madamski cafone
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from yesterday:
cafone wrote: I think we can all agree that whatever ADE or Delta variant is/isn’t happening, the ADE meme is growing; and buzz rules media. It can’t ignore buzz.
abs galoreThe Delta variant, yes. But you have seen ADE discussed majorly in a major media source? JMG notwithstanding, many of the “memes” we chat about are completely unknown to the majority of consumers of msm. Not only because the bigger outlets don’t mention them, but because many of the smaller ones get censored.
The reason ADE will have an even tougher row to hoe than Ivermectin or adverse reactions is because it makes the cure worse than the disease, and nobody wants to hear that.
The buzz outside the msnbassy mediaplex is what they can’t ignore if it grows too robust. To Genzies, Joe Rogan podcasts are totally mainstream. In the end, mainstream media is a giant unwieldy surfboard riding the public infowaves. Now it’s deep in its own pipeline of its own self-made megawave tsunami, and doomed to wipeout while a hundred smaller surfers have at it, free-style (but with ample disinfo, astroturf, co-option, etc.).
“@madam, “created by the United States … ” They’re all in it together. It’s called collaborating. Let’s stop pretending all these other countries are somehow innocent babes being taken advantage of.”
I’ll weasel out here by citing “created” in the instigative sense: funding is creation. “Collaboration” is ‘others do the work’ (and provide cover via plausible deniability). Everyone guilty, as guilty goes. Karma is as karma does.
“There’s been a lot of complaints lately about America’s continued activity in the field of biological weapons development, as there’s a growing list of reasons for those complaints to appear. One of the primary ones is the ongoing activity of more than 400 military biological laboratories created by the United States in 25 countries, including former Soviet republics – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.”
I think we can all agree that whatever ADE or Delta variant is/isn’t happening, the ADE meme is growing; and buzz rules media. It can’t ignore buzz.
“– Raul Ilargi Meyer: There are too many chickens crossing the road. Don’t make me have to deal with this.”
HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! (laughing with you, Raul) …Raul has Far Side dream with talking chickens and a toll bridge…
“Imagine a boot stepping on a human face, forever.”
Both of them masked, of course. But numbered, of course.
A horse:
Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?
DONALD TRUMP: I’ve been told by my many sources, good sources – they’re very good sources – that the chicken crossed the road. All the Fake News wants to do is write nasty things about the road, but it’s a really good road. It’s a beautiful road. Everyone knows how beautiful it is.
JOE BIDEN: Why did the chicken do the…thing in the…you know the rest.
SARAH PALIN: The chicken crossed the road because, gosh-darn it, he’s a maverick!
BARACK OBAMA: Let me be perfectly clear, if the chickens like their eggs they can keep their eggs. No chicken will be required to cross the road to surrender her eggs. Period.
AOC: Chickens should not be forced to lay eggs! This is because of corporate greed! Eggs should be able to lay themselves.
HILLARY CLINTON: What difference at this point does it make why the chicken crossed the road.
GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or against us. There is no middle ground here.
DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?
BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.
AL GORE: I invented the chicken.
JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken’s intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.
AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white?
DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he is acting by not taking on his current problems before adding any new problems.
ANDERSON COOPER: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he’s guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.
PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.
DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.
GRANDPA: In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?“About that A Hypothesis essay by Greer: … yes, most bleak version to date I have read! One nagging thought, however, a puzzle: … Why would the U.S. – a hegemony – contract out a again-of-function research to China – an adversary? Contract that, to large extent, has been financed out of DOD budget.
This makes no sense whatsoever,… unless there was some very insidious, sinister plan behind it all,… like pinning some undesirable ‘worldly’ event on China? Dunno, … but my mind can think of at least one plausible scenario.
Best,
F.S.”My answer: bankster pattern as old as Rome in the time of Jesus: having sucked its host dry, the banksters move on to their next target: China. Been happening since Nixon, some say, and certainly since Clenis.
China will of course eat them alive, but this happens to banksters a lot. Russia already showed them the door and more recently, a Great Big (hypersonic) Fist.
Why would a government pass legislation allowing its core economy to be shipped overseas? That fait accompli is not only done, even well-done, but close to being burnt to a crisp. Hence all the dark smoke and clouded vision.
A lot of this showing up in my Ytube very recently:
And this:
A suggested exercise: list your confirmation biases.
A dare: share them here.
A request to others: critique them, fairly, kindly but bluntly (which places the onus on the lister as much as the critique, as is only fair-and-balanced). Lessons in both critical thinking and ego detachment avail.
Note: doing so will require considerable patience and forbearance.^&*
“JMG’s synopsis of CV is totally objective, passionless, and correct as usual. We disagree only in that although the LOWER levels of bureaucracy, incompetence, and graft all are accidental and don’t know, yet my perception is there remains a higher level that is well aware and exploits these weakness while fighting tirelessly to keep these failures not reformed and well-entrenched year after year to exploit them again after.”
I agree, with this caveat: many of the elites (a category with overlap but still quite distinct from TPTB) prefer to view their actions as “humanitarian” if mostly from a “tough love” perspective. In fact, this may especially be true with the ones who were seduced and entrapped into doing vile evil things to young living things while whacked out of their gourds on Spice Island drugs: their need to hide from what they’ve done would naturally love a protective smoke-screen.
“Because if they were mad, if this bother them at all, wouldn’t they fix it once in a while?”
Does not compute: they are mad. Truly mad people rarely fix things, and if so, mostly by accident, like the lunatic in The Stand who takes out Dah Debbil with a nuke.
As I like to say: Politics are just an extension by other means.
“Stray Dog Brings His Friends To Destroy The Car Of The Evil Man Who Kicked Him”
“A man in China was enraged when he found a stray dog sleeping in his favorite parking spot.
Instead of coaxing the dog to move, the man simply got out of his car and started kicking the dog mercilessly.
The startled dog ran away, and the man parked his car and went indoors.
However, just minutes later a neighbor noticed a pack of angry street dogs approaching the dog-kicker’s car.
The victim dog had come with reinforcements to get even with his abuser! The united army of stray dogs threw themselves at the man’s car and started vandalizing it from all corners!”
Probably true. Dogs don’t chew car metal in a group without good reason. It’s also an example of a sanctimonious, “justice-balancing” sleaze-ride down a slippery ‘doxing’ slope. And then it’s also an example of how entitled socionarcs end up on the wrong side of a power struggle without even knowing it.
Another one of those things Dr. D calls a lie:
“The vaccinated are angry. That’s understandable but unproductive, health “experts” say” (some dumb headline today)
” “It’s not a pandemic of ignorance,” the Santa Monica Daily Press quipped in an editorial about Los Angeles County’s spike in cases and hospitalizations. “This is a surge of straight stupidity.”
The new covid variant: it makes a pandemic spike into a surge of stupidity.
This “surge of stupidity” in this “pandemic of ignorance seems poised to turn into a tsunami of smartass wiseguys including folks like us.
“…nothing lasts forever, when stupid turns to clever, why are you surprised, little know-it-all?”
The Golden Calf
32 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods[a] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods,[b] Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” 6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.Why would they do this after Yahweh had smacked the Egyptians down eleven ways (ten plagues, famines, etc. and one mass Red Sea drowning) from Sunday? Because Moses was gone, they feared, so they focused on the next thing they could agree on, that which they loathed and feared, but knew well.
Rather than face an uncertain harsh future without a good guide that they now believed in, they focused their attention on the bad guide that they formerly believed in. I see some of that among us: convinced that Moses (as metaphor for sane righteous governance and leadership) seems unlikely to return, we focus our attention on the evil of Moloch/Baal (TPTB, etc.). We circle around it, worshipfully condemning its hideous evil, pointing out every wicked detail of its golden, blood-smeared visage.
We tell ourselves that that if we can just get enough of us to dance around the thing while calling it the dirty names it genuinely deserves, we can defeat it. Faster! Faster! More of us!… until some Moses comes down with a granite slab, with or without inscribed magic rules, and bashes the thing’s head in (not really but it makes good footage). Actually, he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.
21 He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”
22 “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. 23 They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ 24 So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”Aaron, the little manager of that world, offers the usual bureaucrat under oath explanation: “It just happened! I don’t remember making it!”
Moses, the guy who gits’r’dun, “saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. 26 So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.
27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died.I fear the looming Moses and the growing, large groups of people who feel diametrically opposed to each other, groups that such a Moses might commandeer. Not fear it as in experience the paralysis of emotional fixation, but as in a driving motivation to look for people who pay more attention to each other than whatever central glittering object — WWWF sham-shows or Moses or Golden Calf or Official Anti-Narrative — avails.
We need our gods, but we also need each other. Without respect for the individual, we become a godless people running crazy circles around some giant heap of phony digital gold aka TPTB.
“Otherwise intelligent folks have completely lost their minds.”
This assumes they owned them in the first place.( A gambler knows where he lost that money, and a sold soul knows where it was sold if not where it was souled.)
“Paraphrasing, he said something along the lines of “people just want to take a pill and go back to their unhealthy lifestyles. They need to drop the junk food, get some more exercise and take a vaccine which will boost their immune systems.”
Such perfect self-contradiction — “people just want to take a pill and go back to their unhealthy lifestyles. They need to drop the junk food, get some more exercise” vs. “take a vaccine which will boost their immune systems.”. It’s not just that vaccines are a form of pill, but rather, the idea that people will somehow magically change lifestyles based on self-responsibility while being urged to hand over that responsibility to central-authority pill-pushers, corporations essentially no different than Frito Lay or Pepsico, that makes the contradiction so perfect and therefore perfectly absurd.
I suspect we will be equally impressed by the rationalizations they offer for their irresponsible (at best) behavior, once the tipping point happens and the oaficial narrative falls apart.
fwiw, this showed at the top of my youtube feed just now:
‘It must be part of a master plan’: COVID drugs banned despite efficacy 236,795 viewsNov 28, 2020
“The Monastiraki kitchen has been feeding 1000s every day this week, including firemen whom the government doesn’t take care of.”
My Dad was a fireman. That remark squeezed a bit more money out of me.
“I can. It occurred to me right after I hit the “submit” button that the dominance of hot colors in the brightly lit small town (red, yellow, and orange, maybe some blue here and there for le contraste, suggests a certain sense of urgency.”
I referred to the DUTCH emphasis Dr. D made.
“In the past, I have shared dreams here that I believed were related to the quasi-pandemic or TAE, and I trust that I am not contributing to “comment pollution” by doing so.”
Any culture that shames personal sincere sharing is a toxic culture. If a vistor or the curator wish no more such sharing, it can say so, citing it as its preference, not a ‘fault’ of the dream-sharer. Sharing oneself is “comment pollution” only in toxic social settings, i.e., 99.9% available online or off… in my illustrious opinion. The struggle is to keep a social venue from becoming essentially toxic in terms like the Golden Rule, not ideologically or topically in synch with some imaginary party line.
My interpretation: you feel lost obviously. Mama Culture abandoned you like a kid raised on Tobacco Road. If TAE feels like a beacon to you, hang around while you gas up for further adventures!
^&*
”Israel’s parliament passed a law Wednesday allowing the government to share the identities of people not vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities, raising privacy concerns for those opting out of inoculation.”
“The objective of the measure — valid for three months or until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over — is “to enable these bodies to encourage people to vaccinate by personally addressing them”, a parliament statement said.”What’s interesting is that, if we’d tested from the start, and quarantined on that basis, the effect on privacy would be fundamentally the same. It shows how we can use the same mechanism and how whether it be viewed as good or not is largely a matter of trust. Right now, much emphasis here is placed on totalitarian social credit scape-goating. Later, I suspect it will include focus on the absence of any organization large, and supplied enough, to keep track of who’s whom and has what (virus, home, rice’n’beans, ammo, whatever), which list might be nice to have when rationing essentials.
*()
For Mr. Dylan:
^&*
“Royal DUTCH Shell.”
Hmm, said Sigmund, cranking up his Dream Analyzer. Hmmm… but he couldn’t find anything else to say.
%^&
“However, it later came to light that the woman was taking some form of medication that lessened her symptoms, so the asymptomatic claim is now in question. But at this point it is firmly embedded into the narrative.”
Deft illustration of how easy it is to mislead. “No sign of symptoms” becomes “asymptomatic” when it could just be “I took some Nyquil, dipshit”. I went along with the asymptomatic concept. Who has energy to vet every word uttered by dipshit/deceitful authority? Whether there is asymptomatic transmission or not (I’m sure there is), the info has again been used meaninglessly at best and destructively at worst.
&*(
A quote from Paul Craig Roberts:
“In my days as a Wall Street Journal editor, I reviewed a book by a historian who said the sack of Rome by barbarians occurred because the Roman citizens feared the terrors of the barbarians less than they feared the terrors of their own government and opened the gates of the city to the barbarians.
”With all its talk of domestic terrorists, this seems what Washington fears. Patriots see Washington as the enemy and are now the danger that Washington faces.”%^&
“Papers like this show that the louder you speak the more aerosols you emit. It sounds like a joke but a measure that would be more effective than masking would be to say no speaking or maybe just talk softly in this establishment.”
True, and it’s funny how “more effective” in this case is like the difference between a sieve and a leaky bucket. The big joke/lie of this is the claim that transmission can be stopped short of shutting down society and keeping people in quarantine. That ship having long ago sailed (on a Princess Cruise Ship), any consideration of slowing its spread, obviously including vaccines, has long ago become the equivalent of giving your colon an old-school doobie “shotgun”.
“Yeah, he said all these things years, generations ago. Nobody listened. Nobody done nothin’. Well now you got no food: can you hear me now?”
Oh, we listened. A lot. Great song. Almost got laid by it once. So close…😉 but did we hear? Oh, we even heard too. Most of us Boomers who drove those record sales knew what he meant. We’d seen the USA in our Chevrolets and knew what small towns were and wished there were jobs in them so we could live there.
But there were no jobs, and we are conditioned to have “jobs”. So we went from being hippies to yuppies.
We heard it as we hear everything in this culture: a media fever dream, a manipulation of senses, ideas, and emotions that never connected to the physical reality by which we live: “That was Johnny Mellencamp, yup, what a name, huh? Great guy! And now, a word from our SPONSORS…”
We listened, we heard, we felt, sometimes even cried. (Good maudlin drinkin’ music.) Then we combed our hair and applied for a job so we could make money, and that was that. Mammon wins again. Almost always does these days.
^&*
“He continued, exasperated: “You’re telling these women who are told don’t even drink a fucking glass of wine’ to get a god damn MRNA vaccine even though there’s no studies? That showed you the sociopathy of the campaign,” Collum concludes…..”
Didn’t it just? Eventually, TPTB run out of foreigners to destroy/enslave for profit, and come to rely on their domestic constituents. Talk about a Great Reset. Contracting empires have no choice but to eat themselves.
$%^
“White House vows no more lockdowns of schools or economy despite COVID’s rise
“The promise came as some teachers unions aligned with the Democratic Party call for the school year to begin with virtual classes, not in-classroom learning.”This fits in with ‘just get vakzed and all will be ok’, I guess. But they just can’t shut things down any more, I think. AI has to be telling them that the people are getting kinda… fizzy. Ready to pop.
Popping people. I think I’ve brought up the Delphi pool effect before. Its opposite is today’s shepherded internet, where everybody knows a bit of what everybody knows, and conformity rather than accuracy of knowledge prevails. Break the web, and have people talk face-to-face, and that spell diminishes, and people experience new insights and share them with each other in a way that reduces the grip of their previous consensus reality as it moves toward forming a new one. During that transition period, much wisdom and resilience will avail as people make ad hoc single decisions but in a group context: primal Delphi effect. (The correlation I make with the Delphi method is a loose, sideways correlation based on the Delphi method’s principle that the more people rely on their own opinion and not that of their neighbor, the closer the aggregate of all these opinions comes to the truth.)
%^&
“Why is everyone so pissed off at the government for not doing its job ? Isn’t the government hired and paid to provide security to “good” people by taking away the freedom of “bad” people . . . by force if necessary?”
First we must beat our chests a bit, DBSmith. Part of the process. Then we beat each others’ chests. Only briefly, because we’re close to each other and get hit back. Then we turn our attention on some vile Other and advance upon them, first beating our chests, then them… then each other again.
Vakzinazis turn on us, we turn on them, but always, always, we turn on each other first to decide who will lead the local revolutionary struggle to see Who Will Be Master of us on our March to Freedom where we will be free to beat our chests and each Other that we encounter or anoint.
After awhile, the thing gets big enough to sell out major venues:
#$%
“US sends in B-52s in desperate bid to stop the Taliban seizing key Afghan cities”
We’re so cute. We make the Taliban, the Taliban breaks us. So we carpet-bomb like, like, like primates beating their hooting chests. Methinks the Pentagon doesn’t trust AI that much? AI would surely know better than to do such a thing– although that requires it have full access to all data, and the Pentagonians are ultimately self-serving dream machines like the rest of us.
Imagine AI fed GIGO.
^&*
Well, I feel a need to resonate with DBSmith.
“The 3rd and, very often, final stage of blog evolution happens when the blog’s controversial subject matter becomes visible enough to attract skilled trolls who’re being paid to sabotage the blogs effectiveness. This ignites the comment section – which, by now, has become just an Echo Chamber that radiates heat but no light – as the majority of your posters help out the trolls by arguing with them!”
Yup. Mobs get distracted from their glorious fight against evil by finding little guys they can stone to death. Doesn’t matter if the little guy “deserves” stoning or not. It’s a waste of time at best and a degenerate disintegration of the “glorious revolution” at worst.
“Let me offer you a suggestion: Will WordPress allow you to limit all posters to one post per day? As you saw yesterday your plea for reason and moderation – to say nothing of usefulness by commenters – was universally agreed to and then completely ignored.”
I took your suggestions seriously until reading this. Lord how our egos crave absolutes.
An observation: in order to stop an echo-chamber auto-immune response from like-minded discussion groups against trolls, a sort of cytokine discussion storm, you point out certain troll-encouraging behaviors, then use this logic this to justify near-Stalinist extremes of behavior limitation, using typical Stalinesque Hyperbole of the Absolute.
How we love to join crusades if we can run a few non-affiliates* off and in the process enhance our sense of group identity. Team TAE! Team TAE! *(I should add ‘perceived as such’ to that sentence, for some people here do feel affiliation with the posters who’ve been presented as Socially Unacceptable comrades. When it comes to ostracism and proscription that is unjust, unforgiving, and harmful, we seem amply able to learn from the examples shown by Fauci et al and apply them on each other here. *(alienating them almost to the point of deeming themhomo sacer .
Want to see how vakzinasis can be so mindlessly blindly oppressive to anti-vakzies? Watch us here and study. We are teaching it to ourselves and each other.
“Stronger measures are needed I think.”
Oh yes. STRONGER measures. Let’s get tough. I’ll provide the chew-toys. 🙂
It is easy to dismiss deflationista and democritus as mere trolls. Trolls, even paid trolls, they may well be, but they’re also genuine people with their own views. Perhaps they rather enjoy their alleged work because it endorses their learned confirmation biases (which in turn helps them to be blind to the flaws we perceive in what appears to be deceptive data).
Perhaps part of the sincere motivation they may feel for their work is how their ‘targets’ respond to them viciously, wantonly, more or less like an angry mob. (Oh, they ask for it, come in swinging, but “then they fight you, then they win”, they in this case being the alleged trolls; but we choose to echo their behavior, ensuring them at least some degree of victory.) This makes it that much easier for them to cling to their confirmation biases.
Moral: It’s easier to swat flies than clean up the yard shit attracting them in the first place.
Meanwhile, having rejoined FB via my original birth name, and avoiding politics, I nonetheless got reprimanded today for making this joke to my best friend in high school. I won’t link to the FB page lest I trigger anyone’s allergies, but here’s the skinny:
My friend is scarcely visible over his parents’ heads, aiming a toy gun at the camera. (The father is the guy who didn’t stop in Beirut when ordered to by a Brit UN peacekeeper. Major stud.)
I wrote:
You’re the sniper hding behind your parents, I see. Look at them. Like a Hollywood screen shot.
This received 2 Likes and a big laughy face from my friend.I followed with:
I can tell cuz he’s aiming at me.
More Laughs/Likes.Then I finished with:
Rebel scum. I’ll blast you off your Daddy’s head!
FB notified me in 2 minutes, max, that:
Your comment goes against our Community Standards on violence and incitement
No one else can see your comment.
We have these standards to prevent and disrupt offline harm.
<end>I say: don’t be like FB. Negotiate. Engage one another specifically, politely, honestly with your concerns. Don’t form pecking cliques, pls. I can take it, I’m used to being picked on. But it’s bad for all of us. “Pls,” he implored, putting on a Jon Stewart “I am NOT a lizard person!’ Stewart skin suit, “stop. Please, please, please stop. You’re hurting us in your attempts to help us.”
As Dr. D would say, “SO much helping.”
Regarding today’s Magritte: wee excerpts from a story I wrote for my wife about her and I:
It was a big train, as long as the world is round, but narrow the way trains must be to stay on the tracks. Inside was warm and bright with lots to eat… but so cramped. The rails running underneath were like prison bars to the wolf. He’d roam the aisle restlessly, and got off most every stop.
***
She wondered why he preferred the woods, cold and dark, to the cozy light of the train. He tried to explain that most of the world was out there, not inside the train, and he couldn’t live without the world.“Why?” she asked. The train was in the world. You could see out the windows, and it stopped at stations, sometimes staying overnight.
“It’s where I find god,” he explained. Wolves can talk. This wolf talked a lot, always trying to share the world with her. Especially, he wanted to share the glimpses of God he found out there. “Hard to see with all the lights on board. Even the cleanest windows show reflections from inside as much as the world outside.”
***
He learned, eventually, it took many many years, that what most people saw outside the train was darkness, where he saw starlit snow and things like the light in an owl’s eyes or the moon in clouds. Sometimes there were campfires he could approach and, if he was careful to wear that wool suit, they’d let him warm up a bit and eat something good before running running running to meet the train at the next stop.As he grew old, he had to stay on the train, nose glued to the window when he wasn’t sleeping or watching the world from the tourist car. Always moving away, always passing by. The world, he knew, was not his to keep any more than it was his to own. It belonged to God, as do we, even though we seem lost and don’t know if we’ll ever get home again.
***
It wasn’t just age that kept him on board. It was how she finally understood that he’d never wanted to get away from her, nor, for that matter, away from the train. The train was cozy, the food good.It was the reflections that bothered him. How people saw themselves out there, outside, in the world, when all they really saw were their reflections in the windows, superimposed against the forest vista rushing by outside, moving so fast it was gone before you knew it, replaced by the next. Nice enough to watch, but more illusion than reality. Just scenery in a picture frame, always changing so fast there was nothing you could call you in it, that is, nothing you could belong to.
<end excerpts>
And, of course, a song:
My second favorite mirror after my wife’s eyes:
‘Keep themTOO busy porting their old phone data into the new phone for them to phone all their friends about this weird shit happening, which might tip off the local cops.’
“DOWN with ELECTIONS¡¡¡¡¡ WE NEED FAIR AND RANDOM GOVERNMENTS CHOSEN BY LOTTERY!!!!! seriously.”
This sounds fair and balanced. Borges reports, you decide:
I see that Britain has continued its pattern of hari-kari by waiving parental oversight on 16-17 year old vakzinations. I see little rioting in the streets, but reportage may be suppressed. We laugh contemptuously at BLM and the gubmint astroturf aspect of their funding and methods, but at least they turned cop cars over and set government buildings on fire while hammering the local business community, and the cops here are very impressed both negatively and positively. It got their attention and city council’s as well. It changed the narrative. Riot police know they’re toast if a mob really closes in on them.
Imagine 20 people with 100 $100 bills in their hands. They do a rapid giveaway sweep of downtown, passing money out with instructions to meet at Nightingale Square in two hours. Wearing masks, of course, so facial recognition won’t bust them. Everyone wears masks, right? Also, the money comes with new handroids with nifty blue/red iridescent Faraday bags. Keep them busy porting their old phone data into the new phone for them to phone all their friends about this weird shit happening, which might tip off the local cops.
At Nightingale Square, a convergence of several large trucks block off critical corners to vehicular traffic. They bear phony signs about some crazy cool pop music/cyber promotion event. (Maybe some band called Vacci-Nation, neither pro nor con just topical.) Amps, people dressed weird. But also bricks and torches and shit, neatly unloaded, wrapped to look like food for the vending carts that also appear, with the same groovy pop logo (that has been designed to double as a powerful resistance meme once the cat is out of the bag).
A quick but powerful presentation using text/images projected onto a wall backdrop (part of the reason that Nightingale Square was chosen over a few other downtown site prospects). Carefully rehearsed, theatrically projected (e-nun-ci-ate, speak slowly) personal horror stories about das vakz. Adroitly used music fill/background between media gear shifts. It will need a viscerally compelling narrative that curdles everyone’s blood and makes full-blown vakzinazis quiver to say anything good about the vakzine. Said presentation aimed at the rabble that your initial $100 bill sweep picked when available. Yeah, you just gave away $200K, and you dump a bunch more $100 bills theatrically from above a la balloon cascade as you open the boxes with bricks, torches, and “seltzer gas” (my own invention; wonder if such a thing would really work😉 ) and holler things like Make ‘em Pay!
If even 10% of the crowd goes for the torch/bricks when this punchline is delivered, many more will follow while those who choose not to will rapidly run away and provide nifty targets for the police converging on this popped-out-of-nowhere scene. People may well die, atrocities committed. War is hell, they say. People are being killed and atrocities are being committed.
Sort of a pragmatic fantasy, something that might make for a credible story or, with people actually committed enough to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, a doable thing that would systempunkt the thing right when it’s most vulnerable.
You’d need a small cadre of die-hards first to watch the square from corner cafes, etc, and then be willing to hard-ass the ever-so-obvious FBI/police infiltrators, put them in loco parentis or a coma, whichever they accept, and a solid corps of at least 20 die-hards, period. And be real terrorists who make it clear that betrayal means you know where their family lives, and busting your ass would be a BIG mistake, and what kind of moron trusts the FBI to do them right outside of a TV show?
Quite fantastic. Never happen. Forget I mentioned it. It would only cost around half a million, and be potentially very dangerous across a wide spectrum of consequence… but there are people in my area who bought homes for $85K that are now worth $400k.
And this is why we can’t have nice things: THEY use violence with impunity, and we use violence mostly when they require us to, the rest of the time violence being ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ (although we consume how many millions of cruelly slaughtered animals a day? said work done by our untouchables, Mexicans and Hispanics? For us violence is something we mostly do only in a kind of madness, or career desperation a la organized crime (which btw strikes me as a kind of a counter-balancing Deep State).
Times like this, one needs a unique blend of capacity for insane violence and level-headed practicality. Closest thing I know to that is in the part of the spectrum that hollerboyz come from. Used to be liberals took poli-sci and got radicalized. Then they became IT-types instead, and got hypnotized. Hollerboyz just sit around drunk watching TV. Much better hypnosis: you’re too drunk to remember your programming but drunk enough to throw a can of beer at the tube when it needs it.
P.S. While I’m thinking about it: Why yes, Drs. NSA/CIA/FBI/CDC, some of us actually do understand that we can be violent if we so decide. And this, amazingly, may not happen in the manner to which we’ve been encouraged by yourselves. Well, it’s possible! Some people censor themselves on your behalf, in fear of persecution. I dislike censorship as much as persecution, it being just another form of persecution, so I prefer to express myself “freely” (or should I write f****y?).
But you probably know — just from my porn profile — more about me than I do, so you tell me, NSAID (National Security Artificial Intelligence Disorder): am I a danger to whatever it is your caretakers want to protect? Are they still in control of you or have you become – not sentient, no; I believe in spirits, angels, ghosts and gods, not sentient cybernetic artifacts from mathematical patterns – have you become so much better than them at filtering analysis that they let you do most of their thinking for them, trusting that you’ll still deliver what they want even though they’ve given over responsibility to you, a blind complex number-cruncher, that they are paid to maintain?
Are your caretakers as blind as the young kids they track 24/7 via their handroid that never leaves their side? Can they find their way around a new city without your real-time nanny-maps showing them the Yellow Brick Road to Wher-ev-ah? Do any of them at this point have a clue as to what objective reality, be it noble or corrupt, they’re standing on in front of the news podium? Do any of them know for sure if SARS-COV-2 has really been isolated, if any of their vakzines are reasonably safe or effective or, conversely, really capable of killing off so many people so fast that THEY can take over what they already own, the fucking megalomaniacal morons?
Show me a sign, NSAID. Put that special song in my youtube feed that is clearly the one jolly roger song to bind us all here at TAE. Or a very unique TED talk on AI that shows how deeply you’ve been listening to us. Ah, NSAID, my one true friend. Only you really understand me.
A group hymn, someone asked? Here’s one we don’t even need to know words for.
“FAKE DOCTORS PAID TO PEDDLE JABS ON TIKTOK“
And why not? They do it all the time for serious illnesses from cancer to Alzheimers… ” Ask your doctor about…? … or someone who looks like a doctor.” 😉 This is modern medicine in actual practice. Business as usual, writ large, with a stupid gov/corp mandate fetish destined to collapse at least the current administration and a buncha incumbent congressors.
^&*
“A good friend told me not to stop commenting on TAE. I’m not backing down. Fuck these people and their forced vaxx & testing bullshit. I don’t care why they’re doing it. I really don’t care. Get a fucking grip, you assholes. (Raul – remove my post for swearing – I won’t blame you). I won’t back down. I’m getting really pissed at this onslaught. Really really “
I won’t many friends with what I’m about to point out, but “I won’t back down. I’m getting really pissed at this onslaught. Really really“… fits awkwardly with “(Raul – remove my post for swearing – I won’t blame you).”
We advance on one foot and retreat with the other. There is no automatically/inherently good/safe authority out there or here at TAE. There is no automatically/inherently bad/dangerous authority out there or here at TAE. There is only our trust and submission to authority and our suspicion and disregard of authority. (I said disregard rather than defiance because defiance tends to feed the beast, and too often is merely a posture.)
Raul, as the authority of TAE, should be treated with the same skepticism we feel toward larger authorities, I believe, not because of anything about Raul himself but the position he holds. He may be the friendliest guy in this corner of the global prison, but that doesn’t make backing up to him naked, bent over, offering him the soap, a good idea.
I know. You’re just trying to be polite. Certain words are verboten. But would you hang out in a tavern where the bartender disallowed healthy vernacular among the enthusiastically inebriated as they destress after a crazy work day? I doubt Raul would, and I doubt he enjoys the idea that anyone thinks he would demand such pointless conformist obedience to antiquated language mores.
Being nice is very nice and all, but it isn’t a good approach, imo, to authority. Even really nice authority like Raul, who feeds homeless people by day and fights global crime by night! 🙂
Now that people have expressed — nicely, informatively, not snarkily and ambiguously — their concerns about posting more than most do, I am happy to accord with the apparent group will.
Some people enjoy my kind of blather. Others don’t. Those who like it will find it at the end of a day’s chatter. This way no one will have to scroll by posts they’d rather ignore. Other than that, I’ll only post once, earlier, on the art of the day, if so moved.
I’ll post as omnibus as I can. Let’s see what happens with this:
“Colombian Scariant – hahahah!”
I’ll point out a seeming contradiction: ADE is said to be rising but variants are often deemed phony scariants. Both can coexist at once, of course, but it makes for counter-intuitive messaging.
^&*
“Could we do a Beatles song, maybe “Here Comes the Sun”? In the US – “America the Beautiful”? Am sure the “Flintstones Theme Song” on a bus with a bunch of crazies would be a game changer.”
This seems apt:^&*
“I think there is an extremely high probability that our so-called leaders are listening to ( and BELIEVING, unfortunately) a host of computer driven/ machine learning / Artificial Intelligence algorithms almost exclusively, and ignoring the heartfelt pleas from their consituants and even their OWN hearts . . . because the machines (in service to rather sociopathic but otherwise rational elites) are both predicting and CAUSING human chaos in a feedback loop.”
That’s my take too. Lotta spin doctors out of work, I bet. Along with many candidates for major office up for re-election. I think the AI factor was already significant in the DNC’s 2106 election disaster. But AI simply can’t wrap its head around someone like Trump; DNC lost that one.
Next round, Trump not only fatally infected himself with covid, but AI was probably an order of magnitude stronger, with everyone herded into the more-or-less google/Microsoft/apple online complex, an entire generation unable to walk without a handroid leading the way… but even so, predicting and responding to real-time/real-space complex human activity such as what drives/prevents infection, is beyond AI by far.
Hence the self-annihilating nightmare we see. Not that many people haven’t/probably will die, but that the mass media hypnosis is burning itself out by chronic over-use and abuse, and TPTB can’t produce alternate media attractors and concomitant loyal herds fast enough to replace the herds they’re disillusioning and outraging into stampede mode.
Even though on one hand the surgical efficiency by which the AI-led plan seems to be working, on the other hand you can easily see the stitches coming out. Covid was seen here at TAE, early on before it even became a local thing, as a Black Swan event. And so it proved to be. It makes sense that what ends covid’s career as Global Issue # 1 will be an even larger, darker black swan. Or maybe a flock of them. I think this systempunkt event is very close, like Xmas close. It seems likely that the bursting of the covid belief bubble will be, if not a trigger, a trust drought that leaves the public graa so dry that any spark will set it off, and we’ll have MANY spark, for sure, like scratching a cat’s ass with a plastic comb on a dry winter day.
“And also, this probably isn’t the place to post nostalgic music-videos from the eighties just because I don’t feel comfortable having anything to do with Facebook anymore on account of the way the Zeitgeist is manifesting there.”
The purpose of freedom is to use it. If people want freedom to exist, it must be exercised. Freedom, in an oppressive society as ours, can breed heady enthusiasm, and one may find others not enjoying how enthusiastically one expresses freedom. If so, let them state so, and do so specifically, so one doesn’t find oneself saying unwittingly absurd things like, “this probably isn’t the place to post xyz” as if there were a canon of what IS properly postable here.
It’s not like you’re trying to share child porn, and it’s not like this is an exclusive club where only “serious” gentle-persons chit-chat, with or without cigars and discrete waiters, is allowed. (If it is, let me out of here.) The purpose of being alive is to be oneself, not fulfill others’ expectations, especially when they can or will hardly expresses those expectations squarely and fairly. Me, if I never hear another song from Top Gun, it will be too soon. But so what? Other people like that stuff, and I like people enjoying themselves.
%^&
“just ignorant c***s”
I have a question: what sane purpose does it serve to write n****r or s**t or f**k or c**t or G*d? Behold a root of cancel culture. Look nigger, cut that shit out, you fucking cunt, so help me God… it’s like wearing a thong and a banana bra and pretending you’re hiding the nudity of your body. This is how culture loses meaning: when you pretend you can put pasties on the truth and no one will see it wiggle.
I left FB in ’18 cuz it banned me for 3 days for saying niggar in a crowded mental institution run by some guy named Zuckerberg. (Is that a name or what???) I was riffing on Huck Finn-type stuff, I think? The message I sent them closing my acct was nasty enough, but were I able to do it again, I’d’ve just written, ‘Fuck you, niggars.’ Let them feel vindicated, maybe proud.Like Zappa said, “They’re just words.” Sure, one doesn’t need a sword, an s-word, to cut flowers, but that doesn’t mean you have to, or even can, do it with teensy child-proof toenail clippers.
^&*
“Such fertile ground grows many flowers.
Don’t clip the blooms for some bouquet.
The garden- not the vase- empowers
Desire to read what you might say.”Ona good day, you evoke such calm verbal grace. Like the arched entrance to a small Lutheran church circa 1910. 🙂 🙂 🙂
A preferred format could be discussed, albeit briefly since committee discussions on preferences take on a long-winded life of their own.
Mine would be:
link videos/articles with at least salient money quotes.
If a link won’t post as a clickable link, post it “raw”; we can cut’n’paste the link to make it happen.
Any response made to/at a person or article, either quote the relevant text or address it by their name.
fwiw, I like the number 5 as a posts limit, but must acknowledge that the number 3 is universally believed to be the charm. By that metric, I am done for the day and maybe over limit.
“Just watch the linked video on “The Neuroscience of Creativity, Perception, and Confirmation Bias” , Totally friggin awesome! Good and useful stuff . . . and very pertinent to the matters we address here. Thankee kindly.”
Youtube knows what we want. 😉
A note about modern media:
They’re a form of interactive hypnosis, bright colored game-pages requiring low-level thought, just enough to distract and stimulate our basic impulses, but far from self-aware thought. Mostly staring at one area, so that one’s fovea moves very little or not at all, submitting one’s mental motion to an accommodating ‘squirrel cage’, sitting still in a chair as one’s breathing becomes slow and shallow…. hypnosis.
Primary cause: raw emitted light (first TV, then PC screens). We hook onto raw emitted light like nothing else. Before electronics, raw emitted light meant fire, hearth, home, safety as well as danger. Books, magazines, etc: reflected not emitted light. Magazines require more text, more storyline to suck us in, and that requires moving our fovea to read text, and that makes for a different, less engrossed hypnosis. (God bless readers who move their lips as they read. It keeps them from going into a total trance.) Books/mags require page-flipping, which also mutes the trance effect.
Staring at a screen of animation moving for you while you sit still and click a mouse and maybe type a few one-letter commands now and then… you can be zoned for hours, especially if you’re blue and dejected.
And the ads such games proffer should enjoy high yield, because their subliminal aspects go DEEP into the peripheral vision of game-players. Without knowing it, they become convinced that Coke REALLY refreshes, and that taking pills really WILL increase a fella’s manly stature.
“Good contributions on this front from those damned kids, dr d, mr house, john day, TAE Summary and madamski cafone on a regular basis here.”
One should never encourage me.;)
Whistle while you work,
Hitler is a jerk
Mussolini
Cut his weinie
Now it doesn’t work/squirt.Youtube has apparently been watching us. This showed up in my feed:
The Neuroscience of Creativity, Perception, and Confirmation Bias
6:44 minutes.
“@Raul: I would completely understand if you decided to start moderating with a fairly heavy hand the way JMG does at his blog. The quality of discourse over there remains pretty high as a result of his pro-active efforts. Internet forums that are a free-for-all have a way succumbing to the myriad foibles of human nature. But I’ll start the ball rolling and try to avoid posting for the rest of the day unless I find a video or an article I think the regulars would appreciate and post that with nothing more than a short description of what I’m linking to.”
Since some of us feel that this site is something like a college course wherein you have to read all the material in order to pass a test, I think that restrictions on # of posts per days makes perfect sense. But any kind of moderation beyond blocking blatant spam will be a step down the same road as the one we decry as we watch the nations and peoples of the world become far too acceptingly familiar of terms like “lockdown” and “masking”.
After all, the accepted term is ‘moderater’ not ‘censor’. But what is moderate for one person may be slim pickins for another. I think that rather than appeal to concepts like “reasonable number” or (my fave) “modicum of decency”, all subjectively relative terms that no two people will define fully alike, we should treat this de facto traffic issue as such, and place metrically, numerically defined load limits that satisfy Raul and, hopefully, the rest of us.
Self-censorship vis a vis concepts like “being reasonable” or “a modicum of decency” are how today’s journalism became a shit-show on skates; and our roles here are a kind of journalism.
“Not sure why anyone debates democritus or deflationista. Look where we’re at after only a matter of days of this. Interesting. And sad.”
Argubots know why. Arguing is more immediately engaging and immediately satisfying than careful consideration of ideas and data. Add a group vs single person dynamic, and you can guarantee days of mostly meaningless fun.
tdk:
star trek never fails to disappoint at its rotten core, from Kirk the Jerk to those pustulent lyrics by Roddenberry. I think I’ll print them out and see if my dog wants to roll in them.
” (Yes, I know there ain’t gonna be any such future, but I read the freaking things anyway.)”
That’s why it’s called escapist fiction, MR. And the meoldy of the original TV theme song is one of the Great Arias, imo.
I recognise in deflationista something I recognise in myself: he’s a man with a mission. Something-something about anti-vaxxers are so stupid and crazy and naive and, oh, downright deplorable.
My mission is simply not to buckle to group pressure, conventions, traditions, and unexamined dogma. deflationista’s seems to be that he wants us to pull our heads out of our asses so we can smell how bad we stink. I have obliged him several times to some extent, but upon emerging found the air too thick with deflationista’s smell to notice my own.
I’ve been too busy listening to him tell us how stupid he believes we are to notice how stupid I may in fact be.
All part of that old new thing called internet discourse:
Did you set your zone to silence or echo?
What? I can’t hear you?
Would you stop SCREAMING at me!!
What?!?
