You should try to be happy, if only to avoid the badgering of those who take unhappiness as an invitation to offload their opinions. As Kierkegaard put it, Job patiently endured all – until his friends came to comfort him.
Another Warhammer 30K book in the Horus Heresy series, following the Word Bearers’ attempts to destroy the Ultramarines in a surprise attack. It’s quite good fun, though not very coherently plotted, with some subplots and minor characters seeming to be of great importance and then just disappearing without trace. It has a lot of battles and gore and demons, and some good moments with Lorgar and Guilliman.
I wouldn’t recommend if it you’re dying and only have a few months left on the clock, but if you just want to kill time it’s okay.
Many years ago at university a Leftist professor I knew used to say that things were moving in the right direction, meaning his direction: abolition of the death penalty, not merely legalisation but active governmental promotion of homosexuality, utter judiciary indifference to drug use; and very recently we’ve seen paedophilia being vigorously pushed by the powers that be.
For many, this Leftward swing is a natural, organic development. Every generation rebels and wants to let it all hang out, take drugs, burn things, and kill and rape, and so a conservative society will, in this view, inevitably develop and so come to some degree of enlightenment.
This raises some questions. Why exactly do some societies become liberal and others don’t? Why did the West remain largely conservative until the 20th Century? Why do Muslim immigrants to the West tend to retain their native conservatism?
My own feeling is that the decay of the West, to the point where convicted paedophiles are allowed to dress like demonic women and read stories to small children, is a far from organic development.
In reality, not every teenager rebels against his/her parents; I would guess it is about 20-30%, and perhaps only 5-10% are serious. Our biology seems to contain a necessary degree of mutation, even deleterious mutation; and this ranges from the physical to the psychological. Under normal circumstances, almost all of these teenage rebels become natural conservatives after a few years of hedonism. That is, they start like this:
and mature into this:
This natural order of rebellion, questioning, and eventual maturation has been purposefully disrupted by the Left; it would be as if the Amish themselves promoted Rumspringa as a chance to escape the boring stupidity of Amish society, and each Rumspringista was encouraged to go to LA and become a porn star and never return.
None of the supposedly inevitable developments of the last 70 years have occurred organically or according to “the will of the people”. They were all pushed by the political, media, and corporate elites – that is, by the Cabal.
This brings me to my last post, which was partly about the 70s group Big Star. I think it was Q Magazine, many years ago, which ran an article about the band, with a photo
captioned: “Big Star: none of them ever were.”
When I first heard their music, aged 20 or so, I was amazed that I had never so much as heard of them. Surely, I thought, they should be up there with The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds? But no. They released a few great albums to general indifference and then disappeared.
The conventional account is that their music was slightly too quirky, or they were on the wrong label. I think, now, that their music wasn’t pushed by the label; whether because Cabal didn’t want them to become successful, or because (as I think more likely) the label marketeers were incompetent, the important point is that a great deal of success is to do with marketing: the actual quality is kind of beside the point.
Big Star’s lyrics were often every bit as decadent as The Rolling Stones’, but their sweet high sound was perhaps dissatisfying to Cabal – or it was just bad luck. Either way, without marketing all their talent came to nothing.
As our society becomes ever more intricately interconnected & thus amenable to the puppeteer’s hand, success & failure are increasingly a matter of Cabal planning. Thus, something like Cardi B’s WAP (“wet-ass pussy”) is a success; according to Wikipedia:
Upon release, “WAP” received widespread critical acclaim. For Pitchfork, Lakin Starling called it “a nasty-ass rap bop, bursting with the personality of two of rap’s most congenial household names”, adding, “the detailed play-by-play in the verses doesn’t aim to impress guys—and that, the song suggests, is why Cardi and Meg’s expertise is credible,” as they “center themselves as women in order to freely celebrate their coveted power, sex appeal, and A1 WAP.” Jon Caramanica of The New York Times deemed it “an event record that transcends the event itself”, and stated that both rappers “are exuberant, sharp and extremely, extremely vividly detailed” in the song that “luxuriates in raunch”. Rania Aniftos of Billboard described the song as a “twerk-ready, scorching banger”. Mikael Wood of Los Angeles Times deemed it a “savage, nasty, sex-positive triumph” and stated that “the women’s vocal exuberance is the show—the way they tear into each perfectly rendered lyric and chew up the words like meat”.
There’s music journalism for you. They are talking about this:
I found the video unusually disturbing; I would broadly agree with the Vigilant Citizen: I can’t speak for specific details but my first (and last) impression was of something like a homage to, or advertisement for, MK Ultra, with purposefully disorienting visuals and music, and an atmosphere not so much of sexuality as of servitude and perversion.
So, consider the Cardi B video, and then listen to Big Star’s ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’ and consider that the former is being aggressively pushed by Cabal and their journalist/corporate puppets, and the latter disappeared without trace.
A nicely-Big-Star-influenced song by Spiritualized:
Though I’m tired just sitting here talking with you
There’s better things y’know a lonely rock ‘n’ roller can do
Is a reference to the little-known Big Star statutory rape classic ‘Motel Blues’:
I am like a pelikan of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.
I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.
Psalm 102. 6-7
I work, if you can call it that, in a very left-wing field; meaning that most of my colleagues are somewhere between rabid SJWs and what Millennial Woes calls “globeshitters”: pot-smoking drifters who want open borders so they can live wherever they want without a visa.
In Germany, one of my colleagues – a perpetually sour-faced blonde American from Maine, with a face like a slapped arse, as they say – flatly informed me that Trump was inciting white racists to attack “minorities”, and then cited the Nick Sandmann incident as proof. I just sat and stared at her, for by this point the mainstream media were on the backfoot as video footage of Sandmann’s total innocence spread beyond their control. I didn’t bother correcting her; almost all of my colleagues are in the 90-120 IQ range and have read nothing save CNN headlines since they were 5. There is no arguing with such folk.
I am a Q-tard and Trump-fan, although I don’t think Trump is perfect: I however think he is significantly more red-pilled than people realise – he is just aware of what is politically feasible, and of course I think he is at heart a civic nationalist who wants us all to get along.
I wonder sometimes, how would it psychologically affect me, were the Q-business to fall flat, to be revealed as a psy-op or LARP. I would, I think, just revert to my pre-2016 Weltanschauung, regarding politics and worldly power as wholly corrupt; a realm in which the only true way is an avoidance of worldly things, a preservation of the metaphysical and magical foundations. I would most likely just play The Who’s classic ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ every day for a few weeks:
My prog colleagues I would see as so deeply “in” the illusion spun by the mainstream media, that to attempt a breakout would be akin to a Special Boat Squadron operative, clinging to the hull of a submarine which has suddenly sunk a few hundred feet, attempting to cut his ropes and swim to the surface. It is possible, has happened; but below negative buoyancy you don’t naturally rise, you naturally sink, and the more rabid Left are well below negative buoyancy: their entire self depends on a decades’-long illusion.
If the 100,000+ sealed indictments include journalists, it will be interesting to see what befalls in the world of the far-left progressive, after the cogs and motors of their particular illusion stop turning. My guess is they will be like the Japanese soldiers who continued to fight World War 2 in the jungle for another 40 years: just without the bravery and self-sacrifice and honour.
My two friends and the GIGN operator had an intimate knowledge of death, as do I.
Much more than I’ll ever reveal on Twitter.
One friend was a quadriplegic who wanted to kill himself. We talked about it as often as he wanted.
It didn’t bother me.
The other friend was a severe asthmatic who knew that he would die young.
We never mentioned his condition.
Who knows how many people the GIGN operator had killed?
They were all men who loved roaming, formless conversation.
(I edited what I took to be typos)
A surprisingly good read from an often disappointing writer. I first encountered Ondaatje in the late 90s through The English Patient and then In the Skin of a Lion. I thought he was one of the greatest living writers at that time and eagerly bought, in hardback, Anil’s Ghost in 2000; but none of the characters really came to life, and the setting (Sri Lanka) held no interest for me, though that latter is a purely personal note. I repeated my folly in 2007, buying Divisadero in hardback and regretting the purchase with great vehemence: I found it incomprehensible and uninteresting; it just came across as a creative writing project hastily cobbled together for a publisher. Having learnt my lesson I bought The Cat’s Table (2011) second-hand from Oxfam for 2 euros, years after its release, and to my surprise found it quite enjoyable, if rather slight.
Perhaps, I reasoned, there is an inverse correlation between my financial investment and the readerly return, when it comes to Ondaatje. I accordingly stole a copy of Warlight, and found it very good indeed. It’s set mostly in and after World War 2, following a boy whose mother works with partisan groups for British Intelligence. His father mysteriously disappears, the mother is gone for long periods, so he and his sister are effectively raised by a group of semi-criminals loosely associated with British Intelligence.
The setting and background – WW2-era espionage – recalls The English Patient. I think one reason so many writers choose this period is that it seems the last time greatness and large drama were so casual and everyday; it’s as if a door closed in 1945, and thereafter you have a lesser race of men, bureaucrats instead of brigadiers, forms signed in triplicate instead of massive tank battles commanded by men like Georgy Zhukov and Erich von Manstein. One senses something of this in The English Patient, with its two time frames (late 1930s Cairo & the desert; and then an Italian monastery in 1945): Almasy and Katherine seem grander, more mythic than Hanna and Kip, and even Caravaggio; the burnt, scarred Almasy of 1945 is as it were a remnant of a greater, destroyed world.
Warlight doesn’t quite rise to the peaks of The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion; none of the Warlight characters have that mythic splendour, nor does the prose reliably meet that standard. There are, however, many excellent passages, e.g. this description of a gardener:
He wore bottle-thick spectacles. His ox-like stature made him distinct. He had a long lowland “badger coat,” made out of several skins, which smelled of bracken, sometimes of earthworms. And he and his wife were my watched example of marital stability. His wife no doubt felt I lingered around too much. She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit’s wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him.
I feel that Ondaatje is, here, really making an effort to write an enjoyable, good book for the first time in 30 years. There are many fine moments, asides, secondary characters, observations. It has a very Ondaatjian sense of frequent wildness in the everyday, as the characters construct a personal routine & discipline which seems, from day to day, reasonably stable & even normal, but which is permeated by strange & maraudingly poetic event, by e.g. a nun falling off a bridge, caught by a construction worker swinging on a harness, by Bedouins recovering a burnt Hungarian pilot from his ruined plane, and pressing their cache of rifles and handguns against his hands for him to identify by feel alone, by a boy driving at night in a car full of illicit greyhounds.
This place is the Cyprian’s for she has ever the fancy
To be looking out across the bright sea,
Therefore the sailors are cheered, and the waves
Keep small with reverence, beholding her image.
(Anyte of Tegea, translated by Ezra Pound)
An unexpected moment from Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham on 31st August 2020 (from 15.23 to the end)
Ingraham asks: “Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings?”
Trump responds:
People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. […] People that are on the streets, there are people that are controlling the streets.
We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend. And in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that […] It’s under investigation right now. But they came from a certain city. And this person was coming to the Republican National Convention. And there were like seven people on this plane like this person. And then a lot of people were on the plane to do big damage. […] The money is coming from some very stupid rich people.
This doesn’t sound like your typical petty criminal Antifa group. Although “thugs” suggests thick-necked ex-cons, it also sounds like a group trained to handle unspecified but presumably military “gear”; so it could well be a military unit, flying instead of being bussed in.
I almost missed “this person was coming to the Republican National Convention” the first time I played this clip. So there’s a good chance that some very rich Republicans are funding and promoting Antifa-like operations. Another throwaway line that’s probably worth thinking about: “and there were like seven people on this plane like this person”. I first thought he meant seven men in black uniforms, but now I think he means there were in total eight people flying to the RNC, accompanied by a black-clad military unit; so most likely there were eight “very stupid, very rich” Republicans taking a military unit with them in order to execute a military action at the convention (to assassinate Trump?).
It depends, I think, on the degree of training & expertise – if they are just thugs with weapons, then they were presumably tasked to create havoc; if the “gear” was higher-grade (explosives, sniper rifles etc.), the “thugs” would probably have military training and have a correspondingly serious mission. I lean towards the latter, as Antifa are typically bussed in on Sorosline coaches, and I can’t see why eight very rich Republicans (or Republican donors) would take the risk of flying with armed Antifa personnel unless there was much to gain.
The next interesting line: “they came from a certain city”. I don’t see the point in highlighting this, since of course they had to come from somewhere, unless the name of the city would almost certainly identify the main “somebody”, who is very rich and very stupid (I thought of Utah but apparently Mitt Romney didn’t attend the RNC); or there is some other significance here, e.g. the Cabal had a meeting at this city before the plane took off, and Trump is signalling “we know about it.”
As for why Trump would let his enemies know he knows, I think this was one of the original purposes of the Q project: to shake the tree and see who could be turned through intimidation; at the end, there will probably be many lesser Cabal tools who choose to support Trump/Q not so much out of morality & repentance, as out of fear – having the contents of a secret conversation appear on the Q boards, and calculating that if the Q narrative of sealed indictments and eventual military tribunals is to be trusted, it would be just as well to jump ship now.
That the RNC passed largely without incident suggests these men in black uniforms ended up in custody, or the morgue.
Remainders 