Are You Ready For Some FU-ball?

NFL players genuflecting in submission; Brad Mills/USA Today
Sports, via Reuters

The idea of compulsory worship of the State and its symbols makes me puke.  I haven't stood for the US national anthem in decades - probably since high school - and especially at sporting events.

Don't get me wrong, I happily stand and salute any time someone waves the Bonnie Burnet Blue and plays Texas Our Texas, but that hasn't happened at any public event I've attended since the early 2000s, and the reason I do so is because my country has been a captive nation of war since 1865.  But that's another story.

What I find particularly amusing about the current debate-du-jour in the good ol' US of A is that the people protesting the national anthem by going down on one knee is such a screwed up situation that I can't help but laugh my fool head off.

Before I get to the real meat of the matter, and being a product of Roman Catholic indoctrination, seeing people go down on one knee is what I call genuflecting, and it is a sign of submission to higher authority.  Thus, these over-stuffed boneheads are, in effect, offering greater submission to the State than simply standing and covering one's heart.

Har-har-har!  What a bunch of buffoons!

What is most amusing, however, is that all these meat-balloons that are submitting to the State in supplicated "protest" are biting their own asses.

They play a game that does not exist anywhere outside the United States.  They work for a monopoly that has special dispensation from that State to be exempt from the laws of that State that prohibit monopolies.  Most of the players would be manual laborers were it not for the incredible luck they had in landing such over-paid jobs that made them millionaires and national "heroes."  Their places of work are stadia that were paid for by municipal bonds and legal tax cheats granted by folks who have been sold a bill of goods in the interest of "tourism" and "public relations."  The owners of these bloated boneheads (yes, it is a kind of slave market) are billionaires who, for the most part, use the teams as tax write-offs against their massive incomes.

Furthermore, these steroid-puffed slabs of beef receive additional income through product endorsements that are marketed to duped citizens of those United States, and incentive payments from networks whose major source of income (given that their other shows are increasingly unwatched) to draw bleary eyeballs to the weekly spectacles that few outside the United States watch (soccer, a.k.a. football, rules the rest of the world).

Frankly, given that these people wouldn't have the ridiculous incomes and unreal jobs if it weren't for the United States, they should be bowing and scraping the turf on their obscenely wasteful stadia in submissive gratitude for what they have.  They certainly know nothing of the trials and tribulations of the inner-city poor folk they claim to be in solidarity with, nor would any of them bother to go into those neighborhoods.  They are upscale now, and have been since high school.

The gentle reader may ask what makes me any kind of expert on American FU-ballers.

Well, back in the day, when I was a fresh graduate from university, which I paid for out of my own pocket with no sports scholarships, I lowered myself to work sports for one of the Big Four affiliates in Houston.  Not only did I spend untold hours toting heavy gear up and down the sidelines of pro-sports events, I spent vastly more hours in the dark editing "news" stories for the local and national sports broadcasts, working for a boos that hated white men (this was the late 80s and early 90s, mind you).

I shot hours of interviews with these mental midgets with a ratio of 100-to-1 of footage recorded to usable sound bits (not even enough for full bites).  I did focus pieces on these meat-lockers in their palatial estates, where they regularly got into trouble beating wives and girlfriends, doing copious drugs, driving intoxicated, and living like Roman gladiators with the blessing of Caesar.  In fact, I can't count how many stories were quietly pushed aside to keep public images polished to a high sheen.

Yes, these over-grown and sickly-coddled children should not only be genuflecting to the flag and anthem that represents the only nation on Earth where they could find meaningful work, they should be lying prostrate in worship.

The owners too.

And where they have all screwed the pooch - though it is hard to sort this one thing out of the incredible list of options - is that they have fed into the one issue that Donald Trump can turn into a fortune.

Trump is a marketing guy - dare I say genius.  That's how he got to where he is now.  He is adept at manipulating symbols to dress up pigs' snouts for the ball and reaping a mighty profit from it.

These Bumbledicks (Marxist-Socialist Progressives) - owners, players and media alike - have just handed Trump one of the meatiest scenarios they possibly could, and we note that Trump has dutifully taken the opportunity and like an NFL quarterback doing the sneak, is running with all his might for the end-zone.

What completes the delicious irony is that no one, and I mean NO ONE (except us Far Siders) will dare to attack Trump's glaring Achilles' Heel on this issue, and that is the sheer number of dual citizens among his appointees, staff and advisers, since those dual citizens are of the nation of Israel.

What an incredible farce!

Who Or What Is NASA Resurrecting?

NASA's strangely named probe OSIRIS-REx just rounded Earth on its way to asteroid Bennu.  It passed about 11,000 miles/20,000 kilometers above Antarctica on a sample-return mission to Bennu that should wrap up sometime in 2023, with a packet of gravel being hurled at Earth.

Now, I like Richard Hoagland, despite the fact he is little more than a P. T. Barnum type with some smart people behind him doing all the work. One of his "wild-eyed theories" is that NASA is deliberately performing magic rituals based on Egyptian/Masonic mythology, and in the extant case it is hard to argue against it.

The asteroid 101955 Bennu is named after a minor Egyptian deity called Bennu, which took the form of a heron bird.  Bennu was a symbol of Egyptian Sun and resurrection cults, and was frequently a part of ancient Creation myths.  Bennu is also likely the prototype for the more familiar phoenix, which is periodically consumed by fire (Sun) and resurrected from the ashes of its previous incarnation.

It gets better.

Osiris was the Egyptian father of the gods,  He was the origin of the Greek god Chronos, who is represented by the planet Saturn, and was considered the First Sun of our Solar System, later deposed by Zeus, and then our current Sun.  Osiris is represented in the sky by the asterism of Orion, whose belt is mirrored by the three great pyramids at Giza.

Osiris was married to Isis, whose name appears quite frequently in the news these days, either as a reference to a bunch of CIA assets posing as Islamic terrorists, or as the International Space Station (ISS).  Isis is the precursor of the Virgin Mary in Christian doxology.  Isis was not only the wife, but sister of Osiris, as well.

Their brother Set or Seth was a rather power-hungry sort.  He is likely the model for Zeus, and he killed his brother Osiris in a terrible battle.  Set defeated Osiris and hacked his body into 14 pieces and scattered them across the Earth, thus making himself the king of the gods.

Isis set out on a mission to collect the pieces of her husband/brother Osiris, and placed them inside a hollow log, except for the penis.  She bound the log together and tossed it in the Nile River, where it remained for three days before Osiris was reborn (passion, death and resurrection of Christ).  It should be noted here that Isis placed a number of herons, or symbols of Bennu, inside the log with Osiris' body to ensure resurrection.

After rebirth, Osiris became god of the dead and ruler of the Afterlife, while Isis took his dismembered member and impregnated herself with their son Horus.  Note the virgin birth echo here.  This is not a spurious connection, as quite a bit of Christian iconography depicts Mary nursing Jesus in identical poses to Isis and Horus.

Horus was symbolized by Mars, as an angry, scared and red individual, who took it upon himself to get revenge on Set for what he did to Osiris.  Horus was deeply wounded in the battle, and lost his right eye, which many will recognize atop the Masonic unfinished pyramid.  He also received a deep scar on his face, much like Valles Marinaris on Mars, though no one has ever explained how the Egyptians would have known about such a feature.

Despite this necessarily abbreviated version of the story, the symbolism it contains is rather curious.  NASA not only chose 101955 Bennu of the thousands available as the target of its asteroid sample-return mission, but the mission would be called OSIRIS-REx, which of course means King Osiris. 

NASA also chose to swing the craft directly over Antarctica during a gravity-assist maneover, a continent that has been the focus of quite a bit of attention over the past few years due to rumors of strange discoveries there related to ancient civilizations.  We cannot forget that just last year, NASA star Buzz Aldrin, ostensibly the second man to walk on the Moon, went there and had to be air-lifted out due to a mysterious illness.

Hoagland has made a rather compelling case for the use of symbolism and ritual by NASA in its history of spaceflight.  We then have a craft named after Egyptian god Osiris with the title of "king" no less.  Osiris carries with it connections to death, resurrection and the Sun (before his death).  His son is connected with Mars and the Masonic eye.  Its mission is to an asteroid named after Bennu, Eguptian demi-god of resurrection, creation and the Sun, with a connection to the mythical phoenix and symbols of which were placed in the coffin of Osiris to ensure resurrection.

With all the interlocking symbolism of death, resurrection, the Sun, and ties to Egyptian, Masonic and Christian symbology, plus the curious ritualistic "death" and "resurrection" of Buzz Aldrin, a NASA star, in Antarctica, and the "coincidental" fly-over of Antarctica by Osiris-REx on the way to Bennu, would has to wonder what in the hell is going on over at JPL?

What or who is NASA trying to resurrect?  What is in Antarctica?  Why all the strange, interlocking symbolism?  And why is the mission being kept so quiet, given NASA's proclivity for announcing even the slightest achievements to justify its bloated expenditures of taxpayer money?

It all makes for some interesting musings, when one isn't overwhelmed with trying to survive in this world gone mad.

Some thoughts for a Saturday morning...

Blow Morpheus Blow

With the Sun whipping up a seemingly endless supply of major storms and earthquakes around the world, this seems like as good a time as any to revisit one of our favorite topics: prepping.

A few people may remember the the very old school fable of Aesop fame - the Ant and the Grasshopper.  As you (gods forbid) read or (even worse) watch TeeVee, anyone you see panicking is a "grasshopper."  Anyone you see sitting on their porch with a shotgun is an "ant."

In Aesop's fable, the ants worked all summer to stock up for the coming winter, while the grasshoppers played in the sun and mocked the industrious ants.  Come winter, the grasshoppers were freezing to death with no food, while the ants were safely underground with their stores, riding out the deadly cold.  In some versions, the grasshoppers even mount a war against the ants to take the supplies by force.  This latter group is what we call "government."

One thing that is highlighted by Harvey, Irma, Katia, and the Mexico earthquake is how one preps.  Most people will think of grizzly, bearded wildmen burrowing in the desert floor and piling up boxes of dried food, water and LPG gas tanks.  While effective in some cases, the recent tragedies worldwide show the ultimate futility of this kind of prepping.

Some people spend inordinate amounts of money stocking up on these kinds of things only to find they can be lost, abandoned or stolen when it comes to the nut cutting.  Ask the people in the wakes of Harvey or Irma how effective their caches were in the wake of the storm.  Ask the folks in Mexico whose houses collapsed how well their supplies helped them.  Ask the folks in the Caribbean how useful their food and water stores were after their houses vanished in the storm.

Yes, I agree that having stored food, water, a genset, gas stove, guns, ammo, and some basic tools are essential for any well-prepped individual.  I have personally enjoyed myself with power, a decent meal, fresh cup of coffee and a loaded shotgun, while everyone around me sat in the dark unable to cook or even see at night.

But putting all your effort into supplies that cannot be easily carried, and are just as easily stolen or lost, means that you are only partially prepped.  None of it makes a good goddam when your house is underwater, or surrounded by a hungry mob, or simply gone.

The well-prepped individual can be dropped in the middle of any situation with nothing but a knife and within 24 hours, he can have shelter, food and fresh water.  He can also navigate to (or away from) the nearest outpost of civilization.

Real prepping takes place in the mind.  It is a set of skills and mental preparedness that allows one to take advantage of whatever comes to hand, and the mental capacity to remain calm and rational while everyone else panics and the world turns to chaos.

Skills and mental discipline are highly portable.  They require no packaging, weigh nothing and cannot be stolen.  The only physical items a well-prepped human needs is a good, sharp knife.

When all else fails, the abilities to hunt/trap and fish, build a lean-to, forage for fruits and vegetables, and determine location and direction from the Sun and stars is all one needs to survive the worst disasters.  Along with a good knife and a calm, rational mind, one can manage in even the worst situations.  Even better, one doesn't have to watch year's worth of work and thousands of dollars invested vanish or fall into the hands of ill-prepped mobs.

It is rather difficult for rampaging mobs to see, much less steal your skills.  You appear to have nothing worth stealing if your entire survival investment is tucked neatly in your brain and strapped to your leg.  Even if someone commandeers your shelter and food, you can easily move on and acquire all it again in a safer location, using your navigation skills.  You also have nothing to carry to weigh you down or that requires constant guard.

An additional benefit is that you will require absolutely nothing from government "officials."  If the recent disasters have proved anything, it is that all government assistance comes with enough strings attached to hang a hundred men.  When your hand is out to anyone, much less a government goon, they have all the power and can make you do anything they want to get your treats.

Most people will argue that they are too busy to practice these skills.  Maybe they prefer a vacation in Cabo San Lucas to a week of wandering naked in the desert trying to survive on wits.  Maybe they are too pacifist to become handy with weapons.  Keep in mind these are the people who will become the rampaging looters and mobs when the world ends - and the world ends at least once in everyone's lifetime.

Here's some simple tests of your preparedness.  Go outside at night and see if you can determine where north is and your approximate lattitude by looking at the stars.  Walk around your neighborhood and see how much edible food you can find in an hour (hint - there's a lot).  How much water can you collect overnight using nothing but found items (leaves, sticks, etc.)?

If you are truly prepped, you should be able to figure the cardinal directions in 30 seconds, and your approximate latitude in an hour.  You should be able to make a decent salad out of found food within 100 meters of your house.  You should be able to collect one cup of water in most locations overnight.

That's prepping.

Water stores are good when the public supply is contaminated, as it usually is after major storms.  What will you do if your supply runs short?

Food stores are great when stores are shut and roads are blocked, but what to do when your rations don't stretch far enough?

A house and a genset are wonderful when the power is out and the rain is pouring down, but gensets need fuel and houses can be destroyed.

Take your prepping to the next level.  Buy a high-quality hunting knife and learn some useful skills in your spare time.  Remember, the time to learn these skills is NOT when you need them.  Teach yourself how to build water purifiers out of found items.  Don't rely on having stores for emergencies.  Not only might you have to abandon them, but they make your a prime target of the masses who didn't do anything to prepare.

Most importantly, discipline your mind so as not to panic.  The worst thing anyone can do for their survival is panic.  Once one stops thinking clearly and rationally, the rest of the fight is over.

If you are lucky enough to have avoided all the recent disasters around the world, count your blessings and start some real prep.  Two things we can always count on: disaster will strike at some point, and government never helps anyone but itself.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

We live in an age when corporations, even more than governments, can literally "flip a switch" and create information, or make it disappear.

Organizations like Google, Farcebook and all their related and equivalent beasts - including all of China's homegrown copies - are the embodiment of fascist architecture.  No need to burn books when hitting the delete button neatly vanishes the past, and data entry clerks create the future, like hives of Winston Smiths.

There is really only one way to combat this creeping threat.  Buy all the hard-copy books you can find, especially those printed before the 1940s, and especially things like dictionaries, atlases, encyclopaedias, and similar reference books.  The day will certainly come when owning real, printed books will be illegal, a la Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but until then, the only way to preserve unedited, unmolested knowledge is in a form that cannot be manipulated by the gargantuan media monsters.

An individual is only as powerful as the information he has.  This is why governments spent inordinate amounts of time and money on "intelligence."  Seeking the truth, while denying it to one's enemies is the oldest form of warfare Humankind has known.

When people lie to us, they are in fact committing a form of violence, because when we act on false information, the outcome is likely to be far less than what we were hoping to get.  When Google, Farcebook and others purposely deny us information, they are in fact committing violent acts on us for the express purpose of causing us pain.  Whether they alter the information or block it altogether makes no difference.  It is the denial of true and correct information that constitutes the act of violence.

For centuries, governments has done this.  We variously call it propaganda or false flag attacks, but over the centuries, we have come to expect it from such institutions.  For millennia, religions have done the same.  Governments only usurped and secularized the technique, but the results have been the same.

Now there are corporations who have the power to deceive both governments and religions.  In the digital age, it is not who controls the libraries, it is who controls the transmission.  After all, having powerful information is useless without the ability to transmit it to someone else.  As a corollary to Marshall McLuan's postulate that the "medium is the message," we can now add that the "medium controls the message," and "whoever controls the medium controls the world."

If I have the power to alter, block or manipulate any message sent to anyone on the planet, or worse, to generate messages based on your habits on- and off-line, then I have to the power to deprive you of necessary information, or to change the content of the message. or even worse, to change the information to cause you to act wrongly.

The most devious part of this kind of warfare is that it is now possible to manipulate the messages, disguise the manipulation, and to do it so fast as to make the manipulation seem almost impossible, even if it is suspected.

A couple of decades ago, the US broke up the Bell System, because a single company had full control of all telephonic communications.  Most of the worry then was simply non-competitive control of pricing for access, but I can imagine that if Bell could have manipulated real-time conversations at will and without detection, then the outcry would have been far more urgent.

Before that, the US broke up the Standard Oil Company (Rockefeller's monopoly) because it had complete control of petroleum from the wellhead to the fuel tank.  One entity having this amount of control over something as important as energy rang alarm bells in the minds of millions of people.  Rockefeller not only had the power to set prices, but to control quantity, quality and delivery.  He could force producers to sell lower and force consumers to buy higher, and there was nothing anyone could do.

That those former monopolies acquired so much power as to alarm most rational people and cause a wave of cabal-busting, it is even more alarming that no one seems to have the temerity to take the Googles and Farcebooks apart.  This is because, unlike Standard and Bell, the new monopolies own the government.  They can cut off government just as effectively as any individual.  And those the leviathans can't control with fear, they can simply buy with bottomless cash supplies.

This degree of fascism has never existed before in human history.  We have seen extreme cases on numerous occasions, including the current American and Chinese empires, but never have we seen such power coagulated in so few hands with so little opportunity to control it.  These corporations have endless power to advertise themselves, insert themselves into so many aspects of daily life, and absolute authority to boost or destroy whomever they please, and with the twitch of a finger, they can make any of us vanish - if not physically, then in any other way that matters.  They can control our ideas, thoughts and actions in ways we are hardly even aware of.

Imagine if/when these behemoths launch algorithms that can digest vast amounts of data almost instantly, then act and react faster than most of us can even glance at our watches.  A more serious question arises, though.

If we mere humans are able to break up these digital monopolies, would we find ourselves becoming the Sorcerer's Apprentice?  Would we hack the magic broom into a thousand pieces, only to see each piece become a new attack on our humanity?

These are serious problems and they raise even more serious questions.  We are blithely dancing into our own demise without question who or what we are following.  It is well past time to migrate away from Google and Farcebook and their ilk.  Choke them with the power of the purse.  They thrive on our eyeballs, so we must deprive them of their food.

In the meantime, start building private libraries of books - real, printed books with print dates long before the digital age.  Collect reference books - medical, electrical, engineering, and general knowledge.  They are powerless to block or modify that information, but we should be ready for full on physical attacks on books if they get desperate enough.  Threatened beasts are unpredictable.

Like master pickpockets, they dangle shiny baubles in front of our eyes while sliding their fingers into our minds to steal our humanity and reality.

When things seem too wonderful to be true, they often are.

King Canute Ascendant

My rant du jour will likely "trigger" some folks, but it needs to be said.

Many humans are complete and utter idiots.

As a native of Houston, Texas, and having spent a significant amount of my life living there, and having never been flooded out of my homes, I feel eminently qualified to say that a great number of victims of the recent Hurricane Harvey floods are complete bozos.

Don't get me wrong - every man's death diminishes me.  I feel the loss of life and I can deeply empathize with loss of property, but if you are one of the people who lived in a flood zone, you are a victim of your own hubris and lack of foresight.  Thus, I do not feel the least bit responsible, nor do I think taxpayers have an obligation to compensate you for your stupidity.

Since many folks in many countries are the results of government education, many folks will not know about a 12th century Celt king by the name of Canute.  Canute was a rather wise and calculating fellow who had his head screwed on straight.  One of his most famous antics was to prove the futility of fighting Nature.

Canute had his throne carried down to the beach in jolly old England, when it was part of the Norse Empire.  He was on a mission to demonstrate the true power of government.  He sat on the seaside and commanded the tide to halt and not get his royal feet wet.  Well, you can image what happened, but if you can't, the tide came in as usual and soaked him clear to the knees.  He rose and declared that earthly power means nothing in the face of Nature.

Jump 900 years ahead, and we land on the shores of Brays Bayou (what we call rivers in east Texas) and a neighborhood called Meyerland.  In my 56 years trodding on this planet, I can distinctly remember Meyerland getting epic floods at least 20 times.  That's roughly 30% of my personal memory, and it's probably a lot higher.  Locals joke that flushing the toilet causes Meyerland to flood.

Yes, folks, this area that has had major flooding in each of the past three years, is full of people who are actually wondering if they should rebuild.

Forgive me for being so blunt here, but are they complete and utter idiots?  It would seem so.  Sure, the rolling landscape of the river's banks, the oak-lined streets and the nice jogging/bicycle path along the river makes this an attractive upper-middle class place to live - when you are not swimming to the kitchen to grab another glass of electric Kool-Aid.

And in addition, the residents will likely stick their losses in the pockets of taxpayers, seeing as how they didn't have the common sense to stay out of a flood zone, much less stay there after decades of flooding.

The logical thing to do would be to bulldoze every house that had water inside as a result of Hurricane Harvey, and let Nature have Her domain back.  But common sense is not an attribute that is common amongst humans.

Houston was founded by a pair of Yankee swindlers who sold swampland to a bunch of unsuspecting Yankee families, who arrived to find a mosquito-infested bog shot through with half a dozen rivers that drain a significant part of East Texas into Galveston Bay, via the now-enormous Houston Ship Channel and Port.

Despite repeated destruction by hurricanes and just plain old Texas gully-washers, folks still build houses in low-lying areas that are drainage ditches (albeit big ones) for half of Texas.  Even worse are the great numbers of blithering buffoons who currently live in former rice paddies, for which Houston was once famous.  If you are not familiar with rice cultivation, it requires the fields to be flooded until the plants top out in late summer.

Not only are millions now living in areas that used to be farm and cattle land, a full quarter of America's oil refining capacity lines the shores of bayous and the Gulf of Mexico, which areas have been repeated hammered by hurricanes and floods since the Gaia super-continent broke up a few billion years ago.

In other words, only the most dense, room-temperature IQ nit-witted bonehead would have been surprised by this latest flood.

What makes it such a disaster is NOT the amount of water or the area submerged.  No, this disaster is entirely of human genesis.  Millions of people now live in places that were once pastures and swamp.  When I was born, Houston had a population of a quarter million.  It now has 4,5 million registered residents, and who knows how many unregistered ones.  They have built homes and vital infrastructure in places that everyone knew (if not knows) was flood prone on an annual basis.

King Canute was making a point about the limits of his power, but modern Houstonians simply defied common sense and Nature Herself.  And to compound the idiocy, victims expect government (e.g. Taxpayers) to bail them out.  Why not?  American taxpayers bailed out the bankster after decades of systemic corruption and stupidity.  Everybody can make everyone else pay for their lack of forethought and complete boneheadedness, right?

If you build a house in an area that is known to have flooded at least every five years since humans have inhabited the region, and then find yourself fishing and fighting alligators in your living room, I have a grand total of Zero Sympathy for you.

Nor do I feel bad for people living in high-rise towers in earthquake zones, nor piles of ash that once lived on the flanks of volcanoes, nor fish food that once inhabited hurricane and flood zones.

One assumes that people who do these things receive some extraordinary benefit - as any extreme risk should offer - and they don't share that benefit with me.  So why should I share in their losses for taking those risks?

I lived in Houston for 40 of my 56 years and never once had flood water in my house.  The closest I ever came was about ten feet from the door.  I chose the places I lived based on topographical information and local anecdotes.  If no one could remember the last time it flooded, and the topographical maps of the area showed sufficient elevation above mean sea level, I figured I was pretty safe, but in any event, I would have taken full responsibility for CHOOSING to live in Houston in the first place.  I do the same while living in Jakarta, though here there is about a ZERO chance of government handing out money, like it does in America.

Is this harsh?  Yes.  It is not easy to look at people in distress and remember that their suffering is a direct result of their actions and choices.  They must, however, take responsibility for those choices, as they presumably made them based on some perceived benefit that they were not going to share with the rest of us.  Why should we share the negative results of their choices?

If, like the residents of Meyerland, you were fully aware that your area flooded regularly, and you have had floods in the recent past, and you chose not to visit someone further inland when the hurricane threatened, and you choose to rebuild and continue living in the same place, I feel absolutely no sympathy for your future losses.  Your losses are entirely the result of your hubris and unwillingness to accept that you - like King Canute - have no power over Nature.

As the undisputed master of clear thinking, George Carlin, opined, "People build their houses on the side of a volcano, and the wonder why they have lava in the living room."

Man up, take your whacks, learn from your mistakes, and try to make better choices in the future.  It's called Life, and Nature is in full control of it.  Moving your throne to the edge of the sea and commanding the tide to stop to accommodate your whims is a rather stupid thing to do.