Food for thought as the angle of descent worsens…

[continue reading…]

A man after my own heart.

Hard not to sing along even if it is sotto voce.

In the past, the dominant sins were probably the triad of Anger, Lust and Pride. These, at any rate, seem to be the dominant characteristics of great sinners of history – right up into the middle twentieth century.

But as Western society became more industrialised, specialised, coordinated, and impersonally-systemic; the dominant nature of evil became Ahrimanic.

The most prominent triad of sins became Fear, Resentment, and Despair.

Fear, Resentment* and Despair is the dominant mood of the world in 2020 – these are the modern, ‘bureaucratic sins’.

The self-seeking, self-aggrandizing evil of the mid-twentieth century (as exemplified by the atheist-socialist dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) is not much in evidence in the West. Of course, Luciferic evil is still present; but these sins require greater courage and motivation than are possessed by the masses – or indeed the rulers – in 2020.

Luciferic sin is weaker and less common than in the past; because it requires high motivation which is fuelled by the virtue of courage.

Great Luciferic sin entails a positive, active, for-the-self mind-set. However; courage, hence motivation, has been incrementally eroded by the passage of several generations of de facto atheism. Hence the rise in Ahrimanic sin; which is much more passive, negating, and directed against-others.

Beyond the Ahrimanic lies the Sorathic, which is even more fully negative in its motivations. I think this happens because the Ahrimanic sins erode their own basis.

A bureaucratic world tends towards a state of passive, unconscious, materialism. The Ahrimanic impulse begins with a denial of the aliveness of the mineral world, extends through denial of consciousness to plants, then animals, and eventually – as for the past decades, creates a world where aliveness and consciousness are denied even to Men.

This materialism (positivism, scientism) is the basis of modern bureaucracy; which terms Men ‘human resources’, and generates policy on the basis of numbers and statistics. The individual Man counts only as an integer.

When this world view of negation of the Self, penetrates the soul and has been internalized; we get the Sorathic form of evil.

…Evil as the negation of The Good – any good.

So, evil loses any positive goal and becomes directed-against Truth, Beauty, and Virtue; against life and consciousness, against the natural and spontaneous, against Beings and their relationships.

Sorathic evil’s only ‘satisfaction’ (because it has become incapable of ‘pleasure’) is in this destruction of anything that is of-God; anything created, anything capable of creation.

An example? Well, a very obvious instance of Sorathic evil in 2020 is the imposition of that demonic-triad of lockdown, social-distancing, and masking. Leading, as they must do, to the permanent annihilation of human society – and the construction of a world of universal solitary-confinement.

Obviously, the mainstream, birdemic-related, excuses for annihilating human society and culture are lies. But – much more significantly – even the architects of the Great Reset cannot make a coherent argument about why societal destruction is necessary!

They do it, but They can’t explain it.

Their attempted justification of universal isolation relates to the need (and benefits) of automation, robots, and artificial intelligence systems; but this is a non sequitur. The ‘need’ for one, does not imply the destruction of the other.

What we are therefore seeing here is a very pure form of Sorathic negation. Even the Global Establishment themselves, the people who are imposing societal destruction on the world, do not understand why they are doing this work of societal destruction.

They insist upon its necessity, but they cannot coherently explain it!

RTWT AT: Bruce Charlton’s Notions: Fear, Resentment and Despair – the triad of Ahrimanic sins… Leading towards purely-negative Sorathic evil – as seen in 2020 with social destruction

[HT: bookofjoe: ]

First take. Perfect take. One and done.

Make time for this. Full screen. Full voice.

[continue reading…]

Hanukkah is supposed to be a minor Jewish holiday that comes in the early winter – a way for Jewish kids to feel better about not having Christmas.

In fact, of all Jewish holidays, it may have the most universal appeal and be the most relevant to the war on religion raging in our culture.

According to the Book of Maccabees, when his army occupied the Land of Israel in the 2nd century BCE, the Syrian King Antiochus IV outlawed Judaism in an attempt to force everyone in his empire to adopt Greek culture and religion. Performing Jewish rituals (including Torah study and circumcision) were punishable by death.

Statues of Greek gods were set up in the Holy Temple and swine sacrificed on the altar. An elderly priest named Mattathias started the revolt by killing a Syrian official and a Jewish Hellenizer and fleeing into the Judean wilderness shouting, “Whoever is for God, follow me!”

When Mattathias died, his five sons carried on the revolt, defeating the Syrian army in a guerrilla war. In 165 BCE, they liberated Jerusalem and cleansed and rededicated the Temple. The miracle of Hanukkah, commemorated by the menorah, involved the candelabrum in the Temple burning for 8 days with enough oil for one.

Contrast Hanukkah and Purim. In the Persian Empire, when the physical survival of the Jewish people was threatened by Haman, Mordechai asked them to pray. When our spiritual existence was at stake, we were told to fight, establishing a hierarchy. You pray for your survival; you fight for your faith.

Not all Jewish insurrections ended nearly as well. The two revolts against Rome (68-70 CE and 133-135 CE) led to the destruction of the Second Temple, the fall of Masada, mass slaughter, and almost 2,000 years of exile.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising (1943) was an heroic act of defiance in the face of certain annihilation. It wasn’t until Israel was reborn that we once again had a fighting chance.

Today, no one is setting up idols in the Temple – at least not literally. But the conflict is just as real. The weapons are laws and restrictions, rhetoric and politics.

A majority of delegates to the 2012 Democrat nominating convention were so offended by the idea of God, that they tried to remove an innocuous reference to the same from the party platform (an observation that everyone willing to work hard deserved “a chance to live up to their God-given potential”). Imagine what they could have done with the Declaration of Independence. “Whoever is against God, follow us?”

They’ve been so successful in purging religion from the public square, through a deliberate misinterpretation of the Establishment Clause, that in the public schools, even a moment of silence is verboten, because someone might be thinking of God.

COVID gave secularists a golden opportunity to attack religion in the name of disease control.

Last week, the Supreme Court overturned New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on attendance at worship services. In what are designated red zones, attendance of no more than 10 people at a time was allowed, regardless of the size of the hall. In St. Patrick’s Cathedral (capacity, 3,000), 11 would have caused a major outbreak.

The Court’s majority noted that there weren’t similar restrictions on retail establishments and businesses providing personal services (big lot stores and tattoo parlors). During the lockdown, while churches were closed, abortion clinics were open. But that’s progressives practicing their religion.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett was part of the majority in the Cuomo/COVID decision. At her confirmation hearing for 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, Barrett was grilled by the secular Grand Inquisitor, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). (“Are you now, or have you ever been, a Catholic?”) Feinstein explained that dogma and the law are two very different things, but “the dogma lives loudly in you (Barrett),” which disqualified her from serving on the bench. Feinstein assumes that American law had nothing to do with 3,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition.

John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” Democrats believe power should be held only by amoral and irreligious people.

Progressives demand that we all sacrifice to their gods – abortion up to the time of birth, marriage deconstruction, racial justice, and income equality. From this pagan cult, there can be no disagreement, no dissent.

The light from the Hanukkah menorah is meant to illuminate – to help us to distinguish the truth from the lies lurking in the shadows.

Whoever is for God, follow your conscience.

Hanukkah’s Universal Message | Frontpagemag

An old friend is fond of referring to New York City as, “Hell with good restaurants.” Well, I think we can delete the “with good restaurants” part.

NYC Chipotle besieged by rats feasting on avocado, employees After a closure of a few days for cleaning, the store reopened, but workers were still afraid of the rats, which had apparently grown fat off the constant supply of food. “The whole situation seemed crazy to us, we definitely felt it was incorrect to keep the store open while all of this was happening,” Paulino Ruiz said.

About a week later, the ordering system went down and the store was forced to close indefinitely, the workers said.

“A company as big as Chipotle shouldn’t be worried only about the amount of money they’re making, and leave their employees to keep working under dangerous conditions,” Paulino Ruiz said.

But don’t think about ordering deliveries: New York Proposes $3 Package Surcharge To Fund MTA

Under a new proposed bill, New York City residents would be required to pay a $3 surcharge on packages they ordered online, with the exception for medicine and food.

Assemblyman Robert Carroll, who proposed the bill, says the online shopping fee would raise more than $1 billion a year “to fund the operating costs of buses and subways in the city of New York.”

Or taking a walk through Times Square: Pair trampled by horse during wild brawl in Times Square

The mounted unit could be seen hopping over the men, as another person made off with a bike lying near them.

Seems to me that the two factions in America these days are those who want to

Make America Great Again

and those who want to

Make America Shit Again.

But that’s just me. I could be wrong.

The Storybook Houses of Los Angeles A pioneer of this peculiar architectural style was Hollywood art director Harry Oliver. The Witch’s House house in Walden drive was one of his first creation, and it remains one of best examples of this particular style.40 Acres and a Mall –   “Great Replacements” can and do happen, and black L.A. is in the final stages of one. But black L.A.’s Great Replacement is unique in that it represents the complete and total failure of the post-civil-rights-era black American business model, which can be summed up as “Don’t make yourself indispensable, don’t make yourself needed, or even wanted. Shout, march, and bully for your supper, because you’re owed it.”

Black L.A. is disintegrating because blacks are surrounded by racial and ethnic groups that adhere to very different models. The problem facing black L.A. isn’t “white supremacy.” It’s that every demographic group in Southern Cal does better than blacks. Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, even African blacks. Those groups have more wealth, they constitute a more vital part of the workforce, and they contribute more to the economy than black Angelenos. So as L.A.’s blacks are chased out on one end by Hispanics who conquer by sheer numbers, they’re gentrified out on the other end by every other race and ethnicity in the city.

There can be no improvement or renovation to the mall, whether by whites, Jews, blacks, or whoever, because the moment that area ceases to be crappy, all those other, more successful populations—with their capital and spending power—will flood in. It can’t be stopped. Black Angelenos are in an unenviable position where their only possible hope for survival as a “community” (as opposed to a diaspora) is to keep their last remaining neighborhoods shitty.

In the case of the vaccine, there is no reason at all to trust the government. They have simply lied too often about too many aspects of this virus. Compounding it is their communications organs have been staffed by demented sociopaths who lie for the sheer pleasure of it. The only way anyone we could trust the media is if they are the first to be inoculated. Even then, it would probably be a fake vaccine, so we would need some way to ensure they are getting the real jab and not a fake.

This is why the vaccine will be mandatory. Another aspect of liberal democracy is the rulers respond to well-founded distrust of them with coercion. In this case, we will be getting the Orwellian freedom passes. In the U.S. they will have some bland bureaucratic name because our managerial elite is functionally illiterate, but the Brits retain their pithiness, despite it all. As a result, these new internal passports proving you are up to date on your Covid jabs will be used to compel compliance.

What does this mean as a practical matter? What they are plotting is a system where everyone is issued an innocuous looking card with a vaccine stamp and date. When you get your booster shot, you get a new stamp with an expiry date. Oh, you are unaware of the regular booster shots required? You see? This is why this vaccine is a miracle. It will require you to give Big Pharma a check several times a year. Your doctor at Acme Hospital System Inc. will also be getting her beak wet.

If you think you can just blow this off, think again. For starters, there will be a massive public relations campaign to shame skeptics. Old people will be shown lining up for the jab and famous people will demand you get the jab. Soon, private business will demand proof of the jab before they accept you as a customer. Want to fly on a commercial airline or ride public transport? Papers please. Want to attend a public event like a sporting match? Papers please.

My brother and I owned 9 square inches. How many did you own?

The Yukon Square Inch Land Rush of 1955 The ad campaign was launched on the Sergeant Preston radio show in January 27, 1955. It also appeared in nearly a hundred newspapers across the country. The campaign was a sensational success. Quaker Oats cereal boxes flew off of grocers’ shelves. People bought dozens of boxes in the hope that they could consolidate all their square-inch plots into something more substantial. One guy had over 10,000 deeds which he wanted to convert them into one single piece of property a little less than a quarter-acre.

Meanwhile, letters poured in to Quaker Oats offices. New landowners wanted to know where their land was located, how much it was worth, and if there was any gold there? One kid sent in four toothpicks and some string, requesting his inch be fenced. [continue reading…]

The role of Stone is that of Ice
But seeks a slower sun.
To Synapse, stealth Invisible,
Concision to the Bone.
The praying hands of branches bared
By Wind, this season’s Star,
Implore — insensate, arrogant —
As snowflakes formed in Fire.
Above our church a fist of smoke
Diminishes all Blooms
Within that Park where Prayers revolve
On a Carousel of tombs.

Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier in 1947, poses in front of the rocket-powered Bell X-IE plane that he flew at Edwards Air Force Base.

I haven’t yet done everything, but by the time I’m finished, I won’t have missed much. If I auger in (crash) tomorrow, it won’t be with a frown on my face. I’ve had a ball.”

Yeager died Monday, his wife, Victoria Yeager, said on his Twitter account. “It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.”

My Sad Captains

One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

— Thom Gunn

We’d finished filming John and Yoko for the video a day or so before he was shot to death. It was their last video, but of course, we didn’t know it at the time. There was film of them holding hands and walking in Central Park in the place that would later become “Strawberry Fields.” We’d filmed them rolling naked in bed together in a Soho Art Gallery where she looked healthy and ample and he looked small and slight, with skin that was almost translucent. I remember being slightly surprised by the fact that Lennon’s need for Ono was so constant and palpable. He was seldom more than two feet away from her side and had the disconcerting habit of calling her “Mommy” whenever they spoke.

My role was as “executive producer” which really meant that I was to stand around with a roll of hundred dollar bills and pay-off the Teamsters and solve other problems with copious applications of money. It was an odd job in more ways than one, but I was grateful to have it at the time.

We’d sent the last of the film to the lab, and my old friend and director Ethan Russell had gone back to Los Angeles to begin editing. The crew had dispersed and I’d taken to my bed racked with pain. The job, this time, had been so tough and high stress that my neck had gone out. I could barely turn my head without feeling as if a sledge was hammering a hot-needle into the cervical vertebrae. I was lying carefully propped on the bed eating Bufferin as if they were Tic-Tacs and trying not to move. My neck was held in one of those tight foam collars. Not moving was the best thing to do at the time and I was doing it with all my might.

It was a small one-bedroom apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. My first wife and I were there after three years of living in London, Paris, the Algarve, and other European locations. She was eight months pregnant with our daughter and looked as if she was trying to smuggle a basketball across state lines for immoral purposes. Her mood, never really cheerful, was not improved by her situation.

The apartment was on loan from her uncle’s girlfriend. I was down to my last few thousand dollars and was looking for a job. The film gig had been a gift from my old friend Ethan, and I’d been glad to get it. But it was over and, with a baby banging on the door of the world, things were not looking up. At the time, the only thing looking up was me since my neck required me to lie flat and gaze at the ceiling. It had been a rough two weeks but I thought things would certainly improve.

And of course, that’s when things got worse. It got worse in the way most things do, the phone rang and my wife called out, “It’s for you.”

Some New York wag once said, “Age fourteen is the last time in your life when you’re glad the phone is for you.”

I groped blindly to the side of the bed and picked up the extension. It was Ethan calling from an editing room in Los Angeles. “John’s been shot. He’s dead.” [continue reading…]

Pie Town  Lee  along with his wife Jane, arrived in Pie Town, a community of nearly 200 homesteaders, in Jun 1940. As the Magdalena News put it: “Mr. Lee of Dallas, Texas, is staying in Pietown, taking pictures of most anything he can find. Mr. Lee is a photographer the United States department of agriculture. Most of the farmers are planting beans this week.”

40 Acres and a Mall –   “Great Replacements” can and do happen, and black L.A. is in the final stages of one.

But black L.A.’s Great Replacement is unique in that it represents the complete and total failure of the post-civil-rights-era black American business model, which can be summed up as “Don’t make yourself indispensable, don’t make yourself needed, or even wanted. Shout, march, and bully for your supper, because you’re owed it.”

Black L.A. is disintegrating because blacks are surrounded by racial and ethnic groups that adhere to very different models. The problem facing black L.A. isn’t “white supremacy.” It’s that every demographic group in Southern Cal does better than blacks. Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, even African blacks. Those groups have more wealth, they constitute a more vital part of the workforce, and they contribute more to the economy than black Angelenos. So as L.A.’s blacks are chased out on one end by Hispanics who conquer by sheer numbers, they’re gentrified out on the other end by every other race and ethnicity in the city.

There can be no improvement or renovation to the mall, whether by whites, Jews, blacks, or whoever, because the moment that area ceases to be crappy, all those other, more successful populations—with their capital and spending power—will flood in. It can’t be stopped. Black Angelenos are in an unenviable position where their only possible hope for survival as a “community” (as opposed to a diaspora) is to keep their last remaining neighborhoods shitty.

Pluto   This little planet1 with the adorable heart-shaped tramp stamp is Pluto. The photo was taken around 4 pm EDT 13 Jul 2015 by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) the Ralph Instrument aboard the New Horizons spacecraft from a distance of 476,000 miles.

Clyde Tombaugh (4 Feb 1906 – 17 Jan 1997), the oldest child of Muron and Adelle Tombaugh, was born in Streator Illinois. As a child he became interested in astronomy and after the family moved to a new farm in Burdett, Kansas, he began building telescopes and sending his observations to Lowell Observatory. The observatory’s director, Vesto Slipher, was so impressed with his drawings that he offered Tombaugh a job.

Whipped Cream & Other Delights

This LP, a 1966 pressing of Whipped Cream and Other Delights (A&M SP-4110), was Herb Alperts’ most popular and successful release. It spent eight weeks at #1 on the Billboard charts, sold 6.5 million copies, and won four Grammys. If you didn’t own this yourself then it was almost certainly in your parent’s or grandparents’ record collection.

Then there’s that cover. [continue reading…]

“This is the way the West ends.
This is the way the West ends.
This is the way the West ends.
Not with a bang but a cable failure.”

Your aftertax dollars you sent to China at work.

Meanwhile, in the wannabe 51st Democrat State of Puerto Rico, the Arecibo radio telescope collapses from lack of funding and maintenance … [continue reading…]

[NB: A long bit of self-indulgent work that I am placing here only because I need to centralize certain elements of my writing. It’s long, obscure, and more than a little bit prosaic so feel free to ignore it. ] [continue reading…]

Upstream they’ve allowed the water level of the river to fall until the dam’s top blocks can be seen as the waterfall retreats. The river’s bottom emerges and a spring shorebird skitters along the edge of the green muck, its beak probing the dirt. Three pigeons pace on and peck at the drying granite blocks. Each block in the slightly curved dam wall under their feet is an easy ton of stone. The dam spans the river and, when the water is allowed to rise, it vanishes under a sheen of falling water. But now the water is low even though the river still flows.

Behind the dam a grating of steel bars lets the river flow under the dam and gush out the spill pipe at the foot of the stone blocks. There the river continues to flow under the footbridge, between the stone and brick walls of the mill, over another waterfall further on, and then, past other mills still downstream, out to sea.

The mill holds the river tight between its walls for a short span and, in the past, the dipping, turning wheels would have spun drawing the river’s power into the mill and, through rods and pulleys, relayed it on to the machines.

The first mill at this turn of the river was a saw mill in 1649. Then a grist mill came in its place. In time that too was torn down and the granite and brick buildings here now were raised up. The mill rises above the river, five stories of brick set on many courses of granite foundation stones. In its current form the mill made fabrics from civil war uniforms to fine cashmeres. Another mill just downstream made munitions for our arsenals. One gun from those foundries and lathes went first north to Portland and later west out over the ocean to Pearl Harbor. Later that mill’s machines made other parts out of case-hardened steel and pig iron. Other products, over the years, came from the mill: Christmas tree ornaments, cameras and film, paint, ice creepers for the Russian troops during World War II, rifle grenades, ski poles, waterproof boxes, and wooden shoes. [continue reading…]