleasantries, ask what each was up to, and go on their ways.
Malevolent nature visited me the night before, back home in upstate New York. Something slit the screened window of my henhouse, got inside, and slaughtered two of my birds. Big Red was missing altogether except for a drift of orange feathers. I found Little Blue just outside in a drift of her own feathers, half-eaten. I suspect a raccoon got them, slitting the window screen cleverly with its dexterous hand-like paws — yes, so much like our own clever hands. (In classic after-the-fact human style, I fortified the window with steel hardware cloth the next day.)
It’s the time of year when the wild critters of field and woodland are birthing their young and anxious to procure food for them. Who can blame them for that. Chicken is an excellent dish. I eat it myself, though never my own hens. I actually rescued Little Blue from the clutches of a red-tailed hawk last year as the hawk struggled to get airborne with her and let go as I screeched at it. Blue recovered from the talon punctures and had a good year — one good year on this earth with all its menace, when it is not busy being beautiful.
I worry about my chickens inordinately, though my friends who’ve been immersed in country doings much longer than me find this ludicrous. Despite our yearnings and pretenses to bethink ourselves specially holy beings, we’re specialists at carnage when we’re not composing string quartets or carrying out God’s work on Wall Street.
The next morning, I motored down Interstate 5 to the Seattle airport to board a giant aluminum and plastic simulacrum of a bird for a rapid journey to Oakland, California. The fantastic violence of an interstate highway is hard to detect when A) you’re hermetically sealed in the capsule of your rent-a-car, and B) when you’ve been driving on interstate highways so many years that it seems like a normal human environment. And the fury of a jet airplane rending the fabric of the sky is hardly noticeable when you’re in seat 21-D being served iced drinks and pretzels. Somewhere in this universe — maybe everywhere in it — a skeptical intelligence may be wondering at our doings here.
Something lethal is waiting out there to get you and me, too — some carnivore perhaps, a one-celled demon, a venture capitalist with a snootful of Cabo Wabo “thick cut” tequila behind the wheel of a Chevy Tahoe. It’s not so hard to meet heartache and chaos in this world, and yet love and beauty still abide. Treasure them when you find them. They explain everything.
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Nice, thoughtful post there Mr. Jim.
I went on a real nice hike today through the deep bush here in a state park just outside of Duluth, Minnesota, where I saw bear tracks, amongst other things in the muddy trails. I’ve run into lynx and bear on the trails there. We are all bound to meet many things on the road of life, eventually.
Ran into a genuine 300+ pounder last weekend while out hiking here in the mountains of northern NM. He/she was so big I mistook it for a cow lying idly on the hillside at first, but when it turned it’s massive head there was no mistaking it. Very healthy specimen too. It’s black coat glistened so brightly in the sun it appeared to have white markings when it moved. Had maybe 50 yards or so between us, so I chose an alternative trail to steer clear of the great beast just in case, even though it appeared to be totally indifferent to my presence. We get an occasional bobcat up here as well, but mostly just the usual deer and coyotes, the latter of which we refer to jokingly as the local pet control service. Some small number of mountain lions are allegedly in the area as well, but you’ll never see them unless they want you too, which would normally mean that you’re on the menu.
Good you were somewhere up in the San Juan’s and not over in North Bend a week ago. A cougar attacked two men killing one of them. The cougar of course was taken out since we can’t have big cats who like the taste of human blood laying in wait for bicyclists.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deadly-cougar-attack-north-bend-washington-2018-05-20/
We’re just a hair bit too far south and bit too high and dry for the liking of most of the big cats, but they are indeed the one legitimate terror if you encounter one. The black bears are imposing, but usually harmless, but the big cats only have one thing in mind if you encounter them up close and personal: a meal.
Bears?
https://videosift.com/video/The-Canadian-Way-To-Remove-Bears-From-Yard
No problem.
Too cool! Sow and cubs, though. Bad combination for human interaction there.
Lions and tigers and bears…oh my!
I concur with Pete; great post JHK!
And along a similar vein as Pete’s hiking story, I’ve been enjoying nature myself here lately, having spent some time at my wife’s old childhood home, which we’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to purchase a couple of years ago. It is bucolic to the extreme, and at this time of year you cannot see anything man-made beyond our property in any direction. We have more than our fair share of predators, from black bear and coyote to the abundant foxes and of course raccoons. Not an easy place to raise chickens – we had several hens in our city place, but we’ve yet to try our hand at keeping hens in the country.
This time of year is particularly enjoyable in my estimation; the nights are relatively cool, everything is blooming, and the air is lush with the fragrant aroma of honeysuckle and other blooming flowers. The days haven’t gotten oppressively hot yet, and the flora and fauna is bursting with excitement and life. This time of year it is easy to forget that nature is constantly and forever trying to kill you. Soon enough the weather will revert to the standard “3 H’s” of the mid-Atlantic region; Hazy, Hot, and Humid. But for now, I’m enjoying this brief, sweet period. Maybe I’ll take the canoe out this evening and see if I can catch our dinner…
Reading the comments this morning….
“Geez, I lost a couple chickens…”
“I hadda shoot the wildcat, because…”
“Raccoon cut through my inadequate chicken-wire hack job…”
“Took my bestest rooster and the other one, too… boo-hoo!”
The innocence of childhood is punctuated by , if you ‘re lucky btw. Not so big things on the road , to throw your mental stability off. Generally your parents aren’t slaughtered in front of your face etc.
AS you get older it almost feels like you are surrounded by death and the contradictions of the human condition.Our reason guides us so well through our dreams . I often just need to look at my map of middle- earth for comfort. And think hell ain’t what people say , nor heaven so complex. I’m Tom Sawyer and Han solo. With Huckleberry Finn thrown in and Luke skywalker.
The world out there don’t care about your technological gadgets that much.
Yes James, nature certainly feeds on its own and we must never forget that we too are part of nature no matter how we might wish it were otherwise. Fortunately for the victims, Nature only kills them and eats them without any real malice, only hunger (except of course in the case of the common house cat). We humans are far worse for we manipulate, enslave, torture and use our victims, sometimes even without having the decency of killing them in the end. Humans leave them to be savaged again by either the same predator or by another. Lest I concentrate too much on the vile and the evil, we are also very much capable of great acts of courage, self-sacrifice, and caring for our fellow cell mates and I prefer to engage in such acts of kindness and decency and I invite all others to join in with me. We may be preyed upon at all times, but I have found it to be a great truth that when we strive and struggle together, we will always fare far better than when we turn on one another .
It makes one think of one’s own mortality. Some folks are saying that we may be able to extend human life. But that old Russian woman, who they claim is 128 yrs old, said that it was a punishment & she’d never lived a single happy day in her life. I’m skeptical of that. Her memory at this point is probably only good through last week.
But leaving that aside, if you could revert to a youthful condition at that age and then continue living, would you do it? At 67, I feel out-of-place & out-of-time already and I don’t think it’s just because of my declining physical condition. The only thing that keeps me going is I have a few people who still depend on me.
It’s madness anyway, Tate, don’t you think? Overpopulation isn’t just due to the reduction in infant mortality and the availability of food, it’s due to us oldies hanging around much longer. The last thing the world needs is vast numbers of people living to 100 or more.
I’d say 100 is much too generous. 70 might be more like it.
Don’t know of another species of life where if you can’t pull your weight, you don’t survive. Only humans support their old, weak and sick. I’m not proposing we leave them out in the cold, but it seems to be against the laws of life.
Must agree, even though I just turned over 60 on the odometer. 80 seems more than generous for most, 75 might be better. It could easily be enforced simply by cutting off meds for BP, diabetes and the like at a certain point if the patient doesn’t present long term viability, although we all know that will never happen. The drug and healthcare titans are intent on making it about ability to pay, so I guess the best advice for those of us of modest means is to simply get healthy. As in, athletically healthy.
At least I have a Living Will, Scratch, that says they aren’t to give me stuff to keep me alive when I’m not compos mentis – or revive me if I’m not compos mentis and I have a heart attack.
There’s nothing quite as demented as giving a ‘flu injection to a person lying in a nursing home bed with no knowledge whatever of who or where they are. So they won’t be doing that to me 🙂 .
Sorry, GlaxoSmithKline, or whoever…at that point your services will no longer be required, ta very much.
Great advice, Scratch. But for many that means undoing decades of unhealthy eating and lifestyles, and so much of the food these days is crap.
Think Jack Kervorkian should be a hero, not a pariah.
We need legal euthanasia as much as medicare for all.
Yes Scratch. Nail on head.
“The drug and healthcare titans are intent on making it about ability to pay…”
The predatory healthcare system, and all the predators involved, is designed to wring out every last dollar of net worth from individuals.
A 40 year old patient with no ability to pay – “Sorry, we can’t help you.”
A 90 year old patient with ability to pay – “How can we help you?”
Economically perverse, in that, I am 56 years old, perfectly healthy, don’t see a doctor, and don’t take any medications, therefore, I’m not nearly as economically “valuable” as someone on dialysis.
Regardless, we are all meant to die poor, it just depends, as you say, on when “ability to pay” runs out. That’s the end game. Go figure.
Yup, athletically healthy is the way to stay. And–Well– Never say ‘never,’ old buddy.
The drug and healthcare systems may be large, but they are also very fragile in that they depend on a very complex network of very specialized industries and materials to continue to provide their products.
The pharmacy where I work has, at best, two days of meds for its current patients, and gets a delivery every day but Sundays. Any moderate disaster that takes out the roads or stops electricity for 5 days or more will put us completely out of business. You can figure on most folks who have taken xanax for years to go into seizures in a day or two, as will all those on seizure meds. All the methadone clients will be in withdrawal. The hypertensives and cardiac patients will pop off soon after their meds run out.
And if lots of people need to walk somewhere that’s more than about 5 miles away, fuhgeddaboudit.
IMHO, we won’t need another global war to reduce the population. A single pandemic (such as ebola) and/or no gas and electric for 6 months will do the job nicely.
–Aibohphobia
PS–This is not to say that we won’t also get another global war. 🙂
Ability to pay makes sense to me. Why am I penalized with exorbitant health costs because the majority of humans choose to binge eat, drink and drug and then let Medicare and Medicaid foot the astronomical bills for their poor choices?
“against the laws of life.”
Chip,
It’s called “civilization”.
Correct, elysian. And b/c so much about civilization goes against the laws of life, it will be relatively short lived.
Alba, all I meant by my comment is that no one can live forever, although it’s tempting at times to imagine. Even if you could live to be two hundred or more, you’re still going to have to die at some point. And if you did live to be two hundred, how depressing would that be, having witnessed the complete oblivion in the minds of everyone around you of the world you knew! You would have to feel an inexpressible & incurable sadness. I already begin to feel it. I wasn’t speaking of the utility to others of living to a great age. So I don’t agree that it’s madness, if that’s what you mean. I notice your comment has encouraged some eager beavers to come out of the woodwork & freely offer their euthanasia policy advice.
I’ve never at any time in my life felt that very old people were a burden although from a strictly economic, transactional viewpoint, indeed they are. But when we treat people solely as economic units, these are the kinds of ideas that gain popularity.
Not disagreeing with you, Tate. You see people who have lost all their family and friends and no-one is left of their generation. Mostly they are ready to shuffle off themselves, because everything they loved has gone.
However, some people talk about how amazing with would be if we could add decades to our normal lifespan – I just mean that it would actually be horrific from a macro point of view, in terms of the increase in global population.
I don’t regard old people as a burden. It depends on what side you’re looking at it from, though. I reserve the right to consider myself a burden, if I get to be one. I don’t want to be a burden – I want to be gone before I am. Even from the very practical point of view of my home – I don’t want it to be frittered away in care costs for me in a useless old age when it could be used to help my grandson with his future. That doesn’t mean I want anyone else putting a pillow over my face, though, if I’m too expensive to maintain -) .
Yes Tate, we are out of place and out of time. It is a modern dilemma I think for centuries ago when “progress” moved so slowly forward, life stayed a lot more the same from generation to generation than it does today. Sure there are always large differences from grandpa to grandson, but never has it been as radically different as it is today thanks to technology and the huge degradation of our social structure. I was raised to respect and even admire those who worked for a living and who provided value to our society. So many 30 and 40 somethings today look down with contempt at those who work, being raised and “educated” to be “better” than that, that it makes me wonder who will carry on after we are gone. And if you check out their social media pages, you have to wonder what will happen if they ever come to the harsh reality that they are not the center of the universe and that nobody really gives a rat’s ass about all of the crap they post despite the collection of “Likes” they amass. Perhaps this is one of the elements adding to the huge increase of violence in the youth of today. Whether you believe in something afterward or not, they do not call it Eternal Rest for nothing. The older I get the better that sounds because after all I have done and still do, rest to me is the greatest of all pleasures.
I wouldn’t call people in their 30s & 40s “youth” Walter. But a lot of people have been sidelined because of all the jobs that got sent to low-wage countries.
The Republicans in Congress are aiding & abetting the usual suspects the Democrats to sabotage any attempt to solve the immigration debacle. They try to roadblock any action on e-Verify. That’s more important than the Wall. Also, it would be easy to get a tax imposed on money order remittances to help pay for the Wall. We have a class of people who are hostile to any action on these issues, both Rs & Ds.
Fuck those assholes!
I do believe that we are all in agreement here that the sellouts that rule over us come with both red and blue ties and should be hanging from telephone poles by those leashes. If this truth can be spread to the point where all understand it, then perhaps we can go about stopping the bleeding. I fear that they have far too much control over enough of the masses to prevent an Awakening, but I am willing to give it my best effort!
Nice post, JHK. Sorry to hear about the hens. We feel responsible for the creatures we look after.
“The fantastic violence of an interstate highway is hard to detect when A) you’re hermetically sealed in the capsule of your rent-a-car, and B) when you’ve been driving on interstate highways so many years that it seems like a normal human environment. ”
Two thoughts on that. One, very matter of fact: I read one time many years ago that, given an equivalent number of traffic accidents involving big, fancy cars and more standard cars, contrary to intuition there will be more deaths involving the big fancy cars. That’s specifically because their fanciness induces false complacency in their drivers, because they’re held to be more invincible and better clad etc. So the drivers drive faster and have accidents at greater speed.
Also, they may be swathed in realistically rendered Bach concertos, for instance, with ‘surround sound’, which may be soothing, but ‘soothed’ is not a good state to be driving in. I once heard someone suggest flippantly that the best way to reduce traffic accidents would be to have a metal spike sticking out of every steering wheel. Flippant indeed, but the psychology makes sense. That’s the right frame of mind for driving.
And the second thought: when I moved from the outskirts of town (not suburbs as you’d understand them, just 4 or 5 miles from the town centre) I had a car, which I dumped within less than a year of moving nearer the centre. I was already used to taking the bus into town, even when I had the car, but throwing your lot in entirely with your wider neighbourhood and city centre and meeting its denizens every day on the bus and the pavements seems to give you a different relationship to it than the one you have when you have the hermetically sealed travel option.
Yes, there are downsides, e.g. the occasional old drunk bloke on the bus who’s regaling everyone with his opinions (sometimes on them) and whose eye you desperately try not to catch, so that he’ll ignore you and sit somewhere else. But it’s part and parcel of life and some people turn to drink to struggle through theirs. I’d still rather he didn’t sit next to me, though – I haven’t yet advanced to the stage of being less easily embarrassed generally, although it’s time I had.
“So the drivers drive faster and have accidents at greater speed.”
Also because modern cars are quieter. The noise your old banger made when you accelerated made you aware of how fast you were going.
You only need to look at the car adverts on TV. They show you a car up a mountain or driving along a lake, with, notably, no other traffic, which, as we all know, is the everyday experience of most modern drivers, haha…
If the setting is more urban, you may see a man driving with the most precious thing he has in the back seat – his sleeping baby, which the gentle thrumming of the engine has just lulled off to sleep (it does work, though to be honest…). Just so that you can be brainwashed into thinking your car is the safest place on earth for your little bundle of joy.
It happened again recently: Prosecutors in a municipality near here are charging a man for leaving his car parked, with his son strapped in his car seat. The baby boy died of heat stroke. A similar incident occurred a few years ago, around the time I was helping a friend of mine move into a new place. We happened to drive by the funeral… Lord have mercy.
On the other hand cars were complete death traps. My grandfather was killed while driving 30mph with wife and kids (1939). Driving at night he didn’t see the farmers truck parked at the top of the hill (no warning lights, no “side of the road to pull off onto” just a ditch) He was impaled by the steering column; and grandma broke her back, but survived. No seat belts, airbags warning lights etc… unfortunately our technology while preventing disaster(s) has also become our dependence and addiction.
That sounds horrendous. You’re right, though, many old cars were just tin cans compared to modern ones. Sometimes I think the layers of paint now are thicker than the layers of steel back then.
My other half worked briefly in Saskatchewan several decades ago. Briefly because the medical practice bought him the cheapest heap of junk they could find to drive to work in and it skidded on some wet dirt road without a proper surface on it. The car, which also had the practice receptionist in it getting a lift home, overturned, and he got a broken neck. Fortunately he was conscious and aware he had a broken neck, so was able to warn the paramedics. But he still spent 8 months in hospital in traction, so that he might eventually walk again.
Presumably Saskatchewan had to pay for that, so a bit of false economy there, fellas – should have bought him a better car. And surfaced the road and not had a pile of dirt beside it that served as a car ski-jump. Hey ho… at least he can still walk, although his he has to be more careful going down steep slopes than he used to, because of the foot-eye co-ordination thing.
One concept I’ve enjoyed learning and pondering on in my (hobby-)study of airmanship is that of the ‘sterile cockpit’: nothing is spoken or communicated by gesture or expression which is not relevant to the task at hand: FLY THE AIRCRAFT.
It is the horrific exceptions that well illustrate the concept.
As a 50-year-plus motorcyclist I understand the need to focus all attention, fear and energies on avoiding others and staying out of the deadly potholes.
One concept I’ve pondered on in my (hobby-)study of airmanship is that of the ‘sterile cockpit’: nothing is spoken or communicated by gesture or expression which is not relevant to the task at hand: FLYING THE AIRCRAFT.
It is the horrific exceptions that well illustrate the concept: the Russian pilot who let his beloved 15-year-old son sit in the left seat to feel what it was like to be in command – and who ended up crashing the Airbus and killing all aboard.
What’s more, as a 50-year-experience plus motorcyclist I understand the need to focus all attention, fear and energies on avoiding others and monitoring surfaces.
Always good to hear from a fellow two wheeler, bless you. There is nothing better than motorcycling to get there IMHO and I do it year round here in New Jersey and have since 1979. For those of us who do so understand that total concentration and an acute sense of situational awareness puts us in total touch with what we are doing and the conditions that we are doing it in. It certainly is a lot more work, but it really keeps you a lot more in touch with and aware of the world around you than rolling along in an insulated box on wheels with the radio blasting, a coffee and a sandwich in either hand and a hands free conversation going on all at the same time. . Keep the faith brother!
Remember the ad campaign ” You meet the nicest people on a Honda”. I started riding one of those at 12 or 13. All the time drooling through the window at various Triumph’s, BSA’s, Harley’s and such. Through the years I’ve owned all of the above plus some of the Japanese crotchrockets. Now all I have is a ’68 BSA Lightning. At age 62 it may be the last one. The older British bikes are my favorite.
Beautiful post.
However, as implied at the conclusion, it really is not malevolent nature stalking hens and snatching fowl and goring pets.
One must not scour ancient stoic writings or Buddhist teachings to conclude that men ascribe motives to add context to aid mental digestion. To reconcile feelings and cognitive dissonance. Again unique among men.
It is not the action that causes pain but the cognitive interpretation.
Yet this is the nature of man. Man’s curse alone on this earth. Recognizing it as such, the inevitable conclusion stands up and forward and obvious to all upon simple reflection and contemplation.
Evil only exists in this world in the mind of man, and only they unleash it from the confines of the mind.
Buddhism also teaches that animals have minds and feel sadness, joy, fear, love, etc – at least in some measure. As do ghosts, gods, demons, etc.
And of course Buddhism teaches right vs wrong. Good exists, as does Evil. Like so many, indeed like the Old Samurai class, you take from Buddhism what you like and ignore the rest.
Where does it exist in nature?
Let me intervene. Your beloved bonobo.
No, they’re docile.
The chimpanzee.
Is it evil?
Evil doesn’t exist outside of man.
Rationalization and intellect breed evil.
Breed motives.
Motives over instinct.
You know this Janos.
You let the evils escapes biweekly.
The Bonobo isn’t docile. The Females are just dominant over the males – and rule with terror.
I agree that animals can’t be held accountable. And evil is real even if only in the mind of man. In Buddhism, Nature is far more than what we call nature, including many non-physical realms.
” Something lethal is waiting out there to get you and me, too — some carnivore perhaps, a one-celled demon, a venture capitalist with a snootful of Cabo Wabo “thick cut” tequila behind the wheel of a Chevy Tahoe. It’s not so hard to meet heartache and chaos in this world, and yet love and beauty still abide. Treasure them when you find them. They explain everything.”
Good reminders of our chosen condition and where we might be going, Jim. Thanks.
It’s likely our determined pursuit of comfort and “safety” that has brought us to this remove. (And, removed from nature it certainly is.)
A good early lesson for me was knowing that with every triumph or victory in the control of my environment brings its own defeats and sorrowful consequence. So, I tend to ‘plan’ (if plan it be) for a more natural future for those that follow and try and incorporate natural processes in building that. It’s quite satisfying and enlightening.
That said, I really don’t [now] understand how the modern, hyper-technical world justifies its existence and its continuation, as it is amazingly destructive of its own home. (Listening to modern rap “music” and what it values and eschews speaks directly to this extremely foolish state of affairs in the human condition. Like the novel 1984, it’s an instruction manual in what-not-to-do if you’d like to be in and of this world.) Nobody lives forever, nor long after they’re dead*, so leaving a bit of something for the next iteration of our/other species is probably the only important thing to be working on. Thus do I find your thoughtful input very valuable.
*We only exist as long as someone remembers our name, personality or ‘works’; not a moment longer. Even the Pharaohs will fade into the mists of time.
Something lethal is out there but something lethal has always been out there. The world has not changed. People changed under the delusion that all they had to do was get the wolf away from the door. Having done that, sent the wolves packing, they lost all purpose and now do not know what to do.
People were made to solve problems and most aliens would probably be impressed with humans that way until they found we were as dumb as rocks.
Give humans a thxisiztula and they start taking the damn thing apart!
But understanding problems is another matter. Some humans visiting aliens would find after enough anal probing do seek to understand. But sadly these humans are in a fringe minority and mostly these humans are not so good at solving the problems they do understand.
“I really don’t [now] understand howthe modern, hyper-technical world justifies its existence and its continuation”
It is a tragic truth that understanding and doing are different things. Tragic because more than a surface gee-whizz understanding, a thirst for the bigger picture in life, could have led to sustainability, peace, love and all that good stuff.
I am a few dozen miles south of from where JHK was visiting his homesteaders in our islands. This is also a couple of dozen miles west of where the cougar attack was last week.
I look out my window and see one of our wild bunnies hop by. They have no predators but cars here, and the neighborhood is full of them. The bunnies have bred like rabbits and they are everywhere.
Last year a family of bobcats established themselves in a neighborhood a mile away. When children of these ‘homesteaders’ arrive here our bunnies will never know what hit them. Our bunnies have not know a predator for generations and I can almost walk up to one of them and pick it up before it hops away.
Lawn watering hardware has allowed bunnies to spread far beyond their natural limits here. Lawn irrigation is like fracked oil to bunnies here when the rains stop. They depend on lawn sprinkling for existence and as it is now they have an endless supply of green on which because of the sprinklers so all seems good. An endless amount of green on which to feed until it is gone. American bunnies!
A drought may stop lawn watering and bobcats are coming but for now it is good to be as dumb as a bunny.
Or as thick as a brick or whatever.
an endless supply of green on which to feedbecause of the sprinklers so all seems good. <== sorry
Man will always seek to be immortal thu his deeds, works, or children. Why? Because he is immortal but only dimly realizes it. So he substitutes these other things in a vain attempt to be what he already IS – but obviously not physically. Death reaps all here.
You’ll never be satisfied to be no better than one of your bean plants, Zone. Don’t kid yourself.
Someone needs to cease kidding themselves alrighty… Start with a cessation of making shit up to suit hateful and harmful conceits.
You’re going to have to reincarnate – probably as a cabbage or turnip. I hope I don’t end up eating you. I’m sure you’ll cause indigestion.
Your next life’s already settled, remember. You chose it yourself with all that deliberate fibbing.
We’ve allowed you a lady friend, though, to keep you out of mischief next life around. Cute, isn’t she?
https://www.arkive.org/arabian-toad/bufo-arabicus/
She’s Arabian. Sorry. Karma. But those Arabian beauties can be really something. Those eyes are liquid pools a little fella could drown in…
Enjoy your mutton, lambchop.
Thanks for sharing Jim, I need a break from Other-Worldly News Media drama and Trauma. Seems that there is more than enough in each persons own individual life to deal with rather than using to avoid life’s ongoing personal reality.
I feel sorry for poor Lacy and the chickens. (There’s a reason why I’m 95% vegetarian — though I don’t know if that might change come the Long Emergency…)
If the operations of Nature often appear malevolent to us humans, we must appear to the denizens of Nature to be the vice-regents of the Devil.
The baby hummingbird I have been watching drink nectar the last couple weeks as I sit out in my patio at twilight was dead on my sidewalk yesterday. Probably not the drama of nature, I think it probably just rammed into my garage window. With all the perils those little guys face it seems amazing the species has hung in there, at least so far.
I laugh and wince at the same time whenever I see a bird fly into a glass pane. My old school addressed the problem by taping cutout silhouettes in the windows of the school library.
For a hundred million years, birds enjoyed the freedom of the skies; but now they have to contend with confounding problems evolution could not have prepared them for. Turns out, there really are new things under the sun, thanks to us.
Are you feeding it store bought “nectar”? The stuff is a drug. Instead of leaving for the winter, they hang around drinking it and die. It may have killed him or her.
People are talking about paying attention whole driving. Important but not enough. Many times reaction time is the only thing that saves us from disaster. Two areas that are bad news for reactiontime accidents, tailgating and cell phone usage. Following too close is insanity, but a big percentage of people do it. And the cell phone, especially texting is nuts too. Add onto this, as we get older, reaction time increases and the need for greater spacing between drivers increases also. Add onto this the increasing speed limits and it is no wonder we lose 40000 folks to traffic accidents each year.
Urban traffic especially parking lots are very dangerous, you do not know where people are coming from next,
A first year Psych professor I had in college said that “true insanity” could be observed everyday and participation was encouraged; just drive during rush hour with Tens of Thousands of individuals going 50+ mph in the same direction but virtually all having a different destination. The only people that are safe are those in the psych wards of hospitals!
I live on northern Vancouver Island and am pretty much on constant alert for predators, (cougars, mink, racoons, bears). I have had my sheep killed by cougars though they were locked in a shed every night. A large cougar tore off the shed door one morning (daybreak) and dragged out obese 200lb favourite ewe named ‘Deb’. Angry me tracked cougar down and shot ‘her’ at 25′ as she was crouched to pounce and attack. My dog and I have walked into several cougars on our property and every so often they try to get into my chicken pen. I always laugh when city folk tell me that ‘we’ are encroaching on their land, when people have lived on my homesite for 100+ years. Anyway, twice I have suffered losses to cougars losing 5 sheep over the years so I no longer raise them. My neighbour across the river had a cougar barge into his kitchen and attack one of his weimers in front of him. The next morning my dog and I walked into the same cat on our property with me picking up my Jack Russell and backing away…always making eye contact.
There are now grizzlies here, said to be 50+ on northern Vancouver Island, while the tourist brochures say they do not exist. When I am fishing below my house and black bears visit, I just head into the house if they don’t scare off. Mink have wiped out my chickens several times, killing all…night or day…locked up in a penned enclosure. They tear their throats out and drink the blood, carcasses are left untouched, and the mink do not return. I have had a mink try and bite through my boot.
How do we handle these threats? I walk my dog on a lead when in the bush. Always. I often carry bear spray or a walking stick with a sharpened bolt screwed into the business end. I have shot cougars practicing shoot and shovel, meaning they go into the river for the eagles and buzzards. Racoons are also shot, as are mink. It’s just the way it is if we are to eat. It’s tough out there.
This morning a North Vancouver school suspended outside activities due to a cougar…what? a city of 600,000? They have been shot in the Empress Hotel parking garage in Victoria.
I have a .30 .30 about 20′ away in a back closet with shells on the high boy. That is for now, while I am writing this and looking out over my lawn towards the river. I have a .410 shotgun with various shells near my bed for when the motion lights come on at the henhouse. Yes, the racoons get shot as they try and break in for a meal. Mink are live trapped at the henhouse and dealt with.
Everyone I know deals with their problems in a similar way, and never ever ‘call’ the authorities. It’s a waste of time. One friend of mine notified game warden of a cougar he shot above his kids school bus stop and was fined. Word gets around pretty quick about that sort of thing.
Salmon tonight for supper. Eggs for breakfast and a walk. It’s tough out there.
Paulo, 100 yrs (as in people living in a place for 100+ yrs) is nothing in terms of nature’s time frame. So yes, people are, and have been, encroaching on wildlife’s territory for far longer than 100 yrs.
Paulo can’t protect his chicken: He tells us his first solution, “How do we handle these threats? I walk my dog on a lead when in the bush.” How does this protect his chickens? I thought it was the inadequate job constructing a proper hen-house that was the problem.
Paulo continues, “I have shot cougars practicing shoot and shovel,” admitting to, basically, killing animals and hiding the bodies.
(It seems the dangers of Vancouver Island, West, could in fact be more various. Does Paulo feed his victims to the pigs? We don’t know. Apparently he feeds them to birds, or fish of some kind-which he then eats…. completing the cannibalistic circle.)
Paulo goes on, “I have a .410 shotgun with various shells near my bed for when the motion lights come on at the henhouse. Yes, the racoons get shot as they try and break in for a meal. Mink are live trapped at the henhouse and dealt with.”
Note that Paulo, instead of actually building a proper, impermeable hen-house, instead uses it to bait totally normally curious and hungry wild animals.
Is there any further evidence to required to suggest Paulo is some kind of serial wildlife murderer?
He baits animals. Shoots them. Covers it up. Does this repeatedly.
This is the kind of neighbor that maintains guns, a lawn, and a malfunctional henhouse. If this guy lived anywhere near me it would creep me out. Note his final statement, bragging about his habit of eating animal flesh and ovum. How bizarre it is some types of people exist. This type is far too common.
An interloper, an invasive is the only real predator in this story.
Too many people. Intruding. Pushing nature to the brink.
They want to live in nature but are unable to live with it. And all that entails.
Do you know what you are talking about? We are very much a part of nature, here. We live by the weather, tides, fish runs, gardens, etc. Screwup and you die, by exposure, misadventure, predator; even a twisted ankle can do it. That comment is an example of why we live here. I am not an avatar, rather, a person. City people live where nature has been paved over and is non-existent. I am reminded of the book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Here, if you don’t cut your trails twice per year you will have no place to walk. Who is the interloper? Not me. This is my home, my life.
And what pray tell is living with nature, the kooks from northern California who wander through the woods and tree bathe? Right now we have one hundred+ hummers at our feeders. Ravens are in the yard. Unbelieveable.
Cake and eat it too.
You want to see nature but not be with it.
So you encroach. Build comfy home. Bring domesticated animals.
Great views from windows indeed.
Best vista to see what’s next in crosshairs.
Mestastazation
Yep, mestizozation. An invasive foreign horde pouring into the land.
He wants people stuffed into the cities with the wilderness forbidden to them – the old “no one allowed in the King’s forest but the King and his men. An Global Elitist, Zionist school. His usual angle of attack is cognitive, focusing on anomie and meaninglessness.
People can expand out into whatever unsullied realms left for the planet’s forgotten inhabitants. Absolutely. But be with them. Not apart.
In no time his island will be choked with the subdivisions that fellow countryman Geddy excoriated. Every man has the right to a plot with a tree and some shrubs after all. It is our right.
To hell with everything else.
The king knows best for all.
Then there is the problem of evil.
Hawks hunt chickens for survival, but they don’t lie and cheat and steal. That takes intelligence and only humans are capable of that sort of behavior towards each other and towards our planet.
animals play games. bad games. go to youtube and watch the lions.
Yeah, the higher predators enjoy what the do. Dolphins are bigger than River Dolphins and will kill the latter for fun. Have you not ever watched the joy of a cat as it torments a mouse? Try to get out more and Watch. If you don’t look, you won’t See. And if you don’t see, you won’t Know.
Toying or honing?
Practice makes perfect.
Again, you’re trapped in your all too human perception contraption.
No, they’re having fun. Get out of your head and you could feel what is going on. I can rejoice with them a bit, but obviously I feel for the creatures they are tormenting. Unless it’s a bug, no doubt a limitation on my part.
And what do they know of this toying?
That it produces anxiety in the tormented?
The value of life?
What is life?
No they don’t.
What’s the difference between toying & honing in this case?
They’re not honing in the sense that a human would think of it, that is, deliberate practice to get better at a task.
They’re having fun. They’re hardwired to like it and it makes them better at what they do.
You can tie rolled dress socks to fishing line and get the same reaction out of a house cat.
They’re not having fun via torment.
True, they aren’t enjoying the torment, per se. They are probably unmindful of it, unlike at least some humans. Nevertheless, they are enjoying it; therefore, they are having fun via torment, but they are probably oblivious to the pain it causes, hence torment is not the object of their fun.
Sorry to hear about your chickens. My brother’s neighbor had a chicken who would hang out in my brother’s yard (before the other neighbor’s dog got her for dinner) and I met her once. I delightful little creature she was. I have a picture of myself hand-feeding her. I never have viewed chicken dinners the same way since.
I take it you weren’t raised on a farm.
A nice interlude here. Beauty, especially, is such an interesting perception. Do animals appreciate beauty? They certainly seem to feel joy.
I struggle with the dual nature of nature, its beauty as well as its horror. It bothers me that the subjects of predation are so frequently babies.
Yes, we trap and shoot. Possums, sometimes raccoons. Our chickens are not penned.
Our hens often raise their broods outside in nests of their own devise (which involves sitting for 3 weeks). The other day as they were in the process of hatching at the corner of the house, we left a trap out and caught a coon about 25 feet away from the little family. Near miss.
Thanks to our host and those posting first person accounts… always eagerly devoured…always appreciated.
Raccoons are so human an animal. I met a guy who was about to shoot a bear only to see it turn around and show a human face. I Bigfoot.
Meant to say A Bigfoot. I’m not a Bigfoot.
A bigfoot-in-mouth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcYppAs6ZdI&list=PL7EB14284851A0225&index=13
“Thank you, thank you.. I’ll be here all week. Try the prime rib”
Do you not believe in Bigfoot? The Indians do. Or do you think you’re smarter than them, Whitey?
Interesting. Do you believe him?
I do think raccoons are quite attractive. We don’t enjoy killing these animals and it is something I note, how when an animal doesn’t bother us, we are delighted with it, but when it does something like eat our food or kill our pets, it becomes a different story. I note that even those animals I regard with unease while at home, are a very welcome sight if I see them elsewhere.
I don’t know. I don’t see how such a large creature could remain undiscovered – unless they are inter-dimensional or spirit creatures.
Yes, raccoons enjoy causing havoc. They come on my back porch and knock the chairs off and tore the cat’s dish to pieces. They have some strength to do that. And obviously killing things is something above and beyond that – so no judgment.
” I note that even those animals I regard with unease while at home, are a very welcome sight if I see them elsewhere.”
Indeed. I’m a townie – field mice are cute (individually) while house mice are disgusting (I live in a Victorian tenement flat with imperfect Victorian floorboards, so we’ve had the occasional visitor over the years since the cat died and an invasion of a corner food cupboard on one occasion which had an open side, now sealed up).
As for this lot, you’d want thick-soled boots…
Watch for the bit (about 60 secs in) where the farmer opens the door:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWVw-j8eYSk
Which reminds me of Robert Burns’ To a Mouse – On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785′.
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/mouse
You will all know the bit that goes:
The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy
But this verse is apposite, here:
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow-mortal
And, relating to the philosophical point someone made, above or below:
Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear
An’ forward, tho’ I cannot see,
I guess an’ fear
I killed a baby bunny last night. I did feel a pang of remorse but dammit it was getting into my garden!
Alba, speaking of Burns, what do you think of Scots, is it a separate language from English or just a dialect? Just your opinion, I’ve already read a lot on it so I know the arguments and the history. I was seriously thinking of trying to learn it, but after the aforementioned reading, decided to waste my time in other ways. I assume you use it to some extent as a more informal register.
Tate
I don’t think my opinion would be worth much, I’m afraid. In the absence of academic study, which I haven’t done and which doesn’t always answer the question anyway, I’d be happy to go with Wikipedia’s few sentences on the matter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
Creating categories and then deciding which category something goes in can be a tautological exercise – it depends on how you define the category.
Apart from French and some semi-forgotten scraps of German, I only speak standard English, occasionally with a few words of common Scots idiom. I would need a glossary for up to 50% of Burns. The verses I quoted are the ones I though any English speaker could understand, with only a word or three to wonder about, without missing the gist.
If you’ve read around the issues, then you already know much more than me. I don’t use Scots at all – neither did my parents. They spoke standard English with a Scottish accent. but with the inclusion of common Scottish dialect words.
When we moved to the north of England (I was four) my tiny classmates laughed at something I said. I was able to speak with an excellent Tees-side accent within a couple of days, to conform. Kids don’t like to be different. My mother didn’t like it and was quite domineering, so I spoke with a Scottish accent at home, instead of moving totally to the dialect of my peers as children will do if left alone. Now, I suppose you would call my accent ‘educated Scots’ 🙂 .
I had a colleague I thought for years was southern English – turned out he was Scottish but went to a very posh private school in Edinburgh. Such are the nuances of class on our little islands.
I should say that back in the day, when my parents went to school (they were born in 1910 and 1918 respectively) schools often had a policy of homogenisation, so dialects were caned out of you in the classroom sometimes, just as my left-handed mother was forced to write with her right hand.
GreenAlba, if you have half an hour to spare, here’s a timely podcast episode you may find of interest:
https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots
Tate too, for that matter, since you asked about the Scots language. (Opinion is that it is, indeed, a distinct language.) Share and enjoy.
Though her husband died before I was born, my maternal grandmother grew up speaking yet another language, Gaelic, at home in rural Cape Breton; but she was punished for using it at school.
Thanks, Elrond. I found half an hour. The discussion mirrored what I’d say about the dynamics of the situation, both socially and linguistically.
Even Burns lived among Edinburgh’s literati as well as on Ayrshire farms and I understand he spoke standard English socially there.
The social aspect of it is what enables Scots (in its milder forms) to be used for comic effect in programmes like Rab C Nesbitt. And Billy Connolly (who previously worked in the Govan shipyards) is affectionately known as The Big Yin.
We like our idiom, even those of us whose English is mostly like anyone else’s. No single English word can describe a dreich day as well. And any Scot will tell you there’s nothing in English that describes the particular facial expression as well as ‘glaikit-looking’.
https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/scottish-word-of-the-day-glaikit-1-2343273
And the legendary response of the bolshy Scottish schoolchild has always been ‘ye cannae make me’ 🙂 .
Seattle, September, 1961, my arrival to gray sky and drizzle was broken only by the blueish arc light of welding on the Space Needle as construction work rushed toward completion in time for the 1962 World’s Fair. I-5 through downtown and SeaTac International were years away. North beyond N. 145 and the U. district was still pastures interspersed by dotted suburb development. Beyond Mountlake Terrace all the way to Everette there was mostly just pasture and wooded areas. The same applied southward beyond Boeing Field to Tacoma. Ballard’s “Fishermen’s Wharf still had an active Puget Sound fishing fleet. Puget Sound islands were practically uninhabited except for a sparse scatter of beach front summer/week-end homes. Strewn along Lake Washington’s east shoreline was, here and there, remnant communities of lumber towns. Scars on the landscape around Bellvue was just beginning to hint at the development which would come following the completion of a second floating bridge (still some years away) across Lake Washington. Population on the Olympic Peninsula seemed hardly more than pioneer outpost.
It was the most beautiful setting and area I’d ever seen. My mind was full of attempting to reflect backward to its appearance as described by John Steinbeck in his book “Travels With Charlie”, which I’d just read. Now, just look at what has become of the entire I-5 corridor which Seattle straddles, from Canada to Mexico, then try to argue that human society has capacity to confront, then accommodate by practical application nature’s message of inevitability.
Cavepainter
Thank you for an excellent post describing western Washington before it got overrun.
I lived in the Olympia area for a few years back in the late 70’s and early 80’s.The growth and sprawl was just starting to accelerate. What a unique, beautiful area. I remember walking out of a bar at midnight and smelling the sea at low tide. Even though Olympia was 60 miles inland, it was a seaport due being on a Puget Sound inlet. I was also there in May 1980 when Mount St. Helen’s erupted, which proved to me that man is not in any way in charge.
I was in the Seattle area a few years ago, I could not believe the sprawl. The I90 corrider west of Seattle was mostly wilderness when I lived there. Now, there are subdivisions (exburbs) all the way past North Bend to the base of Snoqualmie Pass. The same thing is happening along the I25 corridor in Colorado.
If you live in a nice area, the people will come. Population growth is like a continual stream of water out of a garden hose, it has to go somewhere.
Yesterday evening just at dusk low moisture laden clouds were sailing in from the Gulf and were painted mauve against an orange red sky. At just the right moment I looked up to see a solitary Osprey on wing to the bay.
“Uh-will the wind ever remember the names it has blow in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age
And its wisdom it whispers, “No, this will be the last”
And the wind cries Mary – Hendrix
Just to know you ran your best race as the finish line is in sight is enough.
I was reading the Al Hendrix thought the song was for JH mom, dead at age 33 or so. Drank herself to death.
What about the collapse of the EU Banking System? Is that event very near?
from Doug Noland’s blog last Saturday May 26:
“On a global basis, risk aversion is taking hold. De-risking/De-leveraging Dynamics have gained momentum. Liquidity abundance has begun to wane; financial conditions globally are beginning to tighten. This ensures markets will now assume a different approach with risk. So long as risk embracement and resulting liquidity abundance were commanding global markets, EM and Italian fragilities were inconsequential. The same could be said for vulnerabilities in regions, countries, governmental entities, sectors, corporations and businesses around the globe. Rather suddenly, however, prospects for risk aversion, Credit tightening and illiquidity will have newly mindful markets keen to sidestep the weakened, the fragile and the sickly. It may at this point be subtle, but it’s also quite a sea change.
“The world is now on contagion watch. More and more, De-risking/Deleveraging Dynamics are encroaching on Greed. The Fed is raising rates, and global central banks are winding down QE. A shrinking pool of new QE liquidity confronts a rapidly expanding pool of speculative holding liquidations.
“I don’t expect the Powell Fed to turn hawkish. Indeed, if things unfold as I expect the Fed will surely turn more cautious with rate hikes. But I also believe the new Chairman would rather not come quickly to the market’s defense…
Latest commentary from DN’s blog Saturday June 2:
“As I see it, cracks are opening in the greatest Bubble of all time. Serious fissures have developed in E[merging] M[arkets], Europe and China. Meanwhile, the stimulus-driven U.S. economic boom runs unabated… Global markets, of course, were buffeted this week by developments in Italy… I hold the view that the euro monetary experiment has been deeply flawed in both its structure and implementation… Regrettably, there was no mechanism to effectively regulate Credit expansion… ECB policies, along with central bank reflationary policies globally, have only exacerbated wealth inequalities, economic maladjustment and financial Bubbles. This is an especially intractable problem for the eurozone… Eventually, fed up electorates will refuse being held hostage by the securities markets. I expect the euro system will at some point badly falter, and I suspect this view is quietly shared within the marketplace… the Italian to German two-year yield spread blew out to 353 bps in chaotic Tuesday trading… Derivatives and leveraged speculation run amuck… Wild market gyrations were not limited to European bonds. Ten-year Treasury yields, after trading as high as 3.13% the previous week, sank to 2.76% in Tuesday trading. In just five sessions, two-year yields dropped 30 bps to Tuesday morning’s low of 2.29%… If messy European politics weren’t enough, there were the Trump Tariffs… It’s the unfolding trade confrontation with China with the distinct potential to rattle markets. More than trade, it’s a brewing battle royale pitting the world’s lone superpower against the aspiring superpower…”
Grey clouds painted with a delight soon to fade away into an enveloping blackness. And the wind cries and the wind dies and Mary is gone.
Nature is all about sustainability, while humanity does almost nothing on a sustainable basis (breathing is the only sustainable activity I can think of we engage in).
It’s bad enough we’ve so badly overpopulated the planet, but have compounded the problem by virtually removing ourselves from the food chain (one of nature’s marvelous examples of complete, absolute recycling).
We even box up our dead, using valuable wood and metal. Not too mention marking the burial site w stone, granite and even marble. Cemeteries may be the ultimate example of unsustainable human behavior.
Hope this comment is relevant (or not too random) to today’s column.
We even box up our dead, using valuable wood and metal. Not too mention marking the burial site w stone, granite and even marble. Cemeteries may be the ultimate example of unsustainable human behavior.
Exactly right. The whole obscene burial industry should be outlawed immediately. Burn and scatter/dispose is the only way to go.
While cremation is way better than coffins and burials, it is quite energy intensive and unnatural in the way it removes food from the food chain.
But then, human meat may be mildly toxic due to our nasty diet, so integrating the deceased into the food chain–even if we wanted to–could be difficult
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial
Chipshot,
A good idea here, but then again, Tibetans probably consume less man-made poisons than we do! Vultures are moving in to this territory as well; now a common sight.
Or the Breaking Bad method:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaline_hydrolysis_(body_disposal)
Neat, clean, and efficient. Better disposal through chemicals!
Interesting. What changed? Or in other words, why only now? Did something happen to the local feathered carrion eaters, the Crows?
ozone
Related to your sky burial – in particular the carrion birds – I am reminded of the story about vultures in India, which have an important public hygiene role in terms of cleaning up dead animals etc. that would otherwise spread disease.
Seemingly back in the 90s Indian farmers started treating every random illness in their cattle with diclofenac, because it was cheap. Turns out vultures can’t metabolise diclofenac, so when they fed on dead cattle, they died, removing an important part of the disease-control ecosystem. More dead animals, more rats, more disease…and a vulture crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_vulture_crisis
We humans never know what we’re messing with.
“? Did something happen to the local feathered carrion eaters, the Crows?”
Yes, Janos,
Something did “happen” to them…hundreds of them on my watch…..
Sorry, but that was in the “bad old days”…
Confessions of an old crow hunter.
I was thinking that too, but figured composting would be a step too far and would have the problems you listed here. Our very bodies now reflect the toxic environment we’ve created. Quite a mess we’ve created.
Only people who shop organic will qualify to be stamped as Soylent Green acceptable.
There’s no need for that kind of funeral these days.
Here’s a green burial site not that far from me:
http://www.binningwood.co.uk/
A colleague who was walking there said it’s like a real living cathedral, the way it’s set out among the trees, so it’s a lovely place for loved ones to visit if they want to.
Even Edinburgh city has a council-run green burial site on a hillside on the way out of town.
Bamboo and willow/wicker coffins are a big thing now – I wouldn’t dream of using anything else. Cremation isn’t that environmentally friendly either.
You can even get personalised coffins that are basically paper.
Ever watch the Wicker Man? All that stuff is coming back. Rationality leaves with Christianity, believe it or not.
Yes watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI2oS2hoL0k
Rationality left with xtianity… and took the west with with it.
Heartache and chaos
https://vimeo.com/171634946
Then into your life there comes a darkness
There’s a spacecraft blocking out the sky
And there’s nowhere to hide
You run to the back and you cover your ears
But it’s the loudest sound you’ve ever heard
And all we trapped, rag doll cloth people
We are helpless to resist
Into our darkest hour
But it was just a laugh, just a laugh
Just a laugh, just a laugh
Even at this angle
And so we crumble
A ten-ton head made of wet sand
This dread circumference
You gotta be kidding me
The grass grows over me
Your face in the glass, in the glass
It was just a laugh, just a laugh
It’s whatever you say it is
Split infinity
And into your life, there comes a darkness
And a spacecraft blocking out the sky
And there’s nowhere to hide
You run to the back and you cover your ears
But it’s the loudest sound you’ve ever heard
Into your darkest hour
When you’ve had enough of me
When you’ve had enough of me
Sweet darling
When you’ve had enough of me
When you’ve had enough of me
Sweet darling
Sweet darling
Sweet darling
Sweet darling
Not a film I liked – it seems to have a cult following, though, so I’m in a minority I think. There was even a Wickerman (alternative music) festival in Dumfriesshire until a few years ago, which was eventually abandoned after the organiser died.
Let’s leave Christianity and rationality for another time.
Sorry, that was meant for Janos and other replies intervened. Obviously if you guys want to get stuck into Christianity and rationality, do go ahead. I just didn’t want to derail the thread…
And there’s no connection between the nature of your funeral service and the material your coffin’s made from, Janos. You can choose wicker and still go out with whatever high liturgy does it for you.
Or you can waste resources and have a polished mahogany box with all the trimmings, but have no service at all and direct your family and friends to repair straight to the pub for some liquid remembrance. It’s a free country…
I was hoping to be eaten and thereby returned back into the system. Plus when the animals crap me out all over the place my descendants will be able to say that I am everywhere. I just read Dr. Mary’s Monkey and a detailed report of cremation was contained within. Apparently the process does not reduce the carcasses to dust, because many of the bones remain afterwards and have to be ground into powder before they can take their place on the mantle. Or wherever.
If you want to be munched with as little resistance as possible, you can even go cardboard, Walter…
https://www.ecoffins.co.uk/productdetail.aspx?productid=83
I find wicker to be a vaguely midway compromise, but we’ll see.
And you could ask your nearest and dearest to plant a nice tree on top that would be well nourished, so you could blossom year after year 🙂 . They’d say ‘ah, look, Walter always looks his best at this time of year…’.
You may think I’m taking the p*ss, but an earlier iteration of my other half’s Will specifically said ‘I want to be buried under a fruit tree, such as a hazel’. So we could have tried out each new year’s crop and made bad jokes.
Apparently the process does not reduce the carcasses to dust, because many of the bones remain afterwards and have to be ground into powder before they can take their place on the mantle. Or wherever. — Walter
That’s putting a heavy guilt burden on your survivors. I’ve known people that had to (or felt like they had to) schlep their deceased’ remains around in different moves, the said remains always ending up in out-of-the-way pockets of their living space. I used to joke that I wanted my ashes on the mantle with a pair of those novelty eyeballs attached that follow you around the room.
I knew a guy — a taxidermist — who put his dad’s body in a discarded cardboard box, which was the original packaging for a refrigerator, threw it in the back of his pick-up and hauled it out to Texas to its final resting place.
Just don’t do what Walter & the Dude did to Donny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKjBFsyYC0g
Not to worry Tate, it will be ok. In fact, I could care less what anyone does with my lifeless carcass once I am done with it for I will have already moved onto more important things.
Mausoleum, n: the final and funniest folly of the rich. Ambrose Bierce
The original Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. Only the Pyramids survive to the present day. (But one of them, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, may not have been real.)
Time traveled back to the barbershop of my youth, where the only magazine to look at while waiting ones turn for a boy’s haircut was Field and Stream. Anyway, Valerie Jarret is right out of Dr Seuss. I feel better now.
From last week’s post:
Thanks Alba, for that little vid. Loved it.
Akmofo:
I’m a little puzzled. I said it was equally likely that other religious characters were fictional, and you said read Velikovsky. I think very highly of him and am reading one of his books now. Also, decided to reread another as it was many years ago.
But I don’t get how that verifies the Tanakh. When I say that Moses or David may be fictional, I didn’t necessarily mean anything very specific. There may or may not have been real characters. Given the propensity to lie, exaggerate and so on, we cannot know how things were embellished. Of course, without thinking the thing was written by God, one can get much useful information from ancient writings. Perhaps it is the catastrophe in the Tanakh that you speak of. Well and good, but that catastrophe is recorded by many people all over the world.
Of course there are going to be many more or less historical items in this set of writings.
The more I learn about the TaNaKh the more I’m amazed by it’s accuracy and historicity. The TaNaKh was written by scribes and the TaNaKh says so. The Torah was scribed by Moses. Moses learned the Hebrews’ history from his brother Aaron who was the great Kohen (priest) of Israel.
Anyway, there’s a great deal of archeological evidence that verifies various names and narratives from the TaNaKh. If you’re interested you can look these up yourself in various publications. It’s not for me to convince you, nor do I care to.
On a philosophical level, I’ll ask you this simple question: If I won’t believe in the TaNaKh then what am I going to believe in? The TaNaKh gives me a history a purpose a future a hope a family a brotherhood a nation a country a divine world and creator and a guiding light. It’s good to be a TaNaKh believing Jew! I feel sorry for those who are not. They are lost in darkness and despair.
“It’s good to be a TaNaKh believing Jew! I feel sorry for those who are not. They are lost in darkness and despair.”
This is often the illusion of the convert. I do not feel lost in darkness and despair. Nor do I think the idea of a God who would set in motion a creation that would include humans from whom he would then pick favourites is anything other than the stuff of fairy tales. That would make him less than the humans whose creation he set in motion. We do not admire parents who favour one of their children over another.
He would at the very least have to be better than us to be worthy of being called God. Or else he’s God but not a good one.
It’s true that believers in any number of solace-giving beliefs are made happy by those beliefs. That’s why they believe them – and why placebos work.
As Francis Bacon said, ‘people prefer to believe what they would prefer to be true’.
But if it makes you happy, be happy. We find our happiness where we may.
No, nobody is favoring anybody. The TaNaKh is a resource that contains examples of historical wisdom and folly. Whether you wish to make use of it is up to you. Nobody is playing favorite but you. You traded the wisdom of the TaNaKh for your husband’s Nazi medical folly and it is you that suffers for it. It is YOU that must take responsibility for your folly. Stubbornness ignorance pride is the choice YOU made. Don’t blame anybody but yourself for it, and especially not my God!
He owns God you see. His God! He has him trapped in the Tanakh and Talmud – even though he desperately denies knowing the latter.
Your journey of self-inflicted folly, as I see it, Mrs Green:
— https://youtu.be/X8bhqHq1__c
My passing mention of placebos wasn’t intended to mean that my point about beliefs had anything to do with medicine. You seem, if I read you correctly, to have similar views to Christian Scientists, who believe that physical health depends intimately on spiritual health. I don’t think that any level of spiritual health would ever have stopped people getting polio, diphtheria, smallpox or the plague. To think they might is insanity.
I am not foolish enough or sufficiently interested in your approval to find the term ‘Nazi medical folly’ personally offensive. It is merely another indicator of the rather silly baby-and-bathwater syndrome that can be found on this site in so many forms.
My husband would tell you, as he tells me (‘repeatedly’ doesn’t begin to cover it), that 90% of modern medicine (he qualified in the 70s) is ‘shite’. I feel he exaggerates a bit, but whatever…
He doesn’t just mean the pharma companies, whose imperatives inform so much of it. He also means half the ‘patients’, e.g. those who turn up wasting NHS time with nonsense and who should according to him, be told to f*ck off, which of course would be the quickest way to get yourself struck off, although there are many others. He is polite and courteous to them all, I hasten to add, and keeps his opinions on the wasters and idiots to himself.
He gets formal complaints from patients when he refuses to prescribe the medicine they came for and feel entitled to, in the same way that they expect to get what they want from Tesco, when his clinical judgement says they don’t need it. That takes three hours a pop of unpaid time to deal with, in administration.
But he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, as you do. He recognises vaccination as THE major contribution to modern healthcare and knows that the polio vaccine prevented children from walking around with calipers in a way that reading the TaNaKh would not – which doesn’t mean you can’t read the TaNaKh as well for other purposes but it wouldn’t have stopped you getting polio. And he prescribes medication when he judges medication to be necessary or helpful, which it often is.
The TaNaKh would not remotely have helped one of my nephews on the Christmas Day when, at five, he seemed to have a bad cold or ‘flu. His parents assumed ‘flu, perhaps, or norovirus, as there was some about at the time, so they just left him be for a while and didn’t immediately take him to the doctor.
When they finally took him to a Nazi hospital, the Nazi consultant said he had appendicitis and the worst case of peritonitis he’d ever seen in a child. Another hour and he’d have been dead. Perhaps they should have just read the TaNaKh to him instead of an operation.
Mrs Green, as malnourished as the ancients got they didn’t suffer from polio. They also didn’t suffer from monkey virus induced aids and cancers, or the now 30,000 and growing other nazi pharmaco “diseases”. Wrap your mind and that of your husband’s around that little bit of nazi reality and the ramifications thereof.
Nothing happens by accident, Mrs Green. Just take a look at our bitter, Jihadi Yan. His God run away to Argentina. Being emotionally blind, you would posit that the Argentine climate was better for cultivating his mustache and heroin habit, and I would again admonish you for displaying your usual emotional blinders.
Sorry, I am obviously too blind to get the point of your Argentinian reference, as I don’t know which particular one of Janos’ gods you are referring to.
If you think the ancients didn’t get cancer, you are mistaken. We have more of it now because we live longer – it is mostly (clearly not entirely) a disease of the later years. I am aware of environmental causes for some cancers, but cancer did not appear just in the modern world. And Y. pestis has been around a long time as well. I think smallpox has been with us for a while as well, although that Nazi medicine seems to have disposed of it, thankfully.
The fact that HIV is relatively recent says nothing about more ancient diseases. There wasn’t much modern medicine around when the native populations of the Americas died from measles either.
And this chappie from 1400 or so BC seems to have polio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poliomyelitis#/media/File:Polio_Egyptian_Stele.jpg
Yan didn’t tell you about his heroin and cocaine doping moustached God? He popularized the Vatican’s fascist salute and was later spotted in Argentina
— https://www.amazon.com/Blitzed-Drugs-Third-Norman-Ohler-ebook/dp/B01IAS9G94
I’m more convinced I’m looking at a helicopter than a lame Egyptian afflicted by polio
— https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/641465/Proof-of-time-travel-Riddle-of-planes-and-helicopter-found-in-Egyptian-hieroglyphs
That you are convinced of what you want to be convinced of should tell you something.
But good night 🙂 .
G’nite
— https://youtu.be/o7_LyMX8ntg
The Ohler book looks interesting, akmofo. I didn’t realise they were all stoned when attacking France.
The blurb reminded me, for some reason, of Tom Paxton’s Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues.
“That I had to answer nature’s call
I was stumbing around in a beautiful haze
When I met a little cat in black pj’s
Rifle, ammobelt, BF Goodrich sandals,
Looked up at me and said “What’s the matter with you, baby”
He said we’re camping down the pass
And smelled you people blowing grass
And since, by the smell, you’re smoking trash
I brought you a taste of a special stash
Straight from Uncle Ho’s victory garden
We call it Hanoi Gold.
So his squad and my squad settled down
Passed some lovely stuff around
All too soon it was time to go
Captain got on the radio
Said hello headquarters, hello headquarters
We have met the enemy and he has been smashed.”
Kaneh Bosm (hebrew: cane of aromaticity/perfume)
Cannabis in the Old Testament
— https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/1996/05/01/1090
— https://youtu.be/s27QLmdhxKM
Akmofo,
Like I said, there is no doubt much accuracy in it, but over time I have read of may inaccuracies, and more are found. Also sometimes the books are written while pretending to have been written at an earlier time. It can show up in things like names of cities. For example, a person might write about New York City. But for a brief time, it had a Dutch name and was founded by the Dutch.
So if you were writing a history of New York at the time when it had a Dutch name, but you did not know that, you would call it New York, whereas in fact it had a Dutch name at that time.
If you are not considering the Bible the word of God, that may not be a fatal error, but it does show shenanigans.
The tradition that the Torah or Pentateuch was written by Moses is doubtful. At least, the part at the end of Deuteronomy writes about Moses and his death and burial. For some reason, in the middle ages, when some author pointed this out, he was badly persecuted. To me, this is not such a bad problem. They should simply have assumed that a scribe added an ending to his life tacked on at the end. People are so bizarre about that sort of thing, thinking nothing of hurting people who disagree with them when really they do not know what they think they want to be sure of.
On a philosophical level, why believe in something because it satisfies that very good list? What kind of standard of truth is that? I know very well that most people have very low standards and that their search for truth is not foremost, but takes a back seat to more urgent desires, such as comfort and reduction of fear.
When it comes to belief systems, I am afraid that the more one uses serious scrutiny, the more they fall apart. It may be due to human nature that we have some sort of need for belief systems and are too impatient to build real foundations.
My path is a lonely path, I admit.
I can see that it is better to have all those things than not to have them. And it takes (in my opinion a fruit of multiple incarnations) a lot of spiritual fortitude to jettison the story aspects.
I do have some of those things, perhaps the highest on the list – a divine world and creator. I think humanity is largely quite ignorant of its history and this bothers me a lot. But settling for a story is not good enough for me. However, I am not suggesting that the Tanakh is not at least a partial story and any story is always told from one viewpoint and not all viewpoints.
There are problems, though, with these religions and I wish that people could get the good out of them without the negatives.
C’mon, it’s obvious Moses didn’t pen his own obituary. Only idiot Vatican propagandists would insist on such idiocy to discredit the basic truth of Moses and his brother Aaron penning the Torah. And of-course the TaNaKh has seen various redactors. it explicitly says so. That doesn’t change a thing. A sharp Hebrew mind would instantly pick up on such clues in the TaNaKh. For example, the name of the Egyptian Pharaoh “Queen Sheeva” visiting Israel was obviously obscured. But those who know history can easily place the correct name with the Pharaoh Queen Hatshepsut, who was sitting (Sheeva) in for her step-son Thutmose III, the younger co-Pharaoh.
I found my truth. My advice to you, Sophia, is find a friend and husband that will make you a Jewess in Israel. You don’t know life until you do this.
Out fishing this week, I came upon a moose splashing about just up the riverbank twenty yards or so. I followed it up over the bank to find TWO moose. Such majestic and beautiful animals. Have lived in Vermont all of my life and seen but one moose, before. Never caught a fish at that particular fishing hole either, but I go back every year just to see….as Jim says, treasure it when you find it.
Rather temperamental though, or so I’ve heard.
A cameraman caught a terrible thing: a wolf attacked a male moose who was without his weapons – his antlers. He got a hold of the moose’s nose and held on. The moose shook him off, but was in agony. He ran into a pond for safety but the wolf just waited all night for him to drop and die. One wolf, but able to take down such a powerful animal.
Jeopardy question last week:
“Largest member of the deer family whose young are often preyed upon by wolves.” Contestant answered “what is elk?”
“what is elk?” – Tate
============
Without getting into excessive detail, “the Elks” is a fraternal order whose members are mostly, if not exclusively, blue collar laborers of primarily Polish, Italian and Irish ethnicity (I doubt that one in a hundred members is a Jew) who hang with and enjoy the company of other members where they can drink themselves into a stupor on beer for far less money than it would cost at a typical sports bar. My b-i-l, Peter has been a member for about 40 years.
Ditto for most of the “animal lodges” I imagine. The hoi polloi of masonry. But the Shriners are animals too I’ve heard.
I bet you covet those cool little cars they drive.
Food cycle the topic. Sometimes better not to talk too much about certain food topics. Walid Shoebat, known for his uncomplimentary commentary on Mohammedanism got shut down last week. Not because of another report on excesses of Islam per se, this was apparently a narrative on Mexican Cartel dietary shift coming.
(Certainly hope this post does not get YOU in trouble, Mr K…) The near last article in Shoebat was regarding news from Jalisco State: Majort Cartels are providing mandatory instruction in Cannaballism to all forces. (Did not want to use terms like “hands” or “members”…)
Certainly shows foresight to prepare the troops for famine, Segue to real threat of famine in North America owing to natural (Mass Solar Ejection) or much more likely troposphere nuclear detonations causing EMP/HAMP motor transport killers. Study authorities such as Richard Clarke and Peter Vincent Pry and you can be a nutcase like yours truly…
Famine across America is possible until we again have more robust food distribution infrastructure, as was the case until late 1960’s when Ike’s Freeways eclipsed remaining agriculture region rail branch lines. Only in recent decades did Canada finally “modernize” with removal of Wheat Trust region rail branch lines. Along with Theodore “T.-Bone” Pickens’ observation America has experienced the greatest transfer of wealth of any culture in history. Others have added the fact US Strategic Planners have proven themselves lacking in both native intelligence and situational acumen in allowing heritage local and food basket rail matrix to disappear. Interested in the 1950 RR map, see all-time US rail footprint map books from http://www.spv.co.uk, Helpful for post EMP famine reduction rail build back into food production regions etc. Finding forgotten rail and track material, also.
There is a very simple standard to apply before we get into usual website name calling: When 1950’s Happy Motoring and rubber tire visions put Middle East hooks in our jaws with Just-In-Time consumables distribution and loss of rail matrix, US enjoyed an exceedingly important status , so unique and wonderful we were able to leave it behind without noticing… When Viet Nam came and we disbanded the last remnants of military RR transportation units at Ft. Eustis VA, America ceased being
A Lending not a Borrowing Nation
Famine across America is possible until we again have more robust food distribution infrastructure, as was the case until late 1960’s when Ike’s Freeways eclipsed remaining agriculture region rail branch lines. Only in recent decades did Canada finally “modernize” with removal of Wheat Trust region rail branch lines. Along with Theodore “T.-Bone” Pickens’ observation America has experienced the greatest transfer of wealth of any culture in history. Others have added the fact US Strategic Planners have proven themselves lacking in both native intelligence and situational acumen in allowing heritage local and food basket rail matrix to disappear. Interested in the 1950 RR map, see all-time US rail footprint map books from http://www.spv.co.uk, Helpful for post EMP famine reduction rail build back into food production regions etc. Finding forgotten rail and track material, also. – 4014HAMPHEDGE
=============
Have you ever noticed that nearly every commenter who is a regular on these pages has a favorite topic to which ALL conversations will gravitate. This is like a Jewish friend of mine (last name Seinfeld, an actual third or fifth cousin of Jerry) for whom ALL conversations wind up in the second World War. He knows more about WW2 than William Shirer. His wife will say with great disgust, “here he goes AGAIN!”
In the case of Janos it is Jews, Blacks and Hispanics. For BRH it is the degradation of the cities and towns of his beloved state of Connecticut (especially Hartford) at the hands of ‘you know who.’ For Akmofo, everything is about the Vatican/Jesuit Mafia. For me, everything in the world can somehow be connected to pool and pyramids. But………….for Hamphedge it’s all about our abandoned rail infrastructure. The word rail appears 6 times in the excerpt above.
Speaking of Hamphedge and the excerpt, I would like to know if Hamp is making some inside joke when he refers to “T.-Bone” Pickens’ or whether Hamp is like my b-i-l, Peter who CANNOT be made to understand that it is Boone, not Bone no matter if I tell him a hundred times.
1 trick ponies.
What was the name of the nut who always blames the Vatican?
Not Akmofo.
In other words, pool is just as important an issue as race. All obsessions are created equal since they’re all just obsessions. Just like all dogs are equal as they’re just dogs. All cars are cars. And all people are just people and thus equal.
This is what it means to live in Flatland and be unable to rise above the Tautological Knowledge and to have no Chest (heart).
In other words, pool is just as important an issue as race. – Janos
============
Yeah, sort of, more or less, by and large, for the most part.
Well that’s just not acceptable. No doubt since you have no chest you are thus attracted to women with big ones as a way of compensation.
shoebat dot com is disabled, but shoebat dot org has replaced it.
Sorry about the birds. Reinforcing the coop should spare them.
Lovely post. Life is fragile. I try to “enjoy every sandwich,” as the late, great Warren Zevon said not long before his death.
Excellent thoughts. Yesterday, I had to catch a big rat (or corn) snake twice. The first time, it was in the process of swallowing a 3rd duck egg from the nest in their coop. Put it in a cage, judged the mesh would contain it as the thing was FAT. Put it in the back of the truck, went back to work on weeding, it would be released later, a few miles away. When I came back, the crafty bugger had upchucked all 3 eggs to get skinnier & escape. Found it right there by the truck, and this time used a cooler. Removal successful. I have to shoot things sometimes when I catch them in the act of raiding the coops at night, but catch and release is the preferred procedure.
Very good thought at the end of the column, about love and beauty justifying everything. Thank you for your informative, funny and original writings that I have enjoyed for many years. Bravo, JHK.
It looks to me like natural processes are a game of percentages. Can a species keep up its survival percentages to ensure a genetically viable population? If it can’t then it goes bye-bye.
They say that today people from outside Africa have got a small percentage of Neanderthal genes from Sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding thousands of years ago, but that in maybe ten thousand years pretty much all Neanderthal genes will be culled via the process of natural selection. That’s how it works.
The origins of Sapiens keeps getting pushed back in time. They say that archaic forms have been found in Morocco that go back about three hundred thousand years. I’ve seen the pics of them, people with faces that are flattened ie tucked under, but with brain cases that are still elongated as opposed to rounded. But evolutionary pressures had the final say. They say that archaic forms of sapiens were around until fairly recently in different parts of the world, but were obliterated in the end.
Nature isn’t a video-game. And people that are blind to reality, also known as facts, get snuffed, for real. Maladaptive genes, that cause cognitive processes to malfunction, get wiped out. Simple as that.
For many years, I hiked in the foothills of northern Colorado’s Front Range above Boulder, which is still prime mountain lion habitat.I never saw any big cats, but I know they have seen me! Amazing stealth creatures!
Their turf keeps getting encroached upon by wealthy trust funders, hedge funders, etc who are building mountain mansions deeper into the wildnerness to escape the riff raff. However, they call on the riff raff to put out the forest fires that frequently threaten to incinerate their dream Taj Mahals.
Now I live in the Las vegas area, where the worst drivers in the world reside. It is pedal to the metal on the freeway while at the same time texting. More thsn half are either drunk or high on something. So, it is a calculated risk everytime you venture out. If you get maimed by one of these nimrods, you get to deal with the monster called the American Health Care System.
I feel safer among the bears and mountain lions.
The worst are said to be the drivers in Prince Edwards County, Maryland.
AKA ‘Congo Bypass.’
I am currently working my game camera on Musconetcong Mountain where we live here in Western NJ, trying to confirm a mountain lion sighting that two of my neighbors reported to our Committee two weeks ago. I had seen one myself a few years ago and there are always the occasional reports of sightings online and in the papers here, always vehemently denied by the State and Fish & Game Searching online for clues I found a very interesting website dedicated to the big cats that claims there are something like 30,000 of them in America:
http://mountainlion.org/us/nj/-nj-portal.asp
From the website….
“Though mountain lions once roamed the hills and forests of New Jersey, persecution at the hands of humans drove them locally extinct. If we support open space conservation and preserve corridors connecting potential habitat, we could reverse this situation and bring mountain lions back home to New Jersey.”
While another site claims that there are mountain lions in every state West of the Mississippi and in Florida there are none elsewhere, except of course for….
“A good example of how hard it is for a mountain lion to sneak across the east is the young male (CORRECTION the mountain lion had no collar) from South Dakota that wandered through Minnesota, Wisconsin, and likely the Upper Peninsula of Michigan before finally being hit by a car in Connecticut.”
When I consider the growing number of black bear around here and the noticeable increase of the coyote/wolf hybrids in the area as well as their increased aggression towards our household pets, I cannot but recall the passage in Revelation 6:8 which reads….
And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
But don’t listen to me, I am but a voice crying in the wilderness….
A ray of light to hear of mountain lion sightings, Walter.
Sadly, there is almost zero chance of providing adequate habitat, especially when human population continues to grow.
Even if they are adaptable enough to survive near people (ala leopards around Mumbai), we won’t tolerate any attacks (on us or our domestic animals) and will end up viewing them as enemies to be driven/killed off.
Nature isn’t interested or involved in the scribblings of man-made religious books, however– Nature is effected by men who are interested or involved with those same scribblings.
PeteA,
I would call that most unfortunate… especially the effect of the dominionists.
Hey ozone, was it you that suggested that we read books titled “The Brothers” and “Dr. Mary’s Monkey”, because I just blew through both of them and loved them both. Thank you or whichever CFN brother or sister that suggested them. Great reading and quite educational.
Walter,
Nope, t’weren’t me… but thanks for the recommendations! 😉
(BRH mebbe?)
Indeed PeteA the writings need not be prophetic in nature for those in places of power to play them out as a script for what they make happen. Of course that sort of plays into the prophecy angle anyway does it not? In the end it only makes sense that as it all falls apart, everything turns against mankind, the source of the screw ups in the first place. Poetic justice one might call it.
A little change from your regular posts but very reflective of human life on planet Earth. I am solidly convinced that this is the last century for our existence, so make the best of each day.
A little change from your regular posts but very reflective of human life on planet Earth.
Jim’s post there reminded me a lot of a few scenes from the film, “The Thin Red Line” about the role of Nature & reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3df4nT4mlCk
just one good example, there. Some of the best career performances in that film by all the actors involved, including Mickey Rourke, whose scene was deleted from the film.
Nice story about the perils of chicken farming.
Did you know L. Frank Baum (wrote the Wizard of Oz) first book was The Book of the Hamburgs? It was about raising chickens, especially Hamburgs, a favored breed of his.
Meanwhile, across the pond;
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/6430640/visa-down-network-crashes-uk-europe-card-payments/
My daughter sent me a WhatsApp message to warn me about this, as we were about to go out for a birthday meal in a local restaurant. We didn’t panic, enjoyed the meal, and my sister-in-law paid with Visa, without the slightest hiccup. So, as hunglo (?) would say, let not your heart be troubled, on our account (literally).
But thanks for thinking of us, Malthuss 🙂 .
Hubbie took cash anyway, just in case. Belt and braces… But it wasn’t needed, except for the tip (we like to know the tip is going where we want it to go).
The world civil war is gaining economic flesh and blood
Regarding the tariffs on aluminum and steel imposed by Donald Trump on Mexico, Canada and the European Union.
And it is not about the story with aluminum that showed that the real economy of the West depends on the Russian economy much more than the Russian economy depends on the West, or that Donald Trump is engaged in the re-industrialization of America in all seriousness.
All this has no significance, since in this case tariffs from the economic point of view are only symbolically important and the squeal of the victims of these tariffs merges with the squeal of Clinton America in this regard because the law on the basis of which Trump introduced these tariffs is the law on national security, the first version of which was adopted in 1954 by B. Randall in order to prevent the dependence of the US economy on imports from a country that may be at war with the United States.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2018/03/14/are_trumps_tariffs_justified_by_national_security_110279.html
That’s why, because of these tariffs, the Clintonoids in the US are squealing that Trump has gone mad, although in fact the pitch of this screech is due to the fact that they perfectly understand that Trump is in sound mind and solid memory and again outplayed them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/politics/trump-aluminum-steel-tariffs.html
The fact of the matter is that this law is a direct threat to Canada and the European Union that Trump’s America is ready to declare them as its enemies if they do not stop sabotaging the re-industrialization of America and the support of the Clintonoids in the domestic political struggle in the United States.
And when I think about what exactly the actions of the European Union and Canada have recently caused Trump to take such measures, the only thing that comes to my mind is that NATO, which is more than 100% in Clinton’s hands, wants contrary to its own charter, to accept Ukraine to its ranks, and Poland, apparently from the pitch of the same NATO, wants to deploy an American division on the left bank of the Vistula.
And the piggy squealing of Canada, which is part of the United Kingdom, reveals it not only as a source of the first threat to the national security of the United States, but also as participants in the case of Scripals, and screaming by the European Union and Clintonoids in the United States reveals them as the source of the second.
Indeed, Canada’s connection with Nazi Ukraine is obvious and does not require comment, and any reaction of Putin to the crossing of this red line can be used against Trump, and the second threat is just a complete pizdets!
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pizdets
Report: US Oil Output Jumps To Record High In March
(Reuters Thursday, May 31, 2018 – 11:55am)
U.S. crude oil production jumped 215,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) to 10.47 million bbl/d in March, the highest on record, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a monthly report on May 31.
https://www.oilandgasinvestor.com/report-us-oil-output-jumps-record-high-march-1704031
Note: The secular trend for prices is higher, despite the increased production. That means demand is high.
But the most important is that North Korea is really a model of US-Russian relations and the Clintonoids fear the most that Kim Jong-un will be able to exchange nuclear missiles for security guarantees that will allow him to successfully build socialism with Chinese face in North Korea, and that will mean that Clinton arranged a genocide of the 90s in Russia on purpose.
Fantasyguyonamountaintop,
Don’t you have anything at all to say about the subject put forth by the OWNER OF THIS BLOG?
No? Then you’re just being disrespectful with your off-topic, whack-job expositions, not to mention rude.
Get your own blog space or accept the moniker of leech and ingrate. Or maybe you [correctly] figure that no one will be interested in your version of reality……
I am so sorry Ozone for my insensitivity to the fate of a dead dog and a few chickens knowing full well that half of men in their 30s in the USSR died from hopelessness during the privatization of the 90s – process initiated and controlled by the leaders of your country – while the most educated part of the population of the US diligently looked the other way.
The Oligarchs did not help them. The guys from your side.
Yeah, plenty of traitors whos sold their souls for a lentil stew…
Interesting post. The food chain is fascinating especially when people find themselves at the wrong end of the chain. A relative minor oversight with the chicken pen and not using hardware cloth first rather than learning about it last. In a Long Emergency such oversights will prove to have deadly consequences. In an environment of kill or be killed to include starving to death, competence with a long gun seems essential and perhaps also compound bow. Animals do not care about you. They fear people and they should. By all means visit a slaughterhouse and gain an appreciation of the ugliness of what we eat in the way of meat.
The blessed animals are not killing their environment though. We are doing that. Fukishima. Handford storage site. Chernobyl. Bhopal. The Texas sized floating trash in the Pacific. It is one thing to be killed by a volcano but to be killed by man made “volcanos” is plain stupid.
Well said. Animals seldom commit suicide, and almost never through despair.
They don’t know.
Humans do. They know. And humans, all of them resent it. Their lot.
And all of them commit suicide, some of them know it, most don’t, but they are killing themselves most assuredly.
Nature doesn’t really abhor vacuums.
People like to say that.
Nah. It abhors aberrations.
Mistakes
Hello James,
Strange you should have a ‘mother-nature’ event in Northern Puget Sound, or the San Juans where I grew-up.
Sadly these islands appear to be headed for an apocalyptic ‘mother-nature’ event in the near future:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/2006/171/data/cruise-reports/2001/html/24.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOoIJocJSio
https://pnsn.org/earthquakes/recent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFPfbzIyyLk
Keep to the quiet fault-zones of Eastern New York.
Regards,
PFO
Seems very early in the year for a buck to have full grown, hardened antlers.
Because bucks are annuals. Come fall they wither
Specialists of carnage.
What has America become?
The varieties of carnage brought to life by the USofA
Insidious, pervasive, malignant, and infectious
Fast food, junk food, the car, the highway, the subdivisions, the guns, the entertainment that glorifies guns, the porn, the office park, the loneliness, the smart phone, the social networks, the ennui,the despair, the quarterly report, the diplomacy at the end of a cruise missile, the democracy building, and on.
Evil after evil.’
But when you cocoon in it, are reared by it, and sustained through it, well the evil, it becomes you.
America is what it has always been. A mess. A civil war fixed nothing. All of our wars have been for nothing. We pretend that economic principles regarding debt do not apply to us. We flood the planet with pornography and then castigate the world about the treatment of women. The “good news” though is that some women are proving themselves to be as violent and dangerous and vile as males. How progressive. It occurs to me that the zombie apocalypse actually happened but we are zombiefied and don’t know it. Ours is an international and national joke. A very poor joke.
Many great men have eschewed killing other creatures for food. Thoreau echoed Pythagoras in saying, Would you make your body into a graveyard? Hitler too advised vegetarianism as well as abstaining from alcohol. He didn’t insist on either, knowing that such a standard was too far above men as they are now. Had he succeeded, no doubt he would have began to guide a Greater Germany in this direction, starting with the Elite.
“Hitler too advised vegetarianism as well as abstaining from alcohol. ”
So, as the legal waiver goes, ‘no animals were harmed during the making [and functioning] of this gas chamber and oven complex’. How reassuring. And sick.
Even the fact that you choose to say ‘Hitler too’, instead of ‘even Hitler’ as a decent person might have the insight to do.
You’re breaking the rules of not talking about the so called Holocaust.
I used the words I wanted to us and as I wanted to use them. Hitler was for the White Race despite his many faults. The so called Allies were and are not. How can our Civilization last when we don’t put ourselves first?
I think what is held to be unacceptable is to *deny* the holocaust, but I may be wrong.
“Hitler was for the White Race despite his many faults.”
Hitler was for the White Race only, as one of his many faults.
TFTFY
I found this–
The Golan Heights were illegally ANNEXED by Israel, for their oil.
Genie Oil of New Jersey was/is owned by Rothschild
[ unlimited funds ], Cheney [ political pull in the Swamp ] and Murdoch, the [ global publisher ]. They own the Golan oil. Both stereotypical and classic, though I agree with your differentiations.
Haaretz ran an article by a reporter, who was told by Dayan how they provoked the Syrians to shoot first, before overwhelming them. They sent a tractor up the no-man’s land hill to the Syrian lines repeatedly until it drew fire.
The IDF then used ” self defense ” and annihilated them. A proven and profitable business model, wouldn’t you agree ?
I think this is your best posting so far this year. Appreciate when you switch up the approaches every once and awhile.
“What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?
Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.”
Robinson Jeffers
One can certainly question that last line. But the truth’s bones are laid bare here. So why take the view of this man in Jeffers’ poem the “Vulture”?
“I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak
and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes–
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life
after death”.
A flight of fantasy, a noble nod to nature, but still the surrender of his life. Why not go on the hunt instead, the ultimate hunt, not of the lowly vulture, but of the human vulture, that King of Beasts, Man.
Surely many today, looking around at the world’s condition, would say he could use some killin’.
Why not become like Buck, killer of the Yaheets in London’s “Call of the Wild”? You say because there are laws? Yes, to protect us from ourselves, from the beast within, “chained by frail and fragile bonds”.
Buck and his master. The animal in the man, the man in the animal.
London and Nietzsche. Spencer and Darwin, “survival of the fittest”.
Savagery at its finest, survival at its highest?
The ability to kill is the duty to kill?
Fortunately, the ideological and possibly theological analysis of this heresy was conducted by the great American film director Quentin Tarantino
Just remember the last scene in “Kill Bill” in which David Carradine explains to Uma Thurman that the ability to kill is the duty to kill, because people are not only divided into two biologically different species, but also created by different gods, and Uma Thurman, trying to become a working bee, still remained a killer-bee – she simply betrayed her biological species and was punished for this betrayal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWTJIBGNId0
Naturally, Russia, the peaceful peasants of which time and again wound on their bayonets or on caterpillars of their T-34 tanks the guts of the best Western killers, in this context simply has no right to exist.
Check out this kid’s review: Is there a shooter in him? Probably not right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4oGzB0fTcY
You could cook those guts right on the bayonet. The Cat treads got a little lube.
Hi Jim,
Sorry for your loss of Big Red and Little Blue. Nature can be rough and losing a couple of chickens is hard. I don’t breed chickens, so losing chickens is a costly exercise. Whilst I have not encountered a racoon (being on an entirely different continent), from all accounts, they are smart, and getting smarter.
Yes, steel and concrete is the way to go with chicken enclosures, and the stronger the steel, the more certain that disaster can be narrowly delayed. I’ve known dogs who can chew through the strongest gauges of chicken wire, if given enough time.
Incidentally, I constructed my latest chicken enclosure a year or two back so as to exclude the rats and mice – merely because I was alarmed at the amount of grains the rodents could eat in the original chicken enclosure. And rodents attract snakes, and I am uncomfortable and mildly alarmed at the thought that the second deadliest snake on the planet may be lurking about the farm – which it probably is.
To cut a long story short, I seem to have outwitted the rats (for now), but the mice have tunnelled their way under concrete fortifications that the even Romans would have been proud of. Alas, to my horror, I have learned that I am no match for the intelligence and perseverance of the mice, who have outwitted me…
In a de-industrial future I fully expect the mice and rats to gain an upper hand on our food supply. I reckon we’ve forgotten the amount of effort required to keep rodents (among other consumers of human produce, and humans for that matter) at bay. Living on a farm surrounded by forest, a person gets to experience nature and learns where they fit into the picture.
Chris
I had a look at your website, Chris – your farm looks fantastic. I read a lot about permaculture a decade or so ago and have a couple of Patrick Whitefield’s books on my shelves just for interest.
If I were young again I’d choose a path along those lines, but it’s too late now for an old townie. It was a path I considered when I was a teen in school, but at that time I assumed you’d get laughed out of town if you weren’t already from a farming family. That was stupid, given how many agricultural colleges there are and schemes to help newbies get started. Too late now – spilt milk etc…
I like the fact that such places exist and that people work so hard to create and maintain them, even if it’s a world I can’t be part of. So, thanks for the info. on the website and good luck with the rodents.
Chris,
It has become a “thing” in my neck of the woods for keepers of fowl to do so in movable enclosures. 16X16 foot, completely enclosed with wood and wire and moveable to allow the chickens to forage in new areas of grass…moved every several days using a tractor. Supposedly this obviates the need for chicken scratch and enhances egg production.
When I was a student (in England) in the 70s I knew a girl who did a sociology degree (very 70s) but who came from a farming family in Cumbria (so probably sheep).
With the sociology degree almost done, she’d signed up to train as a nurse – with the specific aim of going to Australia, because she thought that was the best way to get in, and marry an Australian sheep farmer, which was her dream!
I often wonder what happened to her. Is she on some massive Australian sheep ranch or teaching social sciences somewhere in England?! Loads of Australian nurses were here in the UK at that time so I don’t know how that aspect worked out for her.
Here we come, ladies! We all live in a hologram!!
Professor Stephen Hawking’s final theory: The universe is a hologram
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/02/professor-stephen-hawkings-final-theory-universe-hologram/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_tw
Total Pizdets!!
http://m.memegen.com/bs37jf.jpg
I think I heard that theory before – was it in one of his books (not that I’ve read them)?
Is Sean Bean trying to look like Rasputin, or is that not even Sean Bean? Pardon my ignorance…
Funny, I thought we all live in a yellow submarine.
Really, I would like to see the math to try to understand what Hawking was saying, but it’s been so many years since I used advanced calculus that I think I couldn’t understand the math.
And ?Mr. Bean is our Captain 🙂
—- https://youtu.be/aeKfzyZjVHc
Raccoon versus chicken. The struggle goes on.
I had one that breached the defenses last week, the first in a good, long time. He found a hole in the netting over their yard and managed to take out two roosters. They were both old but I have to say they died in a way that many of us would aspire to, defending hearth and home and keeping their hens alive.
So, the problem has been fixed and we haven’t seen another attack. I did, however, see that ‘coon down around the coop the other day, prodding and poking the perimeter, searching for another weak spot in the barrier. He failed.
I was forced to make yet another life and death decision here on the farm. Kill the ‘coon or let him live another day. Since I was interested to see if I had overlooked anything in securing the coop I let him prod to his heart’s content and then go on his way. There is no better way to test coop security than to let a ‘coon have his way with it.
If I see him down there again, the trusty Remington might be called back into action. But, sometimes ‘coons tire of the game when they sense the futility.
Good luck chicken farming. It’s a dirty but rewarding game. Try raising a few for the table. Butchering is easy and the flavor can’t be beat.
Just don’t give them names.
Tom
Raccoon vs. Plum Tree
I live in a very rural area…only 4 families in the river valley…we have all manner of indigenous animals from voles to Elk. The Raccoons are a particular problem with one specific plum tree…an early producer of plums superior to even the Santa Rosa variety. When the tree came of age, I would watch the plums ripen, only to have the crop eaten/destroyed by what can only be an extended family of coons.
A solution.
As the attack on the tree always occurs after dark, and sometimes in the very early hours before dawn, I considered how to defend the tree without losing necessary sleep (70+ years of age)…an infernal device!
In my distant youth I acquired several M-80 firecrackers…very loud. I made rudimentary “electrical matches”, so equipped the M-80, and attached the wiring to a pull switch and a 12 volt lawn and garden battery. I then placed scant nylon webbing, attached to the switch in the crotch of the tree…the natural access to the fruit…and then waited. Invariably I would awake to the detonation that would rock the valley in the early hours…I would note the time and then fall back to sleep with some satisfaction. Imagine their surprise! I haven’t lost any fruit to those devils since, but each year have to repeat the process at least once.
*No animals were harmed, other than a ringing of the ears and perhaps temporary night blindness from the flash….
Nice. I might have to give that a try. However, we get up at three in the morning and I suspect my ever suffering wife would not be happy with explosions in the middle of the night.
We have plum and peach trees here at our place. The ‘coons and squirrels enjoy each and every fruit they produce!
We basically have a live and let live philosophy around here. The ‘coons and ‘possums sit out on the front porch with us in the evening as I enjoy my nightly bourbon. Most of the time we all get along.
It seems, though, that we get the occasional problem critter, one not content with the cat food and table scraps we send its way. Unfortunately, the solution for that is the shotgun.
I don’t like to kill them but, and this is just my pragmatic view of life and living in the woods, when it comes to chicken killing and property damage, well, my conscience is clear when it comes time to pull the trigger.
The simplest solution is often the best.
“If I see him down there again, the trusty Remington might be called back into action. ”
Oh, no, don’t…shave him! 🙂
Jim, I lost a small rabbit this week, he died in my hands of wounds from an attack, after suffering for hours. All of my chickens and other critters I regard as pets. I can see each of their distinct personalities, and I’m very protective of them. I couldn’t butcher one of my chickens or ducks. Look how many eggs and meals I’ve gotten from them! Do I really need to cut their throats for one more meal? And they’ve given me a lot of enjoyment.
But the suffering of all these creatures wears on me. And I only see a small microcosm of the animal suffering on this planet. How did Keats put it? “In the very temple of Delight, Melancholy sets her sovereign shrine”. Keats knew about suffering.
Or something Tolkien wrote always stays with me. He described this world of suffering we live in as “the fate of Arda marred”. For each and every thing made by the Gods/Angels of Valinor, Melkor (Satan) was right there to mar it. So nothing came out exactly as they wished it to. I do believe in demons, angels, and that in some way, this world we’re in has been twisted. And I look at all these distinct little creatures and think of their innocent souls and the fear they get when attacked.
A lot of the civilization we build is to try to cushion ourselves from this fear, but our native ancestors were brave enough to confront this straight on, and were much more of adults than we are..
Yes, well said. By their very nature, farmers and herdsmen have to be brutes – to kill the beings they have lived with! Hunter Gathering seems far more wholesome, but of course can’t support many. Old India was largely a vegetarian civilization, with Cows kept for milk and manure. Of course there were too many of them and that got to be a problem.
But God (forget his name) told Melkor, Howsoever you mar my song, you will only succeed in making it more beautiful in the end. Much as symphony that needs conflict and comes to a resolution. Or boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy get her back. Pastorals are kind of boring. We need action! Even the incarnate angels or Elves like a good fight sometimes….
Wow, rabbits generally don’t suffer for hours!
Yeah, we’re experts at carnage. 65 million years ago there was a huge die-off that saw the end of the dinosaurs. Just about every creature bigger than a breadbox died, birds the only dinosaurians making it through. And they made it by a very narrow margin, only a handful of shore-birds living through the Cretaceous extinction.
But mammals survived and those little furry creepy-crawly ratlings evolved at an enormous clip to take over spaces left empty.
I’ve read that the Earth has about a billion years before nuclear processes in the Sun make life here pretty much impossible. Ain’t over yet.
The Earth Abides. Ever read it?
Heard of it. Never read it. Not yet at any rate.
A PA or Post Apocalypse novel with an Eco-Sociological focus. Tripp and Kdog loved it. Written some decades ago.
Damn right. 1949 post-apocalyptic science fiction by George R. Stewart.
About George Stewart
Was it that early? Wow, he was way ahead of his time. How few things of that era have aged that well.
Hang on to that hammer.
Do they still think it was an asteroid or meteor strike that caused the catastrophe?
The asteroid strike was a big thing but there are guys that have been saying that it was multiple factors.
One guy sez that in the couple million years leading up to the asteroid hit, extinction rates were on the upswing.
There are guys that say that the Deccan Traps, a huge lava flow in what’s now India that happened at roughly the same time as the asteroid, was also a factor.
@GreenAlba,
My new Chinese friend-diplomat, the one that turned out not to be a diplomat and nor a Chinese, keeps saying that Scripals were poisoned by the Phoenicians, and the appearance of Yulia Skripal on television was a message to Putin by the British intelligence, which opposes the Phoenicians, that they have the Scripals and they are out of danger.
See http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/memorialize-that/#comment-354729
Whadda you think?
Finca
For someone of my pay grade, who hasn’t come to grips with ‘the projects’, that post was too long for me to go through (just back from babysitting the grandson, so ready for a G&T rather than intellectual efforts.
The Skripal affair is also above my pay grade. I see a few options:
(1) The Russians did it and the Brits are aware they did it (or suspect they did it).
(2) The Brits did it and the Russians are aware they did it (or suspect they did it).
(3) A third party did it and the Brits still think the Russians did it, while the Russians still think the Brits did it.
There are some minor others.
This takes me nowhere. I’m aware the both the Russians and the British elite, whoever they currently are or used to be, can be perfidious. I’m also aware that there are dissidents even within Russia whose lives are not made easy, even when they are not ended, and that no serious candidate is ever allowed to remain in place to stand against Putin in an election, which is also not to say he wouldn’t still win, but still…
Re (2) I would have thought that if the Brits did it they’d have made sure the experts from Porton Down were singing from the same hymn sheet as whoever arranged it, but they weren’t, so that gives me hope that it wasn’t a British project.
But at the end of the day I haven’t changed my opinion, which is that my opinion has no value.
From a brother on Amren anent Spengler:
Oswald Spengler, during the early 1920s, wrote a historical treatise about the phases civilizations go through – primitive, then springtime, growth, maturity, decay, death. Early on governance/rule come from nobility and monarchy (with strong church influence), then republic, then mass democracy ( dying phase of the civilization). About that dying phase, when the urbanized rootless mass is free to chart society’s course, he wrote “…..the Fourth Estate, the Mass, which rejects the culture and its matured forms, lock, stock and barrel. It is the absolute of formlessness, persecuting with its hatred every sort of form, every distinction of rank, the orderliness of property, the orderliness of knowledge.” We see that today in the rejection of all white institutions/traditions (like marriage, male headship, even the white race itself – all being jettisoned). The end-times mass “….recognizes no past and possesses no future. Thus the Fourth Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the historyless. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.” Bingo.
JS: Have you not noticed how empty and formless people are now, with no roots or real beliefs? Some, full of passionate intensity, substitute Ideology for religion. We are nearing the end. The best lack all conviction while these worst will help bring it all down. It’s good people are talking about chickens as their civilization dies. They are preparing to become peasants who will look up at the towering ruins and speak of the gods who built them.
“The Decline of the West,” Oswald Spengler. I’ve been trying to read it the last few months, but other things come to the fore. So far, I’m halfway through the Intro. LOL.
I’ve heard the “Hour of Decision” is his far shorter, the poor man’s version of the classic.
You certainly have your detractors here Janos, but I have to tell you that I have always been able to see past that which offends to appreciate the wisdom within, though I may not agree with your delivery at times. There is NO DOUBT that the empty and formless are propagating at a frightening rate in today’s American society. I attribute much of this to many factors but narcissism, greed, sloth and a great distain for all others are certainly traits that have been bred into the masses to the detriment of all. Perhaps out of chance, perhaps as a plan for control/domination. After all, the primary responsibility of every government ever devised is the control of it’s own population, isn’t it?
It’s a subtle thing too – even visual. The immigrants often just seem more wholesome people, their faces more clear and composed, walking more gracefully, etc.
The lower classes are lost without the love of the higher. Our Elite have turned against them with a savagery and it shows. They immigrants are better dressed too – even the new ones. Are they getting more money than our poor from the Government? Or are poor Whites just too slovenly to even try to look good? Don’t know – perhaps a bit of both?
Yeah, well right now you are slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Lets look at this, Oswald Spengler postulated a recurring theme according to you.
governance/rule come from nobility and monarchy (with strong church influence), then republic, then mass democracy
How is that possible, to say if flies in the face of dialectical materialism would be an understatement. Do we have cycles of ‘democracy’ like we once had floods on the Nile. No we do not. History is a result of man’s chaotic struggle with the unbalanced ecology that we create everywhere we go. I don’t mean strictly the environments we destroy, though destroy them we do, and it can be argued that ridding lands of multi-ton meat eating machines was not a bad thing. Regardless of that, beyond any material effects good or bad from a psychological perspective humans can’t do sustainability. It is simply not in our genes. Only a rare dog has the balance that requires. The rest do individual and pack survival but not group survival. We don’t need ‘cycles’ to explain and rationalize that when we get comfortable we give up our agency and it is not a good use of the human intellect to see things that are not there.
Spengler cooked a stew some people like the taste of. The Archdruid made a to-do about having read Spengler a year or so ago so he could lord his brain over everyone else’s. Fact is social cycle theory is like finding the keys to life in a romance novel. Best you don’t have great expectations because it is superficial and phony and ignores the entropy we actually create in life. Social cycle theory is for beauty queens with clear skinned smiles but not for real people. Time’s arrow takes us in one direction only and it’s travel if far more nuanced that to imagine it flows in a circle just because you can think it to be so.
Man gets himself in trouble with his big brain. It emancipates us to new enslavements. I think we can agree on that.
But human nature is not infinitely malleable. It puts on a leash, not a short leash because we’re human, but still a leash. Therefore, cycles are built-in, just not rigid cycles that take us right back to where we were, like mice populations.
Is there a straw man being wounded here? Who is arguing that men are like mice?
Yes men get ourselves in trouble with their big brains. Yes humans are not infinitely malleable, but it is ridiculous vanity to think that nature would respond to our limited caboodle of skills and thought patterns by giving us cycles.
Who argues that men are like mice? Social cycle theory does, not me. Men who would seek logic in random patterns and by so doing be so arrogant to feel as if they are gods as they sanctify their ignorance with false logic perhaps are mice. Not as smart as mice though for mice are not so stupid as to accept a positive emotional trace resulting the aesthetic brain center perceiving symmetry as truth. Or maybe mice are.
Social cycle theory is consistent with anything goes and nothing matters. Perhaps that is the appeal.
If we have a “limited caboodle of skills and thought patterns,” (I agree), then are we not more likely, not less, to conform to cycles of decline & resurgence?
Who argues that men are like mice? Social cycle theory does, not me.
Are you sure about that? Everyone who ascribes to “social cycle theory” — broadly considered — believes that we never see advances over the long term?
If there is nothing at all to it, then do you believe that we are on an endless path of moral and/or intellectual progress?
Social cycle theory is consistent with anything goes and nothing matters.
I wasn’t aware that social cycle theory had anything to say or do with nihilism. If anything, it emphasizes a return to enduring moral values after a period of relapse from them. But it seems you’re saying there is endless moral (social) progress. I couldn’t disagree more.
Janos,
Excellent post….
Janos, it seems to me you have made a serious error here, or perhaps Spengler. Those things being jettisoned are not arising from the masses, who have no real ideas of their own so far as I can see, nor do most people in the privileged middle class. Instead, they are being lead, propagandized by ‘thought leaders.’ If you analyze the question, seeing how the media are owned and are supportive of these new narratives, the university admins, etc., you can see that all these people spouting these nonsense ideas and living ridiculous lives, they would have done completely differently if transplanted into a different era by a few decades. Society is being torn down from above, by the same people who make the deep state decisions in politics and war. Why? I can’t figure it out.
Also, I find it annoying that you idolize an era that, while perhaps far superior in many ways, also had its immoralities, namely, that while it is probably fine to have a spectrum of success, I don’t believe there is any honest or decent way for someone to become ‘megarich’ which the nobility generally were.
Tolstoy felt guilty after his awakening, but he was fantastically rich. His family had something on the order of 40 or more servants, and thousands of acres.
Oh, and this bit about the nobility. This is a weird thing. Perhaps I might consider if it is better in someways than mass rule, but really, what sort of human dignity is there in a situation where people are randomly assigned as ‘noble’ and get to be rich and powerful and most of the time abuse their privileges, while the masses are abject.
What possible reason could there be to give one family a status which is, frankly, sort of divine, when they are indeed no better than average. A better upbringing, nutrition and education will turn out a somewhat better result but that doesn’t justify such a weird approach to managing human affairs.
I tend to give a lot of credence to the Sitchin theory, that the human race was engineered by aliens and this is why we are so poorly adapted to this planet and also why we have so many genetic defects, why our civilizations got jump started out of nowhere, and they also probably dumbed us down. I worry especially about our temperament that is so obsequious. Pye talks a lot about the difficulties of creating domestic breeds of animals and plants. Sometimes the main difference is temperament. They say Zebras can’t be domesticated, whereas other wild horses can be.
If they created us (Let us create them in our own image) to be a servant race it would be wise to make us malleable.
All over the world the mythos is that we got our jump start to civilization from the gods, and the original kings and queens were regarded as gods or related to the gods. If that is so, than kingship would make some sense, but now it makes no sense.
It has caused a big problem with religion. Because these little g gods were nothing divine, just really smart and technologically advanced. So now people have spent millenia finding little g gods like Jehovah as plausible for the creator of this divine universe. It is spiritually muddying, and keeps us obsequious and unable to discern good from evil. And gives us a very narrow idea of divinity.
Idiot savants are one proof that our brains are not functioning at full capacity.
Superb ability tends to run in families and something like 70% of IQ is genetic. Add to this the training the Elite give to their children and aristocratic rule is justified. Nothing is worse than this scrabble to thet top – the winners being tempermentally the worse people to rule because of the struggle, despite their abilities.
But of course a wise Elite will allow some social mobility – if they want to rule for long. Trying to bottle it up is both unjust and unwise as it will only cause an explosion sooner or later.
The Alien memes tend to mitigate against real spirituality. But at other times you have talked about real spirituality, so it’s good you haven’t let one set of beliefs destroy another, at least in this case. Do you like David Icke? He fights against the Zionists, some of the worst allies of the Reptilians.
Janos,
Lloyd Pye wrote a book about Bigfoot. He says they stay deep in the forests and that there is more uncharted forest territory than you might have thought.
There are also a few species, not just the ones you hear about in America. They are also of different sizes, but generally pretty large. There is a type in Russia/Siberia called Alma and another in Tibet. So the rumors of them are spread around different parts of the world.
Well it’s an interesting thought. Almost everyone who goes camping or hiking stays on the trails. In fact, it’s illegal in some parks not to. What if you don’t? What might you see? Thus hunters have the most interesting experiences.
Even when you go off the trails, those guys like to keep hidden and of course it is their turf that they know well.
For what it’s worth, here’s one of his lectures:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=lloyd+pye+murdered&&view=detail&mid=2C6A84C0F82C5B595C7F2C6A84C0F82C5B595C7F&&FORM=VDRVRV
People have been captured by Bigfoot – even raped! Bigfoot porn is a genre apparently….
Oh, my, that must not have been a god lecture. Lloyd Pye is pretty much a class act.
A good lecture.
Blacks say Whites smell like Wet Dogs. East Asians say we smell like sour milk.
Blacks smell bad, like I don’t know what. Most are alright if they shower, but I worked with some Nigerians who were just naturally really, really bad no matter what they did. Must have been a particular tribe. East Asians smell like uncooked fish. But only the immigrants. Those who have lived here for a while don’t. A change in diet I suppose. Hygiene?
Women create Testosterone in their armpits [forget which gland].
Blacks have high testosterone.
I knew an athlete who described a Black athlete friend as ‘muscular and smelling like an ape.’
[he said that, not me].
“I worked with some Nigerians who were just naturally really, really bad no matter what they did…”
Really. We had a Nigerian graphic designer called George, who smelled like any other George I’ve even met. I met his wife and little boy a couple of times – they smelled like other wives and little boys I’ve met.
It’s true that some Asians find us cheesy, but they often can’t metabolise dairy foods, since it’s not actually normal in any other species to ingest the milk of other species, so not everyone eats dairy. They can therefore smell it on us, the way non-garlic eaters can smell garlic exuding from the pores of heavy garlic ingesters.
I’m left wondering what white supremacist smells like. Horseshit possibly.
*ever* met…
Different races have different smells. If those smells are muted & disguised by frequent showering & body ointments, then you wouldn’t know.
What does race denialist smell like? “WHAT ARE YOU SAYING THERE ARE NO RACES THAT’S A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT” halitosis.
Bully for George. I worked with a Nigerian named Bede – and he didn’t smell either. Please try to comprehend. I didn’t say all, but rather postulated that there is one tribal group that no amount of bathing can help. Obviously George and Bede were not of that group. Some people….!
Nigeria is a big place, Alba.
You are fond of postulating, Janos. Postulate away.
You know, Janos, the difference between you and me?
No matter how drunk I get and how much gibberish I type into the pages of this blog (in Ozone opinion), I still wake up a Jew in the morning, just don’t have a choice!
You, on the other hand, have a God given opportunity to repent your Nazi heresy and save your immortal soul from eternal damnation.
Where’s this coming from? Is it my fault the races smell different? You could become a Christian, but to do that you must renounce the idea of being chosen. You’re not special in any good way.
Finc, I didn’t know you were a boozer.
Only between you and me, the rumors of my boozing are slightly exaggerated.
“Rashai! Rashai! Rashai!”
Hebrew for “Engage the Enemy”, or “Tora! Tora! Tora!”
“Rashai!” is the Kill order given by the Is,,,ra,,,eli’s to launch the Hellfire missile from the drone to take out the Hezbollah target after the Is,,,Ra..el,,I Prime Minister signs the “Red Order” for the targeted killing.
It is unclear how many “Red Orders” are outstanding and if there’s a backlog? Former Prime Minister Golda Mier endeavored to make all “Red Orders” “Kosher” by also having the Religion Ministry Rabbi also sign off on the “Red Order”. The whole process seems rather bizarre to me given that the State of Is,,,ra…el does not have a Death Penalty.
The Americans, in contrast, will kill anybody, particularly in Texas. There’s a prison museum in Texas where they affectionately refer to the used electric chair on display as “Ole Sparky”.
It’s not clear to me whether we need more killing or less killing? I recall that a few years ago the pithy cliche “Less is More” was in vogue.
We could probably either “Out Source”, or automate the job of the bloke at the prison who flips-the-switch for the electric chair executions? He doesn’t “Do Much”. We could get some bloke in the Philippines or India to flip the switch remotely through the Internet?
They could probably now run the gas chambers remotely using software algorithms and robots?
But, of course, if they fully automated the gas chambers, then people could legitimately ask: “But where’s the Love?!”
Also they have little kids come and write insults against the Arabs on the missiles and bombs. It’s hard even for some Jews to accept the level of evil that’s taken for granted in Israel.
Okay you farm boys, don’t think you have anything on this former city slicker. Man, we had it tough too, squishing roaches and trapping mice, sometimes stomping rats. Yeah, it was no picnic.
We weren’t growing or raising anything of course, except children in some cases, maybe some flowers on a window sill, but we learned about predators alright. The deadly, two legged, urban variety.
At times you had to go into the wild, around Harlem or the South Bronx say, so the blade was kept handy and even Rodney kept you company at times, Sullivan law be damned.
Tough on the farm, tough in the city. But we had/have that somethin’ you don’t find down on the farm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2fN36wq-zc
Sorry guys.
After hearing the story of the Chinese diplomat that the Phoenicians rule the world, I was flattered first of all, since the details of this theory lay perfectly on theory of Christian art, which is connected, but does not coincide with the theory of the colored projects.
Personally, the Phoenicians allow me to throw a bridge from the Ancient World to the Middle Ages through the 7th century, when Western Europe plunged into barbarism, and Eastern Europe into iconoclasm.
But the most important is that this was the era of Islamic conquests, and when Islamists talk about the Caliphate, they mean exactly that, because for Islam this was the era of the highest achievements. Only the Islam of the era of righteous Caliphs was often more humane towards the Christians and the Jews than the Imperial power in Byzantium and the Royal in Spain and in the south of France, and Islamists mercilessly destroy both, which in itself says that Islamism is not Islam , and it does not pay to ceremony with them – they will not understand, and even they have no right to claim the respect that Islam earned, because Islamists in the history of Islam reject exactly what Islam really deserves respect for.
The mystery is that before the 7th century the main anti-Christian force was Mithraism, after the 7th century a monastery appeared on the foreground of world history on the island of Mont-Saint-Michel, which according to the Golden Legend until 708 was called the Graves Mountain, which in theory indicates its connection with Mithraism, but there is no data for this. And when I rushed to check the story of my Chinese “friend” about the role of Phoenicia in modern politics, I came across the 7th century, but the first attempt to find the trace of Phoenicia and its very peculiar religion in the 7th century led me to information treasures that I have completely overlooked before.
For example, the Khazar Khaganate, in which Judaism already had considerable influence at that time, was the main ally of Byzantium in opposing the Islamic invasion, the main victim of which were Sasanian Iran and, according to the “Chinese diplomat”, Tang China, now considered the direct predecessor of modern China.
I have not managed to find anything on this topic so far, but, as far as I understand, Uyghurs in vein are counting on the support of world public opinion – in which case they will be treated the same way as students in Tiananmen Square, recalling exactly the sad fate of Tang China after the Talas battle in the year 751. And the Chinese believe that it was the Khazars (Judaism?) that allowed Byzantium to defend its independence in the 7th century and overcome the consequences of iconoclasm.
And the main conflict of our days, threatening the rivalry to life and death between China and Trump’s US, is a clash between the business interests of China’s rare-earth metals mining companies in China and the 5th generation industry that needs rare earths and which was first pushed into US by Obama, and now is being pushed by Trump.
Therefore, Trump tries to force the Phoenicians to unfreeze the mythical tin islands, where the rare earth deposit are presumably richer than the Chinese, especially after China has already declared a war on Trump, six months ago banning the export of rare earths, and now rare earths can leave China only in batteries made in China, but necessary for example for Tesla cars.
This puts a huge question mark next to the Trump plan for the re-industrialization of America, and makes Clinton’s America a potential ally of China, but the Clintonoids and Phoenicians mean the Opium Wars and the Nanking Massacre (Hello, Alba), and the Chinese, unlike many other peoples, love their true history, rather than propaganda about it.
Both the case of the Scripals and the Ukrainian disappearing and appearing again journalist (just like the Schrodinger cat) are all just ripples on the water in the lake, where powerful currents and plesiosaurs are struggling in depth, and much depends on the outcome of this struggle in the relations between Russia and Britain, Russia and the United States.
But even ripples on the water can predetermine the victory of one or another current, this or that plesiosaur, since the tin islands are located near the English Channel, and Ukraine sold missile technology to North Korea, making the conclusion of peace on the Korean peninsula a decisive factor in the struggle between the East India and West India companies in the United States.
I’m not talking about the fact that by watching these ripples you can understand who is winning there in depth, but for this it seems more important to know the relationship of events in the 7th and 12th centuries than the interconnection of events in the 21st century as we are now witnessing the end of the historical cycle that is much longer than 100 years.
And the alignment of forces now most closely resembles the 7th century, when the union of Byzantium and the Khazar Kaganate stopped the Islamic invasion, insuring Katechon existence for another Great Indiction.
The Great Indiction is a 532-year period, after which all the dates of the Julian Paschalia are repeated
http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/calsci_ch4.aspx
“the Opium Wars and the Nanking Massacre (Hello, Alba)”
(Hello Finca)
You can take on the sins of the fathers if you wish to. Been there, done that and bought the T-shirt. Here it is:
https://www.redzila.com/shop/it-wisnae-me-t-shirt/
Tate might like it too 🙂
Actually, I am not blaming the “Opium Wars” on the Good Old England, rather on the East India Company = City Of London, main anti-Brexit force in UK.
I think Good Old Reality is the main anti-Brexit force in the UK at the moment, FInca.
Leaving aside the entirely intractable problem of the Irish border, Trump and his trade wars have just dealt the Brexiters (and not just the recently rescued Port Talbot steel workers) a heavy blow. Liam Fox is running around like a headless Chicken. They’ve finally realised the Special Relationship was only ever in the heads of the English poodles. As the saner parts of the population have known since we reached adulthood.
And those jobs in the City of London, much as I’d rather they were replaced by something more real, currently pay about 25% of the Treasury’s funds, so without them, post Brexit, those possibly unemployed steel workers are going to be even more in need of charitable foodbanks. All that will happen is that Frankfurt, Paris, New York and others will benefit from their largesse instead. The system won’t change, but our poor people will be poorer. Rearranging of deckchairs…
I identify with the Raccoon, rather than with the chicken or the chicken’s owner…. Stop putting up the wire mesh and other obstacles to stymie the Raccoon and Nature generally.
Speaking of Killing, I like watching those old WWII videos of the aerial fighter plane “dog fights”, particularly when the camera and the plane starts shimmering and vibrating as the pilot goes in for the kill and unleashes a devastating burst of .50 caliber machine gun fire and cannon upon the helpless “Enemy”.
Does the fact that I identify with the Raccoon make me a “Bad” person?
Rocky Raccoon
Now somewhere in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota
There lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon
And one day his woman ran off with another guy
Hit young Rocky in the eye
Rocky didn’t like that
He said, “I’m gonna get that boy”
So one day he walked into town
Booked himself a room in the local saloon
Rocky Raccoon checked into his room
Only to find Gideon’s Bible
Rocky had come, equipped with a gun
To shoot off the legs of his rival
His rival it seems, had broken his dreams
By stealing the girl of his fancy
Her name was Magill, and she called herself Lil
But everyone knew her as Nancy
Now she and her man, who called himself Dan
Were in the next room at the hoe down
Rocky burst in, and grinning a grin
He said, “Danny boy, this is a showdown”
But Daniel was hot, he drew first and shot
And Rocky collapsed in the corner
Now the doctor came in, stinking of gin
And proceeded to lie on the table
He said, “Rocky, you met your match”
And Rocky said, “Doc, it’s only a scratch
And I’ll be better, I’ll be better, Doc, as soon as I am able”
Now Rocky Raccoon, he fell back in his room
Only to find Gideon’s Bible
Gideon checked out, and he left it, no doubt
To help with good Rocky’s revival
And Bullwinkle?
Puck,
See this string? …pull it….
You must know about the loneliness of the ball turret gunner then. Many became dipsomaniacs because they separated from the other men in the plane for hours(!) at a time. Most “men” can’t take being alone at all. Women are even weaker. As the Ancient Greeks said, a man alone is either an animal or a god. Thus the nectar of the gods is poison to man.
I just got banned from Amren for telling too much truth. Earlier I was walking down a long corridor and a primitive Black coming the other direction said to me as we passed, “You’re wrong”. The Kabbalists are up to their old tricks, sending thought forms against me. The primitive Black, whose mind was empty, picked up on one of these carrier waves. And the dreams I’m getting at night….!
Have you heard of one of Sivanandas fav mantras?
From the Vedas?
Wards off negativity.
Mirtyumanjaya? Mantra. Must be chanted aloud, is what they claim.
Thanks.
too me a bit of re reading to fully understand what you are trying to convey.
yr arch enemies, the ((( ))) are sending negs your way.
the empty headed nog was like a radio.
Yes.
“I just got banned from Amren for telling too much truth.”
What is “Amren”?
Do you mean “Aman”?
The the Isr ..arli Directorate of Military Intelligence often abbreviated to Aman.
Is this a set up as in checkers? Have to take a jump? I’m playing 4D Chess and I don’t have to take a jump.
Can I count on your aid on the astral plane tonight against the dark Wizards of Zion?
AMerican RENaissance is a ‘racey’ publication contributed to by one trick ponies. Presumably, to be banned, you need to be even more one-trickier than the rest. They have to mind their PR.
even one-trickier…
“contributed to by one trick ponies”
Alba,
C’mon…that statement is superficial…completely dismissive, and just. plain. wrong.
In the thousands of articles posted, how can you come to such a conclusion? Is there no truth on that site? Are there no intelligent people who parse the articles? Or who post them?
Yours is a difficult statement to defend. You cannot, other than to issue vague, nebulous denouement as an argument.
“C’mon…that statement is superficial…”
I agree, elysianfield. It was never meant to be anything else. Which is why I won’t bother to get worked up about the rest of your post.
Mea culpa. Sometimes I can be flippant. Sometimes Janos can too. We are BAD PEOPLE 🙂 .
Not all facts are equally important. And when you ignore one of the most important – like race – then it becomes all important because it’s not being factored into the complete picture that we make and call “reality”. Now as Elysian alludes, the articles are not all simply commentary devoid of all other context. Rather Amren is largely a News site, posting all kind of articles and commentary written by others as long as they bear on the issue of Race and/or White Interests. And this is what you cannot bear: that we have any interests – or any group rights.
Have you talked to the Cycling Chief yet? Why did that make you incandescent with rage? Is not personal responsibility a part of Ingsoc? It certainly is over here. Interesting if there’s a difference. Again it’s not that its “your fault” in a person sense. But rather as a White, it’s your fault in a racial sense that minorities don’t ride bikes. Please feel guilty for the right reason.
See above. Sometimes you take yourself too seriously, Mr S.
Alex Jones gives a Yankee version of Finca-speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btqt59dxXqQ
Yeah, Alex does do a pretty good job filling up space. He too is always ready to bring in the Albigensians as an essential link in our chain of misery. That the Albigensians are still around is apparent in spades as our zeitgeist would have us believe that the human spirit is the genderless spirit of an angel trapped within the physical manifestation of the meat package. Their evil god would have us believe we can remake ourselves into anything we wish and that one choice is as good as another.
He gave “the millennial” three thousand dollars though.
Do you even believe in life after death? Or do you think you are your meat body? None of the aboriginal peoples of the Earth thought like that. The shamanic view is very, very different. Not even the Earth is just earth….
Correlations and time inversion
December 6, 2017, the United States recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel
April 6, 2017 Russia recognized the West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel
April 7, 2017, the US released 59 “Tomahawks” at the airbase in Syria
On April 14, 2018, the United States and its allies launched a missile attack on Syria
On May 14, 2018, the US moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem
And let me remind you what I wrote more than a year ago, on Apr 10, 2017:
Let me describe how events would develop, if what I see in the majority of discussions was true.
This will be a good start to a Holy Week:
as you understand, everything for us will be decided by Vladimir Putin, and he clearly stated his intentions in the military doctrine of the Russian Federation and in the so-called Medvedev’s Nuclear Ultimatum.
But unfortunately he is not believed in the West because he is an Orthodox Christian and Satanists believe that only a real Satanist can do such a thing and an Orthodox Christian never!
Therefore, Congressman Schiff, the head of the democratic part of the commission to investigate the relationship of Trump’s election campaign with Russian hackers, who demanded the arrest of Trump a week ago, said yesterday that Secretary Tillerson, the knight of the Russian Order of Friendship of the Peoples, must take an ultimatum to Moscow, and Alex Jones, known for his connections with Trump, said that the US is preparing a 150-thousand invasion corps for Syria and that Russia is invited not to interfere with this invasion. Otherwise…
And according to my forecasts, Russia will respond to the first strike on its troops in Syria by a strike on radars in Poland and Romania and missile destroyers, as well as aircraft carriers that are equipped with AEGIS system. And most likely by a nuclear strike, since these radars and these destroyers are designed to intercept the Russian nuclear retaliatory attack, and until they are destroyed with guarantee, there is nothing to talk with the US except unconditional surrender.
And what the capitulation in such circumstances means, ask the American Indians.
Moreover, by and large after such a strike, to sit and wait for a reciprocal disarming or instantaneous global strike does not make sense and, in theory, Putin should immediately launch against me, my family and my neighbors all that he has, according to the principle, if you going to die, better die with the music.
But it is really difficult to take such a decision for an active Orthodox Christian, because the Last Judgment for him is a reality that he feels every day.
Fortunately for him and for us, on New Year’s Eve, the submarine “Podmoskovie” was finally put in service, and a few days ago the nuclear submarine “Eagle” and Vladimir Vladimirovich no longer needs to subject his conscience to such tests.
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-super-secret-spy-submarine-returns-sea-18171
The human psyche cannot accept a notion such as “man’s place in nature” because implicit in doing so is acceptance of the true human state of being mortal. The entire construct of religion and myth are the psychological dodge of that fact. We “immortalize” figures of history by dehumanizing them into icons, essentially elevating them to gods — think of canonization of saints. Secular idealism, no less, is intrinsically “religious” for parsing between “good” (the anointed) as opposed to the debased (throw in any other term bracketed with Biblical inference). The destruction of Confederate commemorative statuary is example of a “secular rapture” of faith; the perpetrators act against a reading of history that accepts events in history to be outcome of era sociological circumstance, but rather exemplifying mystical “grace” overcoming “evil”. Just another shaggy god story. You’re welcome.
As one of the eponymous boys said, in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, during his mock interview for a place at Oxford, ‘how would I define history? It’s just one fuckin’ thing after another’.
There is also the problem, within the human mind, of linear time interpretation where time elapsed equals progress. The arrow of progress follows the arrow of time, towards the future.
Salvation in a future.
“I’m also aware that there are dissidents even within Russia whose lives are not made easy, even when they are not ended, and that no serious candidate is ever allowed to remain in place to stand against Putin in an election….” GreenAlba
How much time have you spent in Russia?
Or would the better phrase be “I have read reports” or “It has been reported”? Or maybe, that is the line in the script.
Just what is your pay grade? Ah yes, the voice of British reason.
And I see nothing wrong with either being British or being reasonable, despite a history, like your own, replete with many awful things I am not responsible for. A lack of responsibility that I share with most of the powerless population who were around at those various times.
You are responsible. That’s the whole point. How can things ever change unless Whites take responsibility? Until J.K Rowling fills up that mansion with darkies, she’s just whistling Dixie. And until she does, she’s not setting a good example for the many people who look up to her as a role model.
As Boxer (the draft horse) says in Animal Farm, “I must try harder”. All good comrades say this. If you don’t, you’re not a good comrade or citizen of the British Nanny State and don’t DESERVE to watch or listen to the BBC.
Four legs good two legs better, I doubt she can whistle Dixie.
I pay a monthly license fee to listen to and watch the BBC, Janos.
And I pay taxes for the benefits of living in the British state. I don’t need to take responsibility for anything I have no control over and nor do I.
If everybody with money did as much good with it as JK Rowling, we’d be in a better place.
Whistle away.
Pay a fee to listen to the radio? Pay a fee to watch TV? Pay a fee for a farmer to own a shotgun? Phew, there’s freedom for you.
brh
Are you advocating socialism, brh?
Stuff for nothing? Where do you think the money to produce BBC programmes comes from – the TV fairy?
.
At least if I trip over and break my ankle getting to the TV I can fetch up at A&E without my wallet 🙂
BTW, a TV licence costs me £150/year and gives me 85 TV channels and 30 radio channels through a Freeview box. I only watch about half a dozen channels on a regular basis.
I also have a digital world radio so I can listen to any radio anywhere for nothing anyway. I could poison my ears with Fox Noise if I chose to.
How much do you pay for TV, out of interest?
Ah, I’ve just realised you maybe don’t know that BBC channels don’t do advertising. So I can watch them without being interrupted by drivel every 15 minutes. Are many of your channels free of adverts? For those that are, how are they financed? Just interested.
“Or would the better phrase be “I have read reports” or “It has been reported”?”
I’m fine with that, thanks wm, almost. It’s how most of us ‘learn’ what we know. It was the actual dissidents’ personal testimony I was referring to, as I heard and watched them give it, as well as that of one person who would have been a serious contender.
But of course I am aware that everyone can lie so there’s really no point in listening to anyone saying anything. Ever.
I hope you’re happier with that.
Family, Kin and City-State: the Racial Underpinning of Ancient Greece and Rome, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and J. Jamieson, Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1999, soft-cover, 108 pp., $17.00
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889) was one of France’s greatest 19th century historians. Perhaps his most influential book was La Cité Antique, written in 1864 and translated into English ten years later as The Ancient City. It is a masterful study of Greece and Rome that stressed the influence of religion on the development of classical institutions. J. Jamieson has now produced an abridged and modernized edition that emphasizes the importance of family and kinship ties in this early religion.
Family, Kin and City-State- the Racial Underpinning of Ancient Greece and Rome
This volume makes clear that the central focus of the ancient faith was reverence for the spirits of ancestors and the purity and continuity of the family. It was a religion that served to bind people together by giving sacred importance to ties of blood. The authors argue that this was central to the extraordinary cohesion, vigor, and continuity of classical society:
The very base of ancient Greek and Roman greatness was in intergenerational dedication to family and kin — qualities they shared with all known Indo-European peoples of their time . . . They saw life not in terms of the present generation only, but as an ongoing succession of the bloodline: the living were the trustees of a sacred heritage which it was their duty to pass on, improved if possible, to their posterity.
This religion of the ancestors predated that of the sky gods such as Zeus and Athena, and coexisted with it without contradiction. The early religion eventually faded, but the authors clearly believe that just as emphasis on family and kinship was a crucial element in the rise to greatness, the loss of a vigorous sense of community made decline inevitable.
The Hearth Fire
From the earliest times, the hearth fire was the symbol of a family’s presence and continuity, and represented the spirits of the ancestors. Ideally it was to burn 24 hours a day, throughout the year. The women of the family tended the fire and the male head of the household was the chief priest. Every meal marked an occasion of reverence to the fire and to the ancestors. The family worshipped only its own forebears, using its own particular prayers and hymns. The authors write, “They [the Greeks and Romans] believed that the dead ancestor accepted no offerings save from his own family; he desired no worship save from his own descendants.” To worship another family’s ancestors was great impiety.
Ancestors were thought always to be present, and to lend assistance to the living — fighting beside them in battle and comforting them in distress. The spirits led a happy, sentient existence, but only if the dead had living descendants to honor them by performing the family rituals.
In the early days of both Greece and Rome, every family had a tomb, where its dead were buried together. By custom the tomb was located near the house. Euripides explains that this was “in order that the sons, in entering and leaving their dwelling, might always meet their fathers, and might always address to them an invocation.” Each man tended the graves of his ancestors, confident that his sons would continue the ritual of reverence. The ancients believed that if the dead ceased to have male descendants to worship at their tombs their restless spirits would wander the earth in sorrow.
The continuity of the family line was so important that in the early days of Greece celibacy was a crime. As the authors explain, “man did not belong to himself; he belonged to the family. He was one member in a series, and the series must not stop with him.” Marriage was permitted only within the tribe or city state, and involved the ceremonial transfer of the bride to the husband’s family. The ceremony took place at the husband’s house and amounted to an initiation of the bride into the ancestral religion of her new home.
The ritual of union acknowledged the importance of what the bride was giving up. First, she would pretend to resist leaving her own house. When she arrived at the groom’s house her attendant kinswomen would feign battle with the groom, who would wrest the bride from their protection and carry her over the threshold as if by force. The marriage ceremony then installed her as a priestess who would thenceforth tend the hearth fires of her new home. Even after the sky gods were established and a hymeneal visit to the temple became customary, this was only a prelude to the real marriage ceremony, which took place in the home.
The authors point out that the joining of families was so important and solemn that it was to take place only once a lifetime. Polygamy and divorce were forbidden. A sterile woman, however, could be divorced since her deficiency thwarted the continuation of the male line. Adoption was an unusual procedure permissible only if a couple could not produce a son, and it was customary to adopt the second son of the husband’s closest kinsman. Because of the importance of lineage, female adultery was punishable by death. A wronged husband did not even have the right to forgive; if he did not demand death he must at least repudiate an unfaithful wife.
Because only sons could properly honor their ancestors, a man who died without a son faced extinction. It was this concern for the male line that governed the selection of the Spartans who were left behind to defend the pass at Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 B.C. Only men who were married and had already produced a son stayed to face the invader.
The land on which the family tended its hearth fire and in which it buried its dead was, itself, sacred. In Sparta and probably in early Roman times it was forbidden for a man to sell his land, because it was owned not by the individual but by the continuing, intergenerational family. An early Roman could pass it on to his children and to no on else; only in later times did it become possible to will land to other than direct descendants.
In some Greek city states the land could not even be divided among children, and primogeniture was one of the causes of Greek expansion. As successful city states outgrew their original territory they established new settlements in other parts of the Mediterranean. When colonists set out it was customary to take with them a clod of earth from the ancestral lands as a symbol of continuity.
City states themselves were composed of tribes of related families, and loyalty to the city came next only to loyalty to the family. Attachment to the city was so deep that life beyond the reach of its customs was unthinkable. Exile was therefore tantamount to death, and it was often offered as an alternative to execution. Under Roman law, exile was considered a form of capital punishment. An exile was no better than a foreigner and could not be buried in the tomb of his fathers.
There was nothing universal about the early religions. A city could have gods of its own who were the even more distant ancestors of all citizens, who had been deified as heroes, but these gods were likewise peculiar to the city. Even the sky gods did not have universalist pretensions but protected and received sacrifice only from their people. As Aeschylus has one of his characters say, “I fear not the gods of your country; I owe them nothing.”
Aliens
The authors point out that aliens had no status at all in early Greek and Roman society. They had no religion, could not become citizens even by marriage, were not protected by law, and in some cases could be killed with impunity. A foreigner could be the guest of a citizen but he was not part of the family or the city-state.
As ancient societies expanded and absorbed aliens, provision had to be made to accommodate them. Slaves, for example, could be accepted as junior members of the family and in some cases were entitled to burial in the family tomb, but in return they gave up their freedom for life.
Like all successful societies, Rome and the Greek city-states eventually attracted large numbers of alien hangers-on. They were not allowed to live within the cities themselves and clustered on the periphery. Eventually, it became necessary to give at least some of them legal status and this gave rise to a system of patronage. An alien could gain certain rights and enter into the commercial life of the city by becoming the recognized client of a citizen. Although it became common in the later Roman Empire, naturalization was extremely rare among the Greeks, and required successive votes of large majorities of citizens.
This volume argues that a burgeoning alien population contributed directly to the decline of Rome. Plebs, or aliens who were not clients of citizens, eventually became so numerous they demanded legal status and even political rights. Their alien customs and uncertain loyalty changed the character of Roman institutions and irreparably weakened the Empire. As the authors explain, “Rome declined because Rome fell short of Romans through constant warfare, and also morally through an excess of wealth and a decline of traditional nationally-oriented and nation-building traditions, mores and religion, and finally through the rise to power of non-Roman elements within the vast cultural empire . . . Rome decayed because it lost both is cultural and its genetic heritage.” This book has an important message for those able to heed the lessons of history.
JS: Rome wasn’t Rome anymore without Romans. How could it be? Sound familiar? We’re the Romans now. Just as we are the American Indians about to be genocided. Just as we are the Jews who must love ourselves enough to pass the terrible tests to come, that of surviving without homelands.
review by Thomas Jackson, amren.com
Mental masturbation to ideologically cement a twisted world view. First clue to aberrant thinking.
“The very base of ancient Greek and Roman greatness was in intergenerational dedication to family and kin — qualities they shared with all known Indo-European peoples of their time.
Probably true enough but intergenerational dedication to family and kin is a universal characteristic of the human race and not restricted to Indo-European demographics. It is like saying black lives matter and forgetting that all lives matter. Same aberrant thinking but from your side of the fence you take no offense. You should.
I hope whoever made this story up had fun.
Yes, all traditional societies. He never claimed otherwise. Only we have forgotten. So have you since you want others taking our lands and are fine with them pulling down our altars and high places.
The very base of ancient Greek and Roman greatness was in intergenerational dedication to family and kin — qualities they shared with all known Indo-European peoples</b. of their time.. . .
Clearly exclusionary as 100% of Indo-Europeans are represented and nobody else. If the such intergenerational greatness applies to all, such would have been said, or perhaps most significantly nothing would have needed be said at all. Your pissing on my leg and calling it rain.
He claimed otherwise.
oops, forgot the closing angle bracket in my bold tag. Sorry!
No, he’s writing about our classical ancestors. Greece and Rome are more important and interesting (to most of us) than China, Black Africa, Mongolia, etc) So why would he veer off topic and talk about others? It’s important because we’ve clearly deviated from this natural pattern. If you recall, Ish described how the pattern began to reassert itself in his old age among The Tribe.
It’s raining Wisdom and you’re calling it Piss! Some undefined Liberal engram is simply preventing you from enjoying and benefiting from this article. Not “diverse” enough? Oh Lord give me strength…
Like eskimos left on the ice?
Korean baby girls left in boxes, now?
Eskimos on the ice just go with the flow.
This little crazy theory doesn’t explain the fact why the Eastern Roman Empire, which was much more diverse than the Western, stood up for a thousand years more, until it was destroyed by the Reich – the adepts of “pure” race.
Well monotheism replaced the Cult of the Family to some extent, (in terms of belief and practice, but the devotion remained) and of course the pantheons of the Gods. And Whites can assimilate to other White societies. In other words, everyone became “Greek” in Byzantium. And it only worked because of the strength of the Church. No one would have tried to assimilate but for that.
Its interesting, in Brazil … the 20,000 or so Confederates who emigrated into that country after the Civil War — Confederatos they were called — eventually merged with a nearby Ukrainian community who got there about the same time.
brh
Re (2) I would have thought that if the Brits did it they’d have made sure the experts from Porton Down were singing from the same hymn sheet as whoever arranged it, but they weren’t, so that gives me hope that it wasn’t a British project. == GA
Ha!
That’s the whole point of my colored projects theory, which you hopelessly missed while babysitting your grandson – it is not the struggle of Nations, but struggle of Ideologies.
It is not Russia vs Great Britain, it is Black Project in both Russia and England against the White and Red.
I wish I could say ‘ah, it’s all clear to me now’, Finca, but I feel the hours spent looking after the wee fella were probably better spent that way.
No offence intended 🙂 .
Interesting piece in Unz Review. Exploring what links the (possibly three, not two) Kennedy assassinations. A common thread involving Jack Ruby, Lyndon Johnson, the Warren Commission, & Israel:
Dimona.
http://www.unz.com/article/did-israel-kill-the-kennedies/
No, Israel did not kill Kennedy, but Israel does have the best intelligence network within ODESSA – Organization of Former SS Members – since their post-war program of targeted assassinations of Nazi war criminals hiding all over the globe.
And in my mind there is no doubt that Kennedy was killed by ODESSA for his presumed betrayal of the Nation of Natural Born Killers manifested in his refusal to start a nuclear war with USSR and making concessions by removing American missiles from Turkey.
Just remember the last scene in “Kill Bill” in which David Carradine explains to Uma Thurman that the ability to kill is the duty to kill, because people are not only divided into two biologically different species, but also created by different gods, and Uma Thurman, trying to become a working bee, still remained a killer-bee – she simply betrayed her biological species and was punished for this betrayal.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/notes-heartache-chaos/#comment-354974
By the way, when the news came about Kennedy’s death, nobody in Russia had any doubts about the reason he was killed.
Excerpts:
“The most plausible motive for Israel to kill Kennedy has been revealed by two books: Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option in 1991, then Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb in 1998, and the lead has been followed up in 2007 by Michael Karpin in The Bomb in the Basement. What these investigators reveal is that Kennedy, informed by the CIA in 1960 of the military aim pursued at the Dimona complex in the Negev desert, was firmly determined to force Israel to renounce it…
“Kennedy’s determination to stop Israel’s Dimona project was only part of the ‘Kennedy problem’. During his first months in the White House, Kennedy committed himself by letters to Nasser and other Arab heads of State to support UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Ben-Gurion reacted with a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated:
“‘Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser’s missiles and his Soviet MIGs. […] Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man.’‘
“After Kennedy’s death, American foreign policy was reversed again, without the American public being aware of it. Johnson cut the economic aid to Egypt, and increased the military aid to Israel, which reached 92 million dollars in 1966, more than the total of all previous years combined.
Personally, I find the version that Kennedy was killed by Federal Reserve bean-counters, after Kennedy ordered issuance of some silver coins, more entertaining.
One of my American acquaintances, who also actively wrote about Hillary Clinton, and after Trump’s victory, two men turned up in his place with a proposal to write a script about her as a continuation of Omen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omen_(franchise)
I was interested in his story primarily thanks to the fact that it describes a movie that I did not watch, but which more or less corresponded to my personal experience associated with the movie The Dead Zone. This experience took place at approximately same time when the premiere of Omen 4 was held, and the one who conceived this film obviously also experienced something similar.
I gladly shared my ideas with the man, but after we all in the States found ourselves under the Mueller’s lid, he disappeared somewhere.
And today I heard from him again and it turned out that the potential project bit the dust, as the two men who ordered the script turned out to be the henchmen of Harvey Weinstein, who was the producer of the best American movies, until he decided to film Omen 5, in which the biography of the matured Delia correlates to my posts on Hillary Clinton.
And then all these wonderful actresses immediately recalled how they got the roles that made them famous!
Now about his adventures they will film a horror movie, perhaps “Omen-6”, and I have no doubt that on pornhab.com will immediately appear a porn version of this movie with Angelina Jolie in the title role, thanks to the fact that girls who have made the appropriate plastic surgery are dime a dozen.
https://consequenceofsound.net/2018/06/brian-de-palma-harvey-weinstein-horror-movie/
“a porn version of this movie”
Komaraden Finc,
The title would be…”Damien’s Thorn”?
Suddenly we have black bears roaming around these suburban Connecticut towns; one last week wandered into my back yard, his head looked like it was 2 feet wide. I called up to my neighbor for her to bring her girls inside … sure enough Mr. Bear headed up there and waded into the pool. It was a hot day.
But what I’m really worried about is my rose bushes, the ones in the northeast corner. Only 3 years old, it looks like they’re dying. They were pretty healthy last season, producing some nice red roses. But this season not even any green leaves yet. Not enough sun, not enough rain, not enough love, I don’t know. I’m hoping for the best.
It’s been an interesting week here in the Nutmeg State. The levels of mayhem and violence in our little cities are rising to astonishing new heights, which I will talk about when I get a little spare time. Suffice to say human civilization itself seems to hang in the balance.
brh
” Suffice to say human civilization itself seems to hang in the balance.”
BRH,
On the contrary! No human civilization involved….
What say you now, Gentlemen?
I don’t know E …
Have a look …
In the town of Ansonia, where Yankees shipbuilders once toiled, dozens of black and Hispanic girls brawl inside the local HS, two gangs, much blood and heads split open.
In W Springfield, police stop a car after a chase, woman in car tied up and claims she is kidnapped. Police go to drivers house and find 3 dead women — so far. There was also a little boy in the house, alive. The media — deceitful POS that they are — didn’t run a picture of the accused mass murderer. A little research reveals why they didn’t run the picture.
In the Hartford ghetto two people gunned down on the street, drive by shootings. Both dead.
also 2 arson fires, dozens of people left without a place to live.
In the New Haven ghetto, a young mother shot up and killed in front of her two little boys. The boys father — but not the mothers husband — is suspected, but whereabouts are unknown.
That’s just this week. There were other incidents too, some of them hair raising! Its not even summer yet! i don’t care how many ‘Arts Festivals’ you have, does it make up for this sort of mayhem. It seems like every other day they’re having another ‘Arts Festival’ here to get white people down into the city. “Yeah, come on in, get your car stolen, get robbed, possibly muderered. Show us your progressive bona fides and that you are down for the struggle.” And some of these suburban dumbasses indeed to drive into this hell hole, and some bring their kids.
brh
At last some purpose for modern art – besides making money and degrading our civilization that is.
BRH,
Harsh winter done the deed. My rose bush is in a sheltered location by boulders that absorb some heat and cut the winds. Not ‘thriving’ this year, but not weathered unto death. Lost a lot of the lavender but it looks to be hanging on in spots.
Human civilization is held together by common values and hope for the future. When that goes to shit, all bets are off… as the gradual grinding down of the US is showing in real time. (So, it amazes me that those with the power in this country are attempting to force their “culture” [of overt violence and division] upon the rest of the world. Insane.)
Good luck — and enjoy the bears; leave ’em trundle through as they’re not generally aggressive and prefer vegetation.
Buckminster Fuller isn’t all that different from Ron. L. Hubbard in creating a following based upon crack pot, pseudo scientific Utopian-ism (damn, that word again). He even adopted the Biblical story of Saul having his transformation story on way to Damascus, after which he changed his name to Paul. Buck didn’t change his name but he claimed having retreated for two years silence and meditation — a lie.
GreenAlba, I read reports of the trashing that Mr. Corbyn has taken, I read reports of the nefarious activities of Ms. May and cohorts, I read reports of the austerity imposed on the citizens of the various EU states, I read reports of the complete lack of justice and underhanded back room dealing that has ruined the lives of the Greek people.
You say you are not responsible, I agree, you are totally irresponsible. The issue of whether we are our brothers keeper was settled eons ago. My only wish for you is that you do not injure your arm patting yourself on the back.
That you arrived here in time to be comfortably placed before the latest round of smear Russia has not escaped my attention. Considering your guess at to odor above I would like to offer you a Certs, two-two-two mints in one. You are a Chistmas Turkey.
Wm
I do hope you haven’t got the idea that I’m a Corbyn supporter. Or a May supporter. But perhaps you have.
If you’ve read about Greece – and I find the reports of life in Greece distressing – you will also have read those reports from long ago that show that Greece should never have been in the EU in the first place. Their politicians lied to get in, as regards their fiscal situation.
You will also have read that they have always had a major problem with their citizens paying the taxes they should, especially – but not only – their very well-off citizens. The same well-off citizens who moved their funds out of the country as soon as trouble hit. Rich people are like that. When things are good, they’re Greek. When things get bad, they’re just rich.
Try reading something by Yannis Varoufakis about the EU. He has nothing but contempt for the EU elite and will tell you all the stories you like about the way Greece has been treated. He will still tell you, as he has, that the UK, at this juncture, has lost its mind to consdider leaving. Just broaden your reading a bit.
Those who lead the Brexiters will tell you all about the global trade they plan to sign up to (as if they could remotely make up for the trade done so easily on their doorstep). But what they really mean. in terms of the big stuff, is trade with the US.
Ask the recently rescued Port Talbot steelworkers how they think that’s going to go for them.
“That you arrived here in time to be comfortably placed before the latest round of smear Russia has not escaped my attention.”
A bellend is a bellend. Mints won’t help.
I’d take Corbyn over May any day, BTW, in terms of his ideas and his honesty. I don’t think he has it in him to be an effective PM, though. I’d go for Chukka, but that would find me labelled a ‘Blairite’ which is the last thing I’d ever want to be. It’s a quagmire no-one comes out of clean.
And I have nothing at all to pat myself on the back for. Just as I don’t take the blame for bad things I have no power over, I take no credit for the same when they are good.
I am capable of being ashamed of my country, though, when their leaders do things they should be ashamed of. And if it turns out the Skripal thing is down to the UK, one good thing will come out of it – those who engineered it won’t be entitled to expect us to believe them about anything ever again – and we will make sure they know it.
That won’t change what goes on in Russia, where good people are at the mercy of plutocrats.
And you bellendry still won’t be helped by the strongest mints you can lay your hands on.
*Your*
PS wm
Since you read my posts so carefully, you will know that two major reasons why I support the UK staying in the EU – which that ‘attention’ you are so proud of will tell you is an entirely different matter from admiring or agreeing with those who run the EU (you had figured that out, hadn’t you?), are environmental and connected with the coming energy shortages.
Hence I think we should trade with those nearest to our doorstep. Because it’s more environmentally sound to do so and it wastes less energy. And when times are bad friends stick by each other, so I’d like us to be buddies with our European neighbours and not the guys across the pond who start trade wars. Not that I blame anyone who voted for the guy who started the trade wars. Father forgive them for they know not what they do….etc.
But I have no love for Juncker and his cronies, any more than I have any love for the cronies that run the UK. You’ll have picked that up, obviously. I mean, it won’t have ‘escaped your attention’.
I also like pan-European security co-operation for reasons you should be able to figure out, since I don’t like jihadi nutters shooting people up or driving vans into them. I like pan-European research co-operation too and academic co-operation generally. Presumably you are no more worried about the scientific researchers who are going to lose their jobs than you are about the steelworkers, though. Your ‘attention’, like everyone else’s, is limited.
And I haven’t forgotten the reason European co-operation was so desperately sought at the end of the second world war. Perhaps your attention has waned there as well. I’m old enough for it to still be a thing.
“The issue of whether we are our brothers keeper was settled eons ago.”
That’s why I’m not a Tory.
At Starbuck’s re education camps last week, what do you think, was any of the above pervasive anti social urban behavior brought up during the propaganda sessions? I mean by the employees forced to attend? What if some unenlightened, recalcitrant, unwoke, unaware, (definitely not a party member) Starbuck’s employee broached the subject of the ‘Knockout Punch’, ‘Polar Bear Hunting’, or the astronomical murder rates in Baltimore and Chicago? Would he be sent to Room 101? Would be be fired?
brh
Do you guys even know if Starbucks even has a re-education program? I don’t even know and I work less than 1000 feet from their corporate headquarters. What pisses me off is that because of that asshole not letting those back men wait for their friend at Starbucks they changed their security policies and can’t access the SODO Kitchen anymore. It could be coincidence. Then again it might not be. Regardless the pootch got screwed.
Who can’t access the kitchen?
they changed their security policies and Ican’t access the kitchen.
Used to buy a burger their almost every day.
there ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Do you guys even know if Starbucks even has a re-education program?
Dog,
Uhhh…it was in all the papers….
James, I’m not sure if you check this comment section, but if so, IBD weekly has a pretty good front page story called ‘The New Deepwater Oil Boom’. Apparenly the shale wells are starting to be played out and with higher oil prices oil companies are back into deepwater drilling to make up the difference. How deep I don’t know; they mention a well 4000 ft down. They also talk about new technology that reduces the cost of operating one of these offshore rigs from $ 1 million per day to $400,000 per day. Maybe its a lot of BS, I don’t know (what to believe anymore)
brh