I think the same about Wal-Mart. Give them 40 years and they'll be gone too.
Amazon make a mistake order recently and corrected it with a free $30 gift card. Amazon is going to be along for a long time. Don't they realize the customer is always right and you have to take care of his concerns?
I read this book in my early 20s and lost my copy in a move. That author speaks on having the experience of God - "the AM" of which Jesus spoke, which reminds of of is comment that was going to bring us "life in all its fullness" Joseph Campbell echoed this thousands of years later with his quote that people want to feel "truly alive." This book was written many decades ago but is as relevant now as then.
In which we learn how to say 'war crimes' in Malaysian.
Last week, Richard Clarke, the man to whom nobody in the administration of C-Plus Augustus listened because what did he know, anyway?, had a chat with Amy Goodman in which he minced no words regarding his former employers.
"I think things that they authorized probably fall within the area of war crimes. Whether that would be productive or not, I think, is a discussion we could all have. But we have established procedures now with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where people who take actions as serving presidents or prime ministers of countries have been indicted and have been tried. So the precedent is there to do that sort of thing. And I think we need to ask ourselves whether or not it would be useful to do that in the case of members of the Bush administration. It's clear that things that the Bush administration did — in my mind, at least, it's clear that some of the things they did were war crimes."
And, something that most of us missed, there was a court on the other side of the world that agreed.
In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were... found guilty of war crimes. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia...At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.
At the very least, this court parceled out the blame for the torture program in a fair manner and all the way up the chain of command. The testimony of the victims was as horrible as you might expect:
The court heard how Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers; Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall; Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement, Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter. The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.
In related news, Ed Kilgore notes that Cheney continues to glory in his status as the most inexcusable American who ever lived. It's like giving Pol Pot a late-night TV gig.
At times, Mr. Cheney seems to relish his villainous public persona. Outside the rodeo arena, he took a moment to show off the latest feature on his truck, a Darth Vader trailer-hitch cover, a nod to his alter-ego from the Bush days. "I'm rather proud of that," he said, flashing his signature uneven grin. To paraphrase Rick Blaine, I don't object to a vampire, I object to a gutless one. I'll buy the stake if someone else buys the garlic.
There is a military saying: "Good people in back, sorry people up front." It's why the military is so big on IQ tests.
The main reason Dubya Shrub refused to fly his fighter plane in Vietnam is cowardice, but another reason is that he was one of the wealthy "elites." The lower classes are the ones who are supposed to fight and die. You know - "Rich man's war, poor man's fight." And Dubya said that God had chosen him - a coward and war criminal - to be President.
The wealthy throughout history have always used captives, criminals and the lower classes as sacrifices.
Humanity hasn't changed at all except modern man has advanced technology, which, as Arthur C. Clarke noticed, when sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
I've mentioned before the movie, "The Cabin in the Woods," in which there is an elite, secret Deep State organization that uses advanced technology to sacrifice teen and preteen children to ancient Lovecraftian gods asleep under the earth. The technology is so advanced it can be considered magic.
This was written by Kali Holiday and is from AlterNet.
Religion has long been a useful tool for social control, with fear of god used in service of every despicable practice from slavery to war. A new study reveals that religious rites, particularly ritual sacrifice, helped create and maintain class stratification in ancient societies. According to researchers from the University of Auckland, Victoria University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the findings reveal a “darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies” than once thought.
The analysis focused on 93 Austronesian cultures, meaning peoples who originated in Taiwan, later settling in Madagascar, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. Researchers found that the more class stratification that existed in a society—elites on top, with the rest of the populace on the bottom—the more likely it was to engage in ritualistic killings. The powerful frightened the masses into staying in proverbial line by employing “god-sanctioned” sacrifice, which entailed implicitly threatening the lives of many for supposed wrongdoing. Those at the top became, by proxy, gods among men and women, and they maintained those positions by doling out killings as they deemed necessary.
“By using human sacrifice to punish taboo violations, demoralize the underclass and instill fear of social elites, power elites were able to maintain and build social control,” lead study author Joseph Watts stated in a press release.
“[H]uman sacrifice provided a particularly effective means of social control because it provided a supernatural justification for punishment,” says study co-author Russell Gray. “Rulers, such as priests and chiefs, were often believed to be descended from gods and ritual human sacrifice was the ultimate demonstration of their power.”
The method by which sacrifices were carried out reads like a horrifying laundry list of ways you would never want to go out. Ritual killings took the form of “burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being cut to pieces, crushed beneath a newly built canoe or being rolled off the roof of a house and decapitated.” Once a society began using sacrifice to keep the ancient equivalent of the 1 percent in the top slot and slaves at the bottom, the system became self-perpetuating.
“What we found was that sacrifice was the driving force,” says researcher Quentin Atkinson, “making societies more likely to adopt high social status and less likely to revert to egalitarian social structure."
The study, which was published in Nature, holds obvious implications for the roles of religion—and fear—in our own top-down, elite-ruled culture.
“Religion has traditionally been seen as a key driver of morality and cooperation,” states Watts, “but our study finds religious rituals also had a more sinister role in the evolution of modern societies.”
“Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason, and invective for documentation than in politics. This a realm, peopled only by villains or heroes, in which everything is black or white and gray is a forbidden color.” - John Mason Brown, Through These Men (1956)
There are three kinds of "conspiracies."
The first kind are the ones that don't exist, but people think they do. For the past several years the most popular of these is the belief that two remote-controlled planes flew into the WTC, both buildings of which were wired with explosives. Then the conspirators blamed the attacks on unknown people who disappeared, never to be seen again.
This is the belief in the perfect conspiracy, one that involves people all of whom are geniuses, all of whom are evil, all of whom are rich and all-knowing and all-powerful, and who wish to advance some agenda that generally involves conquering the world. The closest person I can find who fits all these criteria is Dr. Evil from “Austin Powers.”
The believers in these conspiracies are not motivated by reason (although they think they are) but by hate and anger and resentment. They always direct their ire at someone they dislike. They never complain about the people behind a conspiracy they like.
That hate and anger clouds their reason and makes them prone to believing the most ridiculous of conspiracy theories. It also makes them project all evil onto the conspirators, i.e. scapegoat them, then they want them brought to "justice" and destroyed.
Here's an example. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his book, The Gulag Archipelago, noted that when Communism did not work in the Soviet Union, scapegoats had to be found, as always happens at every place and at every time. In this particular case, hundreds of thousands of innocent people were convicted as "wreckers" and shot or given sentences up to 25 years.
The second kind of conspiracy are the ones that do exist. An example is FDR conspiring to get the United States into World War II by getting Japan to attack the U.S.
What all these true conspiracies have in common is that none of them are perfect; all are flawed. I am reminded of that old military saying, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
FDR, like most Americans, thought the Japanese were short, myopic, bucktoothed incompetents whom the U.S. could easily defeat. Right after Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought the Germans were behind it, because they did not believe the Japanese were capable of pulling off the attack. They were horribly wrong.
The third kind of conspiracy is not, strictly speaking, a conspiracy at all, but an argument can be made they can be called by that name.
This third kind is when people who have shared interests and shared goals get together and attack someone. This is the kind that only looks like a conspiracy, but really isn't.
A good example of this in the recent past is the Duke non-rape case. Many of the teachers at the university, who are leftists and therefore ruled by their feelings and not their intellects, got together and attacked the lacrosse players, assuming them to be guilty. Ironically, they were unwitting “conspirators” attacking what they were convinced was a criminal conspiracy by the players, but in reality didn't exist at all.
This type of conspiracy is called "mobbing." I have seen animals do it, specifically birds when they attacked a cat and drove him away. People also do it, the difference from animals being they delude themselves they are rational, but are instead motivated by blindness, self-righteousness and hate - and don't give up for decades, if ever.
Animals don't do that.
Here is what historian Ralph Luker wrote about Sally Deutsch, dean of Social Sciences at Trinity College, when he spoke to her about the Duke non-rape case:
"She bristled noticeably when I said that, after all, he’d (blogger and historian K.C. Johnson) turned out to be correct about the lacrosse case. 'You mean about the charges being dropped?' she asked. I started to say: 'No. Read my lips: There was no rape.' But the hairs were already standing up from the back of her neck up over to her eyebrows and her eyes were flashing."
This is an "intellectual" not run by her intellect but by feelings of hate, resentment and anger. Take a bunch of these loons, get them all together, and you'll have a mob...looking to do some mobbing. They want to find some to scapegoat, imprison, and human nature being what it is, ultimately murder.
The 9-11 Truthers are another example of mobbing. Anyone who disagrees with them is attacked, mocked, ridiculed, called a "shill," a "dupe," "blind," or even accused of being involved in the conspiracy itself. The intent is to marginalize, ostracize, scapegoat and ultimately expel them.
Unfortunately, and I see this as a frightening thing, mobbing is almost exclusively based on the belief in non-existent conspiracies. The genocide in the Soviet Union, the Duke non-rape case, and the Truthers are perfect examples.
Mobbing is not based on reason, but on primitive, raw hate and anger. No good can come from this.
The angrier people are at something, the more likely they are to believe in the most extreme of conspiracy theories. In a perverse sense, they worship as idols people whom they have never met (and as conspirators don't exist), making them into the most malicious of monsters whose evil and whose abilities could not be more perfect. The people who believe these things aren't totally sane. Not insane, but maybe "unsane."
Not only do those who believe in these extreme conspiracy theories always want to find a scapegoat they desire to destroy, they never want to confront their own faults and problems. To their way of thinking any problem is never their fault, but is always based on something external, and therefore does not lead to any kind of rational policy to confront the problem. They believe in ghosts which are the cause of everything afflicting them.
Why do believers in unrealistic conspiracy theories believe as they do? They obviously get a great deal of meaning to their lives from their beliefs. Self-righteousness (isn't that just a form of feeling superior?) excitement, satisfaction, figuring out a puzzle normal dolts cannot, those are some of the reasons. And don't forget: don't let the truth get in the way of a delicious story!
Ultimately, I think they believe they are in a battle between Good and Evil, with them of course on the side of Good. They want to vanquish the Evil. More correctly, those they define as evil, even if they're not. They think there are few things in this world more important than slaying monsters and holding back the forces of Chaos. They're the basis of a lot of the world's literature. Including a lot of pulp fiction.
I've written before of the fairy-tale of Pure Good and Pure Evil. This purity doesn't exist. No one is purely good or purely evil. Yet when people believe in those psychopathic polymaths, or "wreckers," or rapes that didn't happen, it's pretty obvious those "monsters" are being defined as close to pure evil as it gets – and those who attack them are definitely defining themselves as good. The next step (and this always happens) is the scapegoating of which I have written so tiresomely. This often leads to murder - especially mass murder.
The worst "conspiracies" are not the Masons or Illuminati or David Icke's blood-drinking shape-shifting reptilian space aliens, but the mobbing behavior of those who share the same beliefs, the same goals and who attack the innocent.
Such conspirators, although they believe they are rational, are in fact ruled by their feelings, and their self-righteousness and self-blindness leads them into Dionysian orgies of scapegoating, purging and, ultimately, imprisonment and murder.
The awful history of humanity is of the mass slaughter of the innocent, after having projected a nonexistent evil onto them. That is what is at the bottom of the dark abyss of "conspiracy."
Very shortly, we decided this arrangement was not going to work. So, we took two of the recliners and put them in the back yard, with a table between them. This worked out just fine, since it allowed us to sit in the backyard at midnight, drink beer and watch shooting stars.
One night, while we were doing this, he said to me, "Do you see what I see over there on the pavement under the streetlight?"
I did, but from that distance we couldn't make out what was going on. From where we sat it looked like some sort of dark, moving, swirly-pattern. When we walked over to investigate, what we saw were about half-a-dozen cockroaches apparently having a square-dance. We just stood there with our beer bottles in our hands, staring at them in disbelief. It felt like we were in a dream.
Now these weren't the little one-half-inch ones that college students find on the bathroom sink waving their antennae. These were the big two-inch Terminator ones. These guys weren't going to go down the drain with a little water from the faucet.
I had only seen one of these Intergalactic Death Roaches once before in my life, when a woman caught one in a jar and showed it to me. Now I was looking at maybe six of them. My friend had never seen ones this size, and had a look on his face that would have fit just fine on a character in a Stephen King novel when he finds the door to the Bioweapons Laboratory ripped open from the inside.
We weren't about to stomp on these creatures because a) if we succeeded there would have been a horrible mess that required throwing our shoes away because we weren't going to clean them, or b) not succeeding and possibly being body-slammed to the ground by these things, which then would probably get an ankle-lock on us.
These sonsofguns were living in our back yard, right under our noses. Maybe even under our recliners. It was like something out of one of those stories were two universes intersect and you find that in one of them cockroaches really did outlast mankind.
To this day neither of us know what those roaches were doing. Maybe it was a mating ritual, or maybe they just were having the roach version of a rave. I've never bothered to research it, and neither has he. We've been content to know that for a few minutes we stepped into a Far Side cartoon, which was enough for both of us until we decided to return to the civilized world of booze and Barcaloungers.
Whenever I think of that episode (along with the one in which I found a garter snake swallowing a toad while the toad was screaming), the next thought that often occurs to me is how foolish and naïve are those Noble Savage nitwits who idealize nature and think it's our friend.
Primitive man certainly didn't think nature was his friend. He wanted to get as far from it as fast as he could. Nobody put a hat on Smokey the Bear until the 20th century, when the free market and technology had advanced civilization enough that people could go camping with sleeping bags, tents and .45 caliber semi-automatics in case real bears, as opposed to cartoon ones, decided that humans were the ursine version of Cheesy Poofs. And even with all our technology, we still can't do much when Trailer Court meets Tornado.
Nature is certainly beautiful on the surface, with mountains and blue skies and sunshine and cute little prairie dogs but underneath is a different story. It's a good thing insects aren't any bigger than they are; the wars they have with each other would make our 20th century look like kids' dirt-clod fights. I'd hate to have to keep a Tommy gun in the house in case one crashed through the door looking for bread crumbs.
Animals are a lot better than insects only because we've semi-tamed them. But we'll never completely domesticate them. My parents had a cat that would consistently bring home live birds and mice, all of them held daintily in his mouth. When I asked a vet why he was doing this he answered, "You're supposed to kill them and eat them."
It turns out a lot of animals bring home live prey to their young so they can learn to kill them. Our cat was treating us like we were kittens. When I shooed away the mice and birds he probably thought I was nuts, the way human parents might think something is wrong with their kid if he always threw Oreos and milk out the window.
And yet now, we have people – environmentalists – worshipping the earth and all the serial-killer bugs and animals inhabiting it. Although, I suspect, in their minds, they don't really see it that way. The two-inch roaches and cats with the birds and mice don't really figure into their calculations. All they can see is humans as some kind of skin cancer growing all over the surface of the earth.
One of the things I decided a long time ago is that religion will never be gotten rid of, contrary to the claims of the materialists and the secular humanists (both of which are themselves religions). For one thing, as far as I am concerned, everything is religion. Some are just better than others. Others aren't worth anything at all.
We can either search for the truth or take the easy way out and believe in lies and superstition. The problem is discerning which is which. I don't think it's that hard. The Earth and what inhabits it are not to be worshipped. That prohibition is up at the top of the Ten Commandments.
One of the lies that people believe in, a Strange God they worship, is environmentalism. For those who believe in it, it is a religion, although they don't see it as one. They see it as the truth, separate from religion.
The late writer Michael Crichton has called environmentalism "the religion of choice for urban atheists," and has labeled it a "perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths."
"There's an initial Eden, a paradise," he said, "a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe."
Crichton is right on the mark ("missing the mark" is hamartia, which is usually translated as "sin"). Environmentalism even has its own theology, that of junk science. It also has something of which Crichton did not speak, but which all perverted religions have – human sacrifice.
We rightly perceive ancient peoples who rolled their infants into the fires in the belly of Moloch as a bunch of savages worshipping false gods. But when environmentalists today want to see millions of people die to "save the environment," what exactly is the difference between their savagery and that of some primitive tribe? The difference is that the modern ones kill more people. A lot more people.
Paul Ehrlich, an insect biologist-cum-knucklehead-cum-Elmer Gantry environmental false prophet, claimed that 60 million Americans would die of starvation in the 1980s. He's been saying these kinds of things since the '60s. Everything he's predicted has been wrong but some people are still mesmerized because he's one of the high wizards of a false religion based not on facts but on faith.
And it certainly sounds to me as if Ehrlich wants these people to die, to be sacrificed for the false god known as Gaia. A high wizard calls for human sacrifice to appease his god so it won't kill everyone. Am I talking about today, or 4000 years ago? Both.
Environmentalists believe in the fairy tale of Pure Good and Pure Evil, in themselves as the Children of Light, opposed to those who disagree with them and want to pollute the earth and kill Thumper and Bambi, the Children of Darkness. Environmentalists are religious fanatics in the worst sense of the word. All Eric Hoffer True Believers are the same, no matter what they worship. What unites all of them is their belief that those they define as their opponents need to be sacrificed on their Altar of Not-Truth.
We're running out of oil, these false prophets wail. Global warming will fry us, and nuclear power will give three eyes and a foot growing out of the top of our heads. Overpopulation will suffocate the world, so thank God AIDS will devastate us. And let's not forget the depletion of the ozone layer. And on and on and on. Their solution? In two words: human sacrifice. A new Flood (although not as water but as disease or famine) to cleanse the earth, and afterwards, the few Chosen left will step out of their Ark and start anew on a pristine earth.
Another part of the not-the-answer involves giving money and power to these self-anointed modern preachers of Woe&Doom. "Oh, no," writes P.J. O'Rourke in All of Trouble in the World about the tactics of groups like Greenpeace, "Night Wolf is eating the Moon Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out."
So far environmentalism has killed between 10 million and 30 million people since the 1970s, all sacrificed to the non-existent god know as "the environment." And let us certainly not forget that the World Trade Center collapsed prematurely because the builders were not allowed to spray asbestos on the upper floors. To "save one life" from non-existent asbestos poisoning we lost 3000. That's not a fair trade to anyone but environmentalists with heads full of voodoo.
And why were all these people sacrificed? So two-inch-long cockroaches can roam free and unmolested?
Human sacrifice is alive and well. Its supporters just go by different names now than in the past; instead of Aztecs they're called members of PETA. And they've got a leg up over ancient murderers in being more subtle than simply ripping out their victims' hearts in public. Now they do things like get DDT banned so millions of kids die from mosquito-borne malaria.
God forbid that wretched fanatical buttinskis like Ehrlich and Al Gore and Ralph Nader gain the political power they so crave. All have the same motto – "People – we just need a whole lot less of them. And we'll make sure it happens."
I'm sure every roach in the world would dance to that tune.
These days, forcing the boys and girls to "share" and "get along" is called "multiculturalism." It has never worked in the past, anywhere. It doesn't work now, anywhere, and it won't in the future, ever. There are many reasons why it doesn't work, but I think the simplest is what I will call the Tribe, the Outsider and the Scapegoat.
Human nature is such that people instinctively gather into tribes. Every living creature, from ants to elephants, does it; why should people be any different?
This tribalism is a problem that will never go away, so there is no way around its existence. People want community, and that community usually involves being with people like them, or whom they like. This has to be dealt with, which is something most libertarians rarely do because of their obsession with "the individual."
"Tribes" may be a primitive term, but it was applicable not only in the past but also certainly today. You might want to call them "ethnic groups" or "nations" instead. It doesn't matter. They're still tribes, whether they're big or little, powerful or weak.
Problems arise because every tribe in the past has, with monotonous regularity, because of our inborn narcissism, grandiosely called themselves “the People" or "the Humans." Anyone outside the tribe was, obviously, devalued into being non-People and non-Human. That gives a foot in the door to murdering them.
All tribes today still consider themselves "the Humans," even though they use different words. No country today is going to call itself "the United States of All Humans" or "The Union of All People, and Everyone Outside Isn't," but all countries will say God has chosen them and is on their side, which logically means the Other Guy is on the Other Side. That's pretty much saying the same thing as "We're human, and you ain't."
During World War II, for example, the Russians spoke of "Holy Mother Russia," which implied that God had chosen Russia. Their opponents, necessarily, had to have the Devil on theirs. We're the People; you're the Unpeople!
Their opponents, the Germans, did the same thing the Russians did, when they talked of the “Fatherland” (and today, for us, ominously, it’s the “Homeland”).
German soldiers used to march into battle with “Gott mit uns” on their belt buckles. I suppose it was a magic talisman to stop bullets. The question is: on whose side was God during the battle of Stalingrad, where both sides lost, combined, more soldiers than America has lost in all of its wars? The answer: neither.
It's painfully obvious that a grandiose certainty that God is on your side does not equal God being on your side, even if nutcases Jerry Falwell believed it. Neither does it mean your tribe is human and the other is not, even if you think God told you that. A movie example that comes to mind: I remember watching a Japanese officer, in The Last Emperor, exclaim, "The Japanese are the only divine race!" Later, when Russian soldiers closed in on him, he scrambled his brains with a pistol bullet. Self-proclaimed divinity always has a price, never a good one.
People in the U.S., cultural differences aside, are in some essential ways no different than people anywhere else. All people have a shared human nature.
People ask, "God bless America." It's never, God bless another country; it's always, God bless America. God should keep America's soldiers safe, but never any other country's. Our soldiers should be saved by God; their soldiers should die. Is that any different than those German soldiers with their talismans? Why should God bless America if America does not follow God's laws? It should be so simply because we, in our magical thinking, believe it should be so?
It's all pretty grandiose. It's assuming Americans are the Chosen, just as every tribe in the past has thought it was the Chosen. They weren't, and neither are we. Other tribes are full of humans, even if we pretend they aren't and act as if their deaths mean nothing and are just the "collateral damage" that always happens in war.
The biggest problem, though, is that every tribe projects its problems onto the outsider. There are, not surprisingly, two archetypes in literature called the Scapegoat and the Outsider. Often - in fact, maybe always - they are the one and the same.
The most famous, or maybe infamous, story about the Outsider and the Scapegoat is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," which everyone in the recent past had to read in middle school. Every year, someone was chosen as a scapegoat, which made them an outsider, then stoned to death. It was an example of scapegoating always leading to human sacrifice, of projecting "badness" on someone and then killing them, in order to "save" the tribe.
The human sacrifice in Jackson’s story was a fertility rite, which scapegoating and sacrifice always are: once we kill them, our culture will be renewed and reborn, since the “evil ones” will have been eradicated. This is why to the Greeks Dionysius was a fertility god, or why the Aztecs ripped the hearts out of hundreds of thousands of people. They thought it made sure the sun would continue to rise.
Since every tribe grandiosely considers itself "good," all "evil" must be projected elsewhere. If one tribe considers itself human and good and chosen by God, then the other tribe, the outsider, must necessarily be evil, sub-human, and of the Devil.
Maybe we don't consciously believe it, but emotionally we do. It why most people don't care - indeed sometimes even cheer - if foreigners die in wars. Then we act shocked when foreigners cheer when we die, the way some cheered about 9-11. How dare they act like us! Since we are good, they must be evil!
It was horrible that nearly 3000 innocent people were murdered on 9-11, but was it was a good thing the federal government murdered all those people in Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq? But since they were outside our tribe, they don't really count, and sacrificing and killing them doesn't matter because it was to "liberate" them.
Today in the U.S. you can see our tribe projecting certain of its problems on the outsider. The U.S. attacked Iraq twice ago when it didn't attack us, then blockaded the country and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then placed troops in Saudi Arabia, and supported Israel uncritically no matter what it did. We did this because we are "good," at least in our tribe's collective groupthink mind, if not in the mind of other tribes.
And since scapegoating and human sacrifice are always fertility rites, bombing and destroying other countries is of course supposed to make them be reborn and “grow” right – usually by trying to seed them with democracy and feminism.
When resentment, envy, anger and hate sent blowback our way on 9-11, we denied the bad things we had done to others, and instead claimed our attackers had to be "evil," and attacked us because we are "good." Maybe things are that simple in the childish, black-and-white fantasy of Bizarro World, but certainly not in reality.
It's bad enough to have different tribes in different countries get into wars, but when tribes in the same country war, that is a prescription for national suicide. And multiculturalism, if it is anything, is several ethnically-different tribes fighting over the same land and for political power, which is power over others. It is therefore an attempt at national suicide.
Each tribe is going to grandiosely call itself "the Humans" in some form, then deny its flaws and instead project them onto the devalued other, which it will want to remove or murder. Each tribe will also try to use other tribes as fertilizer, to make their own tribe and its culture grow and prosper.
Every empire in the past has fallen not because of attacks from the outside, but because of attacks from the inside. Once the barbarians are inside the gate it's harder to remove them. They may claim they're not barbarians, but apparently the Greek story of the Trojan Horse isn't taught to Americans in school anymore.
Some examples of tribal warfare? How about "Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan," whose motto is "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada." It translates as, "Everything for the race. Everything outside the race, nothing." That's clearly grandiose, and fits exactly the idea of one tribe denying its flaws and projecting them onto a devalued other. It is projection/scapegoating leading to human sacrifice. They're the cause of our problems, not us. Remove them or rub them out!
Another example in the U.S.? In the original teachings of the Nation of Islam (related to Islam in name only) blacks are gods, the original men, and whites are devils. Guess who's completely to blame for the problems of the former? You've got it. It's just another example of "Since we are good, you must be evil and the cause of our problems, so we must eradicate you." Denial and projection. Lies (to oneself and to others) followed by scapegoating and human sacrifice.
People will always define themselves not just as individuals but as part of family, nation, religion. If large enough different groups of people try to share the same land and vie for political power, each is going to define itself as good, the others as bad, then deny its own flaws and instead project their problems on those defined as outsiders. Leftists, who support multiculturalism, don’t merely misunderstand human nature but instead don’t understand it at all, not when they believe several large tribes can co-exist peacefully on the same land.
The only way that different tribes can occupy the same land is if one is tribe is 95% of the population, and the other tribe is five percent. But three tribes that are each one-third of the population? There has never been a society in the history of the world that has survived such an attempt.
The problem is made far worse when the State gets involved, because each group will fight for political power to protect itself and hurt the other. Each group will try to capture the State to use for its own purposes, which involves removing the others, or, ultimately, killing them.
State-sponsored "multiculturalism," a misguided attempt to force different tribes to get along on the same land, will, as it always does when the State gets involved, have the exact opposite effect: it will make them fight even more, to the detriment of those involved, and, ultimately, the nation. Not only are the boys and girls not going to share and get along, they're going to get into constant vicious, bloody, murderous brawls.
This has been noticed for hundreds if not thousands of years: those who howl most fervently for war are the Chickenhawk cowards who can do nothing but give bad advice but never have any intention of volunteering for the front lines.
I’ve mentioned before the undeclared Vietnam war started when I was seven. Even then I was hearing the same cowardly nonsense I’ve heard in every war: “If we don’t fight them over there we’ll have to fight them here!”
But the people who say these things never volunteer for the military. I used to offer to drive them down to the enlistment center but they always had some bullshit excuse. They always do.
I think when I was about 19 or 20 I read Gone with the Wind, which really is a great American novel.
The author, Margaret Mitchell, wrote about Chickenhawks during the War between the States. All they could do is give terrible advice when at parties. “Why, if I was in charge of the war…what the hell is wrong with these generals? They’re doing it all wrong!” But none of them had any intention of making their way even to the rear lines. Or even to a hospital to tend the wounded.
These vile people always pretend they are patriots because the support war – any war. It’s a cheap way of deluding themselves they are patriots when they are nothing of the sort. Those who see though these cowards…these ball-less cowards can only point their fingers at other people and howl, “Coward! Traitor! Pacifist! Liberal! ” They are projecting their own cowardice.
These nutcases see war as entertainment, just the way Romans saw the gladiator fights in the Coliseum as entertainment. They have no idea the Bible refers to this as “the lust of the eye” – seeing death and destruction as entertainment from a distance. A safe distance. A very safe distance.
These Chickenhawk cowards are trying to fill their empty, meaningless lives by pretending they are brave and patriotic.
What’s the old saying? “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”?
That’s not quite accurate. It’s the first refuge of a scoundrel – a coward.
"…unscrupulous and uninhibited [politicians] are likely to be more successful" - The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek
I know people who were disappointed that Barry (“Hope&Change”) Soetero didn’t do anything useful as President, such as stopping Dubya’s catastrophic wars. I thought: what did they expect? Soetero is a a career politician who’s never had a job in his life. The only thing he did as President was go on vacation and improve his golf game.
The same applies to every member of the evil Bush Crime Family. None of them has ever had a job and almost all have been arrested for drug and alcohol offenses. The whole Satanic family is as corrupt as hell. Did it really matter that Al Gore won the popular vote and would have won the Presidency if the Supreme Court hadn’t given the election to Bush in the Florida recount? Can you imagine anything being different after 9-11 if Gore had been President? Things could possibly have been worse – hard to believe considering Shrub was a catastrophe.
The last time we had a President who wasn’t a career politician was Ronald Reagan – and he was, like Trump, a second-rate actor. Which of course doesn’t matter at all.
Politicians become politicians because they don’t want to get real jobs and can’t make it in the real world. They are also obsessed with money and power and sex.
I’ve mentioned before I know an 84-year-old man who was a bomber pilot in Korea and who spent his career as a political consultant. He told me he’s only met one honest politician in his life. All the rest had money and sex and drug problems. The Clintons are perfect examples of what he meant. Bill and his cigars? Hillary a drunken muff-diver? What the hell?
The only thing politicians are good at is running their mouths and being glib and articulate. Hell, Hitler was that and look how he turned out.
This is supposedly one of those old Chinese sayings: “Do you judge a dog wise because he can bark well?”
I am also reminded of that quote by Rudyard Kipling that words are the most powerful drug in the world. He was right - and every election tens of millions of deluded people show that Kipling was right (and every new generation has to learn the hard way). They fall for politician’s lies every time and then are disappointed when all them turn out to be exactly the same.
Donald Trump, thank God, is not a politician. I still expect him to screw up. But I also expect him to also do a lot of good things (more good things than screw-ups), which we never got from Soetero or any of the Bush Crime Family.
And thank God! the corrupt criminal and career politician Hillary Clinton lost and her political career is now over. Nothing would have changed if she had won. It would have been criminal business as usual. And all those tens of millions of people who voted for her would have ended up hating her the way so many people now despise the ineffective Soetero and hate Dubya Shrub because of the bad things he did to the United States.
I know a politically-ignorant woman who told me she was going to vote for Hillary Clinton because of her “experience.” I told her Clinton’s “experience” had consisted of getting fired from her first job in government in 1974 for lying, breaking the rules of the Democratic party, and for breaking the law – and that she had never stopped being corrupt and a liar from that day.
Let’s wait and see to what extent Trump can avoid any of these problems.
It was clear none of them could believe Trump was actually running for President. They couldn’t believe it when he destroyed every RINO in the field like Jeb! (thereby putting a permanent end to the political aspirations of the evil Bush Crime Family) and they were stunned at the way Trump utterly destroyed the career criminal Hillary Clinton.
Does the MSM really think interviewing the senile war criminal John McCain (who dropped napalm on citizens in Vietnam and whom the Vietnamese could have justifiably shot on the spot after he was captured after his Warthog was shot down) or the coward and war criminal Dubya Shrub would do any good at all?
It’s gotten old and is no longer entertaining – so I’ve again quit watching.
I didn’t watch the news not for years but decades. I can’t remember the last time I watched the news regularly – and I have a degree in Mass Communications. I can’t remember the last time I bought a newspaper either. Those days are over permanently.
I don’t watch the news on TV, I don’t read newspapers…to tell you the truth I don’t give a damn about the news. I’d rather watch reruns of “Star Trek” or “Thriller.”
It’s not just me. There are tens of millions of people who no longer pay any attention to the news (this certainly accounts for the popularity of someone like Rush Limbaugh, who is at least entertaining – something the MSM isn’t).
I still can’t figure out who pays all these clowns. It can’t be advertising anymore – much of it has moved to the internet (why have newspapers gone out of business but not TV stations?). Does the government pay these fools? I can believe that. My tax dollars paying the salaries of idiots like George Stephanopoulos and Chuck Todd? (one of my friends says he looks like a mole). I’m paying them to lie to me and bore me? My God, what a horrible thought!
What is the target audience of the MSM? It’s not Flyover Land (that’s what Limbaugh, who is originally from Missouri) successfully targeted. The MSM has to be aimed at the East and West coasts, which, as I’ve mentioned before, don’t count at all politically – and that’s why Trump won Flyover Land but lost the East and West Coasts.
How long can this nonsense continue? It’s got to end some day. Everything changes.
The question is when? To that I have no answer. No one does, for that matter.
More people have been killed because of words and ideas than anything else.
The Russian writer Dmitri Merejkowski (1865–1941), believed all religions could be divided into two basic ones. In the first one, Man sacrifices Man to Man (even if it’s claimed Man is sacrificing to God). In the second, God sacrifices Himself to Man.
The biggest problem throughout history is Man sacrificing to Man. Think the human sacrifice of war, for one example. Or Moloch, in which babies were rolled into his fire-filled stone belly. Or the Aztecs ripping the hearts out of thousands of live captives.
I sometimes use the example of the Christian-hating, left-wing Russian Jew atheist Alice Rosenbaum, who wrote under the pen name “Ayn Rand.”
Her most famous novel is Atlas Shrugged, a fairly well-written book, but one that is full of scapegoating and the human sacrifice of Man to Man.
In it, she basically sacrifices the entire world to save the few dozen people in “Galt’s Gulch.”
As I’ve mentioned before, all sacrifice, even human sacrifices (especially human sacrifice) is a fertility rite, to save and renew society though sacrificing people to a deity (think of the movie, The Cabin in the Woods, which I have mentioned more than once).
Unfortunately that deity is often Man – which is no deity at all. It certainly is the case with Rosenbaum, who called herself “the perfect woman.”
Rosenbaum’s friends used to argue with each other whether or not Rosenbaum was evil. That was settled a long time ago.
Since she was a leftist emotionally and intellectually (but thought she wasn’t one) she was full of hate and envy, like all leftists. It’s why she so happily destroyed the world in her novel.
When anyone does not believe in anything greater than himself then he is reduced to believing only in himself. I’ve met people like that, who have told me, “I only believe in me.”
I can understand an alienated 12-year-old or 16-year-old thinking Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written. But an adult, no, unless that old saying about there are none so blind as those who will not see is really true.
It is apparently an instinct in people to believe in sacrifices, especially human sacrifice (nearly every culture throughout the world, throughout history, has engaged in it.
I was far too old (in my thirties) when I first read Atlas Shrugged to fall under its spell. But remembering what I was like when I was 12 I think even then I would have been repulsed by it. What kind of sad person calls the world “a hell” and destroys it? And then claims the people in it brought it on themselves by not worshiping her grandiose human gods?
I’ll say again that Russell Kirk said that the source of evil was “the Monstrous Self” (scapegoating and human sacrifice are just manifestations of it).
And what does that say about a woman who said she was “perfect,” considered the world “a hell” and wanted everyone in it (except about three dozen of her human gods) dead?
I’ve had her fans tell me her version of society would be an impressive one. In reality it wouldn’t get off the ground, being based not on capitalism and reason but on evil – scapegoating and human sacrifice. It is a house not built on sand but quicksand.
L.P. Hartley once wrote a novel (my copy disappeared years ago) titled Facial Justice, in which women by law had to get plastic surgery to equalize their looks. That’s what envy does to people. Everyone must be equal! That’s what “justice” is to some people.
I and many other people have noticed what happens when people are outside the mainstream. They end up eaten up with envy.
Let’s take the Little Man Complex.
I probably heard that term first as a teenager – I don’t remember. Fortunately I’ve only met three or four guys with it – and they always caused trouble.
Decades ago my mother was an ER night clerk. For some reason she was working an evening shift and I had to visit her.
This tiny little unattractive Jewish intern, who was about 5’3, for some reason gave me a dirty look and came clomping out from behind the counter wearing three-inch heels. I just smiled at him.
Later my mother told me he was the only unpleasant doctor she had ever met. His problem? What else? The envy of the little man toward men taller and better-looking than him.
I’m six feet tall, by the way.
Now let’s take feminism.
The first feminist I met was when I was 18, when I was a freshman in college. She was unattractive, overweight, and loud in class.
Since then, all the feminists I’ve met have all been unattractive. I suppose some are attractive but I’ve never met them. All have been scrawny or overweight but none are attractive. And all have had a bad attitude.
Of course leftism is based on envy – all must be equal! Everyone must be equally good-looking and equally the same height! And the trouble leftists cause is legendary.
Hitler had one testicle, Stalin pockmarked skin, a withered arm and fused toes on one foot, and Napoleon was practically a dwarf. And the ugly Stalinist Betty Friedan was a monster – inside and out.
Because they have no power over their own lives they want power over others (I guess it makes them feel they can do something except stew in their own envious juice). As Carl Jung noticed, you can have love or power but not both. That’s why leftists are full of hate and envy but not love – they want to bring people down to their level, as leftists always desire.
I sometimes wonder how much of this hatred toward Trump is based on leftist envy. He’s not conventionally good-looking but he is the richest President ever and obviously prefers beautiful women – and with his wealth and celebrity he can get them.
All those women marching in the streets against Trump – ugh. They’re not going to accomplish anything except to temporarily make themselves feel better. The same applies to all those effeminate rabbity men marching with the women.
What can be done about this problem? It’s not as if you can wave a magic wand and make everyone taller and thinner and better-looking.
I have no idea but I don’t think there is a solution. Hell, I know there isn’t a solution. People are flawed and imperfect – Original Sin, if you want to call it that. That’s why we have all these problems and we always will.
Not surprisingly envy is the Original Sin in the story of the Garden of Eden. That’s not just a coincidence.
I learned enough about women in that time to service me for the rest of my life (I started learning these thing when I was about 12). For good and bad.
One of the things I noticed, as Carl Jung commented, that women always think they’re right. Not the best women in the house but the worst ones.
The worst ones also blamed all their problems on men (they didn’t even know they were doing it but it was obvious from they said and what they did). In some ways they were closer to children than adults.
The worst ones could always dish it out but couldn’t take it. They thought they could say anything they wanted to men, no matter how insulting, and they stunned if anything happened to them. Their hostility was palpable.
The worst ones also set their standards for men way too high. They thought they deserved someone way out of their league. They had no gratitude whatsoever and looked down upon and abused many of those who didn’t met their standards.
The attractive ones were smart, pleasant and had a sense of humor. The unattractive ones were none of those things.
I have mentioned before one evening I was sitting in the room of one of the best ones as she was putting on her make-up. Out of the blue (and I have no idea why I asked this) I asked her how many guys had asked her out for the weekend.
You know what she told me? Seven! I didn’t even know what to say (this is what happens when you’re friendly and pleasant).
One of the mostly unattractive girls in the house never had a guy ask her out in that year-and-a-half. But since my room shared a wall with her I could hear what was going on in her room.
One night I had her moaning (she woke me up) and knew what was going on. The next morning I woke up as he left so I looked out the window. He was way better-looking that her so I figured he’d never see her again.
He didn’t.
Another girl in the house wasn’t bad-looking at all but wasn’t all that intelligent or pleasant. She did have one date but when he called for a second one she said no. She told me about it. She said he asked her, “So you’re blowing me off, huh?” I thought, why are you telling me this?
That was the only date she had in a year-and-half. The other one could get a guy to fuck her but that was it.
Those two never showed any interest in men but sat there like bumps on a log and expected guys to poof, just magically ask them out.
None of the unpleasant ones have been married or had children. And of course it is men’s fault!
I also knew another girl (who did not live in the house and met at a convenience store when she hit on me) who was attractive and pleasant and had a sense of humor. She flirted with guys she was interested in and they fell over each other to ask her out. She just mowed them down – including me.
My life has confirmed what I learned in that year-and-a-half without exception.
I get guys (the ones I call the Lost Boys of the Manophere) telling me “women have changed since you were younger!” Guess what? They haven’t, since human nature doesn’t change.
“At all costs, never disturb our innocence.” - Arthur Miller
"Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more human beings, usually as an offering to a deity, as part of a ritual." - Wikipedia
I have been interested in human sacrifice for a long time, perhaps 15 years if not a little longer. Why I am like this I have no idea.
But I do know that all human sacrifice is also a fertility rite (the ancient Greeks noticed that with their god Dionysus – who for all practical purposes still exists and is still worshiped - who isn’t the god of drunken partying but of tearing people to shreds in orgiastic rioting). The most famous story about human sacrifice is Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which involved stoning innocent people to death.
Human sacrifices are always considered guilty, and being guilty they deserve to be sacrificed.
It’s a bit different in war. The enemy who is sacrificed is always considered guilty and so deserves what happens to them no matter how hideous. (And these sacrifices are done by the rulers to consolidate their power.)
On the other hand, our soldiers are also human sacrificed, but they are idealized. You know, they made the “ultimate sacrifice,” no matter how hideously they are wounded or killed.
The enemy is always considered evil and always deserves to be sacrificed. Our soldiers are also sacrificed but they are considered good.
I’ve used this quote from Mircea Eliade before: "Since 'our world' is a cosmos, any attack from without threatens to turn it into chaos. And as 'our world' was founded by imitating the paradigmatic work of the gods, the cosmogony, so the enemies who attack it are assimilated to the enemies of the gods, the demons, and especially to the archdemon, the primordial dragon conquered by the gods at the beginning of time. An attack on 'our world' is equivalent to an act of revenge by the mythical dragon, who rebels against the work of the gods, the cosmos, and struggles to annihilate it. 'Our' enemies belong to the powers of chaos. Any destruction of a city is equivalent to a retrogression to chaos. Any victory over the attackers reiterates the paradigmatic victory of the gods over the dragon (that is, over chaos)."
What Eliade is writing about is the archetype of the horror story: good attacked by evil. The sacred "Homeland" under assault by fanatical, insane, evil mass murderers who will stop at nothing in their desire to destroy and conquer us. Heaven under attack by Satan. It's an old, apparently instinctive archetype and many, many people fall for it. Always have, and always will.
This is why “enemies” are always portrayed as homicidal maniacs bent on death and destruction. Monsters. So they have to be sacrificed in a fertility rite to save and renew our society, the way Aztecs ripped the hearts out of tens of thousands of living people so the sun wouldn’t stop in the sky (Mel Gibson portrayed that graphically in his movie, Apocalypto).
You might also want to watch the impressive The Cabin in the Woods, where every year several teenagers are sacrificed horribly (killed by monsters) to keep ancient gods asleep under the earth so they don’t awake and destroy the world.
We look to the past and wonder why babies were rolled into the fire-filled stone belly of Moloch (burnt offering is what “Holocaust” really means, as in the movie The Wicker Man), but is that any different than burning children alive with napalm in Vietnam, or in a firestorm in Dresden, or blowing them to pieces in Iraq and Afghanistan? (Except that we have advanced technology.) It’s always to save our society from that primordial dragon - chaos.
The late Rene Girard advanced the thesis that until the time of Jesus all sacrifices were considered guilty but his death was supposed to put an end to that since he was innocent. Unfortunately it didn’t exactly work because even today human sacrifices are considered evil guilty monsters and so deserve to be sacrificed.
I have no use whatsoever for religions such as Judaism and Islam because both still believe in sacrificing people to their tribal war gods.
Christianity was supposed to stop this sacrificing thousands of years ago but even today it hasn’t achieved that feat – it still believes in human sacrifice. Instead what we get is people using God’s name in vain – and the correct translation is for “vain causes.”
People should at least admit they’re still worshiping Dionysus but they don’t, as Miller suggested, want their innocence disturbed.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.” – George Orwell
"This all raises the question of whether or not war itself is considered a sacrificial rite by the elite, who, along with their families, frequently escape such deadly ritual." - Acharya S.
The only time leftists are right is in the stopped-clock sense. Far less than that, even.
I know what these fools are thinking. “If we get all the minorities together they can outvote white people and we can rule the country forever! And maybe someday we can get rid of white people altogether!”
Guess what? It’s not going to happen.
In the next election the Democrats are going to lose even more seats. Right now the Democratic party is an insignificant coastal party. They did it to themselves (that’s what hate and envy will do to your mind).
Leftists in general are hoping the United States will turn non-white, i.e. a non-white majority. That’s not going to happen either (if for some bizarre reason it ever happened the country would collapse and break up and all those “minorities” would find themselves living in shacks because they couldn’t maintain the science and technology).
Leftists hate the United States – hell, they hate everything, including themselves – and want the U.S. to be destroyed in its current form. Because they think the country is evil! And leftists are always about destroying everything because they think somehow something better will pop up.
Linear cause-and-effect doesn’t exist except in hard sciences like physics. That’s why it’s impossible to predict the future except in those hard sciences. Everything else is instead a feedback system. That increases the probability (and only the probability) of predicting what’s going to happen.
After the Democrats are crushed in the next election what are they going to do then? Double-down on their stupidity? I wouldn’t put it past them.
If they had any sense they’d get rid of haters and enviers like Perez and Ellison and concentrate on the white working class and the heartland (I’ve said before only Flyover Land counts politically – the east and west coasts don’t count at all.)
But in its current form the Democratic party has no sense at all. And I don’t see it developing a brain anytime soon.
I was a very little kid when the undeclared Vietnam war started. After it was over I found out it was based on a lie – the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. 58,000 American dead, two-and-half-million Southeast Asians dead – for nothing.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote about all the “false arithmetic” employed in going to war.
I remember when the incompetent Poppy Bush invaded Panama. Remember that one? It was because Manuel Noriega was a “drug lord.” But drugs are still pouring into the United States. So it accomplished nothing.
What to get rid of drug smuggling? Legalize them. Even heroin used to be be legal in the U.S. – you could buy Bayer heroin at the corner drug store. Were there problems? Always. Many people are weak and stupid (many of them are in the “government”).
I know a guy in a wheelchair from the Panama invasion – paralyzed from the waist down.
I’ve been to VA hospitals more than once. One time there was a bunch of paralyzed men from Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq sitting outside in the sunshine.
Of course I remember when the POS Dubya Shrub had the American military invade Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought, “He’s lying about everything, of course. So I wonder what the truth is?”
Then it all came out. Both invasions were based on lies.
I also know that when wars are started a lot of people cheer them on. The farther they are from the front the louder they cheer. That’s why they’re called “Chickenhawks.” None of them know that the truth is the first casualty in war. Ignorant and stupid they are – all they can do is give bad advice.
Not surprisingly the fact that the truth is the first casualty in war in not taught in school or church or any place else.
I did have one college teacher mention it one time in one journalism class. He said that during Vietnam he had been looking for jobs in Canada since he had no intention of being drafted (fortunately he got deferments).
Why do so many people fall for the lies of the government? (I operate under the assumption that everything that comes from the government is a lie). Do that many people idealize these clowns because they are our “leaders”? Are that many people just sheep? (Sheep will follow the leader over a cliff.)
Back when Shrub was in office I met a few people who called him “my President.” They don’t do it anymore, having changed their minds about him. They finally woke up to the truth of what he is.
The late psychiatrist M. Scott Peck once wondered if Original Sin wasn’t really just laziness. Too lazy to think, too lazy to analyze (Peck had been an officer in the military during Vietnam).
The military, centuries ago, used to classify solders as combinations of lazy, stupid, smart, active.
The worst ones, to be kicked out, were the stupid and active – they got soldiers killed because of their incompetence.
The problem with democracy is that many Presidents elected to office are stupid and active (Dubya Shrub, Poppy Bush, Lyndon Johnson, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Lincoln).
Reagan was smart and lazy. Trump is smart and active.
Some people know these things but many do not – just the way they are clueless about the truth being the first casualty in war.
”The effects which follow on too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade not for God…but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better but leave it either as it is, or even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began.” - The Devils of Loudon, Aldous Huxley
There is no light on human nature more pitiless and perceptive and accurate than mythology. Through hundreds if not thousands of years all the dross was burned away, leaving some very acute observations about the human condition.
Unfortunately mythology is not taught in schools or the churches or by parents. Too bad, since there is wisdom in these stories, wisdom that doesn’t exist at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, places that produce “the Best and Brightest” now busy destroying the United States.
The ancient Greeks outlined this sequence: Koros to Hubris to Ate to Nemesis. They argued about what exactly each word meant. Scholars still argue today. To me, to understand it, just look around at modern society.
I’ve heard Koros described as a kind of greed -- and had those ancient Greeks been Christian, they would have called it one of the Seven Deadly Sins. I’ve also heard Koros described as what happens to people of unsound character when they gain great wealth and power (meaning, more than anything else, political power, which ultimately is the power to “legally” kill people).
Examples (which are another name for stories) work best. Dubya Shrub, who started two unnecessary wars, has an unsound character. An alcoholic who was never treated for it (which makes him a dry drunk), who is brain-damaged by that alcoholism, along with past heavy cocaine use, who never had a job in his life, who was (is?) on psychiatric medication, who believes he is a Christian who is “saved” and believes he was chosen by God to be President (which reminds of the “Divine Right” of European kings – which the U.S. was founded to get away from).
To use just our last three Presidents (Obama, Bush and Clinton) as examples, they are portraits of what Friedrich Hayek meant when he wrote his famous article, “Why the Worst Get on Top.” It’s also why the Founding Fathers were opposed to the leftist delusion of “democracy” – again, the worst get on top.
A man or woman, a weakling of unstable character, who gains great wealth and political power, then next suffers from Hubris -- another name for the towering, grandiose Pride that afflicted Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost (as I’ve mentioned, I prefer the term, “the Monstrous Self”).
Hubris is arrogance, moral blindness, wanton violence, which creates in the afflicted the ability to cruelly and brutally humiliate people without any qualms whatsoever – the way Herod and Caligula and other human monsters did. They always rationalize as a necessary thing how even the innocent suffer terribly, which is why there exists the ironic observation (which both Jesus and Aesop noticed) that all tyrants call themselves benefactors.
The Greeks, with their usual intelligence and perspicacity, banned representations of brutal public humiliation from their theater as obscene – and the original definition of obscene meant something that should not be shown in public.
Not so surprisingly, the root words of “obscene” and “humiliation” both mean “dirt” – to treat someone as dirt. Humiliation also means “to mortify,” which means to “make dead,” not necessarily physically dead, but worse, dead in psyche, as in the walking dead – zombie or vampire, which is how those whose souls have been murdered by vicious humiliations describe themselves.
I am reminded of the sociologist C. Wright Mills when he wrote about what he called “crackpot realists” -- fools who are convinced they know what they are doing but don’t, and instead destroy in their attempts to save. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were fine specimens of that.
Seeing wrong as right is Ate -- madness. When a politician starts unnecessary wars in which they become even richer (again, the greed of Koros), in which tens of thousands of innocent people are killed and many more impoverished, and the instigators claim they had the “time of their lives” (as both Bush and Clinton said), that is Ate.
Shrub was far more arrogant than Clinton or Obama (he was, after all, referred to as Smirk). The more arrogance one shows, the more it is covering up feelings of humiliation. As the psychiatrist James Gilligan so perceptively wrote, “The most dangerous men in the world are the ones who are afraid they are wimps.”
It has been noticed for many years by many people that bullies cover up their cowardice with braggadocio – arrogance on top hiding their feelings of humiliation. When such people gain political power millions can die because of their attempts to replace shame with pride (Hitler had one testicle, Stalin had badly pocked skin, fused toes on one foot and a withered arm, LBJ escalated in Vietnam because he was afraid his critics would consider him “chicken” if he didn’t – and Dubya is an alcoholic and Chickenhawk coward who refused to fly in Vietnam).
Now we come to Nemesis. Nemesis is the goddess of fate and retribution. You can use many other names: revenge, vengeance and retaliation, payback, blowback…perhaps even justice. (As an aside, the Greeks called justice Dike and it exists because of the criminal acts created by Hubris.)
I find it significant that Nemesis means “fate.” That means cause-and-effect, although I believe it is more accurate to define it as a cybernetic system, specifically a positive feedback system: humiliation leads to revenge, then those who are the objects of revenge seek revenge in turn, and so in, an escalating spiral of death and destruction.
Humiliation doesn’t always have to lead to revenge, if the object of humiliation can maintain his or her innocence, as in such stories as “Cinderella” and the first Harry Potter novel (in both cases they are stories that illustrate the saying, “Living well is the best revenge”).
But when it comes to groups of people – ethnic groups, religions, nations – immunity to feelings of humiliation can never be maintained and revenge will always happen. Mobs cannot think, only feel; they never follow principles, only leaders, and they always fall for propaganda that portrays them as innocent victims and their opponents as evil, subhuman monsters bent on death and destruction.
Osama bin Laden said the Islamic countries in the Middle East had been humiliated by the U.S. for 80 years, and that the revenge of 9-11 was “a copy” of what the U.S. had done. Then the U.S. sought revenge for the humiliation of 9-11, and now those people the American government is killing in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting their revenge by killing our soldiers in return. Those who are blinded by political fanaticism cannot see this (because they perceive all political problems as Good versus Evil), and as long as they are deluded, they never will be able to see the truth of things.
In a nutshell, when you brutally humiliate people and make them suffer cruelly, and don’t even know you’re doing it, and instead of ending the suffering by not attacking them you see it as something good and necessary, you’re going to be pretty damned surprised when the people you are oppressing and exploiting and killing rise up and kill you back. You’ll be outraged and consider it ingratitude; they’ll consider it justice.
When unsound people (meaning about 80% of all politicians) get political power, they always seek to expand it. This is why the State throughout history has always expanded its power, always at the expense of people and society.
There have been quite a few people throughout history (Marcus Aurelius and Akbar the Great, for two) who have been able to handle political power. Unfortunately, Clinton, Shrub and Obama don’t belong to that admirable group. Those who consciously seek political power are avaricious, self-deluded weaklings and can never handle it properly.
As Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I prefer the sayings, “Power intoxicates and immunity corrupts,” and “Power is the horse that evil rides.”
As Dostoevsky put it in The House of the Dead, "Tyranny...finally develops into a disease. The habit can...coarsen the very best man to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate...the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, becomes almost impossible."
The opposite of Hubris is humility, or what the Greeks called Sophrosyne. It can be described as “Nothing in excess” and “Know thyself,” meaning having a clear understanding of your character, your strengths and limitations. It means treating people with respect, not brutalizing and humiliating them, and when it comes to relations with other countries, to, as our Founding Fathers advised, trade with them but otherwise leave them alone.
Unfortunately, if you flunk history (which so far has always happened), you have to go through the whole mess again. The U.S., which has the whole of history before it, is ignoring all its successful lessons and is instead repeating all its failures.
I used to wonder many years ago how the Intelligence community screwed up so badly about not forecasting the collapse of the Soviet Union – and how they did the same with Iraq and those non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Both were examples of catastrophic incompetence.
I realized it was the bureaucratic mindset.
I’m sure I encountered people with this mindset in high school but it wasn’t until I graduated college that I really encountered and understood this mindset.
These people with their bureaucratic mindsets were pretty good as managers – and by “pretty good” I mean marginally competent. But none of them could actually do anything.
I used to work for a man who had an MBA from the University of Michigan. He was a newspaper publisher. He was a second-rater who hired third-raters, who hired four-raters. He and everyone he hired ended up being catastrophes.
You might ask, how did an MBA become a newspaper publisher? Because he was part of the Old Boy’s Network (this really does exist).
You’d think he would have worked his way up from the bottom on a newspaper, but nope.
He was just a bureaucrat. Everyone he hired had the bureaucratic mindset. The rules were the most important things even if they didn’t work. None of these people could actually do anything.
I figure the same thing has happened in the Intelligence community. Bureaucrats who can only manage – marginally – but can’t do any Intelligence work. They lack the intelligence, knowledge and analytical ability.
Career bureaucrats are the worst.
Most of the bureaucrats I’ve met were what I call “high-IQ idiots.” Their knowledge was scanty and their analytical abilities weren’t very developed and they weren’t trustworthy because they played politics – they expected people to be loyal to them but they’d stab these same people in the back in a heartbeat.
And they rose to the top by being quite good at playing politics – but not by actually doing anything.
There were people who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and also pointed out the impossibility of Saddam Hussein acquiring nuclear weapons. Did those administrations hire these experts and listen to them? Nope, of course not. Instead we had a bunch of incompetents busy judging things only on political considerations.
None of these bureaucrats had any substance. I don’t know of any who ever have.
I’m hopeful about Trump. I can’t think of anyone in his administration who is a career bureaucrat. He certainly isn’t – anyone who done what he’s done in the market can’t do it by being a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats aren’t flexible and can’t change their minds.
No one in Dubya Shrub’s administration could actually do anything, just oversee – “manage.” And not very well, either. Terribly in fact.
James Burnham once wrote a famous book called The Managerial State. I don’t have to explain what it’s about. You already know.
Working your way up in a bureaucracy is nothing to be proud of. It’s not an accomplishment in the slightest.
“Management” can be taught. Intelligence and analytical ability cannot.
I judge people on how accurate they are at predicting things. That’s the only sign of being of being really smart.
But when they’re wrong all the time – which means playing politics all the time - out with them.
"Whatever power you give politicians and bureaucrats to use against other people will eventually be used by future politicians and bureaucrats against you." - Michal Boldin
This includes ethnic groups. Of course it doesn’t apply to everyone so I always give everyone the benefit of the doubt at first.
Stereotypes apply to groups but not individuals.
If someone steals a million dollars it could be anyone. But if someone steals a billion dollars what are the chances it’s a Jew? Pretty damn good.
Those hanged for rape/murder during WWII were both black and white, but what were the chances most of them were black? You already know the answer.
If you get someone blowing up car engines and getting in wrecks what are the chances it’s a woman? (I I know a mechanic who won’t let his wife drive their car.) And if you find someone standing helplessly at the side of the road looking at a flat tire on their car what are the chances it’s also a woman? I can’t imagine any man doing this.
If someone has 100 shoes is that person a man or a woman? It’s a woman – just the way it’s a woman if they have a box under their bed with 100 Beanie Babies in it (I’ve known two women who did this).
If you find people rioting in the streets, burning cars, smashing windows and throwing things at the police what are the chances those people are leftists? Try 100 percent.
You’re not supposed to talk about stereotypes, not in these days of Political Correctness. Everyone is supposed to be “equal.” To point out there is truth to stereotypes is of course “prejudice” (which actually means to “pre-judge” – to judge before the facts are in).
Almost everyone I know tries to treat people equally but everyone I know believes in stereotypes even if they won’t admit it.
I wrote an article not that long ago that you just about live your life using stereotypes. That was more about using folk tales and Aesop’s Fables than anything else - both of which are the accumulated wisdom of the human race.
Stereotypes are a kind of “rough wisdom” about people. Again, everyone use them. And again they don’t apply to everyone but they do apply to groups.
It’s sad but it’s true.
Donald Trump, if I met him, I doubt I would like him. I doubt I would like him much at all – and that’s based on his personal history and the things he done in his life. Even Reagan apparently didn’t like Trump very much.
On the other hand, Trump has no history as a politician – he went straight from billionaire Reality show star to President.
When it comes to politicians, it’s hard to judge their characters. So I ask, on whom do they blame their problems? Or do they accept responsibility for themselves?
Trump is blaming a lot of things on the Mainstream Media, which makes sense because they are unfairly attacking him – and these attacks aren’t going to stop for the next eight years.
Hillary Clinton blamed her problems on that “basket of deplorables” that to her makes up the country in-between New York City and Los Angeles. When I heard her say that I knew beyond all doubt she was going to lose.
Blaming your problems on other people is the first defense most people use. It’s the first defense little kids use and some people never grow out of it. It’s called projection but the historical term has been “scapegoating.”
Politics is pretty much based on scapegoating, which is why I don’t like it at all. Politicians are always pointing their fingers at their opponents and never taking responsibility for what they’ve done.
I don’t like or trust both political parties. Almost all of the Democrats and some of the Republicans are pointing their fingers at Trump – “he’s the problem!” Pray for him to resign or get impeached or assassinated!
These days the Democratic Party, which has become almost radically leftist, is the party of Finger-Pointing. It didn’t used to be like that in the past.
But then leftists have always been notorious scapegoaters, because it’s based on hate and envy (in the story of the Garden of Eden Adam blames what he did on Eve and Eve blames the “serpent,” a symbol of envy).
Find someone to blame all our problems on and get rid of them! It’s been the history of the world.
Propaganda is based on scapegoating – portray the Other as evil and once they are eradicated there will be end to evil – which will never happen. The last time I saw it happen is when the moronic Dubya Shrub called those who attacked us on 9-11“the evil ones” who attacked us for “our goodness.” A lot of people didn’t fall for it but way too many did.
Fortunately I haven’t heard Trump talking about “good” and “evil” so I don’t expect him to be starting any wars, which I expected from Hillary Clinton with her comments about Russia – and obviously some people are itching for a catastrophic war with that country.
There is something quite wrong with humanity – call it Original Sin if you want. Not so much individual people but the mass of people – oh my God! You can almost lead them around by their noses – just find someone on which they can blame their problems.
This is the whole quote: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
Bill Clinton was in some ways a great man. He came out of nowhere and became President. He was also a pretty bad man – corrupt in his lust for money, and a chronic liar, not to mention a sexual pervert (his wife is exactly the same way). And both think they should be immune from what they did. Don’t all politicians think they should be immune from their crimes?
Donald Trump has the potential to be a great President. He’s clearly a flawed man but in some ways is heroic with what he’s done so far – he’s done more in a month than Obama did in eight years.
A lot of people already think Trump (“He’s not my President!”) is a bad man – a liar and a con man who hates women. And a fascist! It’s leftists who always think these things. It’s why they were babbling about moving to Canada (but not Mexico – never Mexico). They were hallucinating about “Trump’s America” – which these people think comprises all those ignorant stupid inbred hillbillies in “Flyover Land.”
Even Hitler was a great man – half-genius, half-insane. He was also a very bad man. At first he was praised by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt (themselves both bad men), although that didn’t last long.
Throughout history men who’ve done great things – for good or bad – really have often been bad men. Why this is so I don’t really know, but I have ideas.
Ambition? Certainly. And what is ambition but the desire for power and attention and respect? Not just power, but domination and control. Over people. Who really aren’t human to those intoxicated by power and domination and control. Like children (whom they resemble in so many ways) they can’t handle any power.
The biggest problem is when these people want to do great things politically. Politics, when it turns into laws, are based on forcing people to do things they don’t necessarily want to do – though fraud and force (Dante, in his Inferno, put people used fraud in a lower level of Hell than people who used force – because politically you have to use fraud first before you use force).
In fact, the worst of men are notorious for using immense amounts of fraud and force against other people.
The Founding Fathers knew their history and understood – and wrote often – about what having power does to many people. It’s why they had the separation of powers and wanted a weak government.
Some great men are not bad men – Akbar the Great, Marcus Aurelius. But for every one of them there are twenty bad men who couldn’t handle power.
The good guys you can put into a thimble. The bad guys – an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
I once was standing behind a woman – she didn’t know I was there – and she told a friend of hers I was very funny. I didn’t know what she was talking about since I had just been acting normally. But she still thought I was funny.
Either you’ve got it, or you don’t.
The frauds of the Manosphere tell lies about these things. You know – “Game.” Game doesn’t exist.
When you get some greasy, unattractive half-white half-wit such as “Roosh” writing about he uses “Game” to get all these beautiful women, he’s lying. Same with Roissy.
Either you’re funny, or you’re not.
I might be funny but I don’t have charisma. Bill Clinton had charisma. He still does. Poppy Bush didn’t. That’s one of the main reasons he lost.
I personally don’t fall for charisma. Or charm. They’re superficial things and mean nothing. I might have fallen for it as a teenager but that didn’t last long.
Barak Obama did have some charm. That’s one of the reasons he was elected.
Even Hitler had charisma. I’ve seen videos of his speeches – he was a spell-binding speaker, even though I didn’t understand a word he was saying. But it was easy to perceive the power he had over his audience.
I’ve mentioned before some women don’t like me at all. Every one of them has been unattractive/unmarried/divorced, and full of anger and envy. The women who like me the most are attractive, intelligent and have a sense of humor.
The same thing applies to politicians. The most successful ones are physically attractive, intelligent and have a sense of humor. Again, look at Bill Clinton – a charming man with charisma.
Charm is a kind of magic – that’s why a “charm” has to do with magic, the way young girls used to wear charm bracelets (do they even do that this anymore? I haven’t seen one for years.). There’s even a “Lucky Charms” breakfast cereal.
People, whether or not they admit it, still believe in magic. That’s what the Manosphere is about – learn the magic! How to be charming! Cast spells on women! Buy their propaganda books! Learn how to use words as voodoo!
Propaganda is really about how to manipulate people. Sometimes it works but often it doesn’t. The same with advertising. Sometimes it works but often it doesn’t.
Propaganda and advertising and politics are ultimately about trying to convince people to love me. To trust me – because I have your best interests at heart! The difference is that politics and propaganda is based on hatred but adverting isn’t.
Ultimately all of it is about the use of words, which is why Rudyard Kipling once made the comment that words are the most powerful drug known to mankind – and he was a master at the use of words.
There is something wrong with the human race – people are not rational, not when the effective use of words can have such a devastating effect of them.
I knew something very bad was happening, so I parked and went into a local bank. Everyone was standing there silently watching the big-screen TV.
Days later some names began to come out. “Osama bin Laden,” mostly.
Then other things began to come out, such as the fact the outgoing Clinton administration had warned the incoming Bush administration about bin Laden – and it was ignored.
Then other things began to come out, such as the Bush Crime Family had business dealings for 25 years with the billionaire bin Laden family – 25 members of which Dubya Shrub flew out of the country the day after 9-11. What the hell?
Most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and all were Wahabi Muslims, which came out of Saudi Arabia and is funded by the Saudi government. Osama bin Laden was worth about 20 million dollars.
I realized the incompetent Dubya Shrub was not going to attack Saudi Arabia and utterly destroy the Wahabi murder cult. Instead he and his administration attacked and destroyed Iraq, which was no threat to us at all – and Afghanistan, again no threat to us at all.
I remember seeing yard signs, “No war for oil” and reading articles about how the war was for “oil, empire and Israel.”
Oil I understood, although with all the money we wasted on the wars we could have spent it to become energy-independent. We’re going to be energy-independent anyway in several more years, what with fracking and natural gas.
Empire I understood. Wealthy countries almost always become empires – and they always fall, too. Anyone who doesn’t know that is a complete ignoramus.
Israel I understood. Dubya had a bunch of Jew traitors in his administration that put Israel first – Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle – all gone and I hope Trump has nothing to do with any more of those neocon traitors. He is a patriot, something that the Bush Crime Family never was.
One of the reasons Iraq was destroyed is that the neocons in Shrub’s administration had his jug ear and convinced him Iraq was a threat to Israel. Then Shrub conned himself and said Iraq was a threat to the U.S. – which it wasn’t. So a bunch of Americans were wounded and died for a blasphemous, anti-American, anti-Christian country like Israel.
I always thought there was more to it than that. The Bush Crime Family had made tens of millions of dollars from the bin Ladens. And if Saudi Arabia had been invaded and conquered…goodbye to all that money.
And that is why Saudi Arabia was not invaded and the Wahabi murder cult not utterly destroyed. It was all about money and American soldiers being sacrificed to the Bush Crime Family – and all for a little bit of money.
I knew almost from the beginning that Shrub was stupid, ignorant and uneducated. I knew he was a brain-damaged alcoholic and a coward who refused to fly in Vietnam after all that money was spent training him as a fighter pilot.
But I also realize quite rapidly that not only was he a liar and a war criminal he was also a traitor – he had sacrificed God knows how many lives having the American military defend the country – Saudi Arabia – that had attacked us.
Many years ago I owned a taxi. I didn’t just give people rides but also picked up and delivered packages and letters.
One time I was called to pick up a letter from a business. As I was standing in the office waiting for the secretary to get the letter I looked at some pictures on her desk. There were two pictures with a teenage woman in each. I knew the girls but could not think of their names. Did I know them from somewhere? Where?
So I asked the secretary.
I should have kept my mouth shut. She told me they were her late daughters – who had been raped and murdered on a local, closed-down bridge (in high school we held huge parties on that bridge. I also remember my parents driving my sister and me across it when we were little – at that time it was part of Route 66 before the interstate was built.).
I felt like a complete idiot.
I had seen those pictures in the local newspapers or perhaps on TV.
There were four boys involved in this rape/murder – three blacks in their late teens and one 15-year-old white boy. The two sisters were white.
The ringleader, who was judged retarded (he was just stupid) got life in prison. One has since been executed – and he whined he was innocent even when the needle was being stuck in his arm (he was as guilty as hell).
The 15-year-old served 15 or so years in prison but when he was offered parole said no, he didn’t yet deserve it. Some years later he was released. I know he wrote a letter of apology to the parents. I have no idea what has happened to him since then.
The other two are still in prison for life.
When I mentioned this crime to a friend of mine he wasn’t sure he believed it. “Why haven’t I read about something this terrible?” he asked me. He lived only about 150 miles away.
I told him the MSM is dishonest and the only crime it reports is when a white person commits a crime against a black. That kind of reporting has been going on for a long time. Think of potential rapist/murderer Emmitt Till (whose father was hanged during WWII for the rape/murder of a couple of Italian women) – and that was back in the 1950s. Everyone knows about the son but not the father.
He asked a woman who was a mutual friend if this crime had really happened, and she told him, yes, it did. He was stunned.
Since that time, he told me, he has lost all faith in the media. He doesn’t watch the news anymore and doesn’t read newspapers. He reads blogs and that’s it.
His 23-year-old son pays no attention at all to the MSM except for YouTube.
The MSM has bought these problems on itself because of its dishonesty and selective reporting.
I have mentioned before I have a degree in Journalism. I’ve also mentioned I wish I hadn’t got it and left the field decades ago.
By the way, the girls died when they were thrown naked off the bridge and drowned. Only one body was found. They were far too little to swim to shore – perhaps a little over 100 pounds each.
