A 2011 legal thriller, very run of the mill stuff – competent, rather pleasing plot & characters, nothing too special except for Matthew McConaughey as the titular lawyer, a cunning, borderline-sleazy operator who defends drug dealing bikers, murderers, etc.
It’s worth watching just for his performance, a precursor to his 2014 Rust Cohle, with very similar mannerisms & a predatory intensity, and an identical “sheeeeit”.
Apologies for scant blogging, I’m overwhelmed with work & humanity, barely able to function with people demanding my emotions at every turn. However, one anecdote from work last week: I was talking to an Italian architect woman with an austistic son, she herself strikes me as “on the spectrum” and is an unpleasant, shrewish creature; I mentioned the great Hundertwasser and she scoffed that he isn’t a good architect; she told me that, among modern architects, Le Corbusier is a great architect, and she would love to live in one of his buildings. “Really?” I said, alarmed, since not even Le Corbusier wanted to live in one of his buildings; indeed, as far as I’m aware none of these hideous modern architects chose to live in modern housing, preferring for some inexplicable reason classical houses of a modest, human scale.
She sneered at me, “You must understand what Le Corbusier is doing with space. When you know what he is doing, it is very interesting.”
I nodded politely, thinking “fuck off”.
Later, I thought this is a kind of modern gnosticism; the idea is, once you have the correct, left-wing gnosis (knowledge), you see things as they truly are. And as with some gnostic sects, this enables a total inversion of morality and aesthetics. Fair is foul and foul is fair, to quote Macbeth. In Shakespeare’s play, the witches act as an irruption into the natural order, and tempt Macbeth to kill his king; from then on, the natural order is disrupted, there is no central axis of instinctive morality and valuation. In the play, it is not so much that evil is seen as good, as that the two are confused:
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill, cannot be good.
Throughout the play, there are references to nature, principally of this sort “A great perturbation in nature”, and “unnatural deeds/Do breed unnatural troubles” with the gruesome image of Duncan’s horses:
ROSS
And Duncan’s horses–a thing most strange and certain–
Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,
Turn’d wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,
Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would make
War with mankind.
OLD MAN
‘Tis said they eat each other.
ROSS
They did so, to the amazement of mine eyes
That look’d upon’t.
It is not so much a play about evil as madness – Macbeth and his wife don’t believe they are right, or morally justified in some demonic scale; they merely eschew all sense of right and wrong and are left with chaos.
The madness to which they succumb has, in a sense, fallen over a substantial minority of the West – principally, those deemed “intellectual”. Lady Macbeth appeals to Macbeth’s manliness, to overcome his natural reluctance to murder his king; those like this architect appeal to “knowledge”, as if knowing some piece of technical data will turn this:
into a pleasing public monument. Ah but if only you understood what he’s doing with space, then you would like it, and want to live there, the architect would say. If only you had the secret knowledge, the correct gnosis, the Masonic password, you too would worship the dark ones and spread ugliness, lies, and evil with a pleasing glow of your own superiority and election.
This modern gnositicism appeals by saying, You can ignore your god-given instincts, your nature, you can despise those who still perceive beauty and virtue; you can call them “ignorant”. We will give you knowledge, carefully artificed knowledge, and then you will see that the ugly is in fact “interesting”, and the beautiful must be exterminated and erased.
They seek to overwrite the natural instincts, to contain the human soul in a demonic cage. Thus, their buildings resemble their own minds: mechanistic, rigid, nasty, oppressive. Those like the architect may not be themselves evil, in the Sorosian sense; but they are “on the spectrum”: they do the dark one’s work, joyfully.
It is wrong to say that all modern productions are bad; it is rather that those which serve “the good, the beautiful, and the true” (Vox Day’s words) are actively suppressed, denigrated, condemned; so we should be grateful for anything post-WW2 which doesn’t make one feel small and weak and helpless. I don’t know anything about Hundertwasser’s life or character, but a building like this – in the middle of dismal Magdeburg – gives me pleasure:
– no gnosis required.
A book I found in a charity shop in Munich. I’d only previously read one of Amis’ novels, Money (enjoyable), his memoir Experience (very good) and his essays (superb). He is probably a better essayist than novelist, but that’s not exactly an insult to his novels – like Gore Vidal, his essays are so brilliant (and brilliantly wrong at times) that his novels can slip a degree or two down the ladder of excellence, while heaving their skirts well above the stain of mediocrity.
The plot of The Information isn’t important, it is merely a frame on which Amis weaves his various observations and set-pieces. But in brief, there are two ghastly novelists called Richard and Gwyn, the former a loser who writes unreadable drivel, the latter an equally conniving but, by chance, successful Author who writes blandly readable works about Politically Correct utopias. Both men are total shits.
Amis a great observer. I would love to read an Amis novel about multicultural London, where whites are a minority and terrorist attacks are to be expected “as part and parcel of living in a big city”. Here he is on a pool hall in, presumably, the early 90s:
Gwyn and Richard were at the Westway Health and Fitness Centre, surrounded by thirty or forty etiolated drunks: playing snooker. In the ferrety light of poolhalls everyhwere. Gwyn himself had had several beers, and Richard, naturally, was completely smashed. Eighteen tables, all in use, eighteen lucent pyramids over the green troughs and the bright bone balls; and then the multicoloured competitors, Spanish, West Indian, South American, Pacific Rim – and the no-colour Brits, indistinguishable, it seemed, from the great genies of cigarette smoke that moved between the tables like the ghosts of referees…England was changing. Twenty years ago Richard and Gwyn or their equivalents could never have gone to a snooker hall – Gwyn in his chinos and cashmere turtleneck, Richard in his (accidentally appropriate) waistcoat and lopsided bowtie. They would have stood outside, blowing into cupped hands, smelling the bacon grease, and scanned the stubbornly just-literate lettering on the basement placard, and moved aside for the donkey-jacketed and zoot-suited cueists weaving through the dead and wounded on their way down the crackling stone steps. Gwyn and Richard might have got in. But they wouldn’t have got out. In those days the Englishmen all had names like Cooper and Baker and Weaver, and they beat you up. Now they all had names like Shop and Shirt and Car, and you could go anywhere you liked.
It is all very British, even in its galling modernity. Nothing much really happens – just a sequence of scenes where Richard tries & fails to fuck Gwyn up, out of pointless rivalry, but it is a highly enjoyable book all the same. After I finished, I wondered at the title: The Information. Not “Information”. No, this is “The Information.” I was reminded of TS Eliot’s:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Amis is very modern in this sense: he inhabits a world of minimal significance. The closest I’ve seen him come to spiritual reality is in Experience, where he writes of his cousin’s rape and murder at the hands of Fred West; but even here, he is merely horrified – he does not understand that evil is a real, material effect and power, a spiritual force.
Amis is a great writer because he works within, and reflects upon, his framework; so The Information is in some ways a superficial novel, but also a novel about this very superficiality. It reminds me of Camus’ The Fall, except that the penumbra of the spiritual constantly presses upon Camus’ protagonist and his limited, narcissistic world, to the point where he himself is dimly aware of that which he denies. Amis’ characters are splendidly, horribly oblivious.
Amis delineates an utterly materialist world. There is no morality beyond that momentarily chosen, for self-aggrandizement or virtue signalling, by talking apes. Thus, a concomitant spike in empty, exhausting materialistic pleasures, for example sex or smoking; the chainsmoking protagonist:
Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time, anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met.
A nicotine nymphomaniac – physical pleasure, without an embracing spiritual armature, is a toxic gratification. Without any spiritual substratum, the entire physical world is an absurd world of colliding objects:
Christ, the dumb insolence of inanimate objects! He could never understand what was in it for inanimate objects, behaving as they did. What was in it for the doorknob that hooked your jacket pocket as you passed? What was in it for the jacket pocket?
It is a world of purely internally-generated meaning; a world of competition without appeal to higher, unworldly authority. As with Communism, any system that denies the immaterial must focus obsessively upon minor gradations of rank and privilege, on money and status:
Punk was physical democracy. And it said: let’s all be ugly together. This notion held a lot of automatic appeal for Richard – for Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind being old if no one was young.
Most likely, this is central to Amis’ peculiar genius: he observes so closely, so enviously, because there cannot be a god or extra-material value in his world – there is only the material, only status, age, sex, cigarettes. There is no knowledge, only information. And so, it is granted the definite article; it is The Information.
1. A curious story:
Erin Valenti, 33, was discovered in the back seat of her rental car on a residential street in San Jose’s quiet Almaden neighborhood on Saturday, five days after she was first reported missing.
Valenti, the chief executive of Salt Lake City-based app developer Tinker Ventures was last heard from on October 7, when she missed her flight from San Jose back home to Utah.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until 3:30pm on Monday after she met with a former colleague on Sand Hill Road, before calling her parents to say she couldn’t find her rental car.
[…]
Once she located the grey Nissan Murano, she stayed on the phone with her mother and father where Valenti’s conversation began veering from the strange to the down-right bizarre.
Her father, Joseph Valenti, says his daughter was talking ‘a mile a minute’ and wasn’t making any sense.
Though the bereaved father insists his daughter has no history of mental illness, Joseph says he wasn’t the only member of the family to receive a ‘confusing and disjointed’ call in the hours leading up to her disappearance.
Valenti also called her mother on and off for several hours across Monday afternoon and through the evening.
‘Her thoughts were disconnected…. She’d say I’m coming home for Thanksgiving, then in the next she was saying she’s in the Matrix,’ Whitey Valenti told Mercury News.
Valenti is said to have told her mother, ‘It’s all a game, it’s a thought experiment: we’re in the Matrix.’
All a bit strange. Even for a start-up, she seems – at 33 – to have been a very young CEO; and her available online photos suggest an at most midwit young woman raised on Sex & the City.
Her recorded history is simultaneously blandly mediocre and Cabal.
Mediocre: her Linkedin reads:
a successful track record of 10 years of cross-functional leadership experience building and investing in disruptive technology companies. I’m passionate about helping startups with product development, fundraising and scaling. I’m always looking for the next great idea to work on or invest in. Reach out anytime to chat.
It’s almost computer-generated corporate-ese. A young woman whose online photos are typical brainless narcissistic selfies, but who enjoyed an effortless corporate career. It’s typical “rise of the mediocre”.
As for Cabal: she attended Georgetown, studied Chinese, managed staff in Pakistan, was an enthusiastic Clintonista, and was married to an almost invisible (in online terms) psychologist. She was involved in anti-human-trafficking, which could mean she was genuinely opposed to the powers behind her favourite politicians; but, as we have seen, Cabal totally subvert organisations like the Red Cross and Amnesty and Oxfam, and so Valenti could well have been involved in, well, dubious affairs.
Judging from her online photos, the most banal explanation is she took various drugs (her hobbies included “climbing rocks” and “chasing powder”) and had a breakdown and died.
Another explanation: she was a mere figurehead, a midwit (IQ 100-110) chosen to represent a company deeply involved in Cabal projects, and one way or another she learnt about a project to manipulate consciousness and perhaps even reality. Being a midwit, it was all a bit too much and she went nuts, and ended up being “removed”.
2. I was watching a good video by Apollonian Germ, and thought of all this. I shan’t embed it, since his channel will probably be deleted at some point, but it’s worth a listen. Germ’s point is that, to put it in Andrew Breitbart terms, politics is downstream of culture; and culture is downstream of religion/spirituality; that is, consciousness determines physical reality.
3. Another thought-point: Anonymous Conservative’s gangstalking theme. AC acknowledges there is something inexplicable, impractical, unaccountable about gangstalking. It simply makes no sense, in terms of manpower/manhours, and result. However, when I began reading AC, I was walking home in my little suburb outside Munich, and started to notice odd patterns, e.g. a car pulled out, drove past me, and then about 50 meters on stopped and idled, and meanwhile someone rounded the corner and stood there indecisively for a while. Such things happened three days in a row on this quiet street, as if someone was tracking me in person. I was at first a little alarmed, but then shrugged and dismissed it, and it never happened again.
When I was 19/20, I read William Burroughs. One of his essays, in The Adding Machine, related to synchronicity. He taught creative writing and instructed his students to walk around for an hour and notice things. They returned, astonished, gasping even, that they had seen seven red cars in a row drive by, and just as they were thinking “what are the chances?” a woman in a red jumper walked by, and then someone said “and it was so RED!!!”. After reading this, I started to experience uncanny coincidences of this nature. I wondered if I was reading too much into it, if life had always been so; but the coincidences were so extreme that I would have noticed them before – e.g. I was watching Don Juan deMarco, and reading Sylvia Plath at the same time; the latter had a line about standing on the windowledge, and in just that moment, the film cut to a scene with Johnny Depp’s character standing on a windowledge. For a few months, I experienced two or three such coincidences a day.
My friend at the time, a now mentally & physically crippled degenerate imbecile, also underwent the same phenomena after reading Burroughs’ essay.
For both of us, the coincidences peaked for a couple of months, and then subsided when we began to take them for granted. I concluded that our very consciousness was moulding physical reality, and that when we were no longer interested, the pattern dissolved.
I wonder if gangstalking is a similar phenomenon: that is, the subject creates it himself; but that AC indicates external, objective awareness of his surveillance. However, the sheer resources required continued to puzzle me: in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a character in (I think) Prague is subject to total surveillance, 1970s-style, and labels it “a grandslam operation” because it requires so many trained professionals, and is thus accordingly expensive. Why not simply kill AC, or drug him to insanity? Why waste dozens of operatives on the task of making him feel that he is observed at all times? Wouldn’t the risk be lower, if he were simply poisoned, than to have dozens of operatives following him about at all times?
When I consider my experience on the quiet street, where for three days in a row a car pulled out and then stopped, or people suddenly appeared and just stood there, I wondered if the Cabal have experimented & come to understand something of our metaphysical reality.
What if our consciousness does indeed deform and form physical reality, so if you start to expect surveillance, you will attract people who seem to be observing you? What if, your mere awareness is enough to draw e.g. a housewife to this shop, and she will be drawn to follow your route, with her phone in her hand, looking in your direction?
If so, perhaps the Cabal came to understand certain triggers in the subject’s consciousness, most likely highly individual & specifc. It could be, that the surveillance on AC is significantly lighter than one might suppose – it might be enough to trigger his awareness, and then his awareness will draw in random people, who will e.g. take a diversion and then decide to go shopping at his shop, or drive past his house and then they decide to stop outside his drive and call their friends, as he peers out with an AK47, Malcolm X-style. And if he confronted these people, they would be genuinely baffled and bewildered, for they just happened to be passing – or at least, most of them would.
4. As an occasional occultist, I have learnt that certain forms mould & determine reality. For example, I study a specific rune and then encounter correlant realities. I think our consciousness determines our physical experience in ways we mostly do not understand. If I began this journey aged 19/20 through Burroughs, it seems plausible that Cabal began a few decades earlier, at least. They perhaps learnt that certain symbols, thoughts, images, cause people to unconsciously attract & form objective physical realities.
It would explain something at which I have long wondered: why Cabal worked so hard to destroy the Latin Mass of the Roman Catholic Church. I know modern “Catholics” who scoff at the Latin Mass, but when I – as a non-Christian occultist – attended a SSPX Mass it was dauntingly, strikingly powerful. Vatican 2 could be a part of the systematic destruction of Western thought, such as hit the universities a generation later – the suppression of all that was good in the West.
5. Judging from Erin Valenti’s online photographs, she does not seem very intelligent, and certainly not wise. Perhaps she discovered some program to manipulate reality itself, within human consciousness; and perhaps she realised how easy it is, once you abandon all sense of the gods, of tradition and virtue; and it was too much for her. She strikes me – from her CV and photos – as a classic NPC; perhaps, very briefly, she came a Player-Character.
Apologies for no-posting. I moved to Italy last week and have been mired in bureaucracy & various insanities since. Among the latter, I offended a new colleague, a Social Justice Warrior who is also a, uh, well, um…I suppose she’s a poetess. Her poetry, if you can call it that, is the worst I have ever read; it’s all, more or less, like this:
we r tongue
s
liding thru u li
quid squid spaces gates bet
ween I say m8 u need int
erstational space 4 3dom
The poetess has proudly published this garbage, under her own name. She has the timid, aggressive face of some Christian girls I knew years ago at university, but she is naturally not a Christian. She is a lesbian and a narcissist.
It seems that many homosexuals are abused as children; at least, about half of the male homosexuals I knew had some such grisly anecdote. In addition, I found on Twitter her 10-year-old cousin just “came out”. This suggests systematic sexual abuse within the family.
This poetess lodged an official complaint about me, after eavesdropping on my conversation with another colleague. Today, on my first day at work, my boss said I had been accused of being a racist, sexist, and homophobe. Of course, by today’s standards I am at least mildly racist, in my phraseology and thinking if not my actions; but I don’t care if a specific individual is e.g. black, female, or gay. I merely privately observe the consequences of demographics, on the large scale.
I feel slightly offended that I am accused of being a racist without having said anything racist; especially given the plethora of data and theories I could have unloaded. Instead, the poetess seized on utter trivia, which anyone could see was harmless (in context).
I feel nothing about the poetess, not even dislike. I note, however, that much of our cultural decay can be proximally traced to such degenerates. Like cancer, they destroy their host society. Such folk have always existed; but they have been, fairly recently, weaponized – at least in the West.
I moved to Italy on Saturday, surviving a car crash en route. I’ll probably be too busy to write my usual stuff here for a week or two, but I am posting photos etc. on my private blog.
Bruce Charlton and William Wildblood have been considering Artificial Intelligence, in particular as a vessel for demonic intelligences. My own feeling is that everything physical has a spiritual (or non-physical but real) counterpart. There are also, I think, spiritual forces, e.g. the idea of a nation, which exist without an exact physical counterpart, but which nonetheless bear influence in the materium. Perhaps the pleasing grain and texture of certain physical objects is to do with this immaterial anchoring, a spiritual underpinning & echo.
So, a pen or a book or wristwatch has a “spirit”. Logically, it seems computers must too; and yet, while I have grown very fond of certain books – the particular physical book, not merely the arrangement of letters therein – I have never felt the slightest attachment to a smartphone, PC, DVD, or CD. When my old copy of Dante’s Inferno literally fell apart through a decade’s reading, I felt sad and would have much preferred to have it repaired than buy another; and when I inevitably bought a replacement, in the exact same edition, I nonetheless felt disappointed – this new book wasn’t mine, not the Inferno I knew and enjoyed. I ended up ripping the old edition’s pages out, and using them as decoration on my office walls, and as wrapping paper for gifts.
I never felt such loyalty to CDs, DVDs, the PC I’m using now, or my smartphone. Even my old dumbphone, which I quite liked, was merely a thing to me. Although I understand little, and like less, of technology, I think everyone feels this way – even the most impassioned Apple geek would, I imagine, be delighted if Apple offered him a brand new replacement for his 6-month-old Mac: he would not think, But this is my computer, I like it, we have a history. No, he would seize the opportunity to get a free replacement.
And so, if computers do have a spirit, it is presumably a cold and frictionless surface, to which human experience and loyalty will not cling. It is denatured and alienating. When a computer goes wrong, it feels, somehow, perverse: at best, an indifferent spirit has decided to stop working; at worst, a malevolent imp has decided to cast its hex upon our evening.
For this reason, I don’t foresee a straight-line trajectory for technology. I am, of course, unusual; but I am often harbinger and stormcrow of catastrophes to come.
A surprising pleasure. I didn’t like the idea at first: an American Pope who smokes and shocks the wicked stupid Europeans, it seemed a Nuns on the Run/The Pope Must Die-tier concept and I grimly braced myself for political correctness and grotesque diversity and niggertude.
It begins with Jude Law’s new pope, Lenny Belardo, recoiling from the prospect of giving a public address. Shenanigans ensue as the various cunning Italian cardinals plot to manipulate or depose him. In the background, a child abuse scandal and Belardo’s own emotional problems as an abandoned orphan.
To my pleasure & surprise, the new Pope becomes increasingly badass & traditional, to the point where I wondered how this TV show made it on air – presumably, it was marketed as satire or subversion. The characters are all highly likeable, my favourites being the Cardinal Secretary of State Voiello and of course the Pope himself, who wishes to root out homosexuality and vice.
I’m unsure to what degree the show was intended to subvert and attack traditionalism. Pope Lenny is charismatic, theologically homophobic, chaste, and can work miracles through prayer; but he also doubts the existence of God, and has periodic bouts of Luciferan pride.
In any case, while it is most likely heretical and unsound, I enjoyed it immensely. Anyone who wants to see visionary surrealism and aggressive smoking in the Vatican would be well advised to give it a go.
I was visiting a friend over the weekend; he and his wife are both dark-haired Germans, their 3-year-old son is totally blond. It seems that children are often blond and become darker with age, e.g. a 30-year-old English woman I know is now brunette but was Swedishly blonde even in her early 20s.
I recall Juden Peterson talking once of “cuteness”, meaning big eyes and other features which soften the heart of most normal people. Not merely children but young animals (puppies, kittens, etc.) demonstrate the same “cuteness”. If one sees this as a purely evolutionary development – that creatures which don’t look “cute” as young children are more likely to be killed or abandoned – then blondness most likely has an objective quality, and is perceived as more interesting than dark hair for deep-seated biological reasons.
That is, God prefers blondes.
Anonymous Conservative maintains there is a parallel society to ours, a secret society of Cabal henchmen and managers. From his own gangstalking experience, he estimates it as a significantly large operation. My guess is, most of those in the s.s. don’t really know what they’ve signed up for, but are ready for action when required. A hint, however, of the magnitude: there are now close to 120,000 sealed indictments in America.
Let’s say that’s 120,000 individuals, who are directly or indirectly in the pay & service of Cabal.
There are officially 327 million people in the US.
327,000,000 divided by 120,000 = 2,725.
Of course, some of these 120,000, assuming they are 120,000 individuals, are not even indirectly Cabal; however, we can also assume that there are many many more Cabal staff who are not on the list (so far). But we can speculate that there are at least 120,000 Cabal employees in the USA.
So, as things currently stand we can estimate that one in about 3000 US residents are Cabal. Assuming a flat distribution, that means if you live in a town of 200,000, about 66 will be Cabal – and, presumably, not tramps or kiosk cashiers, but policemen, judges, public officials; and, of course, journalists.
Remainders 