Battle For The Planet Of The Dupes

The problem with Trump, at least from my point of view as expressed since the long-ago days of July last year, is that he is a walking corporation.  He is a creature of the State.  He has no existence nor worth outside the coddling arms of the State.  He exists by the pleasure of the State, and the State is his nanny and toy.

Now I know a lot of Trump supporters read this site.  That was clear long ago and far away in our Far Side Official Unscientific Survey, where more than 70% of respondents chose Trump over all other choices (Hillary and Johnson).  So I beg you indulgence to hear me out.

Yes, Trump was elected by a certified, all-genuine rebellion.  Not a revolution, mind you, because the State was left intact.  But enough people had had enough State shenanigans that they were willing to try out a complete new-comer in the presidency in the hopes that 1) Hillary would NOT get elected, and 2) something fundamental would change at the national level.

Sorry to say, and I've waited the obligatory six months of mourning to say this, but America got gypped.

Notice that all of Trump's major promises, and his actions after he broke them, serve only the corporate interests.  To whit: the border wall has all but disappeared to preserve the constant supply of fresh meat for the labor market - which keeps the unions at bay.  Notice that the tax reform (now defunct) was centered primarily on corporate relief.  Notice that healthcare reform (now defunct) was to make the whole Obamacare fiasco even more friendly for the corporations.  Notice that the Pentagon budget and global saber-rattling was continued, even ramped up from the Obama and Bush days, to feed the bottomless gullet of the corporations.  Need more?

Them notice that Freeport MacMoRan, a huge mining corporation that all but owns Indonesia, was in the grips of populist reform and stalemated at the negotiating table at the beginning of the year.  Further notice that Mike Pence (Vice Prez of USA, Inc.) made a quick little visit to these parts and within hours, Freeport had their concessions.

Or how about the much vaunted Trump Saudi trip, which ended with billions in arms sales, and even defense contractors with subsidiary agreements in the Middle East to save shipping costs.

Finally, notice that all the talk of reform for regulations and government oversight center solely on corporations.  Have you heard a single word promising less government sitting on the shoulders of real human beings, who theoretically are the government in any real republic.

If you STILL doubt where Trump's loyalties lie, then I implore you to read Peter Dale Scott's insightful piece on how Trump is a threat to Indonesia's (and many other countries') democracy.

I, for one, could care less if Trump is impeached, though what would follow would likely be far worse than anything those of us who remember the JFK coup remember.  As I have said repeatedly, the only way to fix the problem is to remove it.  No amount of "reform" will ever achieve freedom and liberty for us real folks.

Here's the deal.  We humans are natural, organic beings with priorities and interests that don't always, if ever, align with the State.  The State fears our privacy and rights.  It doesn't want chaotic creatures running loose mucking up its Grand Plans for itself and its creations.

And when it comes to creations, there is only one creature in the world that is completely and utterly beholden to the State, and that is the corporation.

Corporations are formed (born) by a union of law and enforcement.  The State literally creates these creatures and is fully responsible for their behavior.  When the State is fully in control of the corporations, you have Socialism.  When the corporations are fully in control of the State, you have Fascism.  Note well that real, organic human beings don't figure into this marriage from Hell in any way, except for the rare few who are granted big pay packets for being caretakers of both the State and corporations.

Out of loyalty to theirs parents, corporations protect and defend the State.  Out of motherly love, the State protects and defends the corporations.  It is a sick, twisted relationship that has none of our (us real people) interests at heart.

This is why there is a revolving door between corporate interests and State regulatory divisions.  This is why corporate officers never go to jail, just get their wrists slapped and a fine or two.  This is why governments are unresponsive to real people.  This is also why there is a long list of billionaires in government and on the visitors list, not just now, but ever since the late 1800s.

For the last eight years, the Socialists were in charge and corporations were kept on a leash, though a rather long one.  Now, the Fascists are in control, and not only is the leash longer, but the collar has been loosened to allow the corporations to slip their fat heads through and run wild in the neighborhood.

Trump is nothing more than a flim-flam man who understood show business well enough to basically steal the election from the heir apparent, who stole it herself from her own party.  Even the parties are corporations that run in the interest of corporations in order to be seated at the Board Room Table of the US Corporation.

Unfortunately, there is no reforming this mess.  It is far to gone and far to woven into the fabric of the modern world.  The only hope is for real people to once again asset their dominion over the creature they created, called government.

There's only one problem.  The corporations have so polluted our water and food with chemicals to keep us dumb and sick that I have little hope this will ever happen.

Trump was a fluke.  Enough people had enough sense left to try to "reform" the mess.  It will never happen again.  There are only two routes open to us now: the way of complete destruction of the State as it exists, or complete capitulation of real people to artificial corporations (legal fictions called "persons").

Honestly, I don't expect much effort in the right direction.

Bumbledicks, Pizza And Congresscritters

As usual, the Bumbledick GeezerMedia has set out to blame guns for the shooting of two cops, a congresscritter and two other people who aren't getting any attention.

So let's get this straight...the Bumbledick (Democrats) GeezerMedia (print, broadcast) has been on a year-long campaign to radicalize the Know-Nothing Bumbledicks in America, including calling for and actually dramatizing violence against the Bucketheads (Republicans).  When they finally trigger someone to pick up a gun and shoot, they get all bent out of shape on the availability of guns.  Do I have that right?

Both the shooter and the complicit GeezerMedia have shown a major flaw in their reasoning, if one can apply that term here.  They believe that guns are the reason for violence, not one of many tools for it.

This is obvious in the results of the shooting.  The shooter got off well over 50 rounds.  I watched the video several times and counted the pops before the cops arrived.  In this literal hail of bullets, the shooter only managed to injure five people.  So much for one shot-one kill.  The Big Prize was shooting a Congressional Leader type in the hip.

What this tells me is that the Bumbledicks honestly think that just waving a gun around and pulling the trigger kills people.  It's the gun's fault right?  If that were the case, there'd be a whole lot of dead people at the end of the shooting - 30 would be an acceptable ratio with that many shots.

Guns don't kill people.  Trained shooters with properly functioning tools who control their breathing and heart rates and take careful aim at kill points (head, chest) kill people.  The shooter in the park clearly knew nothing about guns and believed the Bumbledick hysteria that the guns did all the work.  All he had to do was carry it and pull the trigger and the guns and bullets would magically do the rest.

Another thing that was obvious in the video of the scene was that I get nearly every one of the cowering bystanders wished they had a gun at that moment.  It took cops a full 10 minutes to drop their coffee and donuts and get to the scene.  Surely, the congresscritter with the gushing hip wound dragging himself away from the shooter dearly wished he was armed.

The thing that struck me, though, was the pattern here.  Lone nut takes gun, goes on rampage, gets killed so he can't testify in open court.  At least since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, this has been a pattern in US politics.  John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, John Hinckley (&c ad nauseam) have all been completely isolated from all other interests and contacts, acting completely on their own, with no further conspiracy involved.

Yet, the congresscritter who was shot - Steve Scalise - was supporting a bill called the "Frederick Douglas" bill, that directly attacked trafficking of children for sex - i.e., PizzaGate.

Ah, remember PizzaGate?  That's the scandal that almost broke based on comments in John Podesta's Clinton email that were veiled references to child sex.  Seth Rich was offed for releasing those email, the federal investigation got quickly buried, and the Frederick Douglas bill is being trounced, even to the point of killing (or trying to) congresscritters.

As with all conspiracies at this level, there are multiple layers upon layers.  As Jack Ruby said about the JFK assassination, the rabbit hole was deep and dangerous and no one wanted to go there.  Same with PizzaGate.

Blackmail is the oldest game in politics.  Compromise a public figure and you own them for life.  They get their most animalistic desires fed on a regular basis, and you get control of governments without your face being all over the media.  The word blackmail dates to the 1500s in Scotland, but the practice is far older than that.

Child sex trafficking is one of the most effective and widely used forms of control across the globe today.  Even the hint of it can bring down kings and presidents, and that is the idea.  Organizations like Child Protective Services "disappear" children into a slimy underworld where they are traded for access and control by the real leaders of the world - names you and I will likely never know.  If you don't play by their rules, you get the Anthony Weiner treatment.  If you try to stop it, you get the Steve Scalise treatment.

To hide the tracks of the conspiracy, a left-wing Bumbledick was activated and steered to the appropriate target by...whomever.  It was important to shut down his support (as Majority Whip) of the Frederick Douglas bill.  Only problem with the plan is that Bumbledicks are notorious afraid of guns and have been told for decades that the guns kill, not the shooters.

Fortunately, the plan failed miserably, though if I were Scalise's family, I would have someone watching every move by the hospital staff.  Amazing how survivable wounds can suddenly kill someone.  Just ask Seth Rich.

In the end, the Virginia shooting is another one of those many-layered conspiracies that can easily be spun in a hundred different directions to cover the tracks of the real perpetrators.  Gun control, crazy Bumbledicks and other stories are perfect examples of the effort to hide the PizzaGate tracks.  Hopefully, none of us Rubes will notice the connections.

There is another, equally deep level to this story, and that is the control the GeezerMedia still has over the minds of so many people.  The constant barrage of images showing politicians getting killed (Public Theater's Julius Caesar and Kathy Griffin's antics to whit) is having an effect on the masses, whether we acknowledge it or not.  But that's a story I have covered incessantly for years.

Do yourself a favor - turn off and unplug the TeeVee.

The Fragments I Have Shored

"LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats        5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….        10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."
--The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot

In an age of eternal turmoil, what can possibly remain important?  If every moment of every day is a new superlative, the world becomes devoid of comparatives.

I remember when the Guiness Book of World Records was a big deal.  Us boys bought the new edition every year and would faithfully memorize the most amazing facts we could find to regale our friends with factoids.  It was also fun to see which records had not fallen since the previous year.

Kids today don't seem to care.  Just waking up sets new records, or so it seems.  The world is in a constant state of flux, where extraordinary events are commonplace, and the commonplace is the most vile form of mundane and banal.


I briefly reminisced on Skype early this morning with a friend back in Texas.  We marveled for a moment at our ability to conduct business and have conversations in real time half a world apart.  In fact, those abilities were free, outside of the minimal monthly charge for internet access.  The stuff of wildly absurd science-fiction movies and books just 40 years ago are now expected, and even necessary to daily life.

What is even more amazing is the cavalier manner in which most of us accept the extraordinary as something expected and required.  No different, really, than the way my generation treated cars, which were to my parents and grandparents extraordinary new devices.

Eventually, the world gets away from us.  We reach an age in which the marvels are far too frequent and amazing to bother paying attention.  We relegate the responsibility to our kids and grandkids to keep up with it all, as we opt to stroll down familiar lanes and greet old experiences.

If you are under 40 and reading this, then the same thing will happen to you, far sooner than you would imagine possible, especially now as the marvels come faster and faster.  Eventually, you will cease to be amazed, even excited.  Eventually, you will throw up your hands and quit worrying about all of it and just be happy to sit and watch the clouds.

Just as the blacksmith gave way to the mechanic, and the mechanic will give way to self-repairing robots, we all become obsolete.  We all outlive our usefulness and even our desire to remain relevant to the extant culture.  After a while, it's enough to pluck a fresh tomato and bell pepper from the garden, make some homemade vinaigrette and enjoy a fresh salad for lunch with the taste of sunshine still in it.

It's not that the creative spark is spent, it's just that we cover it with dirt in the hopes of reviving the fire later in the day with some new catch to roast.

It's not that we no longer enjoy the race, it's just that we finally realize there is no winner - each wave is ultimately overtaken by the next.

The best part is reaching that point where we no longer give a high hoot what anyone else thinks, and just worry about what makes us happy.  You can set all the records you want, but at some point someone else will come along and erase all your efforts.

It's not a bad thing, really, to realize it's fairly pointless.  The memories make a fond companion, if we bothered in our youth to make them.  That, I suppose is the real crime of hte extant culture.  All memories come through a box now.  There is no adventure, no pitting one's self against the elements and being self-satisfied that we survived whatever the world could throw at us.

It is not the same to launch an app.  There is no sense of victory at overcoming time and space.  There is no Grand Battle to fight when we can simply send a robot to do a Man's work.  The only frontier left is the one inside, and precious few dare go there now.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

"Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach? 
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. 
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."

It Is Neither Rare Nor Well Done

It's interesting to note that it was two Houston boys that, on the one hand made broadcast news respectable, and on the other destroyed it.

Back in the Stone Age of analog video, there was an Houstonian named Walter Cronkite.  He rose up through the ranks to become probably the most iconic American news faces of all time.  We called him "Uncle Walt", and he held our hands and walked us through wars, assassinations, (alleged) Moon landings, and some of the most enduring stories of the 20th century.  If he belched, his audience tasted lunch.  He could do no wrong and trained his viewers to trust visual news as if it was real.

His successor was also an Houstonian.  His name was Dan Rather.  He rose to fame by standing on the beach during Hurricane Carla in 1961, then pretended to be embedded with actual troops in Vietnam, and set the standard for "reporters" who made themselves part of the story, rather than objectively reporting it.

Both of them helmed CBSNews, which was once one of the most trusted network news shows, and is now one of the least.

Of course, both of them were globalist shills with different styles, but back then, globalism was one of those tin-foil hat conspiracy theories that only strange men babbling to themselves on street corners talked about - you know, the ones that Momma warned you to stay away from?

Between Walt and Dan, we see the beginning of the end of trust in media.  Walt sat in a studio and read copy to us with a voice and sincerity that made us believe anything.  Dan dove in, staged stories, pretended to be in the thick of it, and weaponized the trust we had in Walt against us.

Nowadays, whenever there's a storm a-brewin', every Tom, Dick and Slicker runs to the beach to try and become the story, a la Dan Rather.  In Desert Storm, CNN vidiots were "embedded" with rear-echelon supply trucks that got lost in the sand, had to be rescued, and then told us how harrowing the action was (that they never saw).

To my mind (a dangerous thing all by itself), the 1980s TeeVee show Max Headroom was the perfect metaphor for the vast difference in media theory.  Unbowed, intrepid reporter Edison Carter got down in the thick of it and told it like it was.  He brought us the live, gritty pictures of reality and told stories that hit hard and changed minds.  His counterpart, Max Headroom, was a creature of the media.  He was the deus ex machina that swam in the digibits and was as likely to go rogue as do anything useful.

Max Headroom was the epitome of Marshall McLuhan's assertion that in the future (now), the medium would become the message, that media would no longer be channels for communications, but the end-all-be-all of communications.  If you doubt this asserting, then ask yourself do you trust a talking-head on TeeVee more than the babbling loony on the street corner, given that their content is the same?  In fact, doesn't broadcasting something make it more real than reality?

This axiom is further demonstrated by the endless parade of personalities and celebrities who pitch products and causes for money.  Can you extract Al Gore the man from Al Gore the global-warming bubblehead?  Is there any difference in your mind between Michael Jordan the athlete and Michael Jordan the Nike shoe salesman?  Would either of these men have any credibility if the media had not conferred it upon them?

To my thinking, Max Headroom was a seminal moment in media history.  This fictional character because a ubiquitous pitchman and icon of the 1980s America.  He sold all kinds of products, was interviewed by "serious" news heads, was used to lampoon all manner of leaders and institutions, and became the message and the medium in a single entity.  I can trace the blurring of reality and fiction directly to him.

In the span of 20 years, between Uncle Walt and Max Headroom, the medium went from a passive reporter to an active creator of reality.  The decay of Western civilization rests squarely on this phenomenon.  It cannot be blamed entirely on the medium, since the audience must be active participants in this process.

Oh sure, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble pitched Winston cigarettes in a prime time animated show, and that was part of the process.  Even Peter Bergman pitching cough medicine with the famous line, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TeeVee," helped blur the line.  But Dan Rather and Max Headroom finished the process.  The former created fiction out of reality, while the latter created reality out of fiction.  Together they ensnared a civilization in a perception trap of circular references.

Our world, or at least the perception of it, has been irreparably damaged by the blurring of medium and message.  There are rays of hope as new generations seem to be extracting themselves from the medium, but it remains to be seen whether they reject the medium, or only change the message.

As the legendary Ernie Kovacs rightly said, "Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare, nor well done."  More than any other, he truly grasped the power of the message.

Thought Police Invade The Far Side

Akun Facebook pribadi saya dinonaktifkan.

• Bantuan Desktop
• Bantuan Ponsel Fitur
• Pusat Bantuan Lainnyatab menu tambahan
• shareBagikan Artikel
• Jika akun Facebook Anda dinonaktifkan, Anda akan melihat pesan khusus apabila Anda mencoba masuk ke akun Anda.
• Kami mnonaktifkan akun Facebook yang tidak mengikuti Ketentuan Facebook. Beberapa contohnya termasuk:
• Mengirim konten yang tidak mengikuti Ketentuan Facebook
• Menggunakan nama palsu
• Berpura-pura menjadi seseorang
• Tetap berperilaku yang tidak diizinkan di Facebook dengan melanggar Standar Komunitas kami
• Kontak dengan orang lain untuk tujuan pelecehan, periklanan, promosi, kencan, atau perilaku lainnya yang tidak diizinkan
• Jika Anda yakin akun Anda dinonaktifkan karena kekeliruan, harap mengajukan banding.
• Catatan: Jika Anda tidak melihat pesan penonaktifan ketika Anda mencoba masuk ke akun, Anda mungkin mengalami masalah masuk. Harap kunjungi pusat bantuan kami untuk bantuan masuk ke akun Anda.

I am proud to announce that - somehow - I have offended the Farcebook gods and have been cut off.  This must be a first for a non-terrorist site in Indonesia, since it is highly unusual for Indonesians to express politically-incorrect opinions.

Perhaps it was my ceaseless ridicule of Farcebook and its annoying thieving plagiarist owner, Mark Puckerberg.  I quite enjoy trashing the owner using his own product.

Like all fascist swine, though, they never tell you exactly what you did wrong.  Instead, they present a list of possible infractions and let your guilty conscience project its own sin onto the list.  This is a hallmark of Fascism, as any reader of Kafka will immediately understand.  The System makes an entire range of activities illegal, so that any given person and any given time has violated any given law.  Thus, you can be punished arbitrarily for any given infraction without ever being told exactly what you did wrong.

No great loss.  I have, or rather had, five Farcebook pages for various purposes.  The loss of one or another makes little difference, though it did provide an audience that I didn't reach with this blog or Twitter of YouTube.  Since I receive no revenue from my efforts on any of the outlets, the loss of one does nothing to hurt me.  One of the many reasons I chose not to monetize my efforts and become dependent on a revenue stream controlled by fascists.  Exhibit A: the YouTube producers who have had their legs cut off.

This kind of abuse and fascistic attempt to control free and unhindered speech is precisely why outlets like 4chan are so popular.  The poster is anonymous and there is no way to trace anything back to a source, and all posts eventually disappear of their own accord, so there is no history.  In this Kafka-esque world, it makes perfect sense, though in a sane world, anyone should be able to post anything under their own name and let the marketplace/peers judge the value of the content.

Puckerberg and his ilk like to call themselves the new media, but in effect they are nothing but an evolution of the gatekeepers of yore.  They sit atop their little ant hills, proudly controlling everything that goes in and out of their nest.  This is nothing but the high school group leader writ incredibly large.  They will set the standard for what is cool and acceptable, and if you want to stay in the group, you had better follow.

I am sure something will eventually happen to our Twitter account, as well.  Followers have shot up 25% just in the last week, probably due to the fact that we post news links combined with a healthy dose of sarcasm and satire.  The only real way to fight the bastards is to laugh at them.  It is the one thing they fear the most, because they take themselves far too seriously.

Eventually, these outlets tie themselves in knots of political correctness.  Take YouTube, for instance.  Advertisers complained that their ads were running against content they didn't like.  YouTube cut off the advertising stream, and suddenly no one - YouTube, advertisers or producers - were getting paid.  After all, the advertisers pay for eyeballs, and if the number of eyeballs drops precipitously, then what's to pay for?

The net effect was to strengthen the producers, who were forced to find their own advertisers and get crowd funding direct from consumers (see our Patreon link top right).  The entrepreneurial individuals are now beholden only to their consumers and direct advertisers, making them out of reach to the fascists, except to cancel accounts.

By the way, we are proud to say Google demonetized us six years ago, long before the current wave.  We were, and still are a leader in pissing off the powers that be.

The problem with things like political correctness is that, once you begin telling folks that they can't say certain things, the list will always continue to grow, until no one can say anything.  After all, we have all met folks who get offended by the simplest pleasantries.  Look at Ebeneezer Scrooge!

In the meantime, we do well to remember the immortal words of Henry David Thoreau:

"There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

And the fight goes on.

A Cultural Tidal Wave

There's an intriguing demographic shift going on the the West, and particularly in the US.  As a child of the 1960s, I vividly remember the counter-culture liberals activating against an entrenched conservative elite.  Issues included ecology, economic inequality and the drug culture.  Free sex and feminism - yes, they were once related and exploded due to the Pill - were the catch phrases of my peers in the Baby Boom generation.

The Baby Boom was a unique phenomenon in world cultural history.  A huge group of post-WW2 children grew up in a world where economies always boomed, the US was the undisputed leader of the "Free World", and the majority of the population was no longer rural.

Freed from having to work the farm and milk the cows, and dripping with Daddy's money from the post-war boom, an entire generation was afforded the ability to turn in on itself and navel-gaze.

For better or worse, the liberal Baby Bommers made significant changes to society and culture.  In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was set up, marijuana is finally becoming more acceptable, and a mini-Boom of babies - commonly referred to as GenX - were the results of Boomer influence.

The Boomers also managed to elect two of the most corrupt presidents in US history: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  The former was elected because he was young, handsome, loved free sex, smoked dope and played the saxophone; the latter because he was black, which apparently was his only qualification - not to mention that many suspect he was the son of a radical 60s Marxist.

As these generational things do, the Boomers were Marxists because their parents grew up in a time when the US was dabbling in Marxist/Communist philosophy - the 1920s and 1930s, during the Great Depression.  The Boomers echoed, and then carried their parents' dabblings to the extreme.

GenX became the Greed Generation, immortalized in Oliver Stone's Wall Street film, while the Boomers themselves cashed in on organic grocery stores, herbal teas and environmentally-friendly plastics ( a la The Graduate).

Each time a new generation echoes their parents' politics, things got just a little more extreme.  The Capitalists went overboard in the Reagan years with derivatives and paper assets, while the Marxists went overboard with Identity Politics and Share The Wealth schemes, like Global Warming, etc.

What seems to be happening now is a blend of ecological consciousness with kinder, gentler capitalism, self-identifying as the new counter-culture.  In other words, the current emerging generation is creating a synthesis of the two extremes, while eschewing the more radical ends of the spectrum.

Now, you have the YouTube millionaires spouting anti-Liberal rhetoric while working out of their parents' basements.  They are anti-consumerist, preferring to rattle the economic order with cyber currencies and a Digital Revolution.  They are shunning Old Media like broadcast networks and Hollywood movies, in favor of producing and consuming each others' projects, and sharing the wealth through crowd-funding organizations.

Culturally, they are leaving the club scenes, swapping underground band MP3s and amateur film projects, and paying for it all with Bitcoin and Etherium.

It's really a bizarre amalgam of preceding philosophies, at least to the eyes of a geezer, and quite fascinating to watch.  These folks don't buy anything the social institutions tell them, and instead actually seem willing to do the work to research information for themselves - not the mention proudly crow their findings on YouTube.

In the end, the revolution that the Boomers promised, but never delivered, is coming out of their great-grandchildren.  The digital world has empowered them to the point that they can do with a phone what us geezers used to do with multi-million dollar rooms full of equipment and distribution licenses and Hollywood studio monopolies on media, and New York brokers.

In other words, there is a shift occurring that hasn't been seen since the Enlightenment and the birth of the Scientific Revolution.  The Gentleman Scientist of yore is now the YouTube producer.  The great composers of yore are now the synth track creators.  The great artists of yore are now the PhotoShop jockeys.

It is an explosion is slow motion.  This new generation is slowly discovering just how much power is at their fingertips.  They are re-evaluating things like college degrees, when all the materials (books, lectures, etc.) are available online for free.  Who needs an investment house when you can get $1 from one million people?  In fact, the Enlightenment ideal of the educated individual is coming to fruit 300 years later, as the technology catches up to the concept, and this new generation, many with no concept of the philosophical roots of their discoveries and efforts, is inheriting the wind.

It is quite a remarkable thing to watch, as the Liberals become the Conservatives, the Conservatives become the radicals, and both are panicking because there's a whole new deal on the horizon that they never considered.

What is truly gratifying is that all of it is moving toward a libertarian ideal that empowers the individual in a self-correcting marketplace of ideas, where feedback from consumers is immediate and the rewards are direct to your pocket with no middle men.  Better yet, they are impervious to the divisive machinations of the withering elite and have no concept of national borders, racial separation and economic boundaries.

Get your popcorn warmed up.  The show is just beginning.

Practice Makes Puppet

READER NOTE: If you aren't following @RadioFarSide on Twitter, then you are missing half the major news stories in the world.  We've been covering stories that Western media haven't even touched, like the Philippines ISIS war and the Melbourne bombing.  We go where your nightly news fears to tread, from the other side of the argument, to the other side of the planet!

Every year, a couple of months or so after Ramadhan, there's an Islamic holy day called Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice.  Animals, usually goats and cows, have their throats slit with a ceremonial knife and their blood is sloshed all over the mosque in a cleansing ritual.

Keep this in mind as you read details of the London Bridge attack, where the perpetrators used long hunting knives to slit the throats of their victims as they invoked Allah.  If you are open minded enough, you might see a connection between Eid al-Adha and the attack.

Islam began as a backward religion.  It borrowed heavily from the Old and New Testaments of Judaism and Christianity.

At the time Islam was being formed, around AD500, Judaism had mostly ceased live animal sacrifices, and Christianity had replaced them with a ritualistic sacrifice called the Eucharist.  In other words, the two existing monotheisms had begun a reformation process that eschewed barbaric bloody sacrifice, at least insofar as it involved actual, living creatures.

Islam, however, sought to return to an earlier incarnation of these religions, adopting many of the (even then) ancient practices outlined in the Old Testament.

In this way, there is an existing mentality within Islam that the slaughter and spilling of blood is a sacred offering to Allah, who apparently enjoys the sight of innocent blood.  By extension, the more radical elements within Islam would transfer the concept of bloody sacrifice from animals to humans.  After all, if Allah is pleased with animal blood, he must find human blood even more so.

In other words, to the warped minds of the terrorists, if they are killed in the process of slaughtering innocents, then they are cleansed by the blood and eligible for great rewards in heaven.  It is as if their bodies are representative mosques, and the sloshing of innocent blood on their bodies is a ritual cleansing that is most pleasing to Allah.  Thus, the oft-cited "72 virgins" reward for being so pure when standing at the Pearly Gates, or however it is rendered in Islam.

This built-in mentality has been weaponized by certain elements in the West.  It has been fostered and promoted since at least the days of Lawrence of Arabia.  This mentality has been made a tool of Western policy and used to herd the citizens of the US and Europe in whatever direction is needed at the moment.

The weaponization reached a peak under the Nazi regime, where the natural rivalry between Jews and Muslims was a ready tool for those wishing to rid Europe of Jews.  The network developed by the Nazis in the Middle East was taken over by the US after WW2, and put to use in recent times as a means of steering the masses.

This goes a long way toward explaining why Western governments are loath to stop the Muslim influx, and why these bloody attacks occur even when the perpetrators are known to be radicalized and have been under surveillance for some time.  This is why Muslims are allowed to run amok in European countries and have the red carpet rolled out for them.

The radicalized Muslims are tools.  They are created and controlled by Western governments as a means to herd the masses into surrendering their rights.  The radicals are not out of control, they are completely under control.  They have been brainwashed and sold a bill of goods by evil slime hiding in the shadows of Western power centers.

This is a condemnation not only of Western elites who foster and use the radicals, but of the radicals who allow themselves to be manipulated and used in such a way.

It is time for Islam to recognize that it is being manipulated by Western elites, and to reform itself in order to free Muslims from this crass manipulation.  There is no glory in slaughter of innocents, there is only hell on Earth and elsewhere.

The other religions of the world have long since reformed and ceased the senseless and barbaric practice of bloody sacrifice.  Isn't it about time Islam took a long, hard look at itself?