Dropped Yesterday, YouTube views? 369,000. Sentiments? Caustic.

[continue reading…]

Excerpted from Savor the Democrats’  Humiliation  by Kurt Schlichter

There’s no sense in pretending that we don’t take pleasure in the total failure of our Marxist-curious party of the left. Through a combination of outright fraud, procedural irregularities, plus the total support of the garbage establishment and its failed institutions, the Democrats took power by the thinnest of margins and have proceeded to fail on a level comparable to Heaven’s Gate, New Coke, and the Weekly Standard. There’s no shame in enjoying their total rejection by all decent Americans. In fact, you should enjoy it without hesitation or mercy, especially since it means more than just us cons getting our jollies.

The Democrats’ “Biden is FDR and not just a desiccated, pervy old weirdo” dreams have died. Their dreams of five trillion in handouts to bums and donors have died. Their dreams of enshrining their ability to cheat in elections have died. The Democrats can’t even shatter norms, like the filibuster, competently.

So much fail in so little time. The Latinx community – which the Dems put all their faith in as part of an unstoppable future majority, is rejecting them, in large part because Democrats are the kind of people who use the word “Latinx” unironically. Some foreigners, seeing the Democrats’ weakness and stupidity – it’s not just Commander-in-Chief Crusty who is the problem – are chomping at the bit to chomp off pieces of other countries because they know that the Dems put the “feck” in “feckless.” The rest are invading our country through what used to be a border. Inflation is up, the market is down, and November 2022 is approaching just over the horizon like a Tongan tsunami.

Noted dead white guy Samuel Johnson, who believed that there are only two genders, once observed, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It’s an apt analogy here, both because it evokes the fact that the Democrats have gone all-in on the side of the criminals as the crime rate rockets up, and also because it demonstrates just how intractably stupid the Democrats are. They ride in the little cart heading toward their November 8th date with the electoral noose, but their minds are not concentrated on that. Instead they are concentrated on fake insurrections and telling us how CRT is not taught in schools yet must absolutely continue to be taught in schools.

This is unsustainable, and normal people would know it, but normal people are not quasi-Marxist pagan fanatics who drove actual religion out of their lives and let commie nonsense fill the void. They can’t stop it, even if they wanted to stop it, because their collection of bizarre obsessions is not merely an ideology but a substitute for actual faith. Progressivism is their god. Unfortunately for them, it’s a false god. It’s a political golden calf, except they oppose the gold standard because it wouldn’t let them print all the cash they want to spend, and Dems are leery of cattle because their Swalwellian flatulence causes global warming, which is another facet of their fake, foolish faith.

READ THE EXCITING CONCLUSION AT Savor the Democrats’  Humiliation  by Kurt Schlichter

First, the Bolsheviks came for Russia. Now the Bolsheviks are coming for America.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond [Official Music Video] 1975

>>>>>FAST FORWARD FORTY-FOUR YEARS>>>>>

In Concert 2019

Added Reflection from 2021: A detailed reaction tour and take by a classical composer. Probably only for aficionados. [continue reading…]

From now on “conspiracy theories” will be known as “spoiler alerts.”

Karl Schwab in his favorite suit

Party on Garth. Party on Jeff.

A fine painter who pays homage one of my old teachers, the late Wayne Thiebaud. Bio | John Brosio  Painter  “So I’m at school and I take an oil painting class with Wayne Thiebaud and the man knows how to teach. Wow. His level of articulation and direct approach would from day one begin to give vocabulary to things I had not yet known there were even words for . . . To this day I still maintain that I learned to paint in a single day from Thiebaud. He did a four hour demonstration of a flower in a little glass of water and I can recall thinking that even a child could do it. Seriously.”

Doesn’t melt in your hands? M&Ms execs try to get their candies all woke up.M&M’s re-designed its characters to be “progressive” and they look virtually identical to the old version except now they’re all apparently woke |  The most notable changes are to the brown and green M&M’s, the two female characters. Both have new footwear — brown’s pumps lowered to a more sensible height and green’s white heeled go-go boots changed out for what Mars calls “cool, laid-back sneakers to reflect her effortless confidence.” forward.

Those LA train robberies with their sea of crap left on the tracks? Point of order, Railroad Execs. Start having your own cops shoot them. Raconteur Report: Point Of Order, Slick The trains, the tracks, the cargo, and the right-of-way they travel on is Union Pacific’s job to police, which is why railroad police with interstate powers have been a thing in America since just about 5 minutes after the first train robbery in 1866. . . 90 cars/day is one every 15 minutes, 24/7. For three months! If they were going into someone’s house every 15 minutes, at a certain point, it’s a homeowner diligence problem, not a prosecution problem, i’n’it? Spare us all the PR assgas and bullsh*t.

Elsewhere: Chris Lynch has a more entertaining suggestion for the train robbers: “The second way would be railroad personnel with high powered dart guns. Start shooting would-be looters with elephant tranquilizers and see if that’s a deterrent.”

No mad reading skillz in the Masses for the endless ideograms of written Chinese? No problema!Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate  [continue reading…]

Lockdown Aw Gone? Otay Mes Amis! Let the Carnage Continue! The return of “Driving Fails” for 2022. Now with more implied gore than ever before.

Warning: the above is beyond bumper cars.

I try to avoid getting sucked into the endless gyre of “Dashcam Disasters” on YouTube, but every so often I relapse. Long, long time ago when “Dashcam Disasters” was a fresh YouTube genre replete with the always ribald Russian “I fall drunk in front of your car” Dash Cams I found it amusing in a kind of pie-in-the-face way, but you have to take your amusements where you find them in this life. That was then. Yes, way back before the Chinese Crud crippled the globe and the Stupids started clog dancing on center stage. Now it’s not such a harvest of boffo humor. This year’s first crop of carnage seems darker and more deadly than I remember Dashcam Disasters being even a few years back.

And it is only January.

Of course, this could just mean something as trivial as a long lockdown and rising gas prices reducing our population’s mean driving intelligence and skill by 10 points. Then again palpable increase in lethal-looking clips could signal a new and much less law-abiding, less patient, and less polite society; one in which it is understood that any spoils in the new world order will go only to the fast and the furious. What once was detached bemusement has become grim and even grisly. So be warned.

UPDATED: American Driving in 2021: Reckless and Wreckful 

The role of the racial reckoning in getting motorists and pedestrians killed by turning elites against safety enforcement should not be ignored. For example, from The Urbanist’s coverage of Seattle:

But in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic combined with that summer’s protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder prompted the department to reassess the role of relying on police enforcement as a go-to tool. Those emphasis patrols stopped. [Seattle Department of Transportation] Director [Sam] Zimbabwe, appearing back at the city council in 2021, spoke to the shift in the department’s thinking.

In case you are wondering, Sam Zimbabwe is a white man who used to be named Sam Zimmerman-Bergman.

“It’s time to daylight the uncomfortable reality that relying on an enforcement-heavy approach in transportation can also lead to disproportionate financial impact, injury, and death for Black and brown community members across our city and across the country,” [Zimbabwe] told city councilmembers less than two years after the same team had been touting its police enforcement strategy….

Unfortunately, the situation on the ground is not improving while this shift takes place. 2021 will replace 2019 as the most deadly year on Seattle’s streets since 2006, with a preliminary tally of 31 fatalities.

Police traffic stops have been in bad odor with the Establishment since Ferguson. As you may recall, the Obama administration turned the Ferguson PD inside out to find the racism it knew must be there. After it found nothing, the Department of Justice then announced that, well, okay, the late Michael Brown did try to wrestle the policeman’s gun away, but Ferguson was operating…a speed trap! This was considered giant national news for a while.

            ….Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
— Shakespeare — Sonnet 116.

THE FIRST TIME I WAS MARRIED I was married to over 200 naked people. We weren’t quite buck naked. The men had crudely made laurel wreaths on their heads — sometimes just a wad of weeds — while the women had wreaths of flowers around their brows and, for those old enough to have any, small bouquets of blossoms lodged in their pubic hair. All the men had large clubs and all the women large breasts. It was the butt end of the 60s and people in my set tended to have that kind of equipment. What children there were tended to be either infants or toddlers, all still nursing at will.

The men and the women had separated an hour or so before the wedding and, at dusk, the two groups came together from opposite directions.

First, the men came, chanting and grunting and pounding and waving their clubs. At our center was the groom, long black hair streaming down over his back, nude and tanned, under a kind of pagan huppah of a custom tie-dye made for the occasion and four sticks sporting God’s Eyes, also handcrafted for the ritual.

Chanting and grunting, (Yes, the LSD had kicked in an hour or so before and was still not peaking.) we made our way to a bluff of hard black stone overlooking the Great Central Valley in California from the first rise of foothills that step up into the High Sierra. All about our feet were deep, smooth indentations in the black rock where the Indians had, for centuries, ground acorns into a mash with stones.

Looking down from the stone bluff we could see all across the Great Imperial Valley to where the sun was descending behind the Coast Range. It was a green day shading into orange dusk. There were guitars strumming somewhere. In those days somebody was always noodling a long nothing on a guitar. We turned and, as men in groups at the wedding have always done, we waited for the bride and her estrogen entourage. The waiting for the women was perhaps the only traditional moment of matrimony to be had on that day.

The women emerged from the shadows of the pine forest that rolled up behind them to the starker slopes of the Sierras where the timberline looked cold and gray under the lingering slabs of snow that still, even in high summer, caught the light and shined from inside the shadows. They numbered around a hundred. Never before or since have I seen such a large grouping of naked women. All shapes and sizes, all ages. I’d like to say all races but this was early in our forced march into the rust-drenched halls of mandatory diversity and they were mostly white.

And all, at least in my memory, lovely — each in their way.

They’d spent their two hours (as the mystery molecule that was our sacrament in those years kicked in), gathering vast quantities of wildflowers from the valley and the forest. They carried large bouquets and had used the surplus for adornment. This adornment consisted of wildflower tiaras ringing the long hair or all colors that fell from their heads, and as smaller bouquets formed by placing individual stems in large quantities into their pubic hair — and in those days of dedication to the natural body, pubic hair was much more formidable than the current rage for plucking, shaping, and waxing could possibly indicate.

Standing with 100 naked men on a stone bluff as 100 naked women walked towards you singing some ancient melody is something that a man does not easily forget. I have, in my memory, a large set of mental Polaroids from those minutes and they have not faded. Primal, true, baked at high temperatures and very elemental moments have a habit of lodging themselves deep in your cerebral cortex never to be evicted.

In time the groups merged and stood close together in the warm dusk as the bride joined the groom under the tie-dyed huppa through which the sun’s light glowed. [continue reading…]

@stalekracker @thelacsofficial #crawfishboil #whatsgoingon #mustbenice #newyear #areyounewhere #manifestation @lapepperexchange ♬ original sound – Stalekracker

If Anthony Bourdain were still alive this would give him reason to live. Behold the Greatest Chef of the Inland Swamps cooks his signature dish. Stay tuned for the elegant table setting at the end.

@homecoming.diary What do u do after work?🤳#foryou #fyp #home #cooking #roomtour ♬ original sound – love dream

Hanging your entire lifestyle, grooming, food supply, storage, and preparation on a single household fuse. Very cool.

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise.
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Sandberg, The People Yes.

BEST GOVERNOR EVER!!! LOVING THE NEW AD!!! pic.twitter.com/6EuyN06urc

— il Donaldo Trumpo (@PapiTrumpo) January 21, 2022

[continue reading…]

If you lived here you’d be home now. And you’d stay there.

706 Summit Cv, Palm Desert, CA 92260
7 bd 12 ba 20,667 sqft
706 Summit Cv, Palm Desert, CA 92260
Sold: $42,000,000
Sold on 01/19/22 [continue reading…]

The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.

Just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on DIE grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. And perhaps that’s the point. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.

And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”

Just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on DIE grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. And perhaps that’s the point. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.

RTWT @ Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto | National Post

Meat Loaf, the “I’d Do Anything for Love” singer, dead at 74 Marvin Lee Aday, better known as Meat Loaf, has died at the age of 74, a representative for the musician confirmed to Fox News. 

“Our hearts are broken to announce that the incomparable Meat Loaf passed away tonight with his wife Deborah by his side. Daughters Pearl and Amanda and close friends have been with him throughout the last 24 hours.”

And I would do anything for love
I’d run right into hell and back
I would do anything for love
I’ll never lie to you and that’s a fact
But I’ll never forget the way you feel right now
Oh no, no way
And I would do anything for love
Oh, I would do anything for love
I would do anything for love
But I won’t do that
No, I won’t do that

And some days it don’t come easy
And some days it don’t come hard
Some days it don’t come at all
And these are the days that never end
And some nights you’re breathing fire
And some nights you’re carved in ice
Some nights you’re like nothing I’ve ever
Seen before, or will again

And maybe I’m crazy
Oh, it’s crazy and it’s true
I know you can save me
No one else can save me now but you
As long as the planets are turning
As long as the stars are burning
As long as your dreams are coming true
You better believe it

That I would do anything for love
And I’ll be there till the final act
And I would do anything for love
And I’ll take the vow and seal a pact
But I’ll never forgive myself if we don’t go all the way
Tonight
And I would do anything for love
Oh, I would do anything for love
Oh, I would do anything for love
But I won’t do that
No, I won’t do that [continue reading…]

“What is it about? Like all Greek songs, about Love and Death.” — Melina Mercouri, Phaedra

“The Politics of life are easy. It’s the Poetics that are tough.”

I’m still working out what I meant when I wrote that. It’ll take me life plus 99 years.

The Poetics of life are much more persistent in their knocking at the door of your inner self than the Politics. Politics have their seasons, but the Poetics are our constant companions, waking and sleeping, thinking and dreaming. In a very real sense, since they run deeper than the Politics, the Poetics are the Politics’ power source. But what are the Poetics about? Simply put, they are “like all Greek songs, about love and death.”

I’ve done a dance or two with death over the years. I’ve found that he’s not very graceful and he always wants to lead.

Once, during a long-lost summer, I was the night driver for a hearse at a mortuary. In the wee small hours of the morning, I’d drive the on-duty mortician to pick up a man or a woman’s or a child’s body from wherever it had become just a body. In the hot California delta night I’d drive the mortician, both of us in Blues Brothers suits, to a hospital basement, a home bedroom, a city morgue, or, one time, to a shabby skid row hotel where the leaking wicker basket holding the suicide had to be held vertically in the creaking ancient elevator for all eight slow floors.

I’ve been alone in the waiting room with my mother when the surgeon, still drying his hands on a towel, walked through the door and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Van der Leun, but we just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

I’ve stood in a room high above Central Park West where the only sound was a death rattle in an old man’s throat, and told the doctor on the telephone that there was really no reason to send the emergency resuscitation crew for the twelfth time in half as many months. I sat quietly holding the old man’s hand for around thirty minutes until his breathing stopped. Then I left that room, told my in-laws he was dead, and watched them mask their expressions of relief.

I’ve found my name carved into the stone monument at Battery Park that lists those that died at sea during the Second World War. I’ve found the names of two men I went to high school with carved on the Vietnam wall in Washington.

If I’d managed to keep one address book for my contemporaries since graduating from high school, it would, as they say, be beginning to fill up with dead people and that rate would increase.

I’ve stood on the Promenade on Brooklyn Heights and seen two towers fall and reduce thousands of people to ash and dust in what seemed like less time than it has taken you to read to this period.

I have sometimes, I confess, “been half in love with easeful death,” but no one living escapes that siren call. The trick there is to lash yourself to the mast of the day, pray, and somehow, through the grace of God, just sail on by.

By now, like many others of my age, I’ve seen death personally and professionally, retail and wholesale. There really is, when you move with it, nothing to love about the dance of death. The only response is, as Prufrock knew, to see “the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.”

So I know something — not a lot, but something — about that old Greek theme of death and it scares me about as much as it should scare, I imagine, any man. And, having now briefly been dead, the fear is perhaps less shrill but more persistent; a tempo of a fading drum heard far off, cast back over the horizon but still approaching.

What I know increasingly little about, and what really frightens me, is the other theme of the Greek songs, love. These days it seems that it will take more than a lifetime to figure love out.

Love frightens me because, unlike death, love cannot be understood. Love can only be given, gotten, taken or dropped. Like death, it would seem that, once discovered, there’s no end to it — or, to take Hemingway’s point of view, no good end to it since one way or another death will trump love — in this world at least.

Love is where the Poetics of life collide with the Politics. It’s a collision where the possibility having to call in the MedEvac helicopter and the coroner is always present; where wreckage is assured and survival never promised. Falling in love is, as a comedian noted, like buying a puppy. You are purchasing a tragedy.

No, that’s not quite right. Say rather you are purchasing a hybrid; a tragicomedy or a comic tragedy, since love always has, for those of us removed from its immediate drama, elements of the ridiculous, slices of the sublime, and not a few moments of boffo laughter at the shambling human animal.

Still, it would be nice if I could understand the nature of love and my absurd role in the love dramas of my life. If the joke, in the end, is on me it would be nice to be able to say that I “get it.”

Nice but not, I think, necessary. Even if I never get it, I do know one thing for certain about love, “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

First published 2009– added to and altered since.

it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

El Greco– Portrait of Fernando Nino de Guevara **, 1600

Your answers to the Inquisitor
In his wine-stained satin lace,
Are irrelevant as answers
Deduced from deepest space.

Your presence in his universe
Confirms him of your crime.
He seeks to seal all passages,
All escapes from space and time.

Behind the Science of his spectacles
Lives a mind reduced by power.
A gesture from his languid wrists —
All’s over in an hour.

“We seek to keep our faithful
Baptized, confirmed, and saved
From those dark, unknown questions
That live beyond the grave.   

“Hunched upon my velvet throne,
My pen controls the Door
That opens to the Vaults of Night 
Above the killing floor.”

** On 3 December 1599, Fernando Niño de Guevara was appointed Grand Inquisitor of Spain. During his tenure as Grand Inquisitor, the Spanish Inquisition burned 240 heretics, plus 96 in effigy. 1,628 other individuals were found guilty and subjected to lesser penalties.

================== * * * ==================

Via Neo The Grand Inquisitor is here addressing Jesus, who has come back to earth. Although the Inquisitor is a man of the Church, he is not in favor of what he believes Jesus offers to humankind, which is free will. Instead, the Inquisitor proposes to enslave people, and he tells Jesus how he will go about doing it.

Command that these stones be made bread–and mankind will run after Thee, obedient and grateful like a herd of cattle. But even then it will be ever diffident and trembling, lest Thou should take away Thy hand, and they lose thereby their bread! Thou didst refuse to accept the offer for fear of depriving men of their free choice; for where is there freedom of choice where men are bribed with bread?

Man shall not live by bread alone– was Thine answer. Thou knewest not, it seems, that it was precisely in the name of that earthly bread that the terrestrial spirit would one day rise against, struggle with, and finally conquer Thee…

Knowest Thou not that, but a few centuries hence, and the whole of mankind will have proclaimed in its wisdom and through its mouthpiece, Science, that there is no more crime, hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? “Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!” will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee–a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel…

…It is then that we will finish building their tower for them. For they alone who feed them shall finish it, and we shall feed them in Thy name, and lying to them that it is in that name.

Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: “Enslave, but feed us!” That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves.

And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious.

Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth?

And even supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings too weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?

…In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden of freedom by ruling over them–so terrible will that freedom at last appear to men!