The State Of The Disunion

 

 

The reader may not be aware of this, but the American left and right are in the same box.

The Progressives are being shunned by the Democrats, and the Populists are being shunned by the right.  The reason is simple, but the mess commonly referred to as US politics is a hot mess.

The Democrats have been under seige by the Progressive left since the 1972 campaign of George McGovern.  The left has had an ongoing crush on Socialism for a long time, but the mass student movement in favor of McGovern was the first time that segment of  the Body Politic had discovered just how many people supported the ideology and the power they had to affect the nation.

It could be argued that FDR was the first Progressive/Socialist president, and it's a strong argument, but the ideological sentiments of the general public weren't quite there.  The Comunist/Socialist movement began in the 1920s in the US, but FDR cherry-picked the elements that would draw the widest public support for his campaign - Social Security, government spending on public works, price controls, etc.

By the 1972 election, the Progrssive/Socialist ideology had found a significant voice in the population at large.  They put up a strong challenge, but the entrenched American right won out and put Nixon in office, but the Progressives made in-roads in local and state offices and continued to build on it.

In 1976, widespread disgust with Nixon led to a backlash and a squeeker victory for Jimmy Carter.  Carter ws the classic "bleeding heart" liberal - emotional, sentimental and naive.  When he gave away the Panama Canal, the right was shaken out of their complacency, realizing that the left had no clue how to run a nation, and placing the nation's strategic interests in the hands of people who felt sorry for other nations was a direct line to ruin.

Sure enough, China bought the port concessions at both ends of the canal, but that's a different blog.

The backlash was palpable.  In 1980, Carter was trounced by Ronald Reagan, a kind of Pro-Freeper, who subscribed to free markets, minimal regulation and low taxes.  It worked.  The economy took off, millions made fortunes, but unchecked greed has its drawbacks.

The entrenched interests who had taken over the country in 1963, with the death of JFK, weren't happy.  And the Socialist left was getting ansy.

GHW Bush was granted a term in office to give lip service to the Reaganites, while the Bush crime family (intricately linked to the JFK assassination) had time to find a suitable guardian for their interests.  In stepped the Clintons.

Billary - for they cannot be separated, like the Katzenjammer Kids - were the perfect pair.  Bill was the mellow dude about town, while Hillary was the hardcore McGovernist.  Together they played both sides of the fence.  Bill attracted the lassaiz-faire right, while Hillary appealed to the radical left.  They were the transition couple, lulling the right into complacency, while sliding the Agenda under the RADAR.  Bill did what he was told as long as the trim and bud kept coming, and Hil injected her vitriol into the Body Politic.

It takes a lot of effort to stop a pendulum.  With Carter, it has swng to the left, and the momentum carried it all the way to Reagan, so Bush the Elder slowed it, the Clintons caught the left swing, and Shrub caught the right swing.  Altogether, they slowed the swing of the pendulum towards the nadir, where absolute destruction lay waiting.

In stepped Obama.  This piece of work was essentially the echo of Billary.  He was the mellow dude about town with a radical bent that would have made McGovern blush.  He almost stayed the pendulum, but there was a growing backlash in the form of Ross Perot/Ron Paul adherents who believed the Reagan Revolution had not gone far enough.  There was unfinished work, and this Obama dude was going the wrong way (compare election results for 2008 and 2012).

America was sliding back towards the right when the left put Hillary up for auction.  This panicked the right.  Rugged Individualism dies hard on the rocks of Socialism.

In steps Donald Trump.  Trump was a hold-over from the Reagan Revolution.  He was a self-made billioniare who was the symbol of 1980s Enlighened Greed.  He was the .Gordon Gekko prototype.  He was a marketing genius who had made his own name synonymous with luxury and had created a media empire from scratch.

But if Carter was the naive left, then Trump is ihe naive right.

The backlash against Trump was immediate, profound and relentless.  He was hounded from the moment he announced his campaign until he left office.  Hillary had been chosen to stop the pendulum, but Trump won, because no one but Trump had foreseen the vast, silent Populist masses that they thought they had silenced with Ron Paul, just as the right thought they had silenced the Progressives with McGovern.  Both were wildly wrong.

What has become glaringly clear in Election 2020, is that there are two competing ideologies that are diametrically opposed and will not be silenced - and are no longer willing to be marginalized.  The Estalishment, installed under Wilson, encouraged by FDR, glamorized by JFK, disheartened by Nixon/McGovern, energized by Reagan, placated by Clinton/Shrub/Obama have been finally pressed together like opposing magnetic poles, and they will fly apart against all efforts to confine them.

We are seeing a Revolutionary Civil War, unlike anything that has arisen before.  One might point to the Soviet Union, but the left in that case was exhausted and capitulated.  In the current case, there is an entrenched oligarchy that has played two camps against each other for decades, but have now lost control of both, and everyone loses.

Trump has likely lost, but a Harris administration - I mean Biden - is a disaster.  Think of the brilliant scene in John Carpenter's Dark Star, where a character gets into an existential argument with a bomb.  The bomb's entire raison d'etre is to explode, but because it can't be released from the bomb bay, the character desperately needs to talk it out of "becoming".

What's really going on in the US, is that the Establishment have put forth their preferred puppet, Kamala Harris.  They have disguised her as Joe Biden, who will be removed from office almost as fast as the echoes die down drom his Oath of Office.  Trump is waging a war against a foe he was ill prepared to handle.  In his inflated self-image, he thought he could negotiate his way out of anything, but he never met a foe such as the one he faces now.  It is a global interlinked cabal of mutally blackmailed Elitists who are scared to death they are going to be lamp-posted and their century-long effort to take over the world will be lost forever.

Talk about motivation.

How can we sum all this up neatly?  Well, America's genetic roots are a bunch of people who wanted to be left the hell alone.  They are pursued by people who have had and want to continue having control  over everything.  There are vast numbers of people on the ;leave me alone' side, and the US Constitution is in their favor.  There is vast wealth and ancient history in the other corner.  They are entrenched and intractible and have been at war for centuries.

There is a solution for the US, and it has succeeded elsewhere.   What remains is to determine the resolve of the independents and whther they are married to an abstraction or reality.

Stay tuned...

Confessions Of A Political Atheist

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” - Ecclesiastes 1:9

In the hyperbolic environment of a highly contentious US election and a global effort to enflame disagreements of every kind, the phrase "never before in history..." is being thrown around like grass seed in a spring breeze.  Hardly.

 According to the Generally Accepted Narrative (GAN) - my term, don't bother looking it up - human emerged somewhere around 250,000 to 350,000 years ago, which equates to million of generations.  In all that time, Human Nature has never varied.  Sure, the force, scale and technology behind our basic motives has evolved and grown, but given the same set of variables, the human mind will always arrive at the same conclusions, and thus the same actions.

In the GAN, great civilizations have risen and collapsed, some well documented, others mysterious, still other we may never know about.  From the Indus Valley to the extant empires and dynasties, nothing fundamental has changed - same pig, different shades of lipstick.

From Cain murdering Abel, to the major crime families today, corruption and greed have always existed and will always exist.  Wherever power and wealth accumulate, corruption and ambition will scale up to meet the resources made available by that concentration.  It is a rule as immutable as day follows night.

One thing is for certain, when someone says, "Never before in history...," they are either woefully ignorant or deceptive.  Yes, instant global communications may be new, but what is said and how it is used is as old as coveting thy neighbor's goods.

In the wake of the first Trump-Biden debate, I have heard numerous commentators saying, "We have never seen a president like this!"  They wail and gnash teeth over Trump's bombastic character and bemoan the collapse of America.  Oh, please!  There have been plenty of similar personalities in the White House.  Maybe they didn't have Twitter accounts, but they had printing presses, and the establishment media of the time were just as fawning or contentious as they are now.  Look no further than William Randolph Hearst, or the yellow journalists, or Benjamin Franklin's own pamphlets and his Silence Dogood persona.

As far as bombastic leaders go, history is replete with them - Jengis Khan, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong.  In the softer light of time, we may revile or venerate these individuals, but they are no more or less bambastic than anyone on the global stage today.

The accumulation of wealth and power in a central location will attract these personalities, the way sugar attracts ants.  Whether they are benign piss ants or dangerous fire ants is a judgment call in generations to come, but the nature and behavior behind the personae has been and will always be the same, so long as humans are human.

As a political atheist, I reject the notion that things are different today, than at any time in history.  I reject labels like lift-right or conservative-liberal.  The definitions of these labels is in constant flux and are meaningless when evaluating events current or historic.  To a political atheist, it is more instructive to look at cause and effect.

When surveying history, one sees patterns emerge, which we can use to define Human Nature - given an equal set of causes, we can expect similar effects.  This is generally called science, with a small 's'.  It is objective and fact based.  It is not passionate about a particular perspective, but tries to discern expected outcomes based on a given set of conditions.

The political atheist sees politics as a cycle, winging first in one direcction, then the other.  It is inevitable and its pattern can be seen throughout history.  Certain personality types emerge to address certain environments, because their skill sets are ideally suited to address the situation.  Humans know this intuitively.  They do not need to be convinced.

There is no winner or loser, there is only the Tao.

As my favorite author and pundit, Mark Twain, is recorded as saying, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."

I grew up in a highly politicized home.  My father, a politician, began his career as a Democrat, then switched to Republican in the Goldwater years.  I watched as society swug from the idyllic 1950s conservative, to the 1960s radical liberal, to the 1970s softer liberal, to the 1980s Reagan conservative, and on and on.  Just one country, just one lifetime.  The same has happened in every nation across the globe, and those patterns synchronize to create the Zeitgeist in ever larger cycles spanning decades to millennia.

As a political atheist, I do not use popularity or the majority to determine my beliefs.  Here again, I defer to the patron saint of political atheists, Mark Twain, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."

Rather, I view politics as one person on a see-saw, running back and forth trying to balance the direction of motion.  The slight differences between cycles are what we can "progress," though the differences are vanishingly small and often erased in the next cycle.

Politics is essentially the choice between firing squad, hanging and the electric chair.  No matter what one chooses, the result is the same, it's just a matter of how much pain one feels getting there.

In effect, politics is choosing how much pain we want to feel getting to the next cycle.  Sometimes, the environment is so disturbing that we choose more pain to get it over with, but at other times the environment is serene and we choose as little pain as possible.  It is effectively choosing how fast we rip the bandage off the pre-existing wounds of the last cycle.

In the Grand Scheme of Things, who we vote for has little or no effect on the path Humanity is taking.  One choice may get us there faster, and another slower, but the destination never varies.

The Future is a cliff in front of us that we cannot avoid.  We can choose to crawl off or jump off, but "off" is the only viable option we have.  The political atheist has studied all the various roads taken to arrive at the cliff and realizes that Universe put it there, and no single choice along the way did anything but vary the scenery we passed along the way.

It may seem that politcal atheism is a nihilist Weltanschauung, but it isn't.  It is the Traveler's viewpoint of enjoying the process rather than fretting over the schedule.  Either way, the Traveler will arrive at a destination.  Whether the destination was the intended one depends on an infinite set of variables, all of which can be enjoyed for what they are.

In a tapesty, each stitch has no choice regarding its color or position in the overall image.  It likely has no clue what the overall image is, nor that it is a stitch in the first place.  It only knows where it is and can choose to fight that fact or accept it, but it doesn't change the inevitable.

As a political atheist, it is comforting to let go of caring about labels and which side "wins" or "loses".  Instead, it is entertaining to watch the mud-slinging "shit show" and the hand-wringing, and the punditry, and the sales jobs, all trying to control the piles of wealth and power.

It is far more instructive to enjoy the process - the view - along the way.  It is beautiful to try to see the colors and positions of the stitches in the overall tapestry.  It is certainly entertaining to watch the histrionics and hyperbole of the competing factions, knowing the futility and meaninglessness of it all, yet drinking deeply of the financial and emotional investment so many put into these things.

We appear to have arrived at one of those fascinating periods in history where all the cycles align.  From what I have learned, this seems to happen every 500 years or so.  We humans have already chosen our course by the collective actions of our species, and most without a clue as to what we have done. 

Adopting this or that label, ideology or candidate changes nothing but the experience each individual will have getting over the cliff.

Lebens Raum Ad Astra

It is a great moment to see private enterprise loosen the iron grip of the State on spaceflight.  If Elon Musk and SpaceX are allowed to continue pushing the boundaries of commercial space access, we may yet get to see space tourism - a decades-old dream - come to life.

I stayed up late into the night to watch the Crew Dragon launch, and I admit I got a little choked up to see private enterprise finally succeed in an endeavor previously reserved for the exclusive use of government operators and political entities.

The Dragon's gleaming interior and ultramodern design mark a stark break from the bleak, utilitarian cockpits of the defunct space shuttle, or the cramped confines of Soyuz.  Sleek couches, spacious interior, a couple of touch screens, and a handful of buttons were all that didn't clutter the sci-fi environment of SpaceX's minimalist design.

Though I was moved by the launch and fascinated by the engineering and design work, I couldn't help thinking that I've been watching this exact scene play over and over for the past 60 years - since the days of Yuri Gagarin (or was it Vladimir Ilyushin?) and Alan Shepherd.  Even more, chemical rocketry is a century old - almost as old as the automobile, rockets in general have been around for 2,000 years celebrating Lunar New Year.  Let's no forget that a number of dogs and monkeys preceded humans into space, as well.

The first iron tube rockets were invented Mysoreans in India in the 1700s.  A British officer named Congreve stole the idea for his rockets in the 1800s. American Robert Goddard is generally credited with inventing modern chemical rockets, though he was standing on the shoulders of many a giant.

In other words, SpaceX is just one in a long line of rocketeers who have refined the physics and abilities of rocketry, but the craft is almost as old as written history.

Sure, I applaude the milestone set by SpaceX, of commercial human spaceflight.  It is a significant achievement, even in the long, storied history of rocketry, especially getting one of the (ahem) pioneering nations back into orbit after a decade of bureaucratic bumbling.

The question I have, though, is where are all the real toys?  Are we really to believe that the 100 years of intense rocket development, the trillions of dollars in research, the many nations involved have only achieved something slightly more advanced than Chinese fireworks?

With all the decades of development on ion, microwave, nuclear, and electro-gravitic propulsion, the best humans can do is fart flaming gas out of a tube?  Why aren't we using aerospikes and EM Drives and spin-stabilized LASER launchers?  How is it, with the vast sums of money and millions of hours of research, we still can't do better than bottle rockets?  Why is it that spaceflight hasn't changed much since the Nazi innovations of the 1940s?  And why are their REAL advances listed as hoaxes?

Given all the possible reasons to riot, one might think that having a century of our savings stolen for projects and technology that we're not allowed to see, much less use, would be chief among them.  We the people are owed a huge debt and we are being deprived of collecting on it by a group of people who are hording our property from us.

Instead, we are told to be proud and joyful at yet another rocket launch, a feat nearly as old as civilization and one which the Russians and Chinese have been happily doing for the past decade while the US was grounded and begging rides.

I want the real toys.  I want to see the man behind the curtain.  I want all the things that were promised decades ago in the blush of human spaceflight adolescence.  We paid for it, we deserve it.  It is our heritage and achievements that are being robbed from us under our noses.

Way to go Elon and SpaceX!  Great job!  Nice design work!  Outstanding attention to detail.  But it's time your partner NASA gave us the goods that we've paid so dearly for - and farting tubes ain't it.

Aceh Versus The Civil War

I entered into a Twitter argument the other day that highlighted a number of issues due to the lack of critical thinking and gross generalizations.

The fellow posted a video showing an Indonesia woman and man being flogged.  Not only did he not know the story behind the video, he extrapolated this behavior to an entire nation without any comprehension of the social and political currents behind it.  Indeed, my correspondent didn't even know why the folks in the video were being flogged.

He lamented that all of Indonesia condoned such behavior.  I pointed out that the incident took place in Aceh, which is a small region at the far northwestern tip of Sumatera, which is semi-autonomous and ruled by Islamic fundamentalists.  I said that public flogging is not condoned or practiced anywhere else in the country, and that if the government attempted to force the region to stop shari'a practices, it would likely cause riots and secession, which would spread through the rest of the country.

The fellow's response was, suppose the Northern states had not stopped slavery in the South.

In the space of a couple of brief text messages, this individual had displayed a profound ignorance of history, politics and human behavior.

To begin with, Indonesia and the US share many traits.  Indonesia is about the same size as the continental US, with roughly the same population and both have religious majorities that spend an inordinate amount of time trying to force everyone else to adopt their values.

Indonesia is composed of more than 300 tribes, each with unique cultures and histories, bound into a loose confederation.  Indonesia's motto, "Bhinneka tunggal ika," is the Sanskrit equivalent of "E pluribus unum," or "one out of many" in English.  Both countries adopt the eagle as their national symbols, and both are republics that constantly promote democracy (they are mutually exclusive terms and ideologies).

On scale, Aceh is roughly equal to the Seattle-Tacoma metroplex, though wildly different in context.  After the 2004 quake and tsunami, Aceh has virtually returned to a medieval state, with all the attendant theocratic allusions that come with that statement.

Of all the regions in the vast sprawling archipelago known as Indonesia, Aceh is the closest to an absolute theocracy under shari'a, or religious law, and like most theocracies, it chooses some of the worst aspects of shari'a to enforce.

The primary issue is that if the central government attempted to stop Aceh from its practices, it would risk having the Islamic majority in the country rally around Aceh, and likely spark national riots and possibly secession movements across the country, especially in Papua where the Christian majority has long sought to extract itself from the rest of the nation, taking its vast mineral wealth with it.

When my Twitter correspondent casually waved the US Civil War comment at the situation, I was triggered.  The two situations were/are not remotely equivalent, and to so blithely conflate the two was more than I could bear.

The US Civil War had almost zero to do with ending slavery.  It was all about northern bankers and industry trying to keep the costs of raw materials from the south as low as possible.  The southern states, wanting to increase profits, were competing in open markets and getting higher prices in Europe.  The morthern interests blockaded southern ports to shut down the South's markets, and levied exorbitant tariffs on exports to effectively steal profits from the south, while leaving the finished goods from the north untouched.

The Confederacy, after secession, was de jure and de facto a separate and independent nation and blockades against it were in fact acts of war by the same reasoning and international law used by the colonists in their fight for independence from England.  Only in the tiniest of factions in the Civil War was ending slavery and issue, and folks on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line wanted the practice ended.

The US Civil War was about economics and the right of people to throw off tyrannical government in favor of something more to their liking.

In Aceh, the situation is only vaguely analogous to the US Civil War, in that a dictatorial effort by the central government to change the local regime would be disastrous and likely lead to mass death and destruction.

The fact is that the people of Aceh submit to the theocracy of their own choice.  They can easily walk or take the bus south to other regions of Sumatera, or even leave the island altogether for greener pastures elsewhere.  That the young man and woman in the video allowed themselves to be flogged was their own choice.

Unlike the US Civil War, there is no economic component.  No outside force is trying to starve out competition and effectively enslave an entire nation.  The people of Aceh willingly choose to live under such conditions because they have convinced themselves that this is a viable and virtuous way to live.

In other words, what my Twitter correspondent was proposing is tyranny by a central power over a group of people who voluntarily choose to live as they see fit.  From the outside, we can abhor and condemn the practice of flogging.  We can offer aid and shelter to anyone escaping such practices.  But we cannot mandate our values on those folks by force.  That would effectively be as immoral as the practices we condemn.

In a republic, as Indonesia and the US nominally are, the fundamental rights of the minority are protected against the tyranny of the majority.  Among those fundamental rights in both countries is religious freedom.  It would be no more moral and ethical for Indonesia to force Aceh to adopt a different culture, than it would be for Aceh to force the rest of the nation to adopt shari'a (or at least its interpretation of it).

It is also wildly fallacious to draw parallels between they US Civil War and the situation in Aceh, other than to say that if the central government forced Aceh to change, then it would be the moral equivalent of what the Union did to the Confederacy.  In both cases, internal forces will eventually overcome habit and tradition, and reform will come of its own accord.

It is important to note that Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was not aimed at the Union, where slavery persisted quite some time after that war, nor was it legally binding on the Confederacy, which was a wholly different jurisdiction and not subject to US law.  It was nothing more than a propaganda tool to undermine the Confederate economy at its weakest point.

The people of Aceh have a choice to stay or move to other parts of the same country with widely varying social and political customs and laws.  They are not prevented by the nation's laws from moving elsewhere, with lawful employment and residency throughout the country.  Those who stay and submit to public floggings for being alone with their paramours without supervision do so of their own accord.

This Twitter-vation also highlights the dire need of folks to educate themselves on real history, and not the propagandistic efforts to justify immoral acts foisted on them by vested interests.

Sunday In The Park

Have no fear! It will get much worse before it gets better, and you and I are not likely to see the better part, if history is any judge.

This is one of those rare moments in time when everything collapses and starts afresh. It happens roughly every 500 years. The last one was the Age of Exploration, when suddenly the entire world became accessible and no longer the sole purview of the elite few. The world was mapped in its entirely and the information made available to the masses through the printing press.

Tourism was born and suddenly humans were able to see more of the world in a year than their ancestors had seen in many lifetimes.

The press led to telecommunications and the internet. One no longer had to go to the library, if one's neighborhood even had a library, but the sum total of the world's knowledge could be brought to your handheld device almost anywhere in the world.

We are on the verge of something just as magnificent and profound, though for those of us in the midst of it, it looks frightening, chaotic and dangerous.

To a villager 600 years ago, anything more than a day or two walk from home must have seemed terrifying - a realm full of monsters and spirits that only heroes and fools dared to go. Now a man born in Texas and living in Indonesia can clack away on a device and reach a global audience.

In a sense, we humans are just finishing our teenage years. As toddlers, we rarely left our backyards. As teens, we suddenly discovered a wider world and pushed our boundaries. Now we, as a species, have reached young adulthood and must leave our nest and enter the larger Universe. Those mature individuals among us remember those first tenuous steps outside the protective shell and the fear and trepidation we felt. That moment is what we are experiencing now as a species.

To a certain extent, globalism is winning, but it is not the kind the elites have been trying to foist on us. They have plotted for centuries to control and direct this inevitable movement for their benefit, but they are losing control and failing miserably. They will continue to fight and exert their errors, as they recently did in Ireland, but that is a tiny victory in a massive wave of change.

If one stands too close to a painting, one only sees the brush strokes and loses the glory of the image. Put another way, individual stitches in a tapestry are meaningless without the overall context.

From the level of the stitches, things are and will continue to get more chaotic, but from the view of the tapestry, it is an exciting time to be alive and see this natural and organic process in action. From our current perspective within the tapestry, we cannot imagine what the outcome will be, but using history as our camera, we can get a glimpse of the Big Picture and know that humanity is finally entering its long-awaited adulthood.

This is a perfectly normal and expected phase, just as parents plot and track a child's development. Just as a child comes to adulthood and no longer relies on the parents, but rather achieves independence, so too is humanity outgrowing the grasp of our controllers and expanding into a realm they (and we) have long feared.

We have outgrown the institutions of our childhood - religion, government - and must now create new institutions that serve us as adults. We are no longer told to go to bed at a certain time, or that we can't have dessert until our dinner is finished. We must make those choices for ourselves, and we are learning (even now) the consequences of making the wrong choices. At some point, we will learn the wisdom of our parents/institutions, even as we reject their foibles.

Yes, it is a time of chaos. We are going through profound changes in our collective body, mind and spirit. We are realizing that we must internalize our control structure and not depend on our parents for it.

On the plus side, we are free. We can do anything and go anywhere we choose, as long as we are willing to put in the effort to achieve it.

It is not an easy transition, but it is a necessary one. Like our metaphorical tapestry, some stitches will get dropped; it is inevitable as much as it is painful. However, from the perspective of the overall image, it is invisible and does not affect the result. Yes, the institutions of control will deceive, fight and even kill to maintain their control, but they are as doomed to fail as we are destined to grow beyond them.

Don't give up and keep working on an individual level to change things for the better. It is the death of winter that makes the spring possible.

Onward through the fog!

A note about the image at top. It is a painting called, "A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatter," by Georges Seurat. It is a massive painting with the foreground characters being far larger than an average human. Up close, it is nothing but a million dots of color, a style called Pointillism pioneered by Seurat. You have to stand at least 10 meters away to see the entire picture. If you are ever in Paris, I highly recommend having a look at it. Quite amazing in its copious detail and overall simplicity.

The Vertical Hold

"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?"
- Adam to God in Milton's Paradise Lost

"There was none among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery."
- The Creature in Shelley's Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 

Throughout history, Mankind has struggled with both his own creation, and the wisdom of his creations.  Literature is replete with the lamentations of humans cursing the Creator for forcing us into a miserable reality, while at the same time cursing what we create in the rush to improve our lot.

It seems that our anger towards the Creator has cut us off from vertical progression and trapped us in a materialistic world of horizontal sliding.  In this Age of Unenlightenment, we plunge into the quest for knowledge in our collective effort to surpass our own creation, and in so doing, we inevitably manufacture unspeakable horrors that repulse our deepest spirits.

We now, as a species, stand on the precipice of creating something that will exceed our perceived limitations.  I say perceived because the ancient aesthetes told us we could transcend (vertical) and showed us many ways.  Instead, we have chosen the materialist path (horizontal), whereby we create creatures that take the journey for us, so that we can live vicariously.

We continually amaze ourselves with our cleverness and ingenuity, only to be repulsed and horrified by the same when we perceive what we have done.  One wonders if God himself felt like Victor Frankenstein, for we certainly emulate his Creature.  One wonders if humanity hasn't in fact gone backwards (horizontal) because in the end we cannot overcome our own Nature (vertical).

Though we have, as a species, become infinitely more clever with mechanics (horizontal), we have shown little if any progress in our collective wisdom (vertical).  If we have done anything collectively, it is to have divorced ourselves from Nature, trying to place ourselves at its pinnacle, though our entire history is nothing more than Sisyphus struggling to push the boulder to the peak of the mountain only to have it tumble down the other side.

The unknown sage tells us that insanity is repeating the same actions expecting different results.  By this simple but effective definition, humanity has completely lost its marbles.

At the end of 2017, we stand on a precarious ledge.  We know full well that humanity's track record is pitiful when it comes to achieving the greater good with our cleverness.  We are embarking on a new path, whereby we are close to creating ourselves as we imagine we should be.  We have within our reach the ability to create genetic and mechanical beings that we hold to be superior by the puny measures we hold to ourselves. 

Artificial minds that are billions of times faster than our own and never forget anything stand waiting to be released on society (or have they already been?), while we dilute and destroy our own educational systems, keeping us from realizing what limits we truly have.

Think for a moment of all the labor-saving devices we have created in the past century, but are we less busy?  Think of all the communication devices we have created, but do we communicate better?  Think of all the vast networks and databases we have created, but do we teach ourselves from it?  Think of all the novelty we have created, but is it more than just shuffling some graphics and re-arranging some menus without delivering anything that is truly new?

It is long past time to stop.  We, as a species, must take a break and examine where we are and what we have done.  We must become vertical, that scale we long ago abandoned.  We will never effectively measure our success and failure without perspective, and that can only be achieved by rising above the landscape of civilization and mapping the terrain of our lives.

We have spent centuries rushing horizontally into a future that is multi-dimensional.  Time does not have a direction, so why must we constantly move through it in only one direction?

Ironically, humanity's salvation lies in the one thing we are seemingly incapable of doing - stopping.  We are addicted to change without ever allowing ourselves to fully comprehending what we are changing or why.  Like juicing fruit, we are throwing away the rinds without having extracted every drop, thus losing valuable sustenance in our haste to down the product and move on.

In the past century alone, we have added vast quantities of knowledge without adding a single quality of understanding.  We leave our machines to extract the richness of the data while we plunder the Universe for yet more data, never realizing that the Universe is contained in every single datum.  We already are what we seek, but that is the one place we have forbidden ourselves to look.

As our literature continually demonstrates, we have not answered the one question that perplexes us the most: who are we?  We curse the Creator for a story we made up about ourselves, and our creations have this dichotomy built into them, so that they too will manifest the same disdain for us.

Until we as a species can come to grips with our own Nature, we will never create anything but externalizations of our own internal chaos.  We will continue to loathe our creations, and they will continue to despise us, until we resolve the one issue at the center of our civilization - why do we exist?

That answer will never come from a machine.

Living Dangerously, Again

This month saw the swearing-in of Jakarta's newest governor, Anies Baswedan.  At least once or twice in the ensuring weeks, Anies has declared Jakarta to once again be in the hands of the pribumi, or pre-colonial, people.  One must assume that Anies is either deliberately inciting trouble, or he is woefully ignorant of Indonesian law and history.  In the eyes of some commentators, he is both.

It is the habit of some demagogues here to declare that Indonesia is (once again) Muslim in a kind of "tent revival" analogue to the waves of Sillyanity that sweep the US on occasion.  Anies is one of them, and has made noises of allowing Islamic prayer in the governor's mansion, a proposition I am not entirely opposed to, as long as the Christians, Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists are allowed the same facility.  There are, in fact, six contitutionally-protected religions in Indonesia.

When I hear these demagogues rail about the colonial days and how this is a Muslim country in the same breath, it makes me laugh.  That has got to be one of the most ridiculous assertions an educated person can hear, at least here.

The name Jakarta is a conflation of two Javanese words: jaya and karta.  The term jaya karta can be translated as "city of prosperity," and was coined sometime in the 17th century.  The city's most direct lineage traces back to the Hindu Kingdom of Sunda, which dominated western Java for centuries. 

Arab invades colonialized a significant part of what is now western Indonesia and Malaysia, coming both directly from the Arabian peninsula and via conquests in India.  The invaders brought Islam with them and forcefully subjected any peoples they met along the way, demanding adherence to Islam or offering death.

By the mid-1600s, Islam had conquered much of eastern Java (the Jawa kingdoms), but the Sunda had put up quite a fight, preferring their native religion - a variant on Hinduism - to the harsh rule of the Islamic invaders. 

At roughly the same time, Portugal "discovered" the archipelago in its quest to control the spread of Islam and find new trade.  The natural wealth of the islands, both in things like gold and the unusual array of spices and flavors of food, with a year-round growing season, as well.  The Portuguese and Sunda king made common cause against Islam, and the Portuguese fleet needed a safe port in the area, as well. 

The first treaty ever executed between powers in Europe and the islands was done here in Jakarta in the late 1600s, memorialized on a large carved stone that was only recently recovered during a construction project in the old city.    It details an agreement between the Sunda king and Portugal, whereby the fleet would receive safe port while they helped to defend the Sunda from the Jawa/Islam invaders.  Elements of Portugal's presence are still found in northern Sulawesi and Ambon, Flores, and Timor L'Este, where the wholly different culture of Portuguese architecture and lifestyle led to bloody suppression and the deaths of hundreds of thousands when Indonesia tried to force Islam on the eastern half of the island.

As a bonus fact, Timor L'Este is just the words for "east" in the local language and Portuguese.  The name literally means, "East East."

A very long story short, the archipelago has roughly 1,000 inhabited islands, out of about 17,000.  Some of the islands have been inhabited since Hono Erectus took up digs here, well over a million years ago.  We can't forget the Flores people, too, who are commonly referred to as the Hobbits.  If recent discoveries and research bear out, there are pyramids here in West Java that are 20,000 years old, on top of all else.

Since the dawn of humanity, wave after wave of people from all over Asia have colonized these islands.  Aboriginals in Australia either came through here on their way south, or more controversially, worked their way north.  Some research says people from Taiwan were the first modern humans here.  The Chinese and Arabs have had a go at it.  Most recently, Europe, Japan, Britain, and the US have all had their hands in the resources found lying about the place.

For any group of the hundreds of cultures found across the archipelago to claim pribumi status is thus demagoguery or just plain, unvarnished ignorance.

In 1965, the Year of Living Dangerously, Jakarta had its first Christian governor, Henk Ngantung.  He was deposed by the coup d'etat that unseated President Soekarno.  Jakarta had its second Christian governor in Ahok, who was deposed this year after being railroaded for blasphemy only because he is a Christian of Chinese descent.  This led to the election of Anies, who has declared a victory for Islam.

This is dangerous talk, Pak Anies.  Every time it has happened before, a lot of people died.  Furthermore, there are SIX protected religions in the Constitution, not to mention dozens of ancient and indigenous religions practiced across the archipelago.

Are we headed for yet another Year of Living Dangerously?  Or perhaps the goal is more localized, along the lines of the 1998 Riots, or perhaps Timor L'Este?  Fascism is born of intolerance, and is no stranger to Indonesia.

This is a republic, Pak Anies.

What Goes Around

You might want to cue up Billy Preston's big hit from the 1970s as we trundle through current events on diametrically opposed sides of the world today.

Back in 2014, a Populist reformer who goes by the nickname "Jokowi" (Joko Widodo) was elected president of Indonesia.  It was a hotly contested election against the Establishment choice, a lovely man by the name of Prabowo Sugiarto.

Prabowo figured he had it all locked up.  He was the darling of the Establishment, had spread the appropriate amounts of money in the appropriate places, and polls showed him having the edge on Jokowi.  It was a done deal.

Until it wasn't.

Prabowo lost the election by a slim margin as huge numbers of people that weren't counted in the polls showed up to vote for draining the swamp.

Enraged over losing the office that Prabowo thought was his for the taking, he mounted protests (paid warm bodies in large groups chanting prepared slogans), filed challenges in the courts (all the way up to the Supreme Court) and generally did anything to disrupt the new administration's ability to make headway in reforming and streamlining the national government.

Jokowi was elected governor of Jakarta in 2011 (Jakarta is a city, state and seat of the national government), along with his reformist ally Basuki Tjahaja (Ahok) Purnama.  When Jokowi won the presidency, Vice Governor Ahok took over the state government, becoming only the second Christian of Chinese ethnicity to hold the post (the first was 1964-5 shortly before Soeharto took over).  However, Prabowo didn't go quietly.

Prabowo moved to the background and began a campaign to get his people inserted into key positions in the Parliament, which resulted in barricade after barricade to Jokowi's reforms.  At the same time, Ahok was attacked repeatedly via his greatest weakness - saying what he thinks.  Ahok famously made a comment in September 2016, which was construed to be a slight against al-Qur'an, and Ahok was ultimately convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to 2 years in prison.  The conviction came after a hotly contested governor's election where Prabowo's chosen candidate, Anies, was elected over Ahok after a concerted effort by Prabowo's political machine to discredit the Chinese Christian based on racial and religious grounds - certainly not based on his record of cleaning up the city's operations.

Deprived of his staunchest ally, Jokowi has been left dangling in the wind.  He literally has no one watching his back now - literally or politically.  For the past two years, he could leave Jakarta to attend to the country's international interests, knowing that Ahok was keeping things under control back home.  Now, however, Ahok is well tucked away and Prabowo has installed his people in every quadrant around Jokowi.

This has led to numerous rumors flying that Prabowo will mount a coup d'etat in late July, while Jokowi attends the G20 summit in Hamburg.  True or not, it is a sign of Jokowi's weakened position that such talk can even be taken seriously.  The conditions certainly match many that existed in 1965, when another former general, Soeharto, mounted his coup.

If you are one of our thousands of North American readers, and all this sounds familiar, then you are right.

In 2016, Establishment darling Hillary Clinton thought she had the presidency of the US sewn up.  She lost by a narrow margin to a Populist reformer named Donald Trump.  After the election, a number of legal challenges were mounted against Trump, and ultimately Clinton slipped into the background where she formulated a stealth attack to block every single action and policy of the new administration.  This has led to unprecedented infighting and witch hunting in an effort to unseat the duly elected president.

The parallels are curious.  I have pointed out the many similarities between the US and Indonesia, and the fact that nearly identical political situations exist in both countries now is even more curious.  As researchers like Peter Levenda and Allan Nairn have pointed out in recent articles, the ties between the Establishment of both countries run rather deep (pun intended).  That nearly identical tactics would emerge in both places at roughly the same time seems less coincidental than intended.

This situation, combined with Macron's victory in France, Merkel's survival in Germany, and the incredibly languid foot-dragging going on over Brexit, it seems that the Establishment is engaged in a scorched-earth effort to prevent the world from escaping their iron fist.

The masses have a really bad habit of thinking elections take care of the popular agenda.  It's really not entirely their fault, since they've been indoctrinated from birth to think they live in "democracies".  They get all riled up during the election cycle, get their candidate elected, then go back to whatever it was they were doing before.  In a few years, they look up again and notice that nothing got done and they proceed to elect another reformer, who also gets nothing done.  Meantime, the Establishment runs all the way to the bank.

As George Ure likes to say, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

The Establishment are obviously hurting, or they wouldn't be so blatantly obvious in their machinations.  They're spooked by their slipping grip and will risk exposing themselves in order to maintain their cushy positions of imaginary power.

How all this will unfold is anybody's guess, but it seems we can make a fairly solid prediction that the remainder of 2017 will be one for the history books - filed under "Rhymes".

The Real Identity Politics

At more or less the same time, I have discovered a YouTube channel and a movement that I truly respect.

The YouTube channel is Lauren Southern, and it begs the question, why are all the hot babes on the good side?  Lauren says what every sane person should be thinking.  She takes on the tough topics and is unafraid to go there, challenging all the sacred cows of the Post-Modernist Marxists, confronting them with camera and microphone at the ready.

Lauren Southern introduced me to a group that is quickly rising in my esteem.  The group is called Génération Identitaire, or Generation Identity, and they are literally putting it all on the line to defend history and culture from Neo-Fascist invasion and governmental collusion.

Lauren's passionate report on the willful destruction of New Orleans landmarks made me weep for the loss of history, while at the same time enraged me.  Her on-the-spot reports from Paris just before the election brought me images and reports that the StreetMeat Media will not ever show us.

And of course her report on Generation Identity filled me with hope that a younger generation will not roll over and allow Western civilization to be destroyed.

This young woman has more moxy than most of the men I have ever known.  She is of the right age, intelligence and temperament to inspire the generation that mine left dangling in the wind.  It inspires me to watch her videos.

When I watch Generation Identity in action, I remember fondly my days as an activist with the Texas secessionist movement.  I was ridiculed and dismissed and even had my former life destroyed by a political system dead set on destroying my cultural heritage.  I spent many hours in jail, as well as driving all over the countryside to deliver and listen to speeches.

I was often accused of being a racist because of my activities, but were forced to eat their words when they realized I was married to an Apache-Latina, spoke multiple languages, and had traveled to dozens of countries - not as a tourist, but as someone genuinely interested in the history and culture.

It makes me misty-eyed to see these young folks training, fighting and taking action, while us old farts sit around and grouse.

When I rail against Islam, it is not the real Islam that named most of the visible stars in the northern hemisphere, or gave the world algebra, or bequeathed the world a rich heritage of art and architecture.  The Islam I rail against is a perverted form of rigid fundamentalist dogmas that has gotten loose - an unintended consequence of Western powers who saw it as a weapon.  It is anti-art, anti-philosophy and anti-reason.  It is fascistically dogmatic and unyielding in its error.

It is no different than the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages, with its destruction of "pagan" temples, pogroms against science and Holy Inquisitions, and even in our own age supported Nazism.

Real tolerance and real diversity means that every culture has the intrinsic right to a space where it can grow on its own, or die of its own folly.  Good, bad or indifferent, though, every culture and must be allowed to grow, dominate, merge, or die off as the organic structure that it is.

What we are seeing, though, is artificial mixing that is catalyzing a war to be used as a distraction for a particular agenda.  This cultural war - a world war if you like - is part of the classic Hegelian Dialectic: create a problem and install a chosen solution by controlling the discourse.  As the poles calcify, the outcome becomes inevitable, since the destroyers of culture are relentless, and the defenders of culture have no choice but to answer with equal force.

Since one side cannot talk and the other side cannot listen, the inevitable result must be all-out war.  At the end of that war, whatever the final result, those with the agenda will say we must do something to stop these wars, and oh by the way, here's our pre-formulated plan to do just that.  Rest assured that the Final Solution will be just as abhorrent as the war itself, though perhaps less chaotic and bloody.

Individuals like Lauren Southern and groups like Generation Identity are likely the West's last-ditch effort to stop the march to war and the destruction of history and culture.  The open questions are, is it in time, and is it enough?  It depends a lot on who listens and how well they can remain focused on the real goal.

As is often the result, people like Lauren are bought off by the corporate interests and groups like GI are infiltrated and steered the wrong direction.  Let us hope and pray that they have the integrity, strength and will to stay on the Path, and more importantly, that others will join them in the fight.

The most important tools they, and we have at our disposal are books.  We must read the ancient foundations of our civilization and take the lessons of those before us to heart.  It is not the first time our civilization has faced these challenges, nor will it be the last, but it is the challenge we have in front of us.  It is incumbent on Muslims, Christians, Atheists, and everyone else, to see where we have been before choosing where we will go.

Department Of Repeated Redundancies Department

I don't know what is more utterly amazing and laughable: is it the complete stupidity and incompetence of government, or the contempt with which government views its slaves?  Perhaps it is both.

Let's start with the headline that gobbled up the weekend news cycle - the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting.  A man, known to "authorities" to be unstable, transports a rifle and ammunition in his baggage from Alaska to Florida, but is apparently not registered on any flight arriving there.  He takes his baggage to the toilet, loads up and comes out shooting.  Then the "authorities" announce that they are questioning the suspect, which would seem like a logical thing to do.  Meantime, the entire government-controlled corporate media debate focuses on adding more of the same policies and procedures that have failed time and time again.

Either the government "authorities" are completely and utterly lobotomized (and let's include their mouthpieces as well), or they think the average American is.  I suspect it is a generous helping of both.

Next headline: Indonesia wants to boost its defense industry by making and exporting bombs that could potentially be thrown back at them.  Now, to a thinking person, you would want to make and store bombs for defense, not sell them to potential enemies.  Furthermore, the Indonesian government wants to boost its defense by continuing to disarm and distrust its own citizens/slaves.

If anyone asked me, which they obviously didn't, I wouldn't be selling my bombs and I would arm and train every able-bodied (and minded) citizen, so that an invader would have to fight door-to-door across thousands of islands in order to take over the country.

But that's just me thinking again.

How about this one: government wizards (a.k.a. "scientists") say they have witnessed a Black Hole tear apart a star and spit the pieces out into space.  In the same freaking article, they say Black Holes gobble up everything and not even light can escape.  Um...maybe I'm missing something here, but didn't you just tell me that this Black Hole is "spitting" pieces of a star out into space?

Maybe nobody reads this shit, because I seem to be the only one thinking these things are just a bit contradictory.

Trump says anyone who doesn't want better relations with Russia is a "fool" and "really stupid."  Pardon me, Mr. President-Elect, isn't that why folks elected you?  I mean, it's a bit redundant to keep telling us what we already know.  How about solutions?  What exactly are Tillerson and the Evil Mass-Murdering Bastard War Criminal Kissinger doing to alleviate the problem?

Next, we have the climate.  Yes, for some reason Al Gore and the Echoettes are sticking to the story that the Earth is suffering from man-made global warming, even though the world is cooling, there are record low temperatures and snowfall all over both hemispheres, polar ice is expanding, and rainfall patterns in both hemispheres are beginning to match perfectly with past solar Grand Minima.  And just to put a cherry on the ice cream, polar bear populations are at record highs.

Still not convinced we've fallen down the rabbit hole?

The Democrats in the US absolutely insist that the Russians hacked the election, even though Julian Assange says emphatically that WikiLeaks did not get the email from the Russians, Seth Rich - DNC IT specialist - was shot dead in the back in broad daylight and NOT robbed, none of the "intelligence" agencies can produce a shred of evidence, and the Russians have no objective motivation to do so that outweighs the risk of getting caught doing it.  Oh, and did we mention that the voting infrastructure of the US is not connected to the internet, and thus can't be hacked by typical means?

In the 1940s, the CIA was created out of some Nazi left-overs and General Galen's spook network in Europe and North Africa.  In the 1950s, the CIA took over the Corporate Media with Project Mockingbird.  In 1963, the CIA assassinated John Kennedy, who refused to follow the spook script and was preparing a full-on assault on their growing power and influence.  Since then, the CIA has virtually ruled the Executive Branch of the US government, and through organizations like USAID, have set up networks in dozens of countries to control and influence those governments, as well.

So convinced was the CIA that it could install its next-in-line lackey, Hillary Clinton, that they profoundly underestimated the amount of vote flipping and ballot stuffing needed to ensure Trump, whom they have assiduously painted as a buffoon, would not get in.  Perhaps they overestimated the somnolent effect they were having on the general public, or they grossly underestimated the number of people who were slowly but inexorably waking up from the 50-year hibernation of reason.

Even though the masses truly did elect Trump, and he is the first president that is not under the direct control of the CIA since 23 November 1961, he is nevertheless controlled by a competing faction of the Deep State, knowingly or not, though I think the former.

The US, and by extension the world, is slowly waking up from a decades-long trance that was achieved in part by the US victory and subsequent economic dominance in the world after World War 2, as well as the fact that so many US males were brainwashed by military service during that war into blind obedience to government and symbols.

The Grand Awakening is due to two primary factors: 1) the 50-year effort of independent researchers to undo the magic spell over the population, which used to be called the underground media, but which was emerged as the Alt Media (or Free Press as I prefer), and 2) the human mind can only take so much rewiring and layers of bullshit before it reboots.  We are in the reboot phase of history at this very moment.

It is also a particularly vulnerable point.  When the mind reboots, there is a time while the OS is loading that one can access the BIOS and change the system parameters.  This is what we see with the "Russian hacking" narrative.  The spooks are desperately trying to reinstall the "fear factor" before things get too far out of hand.

What makes all of this visible is the failure of the classic "black is white" operation that has gripped Western civilization for half a century.  When the flip-flop narrative becomes this obvious, then it is clear that the spell has failed and people are clearly not buying the brute-force attempt to make them believe things that are clearly in conflict with the senses and basic reason.

In so many ways, the institutions of control, such as religion and government, are losing their power over the masses.  The Big Three Monotheisms - Judaism, Christianity, Islam - which have enjoyed millennia of control, both directly and through their secular government counterparts, are falling apart.  All of the war mongering we see is these institutions attempting to drive everyone back into nationalistic, and by extension religious mindsets.  This is the real hegemony that has dominated the world for longer than any of us care to imagine.

The classic "black is white" narrative is nothing more than dressed-up "faith."  Religions have inspired fanatical loyalty by spinning fantastical tales that prevent people from thinking or acting independently by deferring everything to sometime after death when the evil-doers will get theirs, or by waiting futilely for a Messiah who will come to set everything right.  This deference is a poison that destroys critical thinking and creates bovine nose-to-tail herd behavior.

For three centuries now, the Enlightenment has sought to re-awaken the pre-frontal lobes of mass humanity by destroying the "black is white" narrative and the institutions that spin it.

The problem is that a part of the Enlightenment was corrupted and instead sought to take over the institutions of control.  The reasoning that led to the perversion is rather convoluted, but suffice it to say that they figured they could use the control structure to reprogram humanity in their own image.  This is where the Illuminati storyline comes from.

Fortunately, is seems that the true Enlightenment has survived underground and has been busily working to spark the Great Re-Awakening, a process that quite obviously the US Founding Fathers had hoped to achieve with their New Republic, the Shining City Upon The Hill.

Despite herculean efforts on the part of the ancient Controllers and the splinter group called the Illuminati, the Enlightenment has rooted and is just now starting to bear fruit.  But it is a dangerous time.  Entrenched and power-hungry organizations do not relinquish power without a fight, and that fight has only begun.

There is a covert war going on just out of sight, but it is increasingly visible to the masses.  Ultimately, it will become an all-out war in which the ensconced powers will win or leave nothing but scorched Earth behind. It is a war of profound ideologies whose prize is nothing short of an entire planet.  The one weakness of the Good Guys is that they want to prevent the scorched Earth and so are unwilling to go to the extremes that the Bad Guys are.

The next few years will be a true spectacle, even for all its gory destruction and waste.  The clash of two completely and utterly incompatible philosophies will be nothing less than cataclysmic, though it must be said that not all of it will be fought in the real world - most of it will be mental and spiritual.

If you want to see what the other side is capable of, just look at the post-election mayhem in the US.  Black teenagers streaming vile hate and complete lack of compassion on Farcebook.  Paid rioters looting and destroying neighborhoods and randomly killing passers-by.  This sociopathic violence and mindless destruction is only a tiny taste of what the Bad Guys will unleash to keep their privileged perches.

The Good Guys are neither mentally nor spiritually prepared for the hell that is coming.  Far too many people believe that electing a few representatives is enough to fix the problem, when it is in fact the very heart of the problem to begin with.

People like Trump are not the solution, though they are symptomatic of the correct instinct on the part of the masses.  He also represents to a great many people the power that they truly have, though when Trump fails - and he will - there is a terrible risk of despair and hopelessness on the part of the newly awakening masses.  At that point, they will be most susceptible to re-immersion into the control grid.

Both sides have now fired their first volleys, though the Bad Guys know how far they will go to protect their domain.  The Good Guys need to wise up fast and steel the mind and soul for the battle to come.  We have a brief moment for a little R&R, but it is dangerous to let one's guard down.

Black is White...War is Peace...Hate is Love.

Exit President Milquetoast

Well, folks, here we are about a fortnight away from Barack Husein Obama's retirement and subsequent pasturing as a UN lackey, so it's time to start assessing his legacy as leader of the Surveillance World.

Since I have spent a grand total of three weeks on US soil during his inhabitation of the Oval Office, and since I am two weeks older than he is, and thus kind of like an older brother, I feel uniquely qualified to comment on what the world will take away from these past eight years.

One thing is certain: in two hundred years, Obama will absolutely be remembered as the first...um...blank president.  Yes, I said "blank," not "black."  Not a typo there.

Because Obama has almost zero verifiable past, he is a white sheet of paper upon which historians will be able to write any story they so choose.  This makes him a boon to future researchers, since they will, like JFK's assassination, be able to concoct any story they choose on the flimsiest evidence and no one will be able to gainsay the story.  To be able to falsify a claim requires facts and evidence, of which there is precious little in the case of Barack Husein Obama.

So far, he was born in three different countries (US, Indonesia, Kenya), did not have a high school sweetheart nor attended the prom.  He has no accessible school records that anyone can dig up.  He has somewhere in the range of four different fathers.  And he just simply appeared on the national political scene in 2004, as the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention.

Since Obama has no discernibly strong convictions or vision, people have been able to project their wants and desires on him. Depending on your particular point of view, he has either been a champion or bugbear of just about every cause that ever existed.  About the only major achievement he has is a universal healthcare program that appears to be failing faster than the moving men can haul his stuff out of the White House.  Even his wife's school lunch program is dying faster than Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, since no one really liked the food and were only being polite.

Obama added $10 trillion in national debt, but no one seems to be able to point to where the money went.  If I had spent that much, I would at least have a house full of stuff to proudly display, but the US doesn't have any shiny new toys that still have trillion-dollar price tags on them.  Instead, all we see are stories about every public program failing, from military to infrastructure to education.

For a paltry $1 trillion, I could have built a coast-to-coast tunnel linking all the major subway systems in the country with a mag-lev train and still have pocketed a tidy profit and retired to Indones...oh wait...already did that...OK somewhere else.

Hell, the nation's space program can't even put a man, much less a monkey, in orbit.  They have to rely on the evil, nasty, horrible Russians to haul their carcasses up and back.  Good lord!  Even US rockets have to use old rusty engines from a Russian military surplus store on the lower east side of Minsk.

And while we're talking about Russians...

Remember that little-hyped event where Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize?  He had been in office for nine months when the Nobel Committee came up with this knee-slapper:

The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to United States President Barack Obama for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".

You have got to be kidding, right?  I mean, with less than a fortnight to go, the world is on the verge of nuclear war - closer than during the Cuban Missile Crisis - thanks in great part to Barack Husein Obama.  Using this criterion, Adolph Hitler should have won at least two NPPs while he was destroying Europe.

When I think about it, the only thing Obama has achieved that no one can argue with is that he is the first president with a great tan.  Honestly though, the US could have elected George "The Tan" Hamilton and at least gotten better acting, plus he could have done a whole gag on being related to the first US Treasury Secretary, and even starred in the hit Broadway musical.

We all owe at least one debt of gratitude to the erstwhile president, though.  Obama did more to highlight the American obsession with façadism that any other president in history.  As the old Billy Crystal gag went, "It's better to look good than to feel good," and Obama is the embodiment of that concept.

Think about it: you've got the world's most advanced fighter jet that doesn't work, the most advanced stealth destroyer that doesn't work, the most advanced space program that can't put a man in orbit, the most advanced interstate system that is crumbling to dust, the most touchy-feely education system that produces Millennials and SJWs, the most advanced internet that can be hacked by a 14-year-old, and the most advanced surveillance system that can only tell us whodunit, not who-will-dun-it.

Yes, the Obama years shall be fondly remembered as the Mirage Years, where everything looked great from across the noon-day desert, but when you get there it's only sand and cactus.

I imagine this period in American history will be remembered much like the caesarhoods (?) of Nero or Caligula - lot's of fiddling and burning and riding horses through the Senate.  In fact, there's even a hint of godhood in the left's idol worship of Obama.  He reminds me a lot of Woodrow Wilson, whom the left also idolizes, but who also gave the nation a Central Bank, income tax, the first incarnation of the UN, and a gross pile of lies that led to war.

Remember when Obama was installed?  No one was allowed to say a cross word, and school children had to genuflect and cross themselves whenever his image and likeness was paraded through the room.  Photos of the man were always framed with a halo of light, as if he was channelling Ra or Apollo or Mithra.  At least that level of insanity has faded, but all-new forms have surfaced in their places.

Like a falsified birth certificate, Obama is a character of many layers, which when switched off leave one with a blank page.  History will not be kind to Obama, nor will it judge the generation that elected him with fondness and nostalgia.  Even his hard-core worshippers will someday snap to their senses, or at least one hopes, although one is forced to admit there are many for whom little hope exists.

The smartest thing Obama could do at this time is to fade quietly into the background, but one gets the feeling that is not likely to happen.  There are all kinds of trial balloons floating about him becoming Generalissimo of the UN, and that probably won't happen, because outside the US, Obama is little more than a polite joke at cocktail parties.

Not having demonstrated cunning and insightfulness over the past eight years, smart money is on the likelihood that this Blank Page will attempt to salvage some legacy for his having used resources on this Earth.  One gets the feeling that instead of polishing his image, time will further erode it as the spell wears off.

I wish that we could bid farewell to Obama, but alas, that is not likely to be.  At least we can rest assured that his influence in US politics will greatly diminish, as the immediate result of his tenure is a complete repudiation of virtually everything he achieved.

Like Donald Trump or not, he is far more likely to be a lasting historical figure (for better or worse) than Obama will ever be.  Blank pages, like white bread, 2% milk and filtered water, just don't leave much of a lasting impression on the palette.

The Boomers Fizzle

In pondering the world as it is and the direction of things, it occurred to me that Trump's election represents the ultimate failure of the Baby Boomers, since it is unlikely that the political pendulum will swing back as far to the Liberal agenda before that generation fades away.

For those unfamiliar with who and what the Baby Boomers are, they are a large demographic bubble from roughly 1946 to 1964, where there was a marked increase in birth rates following World War 2.  While the Baby Boom occurred worldwide, the term Baby Boomer refers specifically to the generation in the US.  Not only was the generation marked by numbers, but due to post-war economic boom in the US, these people grew up with an unprecedented level of wealth and affluence, and as a group, rejected much of the cultural heritage they had received.

The Baby Boomers were responsible for the explosion of the music industry, relaxation of sexual mores and a general sense of wanting to force the world to accept their sensibilities.  They eventually developed a pervasive sense of entitlement that has informed most of American cultural development in the past 50 years.

To put it clearly and succinctly, the Boomers are a bunch of spoiled brats that never had a consistent rudder in the ocean of Time.  To top things off, their grandchildren are the current Millennials who have recently shown themselves to be devoid of the ability to accept reality with any grace and dignity.

The Boomers were largely responsible for New York and California becoming the cultural centers of the US, if culture it can be called.  The decades' long dominance of liberalism in the media  and arts have largely been centered around those two states, and in the recent national election, they represent almost the last remaining strong-holds of the Boomer Agenda.

As the generation withers and dies, it is watching its life-long efforts fade with it.  Beginning with Trump and filtering down to dog catchers, the Conservative Wave nearly drowned the country and left the vast majority of state and national political bodies in the hands of the so-called Conservative party - the Republicans.  It is rather sad to see such a huge demographic group live long enough to see their legacy completely rejected and the beginning of the dismantling of the Boomer Agenda with the likely appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court, which will last well into the next decade if not longer.

The Boomer Agenda started will enough.  The basic idea was to just leave people alone and let them pursue happiness in whatever form they choose, so long as that pursuit did not damage others - in other words fairly libertarian.  Over the decades, though, it became more and more militant, with Liberal ideals literally being shoved down people's throats, with things such as gay marriage and gender-neutral bathrooms.  Rather than leaving such things up to the States, where those decisions rightly belonged, the Liberals forced the entire country to accept their sensibilities under the guise of being "diverse" and "inclusive, obviously forgetting that diversity and inclusiveness meant accepting people who didn't want those things on an equal footing.

This is a hallmark of the Boomer generation.  It wasn't enough that they believed certain things, they had to ram it into every conversation and public forum, so convinced were they that their agenda was correct.  In other words, they were the classic spoiled children that could never be placated.  Every step in their direction brought even louder coercion to take two more steps, usually at the point of a gun and/or risk of imprisonment - e.g. using governmental powers.

Now that senility, old age and death have narrowed their ranks a good bit, the backlash has begun.  The Generation Xers, Boomer kids, are in power now, and like all children, are rebelling against their parents.  Behind them are the Millennials, who like all grandchildren, tend to swing back to the grandparents' ideals - due in large part to the artificial bilateral spectrum.  The Millennials, however, are suffering from the policies of their grandparents.  They are unable to form coherent arguments, are crippled by uncontrolled emotions and have an unshakable belief that they are entitled to get their way.

There is plenty of blame to go around, from social manipulation through the legal system, to absentee parenting on the part of both Boomers and GenXers.  This fouled up situation is echoed by and strengthened by China's Lost Generation, which is another entire article that presents a very similar problem caused by Maoist social manipulation.  In both cases, a lack of formal, traditional education coupled with social laxity and a break with long-held tradition has resulted in barely controlled chaos that will echo for years to come.

Now aging and increasingly demanding once again, the Boomers are reaping what they sowed.  They are finding themselves isolated and disposed of, as their celebrated youth wanes away.  The short-sightedness of the Me Generation is haunting their old age.  Their lack of real vision and use of coersion to get their way has now suddenly reversed as their children move to undo everything their parents did.  Sound familiar, Boomers?

Unfortunately, their grandchildren, the Millennials, will come into power in about a decade or so, and a completely rudderless generation, products of their grandparents' meddling and uneducated attempts to "reform" culture and society, will once again resurface.  The only hope is if GenXers are able to repair the education system in time to instill some sense into their grandchildren, who will inherit the mess the Millennials are sure to make.

The Great Cycle comes around full of echoes of days gone by.  Hope for a return to sanity seems slim, at best, because the Boomers have done such a fine job of destroying all connections to the past in their headlong rush to create a Utopian future that will never come.

The Boomers are also the first generation to dismiss responsibility en masse for their actions.  This one decision is now the Bogeyman they face in their waning years.  Having cast away their past, they are now cast away by the future.  There is a certain justice in this.

John Glenn And Geezer Talk

The Mercury Seven are now gone.

John Glenn, the first American and third human to orbit the Earth (that we know of) passed away overnight.

I was seven months old when Glenn took his historic four passes around the Earth.  Glenn was one of the two Mercury Seven (Gus Grissom the other) that I never met.

This got me to thinking about history and the connections we all have to it that we rarely think about or take advantage of.

My personal connections and first- and second-hand memories span three centuries.  My grandfather and great aunt shared stories that began in the 1890s.  My grandfather grew up with Jesse James in Independence, Missouri, and my great aunt vividly described coming to Texas in a covered wagon.

From the various adults around me in my childhood, I heard first-hand recollections of World Wars 1 and 2, the Great Depression, the Dawn of the Age of Automobiles, Telegraph, Telephones, Jets and Space Travel, the Age of Radio and Television, and in my own direct experience, the Computer Revolution and the Information Age.

When one considers how fast technology has developed in the past 150 years, and how much of that history we've experienced directly, or through direct contact with people we have known, it is rather mind-boggling.

When my great aunt Tish was born, the Transcontinental Railroad was just 30 years old, the Telegraph was still an amazing new technology, and radio communications were just being discovered in the lab.  The telephone and light bulb patents were filed in the decade before she was born.

This is stunning to me because for most of human history before Aunt Tish's birth, little changed from one century to the next.  Perhaps a few decades brought revolutions to the arts and sciences, beginning with movable type and the Renaissance, but how many people actually experienced it in their daily lives?  Most of that technology only affected the intelligentsia and took quite a long time to filter down into the consciousness of the average human.  The same with the philosophical revolution of the Enlightenment, though by now its diffusion had sped up considerably.

When Eli Whitney developed mass production of arms, suddenly things started to take off.  The availability of cheap, quality rifles and handguns empowered a vast number of people practically overnight.  When Henry Ford applied the techniques to transportation, instantly everyone could own a car much cheaper than buying a horse.  Jethro Tull's seed drill and hoe revolutionized farming and food production, and the pace of life started to pick up considerably.

The changes from vacuum tubes to transistors to silicon chips was practically overnight in historical terms.  Mechanical labor to analog to digital was about as fast.  The conquest of time and space went from the speed of a horse to a little over 35,000 mph (the New Horizons probe) in just over a century.  What's more, most of this technology is available to humans in the daily lives, though many suspect there are far more amazing technologies still to be revealed (I say revealed advisedly).

In my great aun't lifetime, humans went from 500-mile trips in covered wagons to the Moon and back, and those trips to the Moon were witnessed worldwide live on television (a debate for another time).

Just within the confines of my career, I have seen video equipment shrink from wildly expensive rooms full of humming machinery and piles of 1" videotape reels, to my laptop.  I haven't even seen a videotape in several years.  My first trip abroad involved calling home from the telegraph office on a line with a 2-second delay.  Now I can make video calls from just about anywhere on Earth in real time from my handheld devices.

Aunt Tish told me about hiding under the bed during Halley's Comet's 1910 pass, and even gave me a bottle of Comet Pills widely sold at the time to stave off the ill effects.  In 1985, when the comet came through again, I made a pilgrimage to Big Bend in Texas, to watch the spectacle from a gloriously unsullied sky.  If I live to 100 exactly, I will have the chance to experience the comet for a third time, either first- or second-hand.

It was 200 years from Columbus to colonies in the New World.  It was 52 years from John Glenn to SpaceShipOne.  Imagine where we'll be tomorrow.