Suddenly everything old is new again.

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.” (G.K. Chesterton, 1905)

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM https://t.co/6A2EFLqw3h

— Hippokleides (@Hippokleides) October 14, 2022

In spite of the fact that the demons above are still, strangely,  consuming oxygen, it remains a beautiful world….

[continue reading…]

O NEGÓCIO TRILIONÁRIO DA GUERRA

Nesta animação da SIPRI, podemos ver o sentido da exportação de armas no mundo entre 1950 e 2017. pic.twitter.com/wcxzUnUs0d

— geopol.pt (@GeopolPt) October 14, 2022

In this animation of SIPRI, we can see the meaning of arms exports in the world between 1950 and 2017.

How did the Marxist-Democrats try to take over Americans? Here’s how it was before the Great Communist Killing Time:

Biden was declared President in 2020, the most powerful position in the American government.

Once in power Biden’S Marxist-Democrat puppeteers moved quickly to end American democracy.

Marxist-Democrats created false emergencies that permitted the suspension of individual freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly

The FBI, IRS, and other armed bureaucracies murdered or arrested leaders of opposition political parties, which gave Marxist-Democrats dictatorial powers. . . .

SUBSCRIBE AND READ THE WHOLE THING AT: Future History Found After Biden’s Kristallnacht Speech

British and German soldiers hold a Christmas truce during the Great War, 1914

Cahawba, Alabama has an illustrious history for a ghost town: From 1820 to 1825, it served as Alabama’s state capital before flooding so many times that most of the residents fled for drier pastures (and took the title of capital with them).

https://twitter.com/fasc1nate/status/1575591628693458944

Dodge Challenger Black Ghost | The interior is just as sinister with black leather and Alcantara, carbon fiber trim, and Ghost badging. The power backs up the looks with the beastly Jailbreak-spec supercharged 6.2-liter V8 good for 807 horsepower. A mere 300 will be made, and it will no doubt be a collector’s item given that the gas-powered Challenger will end after the 2023 model year.

Modern man is a moral idiot, self-infatuated, increasingly alienated from community & family & therefore from his own nature, caught up in a frantic and fruitless search for something called identity, & for personal freedom & self-expression indistinguishable from animal license. pic.twitter.com/pqLAYtlniY

— illtakemystand (@illtakemystand1) October 11, 2022

11. Plus, the dissident right has:

-Better aesthetics
-Positive views on one’s ancestry
-History
-Brotherhood

It’s a mindset of strength in weak times. Truth in times of denial.

That’s why it has such an appeal to young men. pic.twitter.com/9wlDHvcvXC

— Alaric The Barbarian (@0xAlaric) October 13, 2022

HERB SWEAT?

Byte magazine in January 1980 announced in an editorial that “the era of off-the-shelf personal computers has arrived”. The magazine stated that “a desirable contemporary personal computer has 64 K of memory, about 500 K bytes of mass storage online, any old competently designed computer architecture, upper and lowercase video terminal, printer, and high-level languages”. [continue reading…]

PEWSLAG: The 7 Deadly Sins of Progressivism

The progressive left (aka “Democrats”) has cast off all pretense of “progress” and become a slop bucket brimming over with Americans that hate children, success, happiness, liberty, and life itself. All these local “progressive heroes” will sooner or later get their close-up in the Fake News. Their faces and their ever-expanding mental diseases reveal the state of souls committed to personal degradation and social devolution. These insects have eaten the seven deadly sins with the zeal of pedophiles double dipping at the salad bar in a preschool lunchroom. Theirs is the socialist Utopian view of life fueled with poppers and perversion and propaganda.

Others, the much-maligned normal majority, have the tragic view of life and accept that all humans are flawed; that all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, have touched on all of the 7 deadly sins. It is our nature to sin. We sin as easily as we breathe. Exhibit 5,798: the War in Ukraine. Those with the tragic view of the human condition at least struggle against sin and strive to leave the world brighter and better than when we came into it. The Democrats have now determined to leave their world depraved, degraded, and darker. . . . CONTINUED AT PEWSLAG: The 7 Deadly Sins of Progressivism

New, updated, illustrated and for members only. If you haven’t joined, please do.

The entry level membership is FREE.

Our unquenched urge to ascend persists
And fills stone seats with ghosts of mists.
Below in the center, the gold-glimmered pool
Where once they drenched these stones with slaughter
Stands revealed by the moon to be pure still water.

Tonight Our son will slay again
(Offstage) Our father’s killer,
And carry out Our mother slain,
Wrapped in rags wound tight by twine,
And lay her down, Our unburnt offering,

As the chorus, shuffling slowly, chants
The deathless moral of Our play,
Our daughter, raped and bloodied, screams
Words We hear but do not now know
That frame Our ancient and endless show.

Above these shadows that glaze our sleep
Bats through a maze of moonlight sweep,
Leap, reap in their gyres, free of time’s yoke
Snatching gnats from the smoke
Of Sophocles’ speech.

Epidaurus, Greece, 2000 / Chico, California, 2022

This one’s going out to Emma Jean, the Rodeo Queen, who saved my life that day.

Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death? — Job 38 17

When people find out I dropped dead on October 13 of 2011, they often ask me if I saw “the white light.” They are disappointed when I tell them I did not. They’ve come to believe in the light, believe in it in a very literal way. They’ve heard the light is seen and they’d like continuing confirmations of this sighting. My report always, as I said, disappoints. It would seem for some, even though I was dead, I was not dead enough.

Still, I was dead and I am sorry to disappoint in not being able to report anything other than a timeless blank between two moments; a dark with no dimension or duration between a light and a light. In fact, there was not even the dark.

The light of life left me in one swift instant much as the light goes out when you flip the switch to “off.” The light of life returned to me in the very next instant as if someone slowly turned up a dimmer switch in a small room.

One moment I was standing on my front porch looking at children running about in the playground across the street. The very next moment I was looking up from my bed at the sound-muffled ceiling of the ICU at Harbor View Hospital in Seattle. A voice like footsteps coming closer down a long hallway was repeating and repeating, “You are in Harbor View Hospital. You’ve had a heart attack. It’s daytime….”

Thus, after being held in a coma for 11 days, I was returned to life.

Thus, tick became tock.

Between those two moments I have no information to report since, to my mind and memory, there are no moments between those two. Not one. They are found side by side in my mind; an enjambment bracketing a caesura. The 11 days between them have no duration at all. In a sense, the only clue they provide in their utter nonexistence would be one to the true dimensions of eternity.

Some people seem to think that, with no light to report, my cut-rate resurrection is something rather modest, a common outcome of our enlightened, medically advanced age. Something available to all. They express thanks that the 911 medical crew got to me as fast as it did and knew how to, in effect, jump-start my heart. To those I cannot satisfy with a comic book resurrection mine seems only a mundane report on a modern medical technique. They don’t find it miraculous. But that is only because they are deaf, dumb, and blind to the miraculous.

I am not blind to it not for a nanosecond. It was my personal miracle. And a miracle it was. A miracle in which I was returned to life by the unfathomable grace of God.

The roots of my miracle go back many years and begin, as so many things do these days, online in a long correspondence that became, in time, a deep and abiding friendship and love. Part of that love entailed that, although we lived in separate towns on separate coasts, we spent some parts of each year visiting each other.

In this particular autumn, she was visiting me in Seattle. She had originally been due to leave several days before that October 13th,  but decided — for obscure reasons — to extend her stay another week. And on this particular October 13th, she had — for obscure reasons — postponed her regular late afternoon daily walk and, upon return, postponed her regular post-walk shower. This meant that during the time she would normally be either out of the house or under running water she just happened to be standing nearby when my heart stopped dead. The result was that she started the 911 response within seconds after I stopped breathing. Because of this the three rescue units dispatched to save me came within minutes, returned me to life, and transported me to the hospital where I spent the next 11 days suspended between a light and a light.

Some seem to feel that miracles only happen in the center of a bright light with a large boom and a loud voice out of a whirlwind; Imax miracles in Surround sound. Perhaps they do. I’ve no experience with those miracles. My experience has only been with the miracle of a long chain of small events, happenings, and abiding love that have given to me these eleven full years of being alive in the midst of the miracle of Creation; Creation as it is, both miraculous and mundane.

My formal birthday is the day after Christmas. I’ve never liked the 26th of December. It’s hard to try to have your birthday party on the day after the biggest birthday party of the year.

Now, it strikes me that I have a new birthday — a ‘rebirthday’ if you will. And that’s what I am going to celebrate for as many years as are left to me, my Rebirthday.

Today I know I am both blessed, as we all are on every day in this mysterious life within the light, and reborn again as I am every day, reborn within the miracle.

As are we all.

Or, “Who was that masked man?”

“Everyone says the future is strange, but I have a feeling some things won’t change.”

Once upon a time, under different spiritual, philosophical, intellectual, and political dominance America was a nation of big dreams whose business was making those dreams a reality. In those dear dead days beyond recall America promised an idyllic reality within reach of not just the nomenklatura and the elites, but the vast and ever-aspiring upwards middle class. Today the emblem of the defeat and degradation of that dominance is epitomized in the morbidly obese Lizzo miming fellatio on the crystal flute of James Madison while twerking her fat and fuming cheeks. That the present culture would allow this without heating up the tar and feathers is a signal that the America of aspiration is as dead as the dodo with the proviso that the Dodo was much more attractive and far less draped with folds of flab than Lizzo. 

Today the future just ain’t what it used to be.

Oh well, that America had a pretty good run. That America had some nice ideals and aspirations. That America was unconsciously immortalized in the kitsch classic, Design for Dreaming.  At once camp,  cartoonish, and slyly self-conscious Design for Dreaming froze that America at the top of its arc; its apogee. In fact, the descending cultural arc of Design for Dreaming runs in parallel to the decline and fall of the late great state of being it emblemized. Tracked from its debut to its end we can see how the culture it epitomized went from the ideals of a cornporn operetta to a cultural allusion to an element used in children’s games to a target of mockery by “too cool” America just before that culture of cool was itself transformed into cultural cannon fodder by #metoo, #nevertrump, and other assorted backhoes of woke.

============================ #*#*#*# ============================

Design for Dreaming is a 1956 cult industrial short or sponsored film of about ten minutes in length about a woman (played by dancer and choreographer Tad Tadlock; real name Thelma Tadlock) who dreams about a masked man (dancer and choreographer Marc Breaux) taking her to the 1956 General Motors Motorama at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and to Frigidaire’s “Kitchen of the Future”.

The entirety of the dialogue is sung, though the actors do not move their lips to their characters’ pre-recorded voices. The film starts off with her in her bedroom, with the masked man suddenly appearing. He then takes her to the Motorama. After looking at several cars including Buick, Chevrolet Corvette, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Cadillac, she is taken to the “kitchen of the future”, where she bakes a cake. She then goes back to the Motorama and dances the “dance of tomorrow”. After looking at more cars, she and her masked man (who unmasks himself) travel on the “road of tomorrow” in “Firebird II” and fall in love.

Elements of this film return and are blended into Peter Gabriel’s video for his hit song “In Your Eyes” (starting at 2:51)

Other uses include Rush’s “Superconductor”(starting at 3:42)

And the ever-popular and much more super Super Mario back in 1989:

The film has over the years become a popular symbol of 50s consumerist culture and was featured extensively in the BBC documentary series Pandora’s Box by Adam Curtis (see the intro before the main title).

It also appears in its entirety with an amusing and suitably sardonic “commentary” as a short feature in a fifth-season episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Mystery Science Theater itself was the apogee of the “tool cool” retro-cool hipster culture killed off by woke.

Sic Semper Tyrannis!

PS: A somewhat more developed if not slightly overwritten iteration of this item can be read by all members at In Advance of the Nightmare: When Americans Still Dreamed on The New American Digest

Now Playing at the New American Digest

On Purity Tests in the 21st Century

There is a growing tendency around the Net to judge artists of various kinds according to their “opinions” rather than their art when their art is all that is under review.

And one year later (October 2022) we have a new world record!

Minnesota teacher sets new US record for heaviest pumpkin after growing enormous 2,560lbs vegetable |

• Travis Gienger, from Anoka, Minnesota, set a new record at the pumpkin-weighing contest in northern California
• The horticulture teacher drove the enormous 2,560lbs gourd for 35 hours to see hard work pay off
• Broke a record set just last week in New York where a grower raised a massive pumpkin weighing 2,554lbs
• Gienger also won the competition in 2020, then topped 2021’s champion this year by nearly 400 pounds

Records were broken this year both in terms of the weight of a single pumpkin and in the number of items containing “Pumpkin Spice” in Trader Joe’s.

[STOP THE INSANITY!]

I grew this hefty pumpkin on the left once in another life. It was a frightening experience.

If it wasn’t for Halloween, this grotesque and useless gourd would be extinct. And good riddance.

Let’s. Review.

Somewhere dotted about the fruited plains of America something like lebenty-leben gazillion acres of pumpkins are planted every damn year. Then care and water and chemicals are slathered on these fibrous tumors causing them to grow big. Some very big. Some so big that they can be hoisted into the airdropped onto a car and obliterate said automobile.

Many are midget pumpkins. This year I’m seeing teeny-weeny baby pumpkins ripe for pumpkin abuse. But most are middle to large hunks o’ pumpkin by the time they are “ready for the harvest.”

Sounds so pastoral, doesn’t it? “Ready for the harvest.” Except that when you actually “harvest” a plant the assumption is that, somewhere, somehow, some people are actually going to eat the thing.

This is the fate of only a smidgen of the pumpkins harvested. And even among those that actually eat of the pumpkin almost all are lying through their seeds when they say they like it. Pumpkin soup, pumpkin bread, even (shudder) roast pumpkin — all foul concoctions fit only for the martyr mothers among us.

I know that many will claim to adore pumpkin pie, but that too is mindless. Give me any thick paste and let me pour tons of cream, evaporated milk, pounds of sugar, scoops of cinnamon and nutmeg into a butter-laced and crisp pie crust and you’ll love it even if the base plant was black mold from the basement.

No, the pumpkin is not an acceptable food. But do we plow it under and eradicate it from our list of things we use farmland for? No. Because anything worth doing in America is worth overdoing, we expand the acres devoted to this parasite.

We do it to empower the following process.

First, big pumpkins are grown in industrial pumpkin patches.

Then large machines and hordes of laborers go through these fields and pick them all the pumpkins up.

Then they are loaded onto big trucks and taken to some pumpkin clearinghouse where the hefty gourds are unloaded and sorted.

Then they are loaded onto other large trucks and swept away to various centralized food distribution warehouses across the nation.

Unloaded again these obese gourds are promptly loaded onto other trucks and delivered to grocery stores large and small where the weakened staff unloads and stacks them in piles.

Oceans of diesel are burned at every step in this pumpkin distribution process.

Then in you come and lift a hefty pumpkin up and load it in your car.

Then you drive home and unload it.

Then the whole family gets together to eviscerate it, slimy guts and seeds and all.

Then you all take sharp-edged implements and slash and hack at the defenseless gourd, piercing it clean through and cutting the top of its head off in some gigantic clown lobotomy.

Then you put something on fire inside it and stick it out in front of your house.

More than one family every year puts this vegetable with a fire inside it on a pile of dry leaves in front of their home thus losing their house trailer.

This is done tens or hundreds of millions of times for one single night.

After this less-than-peak experience, sooner or later every hacked-up pumpkin in America is thrown away.

I don’t want to even begin to think about the carbon footprint on this one. Neither do you. It’s too scary. Even for Halloween.

======================= UPDATE =======================

IN AMERICA, ANYTHING WORTH DOING IS WORTH OVERDOING

INCOMING! Pumpkin breaks record at NC State Fair at nearly 2,000 pounds :

ONE CRACK AWAY FROM GREATNESS!  Weighing In At 2,520 Pounds Nation’s largest pumpkin disqualified for fingernail-sized crack

If you can just get your mind together
Then come on across to me
We’ll hold hands, and then we’ll watch the sunrise
From the bottom of the sea

But first, are you experienced?
Have you ever been experienced?
Well, I have . . . .

Speaking only for myself, but starting around the time this song was released in 1967 I was “experienced” about 60-65 times over the following four years. My old friends say this single fact explains so much about me. I demur.

For all the deserved acclaim Warren Haynes gets as a guitarist, he’s just a criminally underrated vocalist. His interpretation is just a thing of beauty.

“OH REALLY?”

I’m Captain Kink. I’m Mister Scratch.
I’m your smiling, deathless dentist, Doctor Pain.
I’ve owned the Earth since Adam’s birth,
And co-authored the book on raising Cain.

But you learned too well my old hard sell;
How I used to tempt your souls with sin and tonic.
And since out-of-date spells don’t populate Hell,
I’m gone post-modern, solid-state, and ultrasonic.

I’m that modern manufacturer
Who swung Liz Borden’s ax for her.
I gave you Neutron Bombs and Asian Flu.
I’ve got old friends in the Senate
(Why so many I may just rent it,
And, for my summer place, the Kremlin too.).

So when your puny little wars get out of hand,
Just sign in blood and, baby, I’m your man.
Don’t you look for any favors from the blest.
God’s angels’ll just confuse you,
Shame you, bore you, then abuse you.
(They might even convince you life’s a mess.)

Me? I’m never that judgmental.
In fact, I’m rather sentimental.
When time’s get tough I’ll be your only hope.
I’ll hold your hand and guide you,
In that darkest dawn, I’m right beside you.
(And you know I’ve always got the finest dope.)

So if doing good is looking…
Rather pale,
And being sweet is tasting…
A bit stale,
And you’ve got the yen to try…
A little starkness,
Just give me one short call,
You’ll have no worries left at all,
When you sign on with Kink,
the Prince of Darkness…

Yes, I’m the Prince of Darkness!
I’m the one that does it all!
I’m the worm that ate the apple,
And I engineered the Fall!
I raise the price of Mideast oil.
I’m the cause of headache pain.
I’m the master of your daily toil.
I put your cake out in the rain!
I make damn sure that nothing nice
Is ever really done.
I’m Mister Scratch, I’m Captain Kink,
I have all the fun!

I developed polyester clothes,
And do-it-yourself divorce.
I’m the master of adultery,
And the excess use of force.
Torture is my daily bread.
Causing cancer’s just my meat.
I poke holes in supertankers,
And drop dogshit on the street.

I’m the Prince of your own Darkness,
A swinging spirit of the mist.
I created Sociology,
And “Leading Economists.”
I even (No applause please)
Funded The Exorcist.
I’m your occult sugar daddy.
You’re my juicy jelly roll.
I produce the TV talk shows.
I’m the King of Rap and Roll.
When I’ve a mortgage on your life.
I’ll foreclose it on your soul.

And if you think you’ve got me beat,
And can really live those good intentions —
Like brushing after every meal
And never eating meat;
Or playing fair, or smoking less,
Or relaxing global tensions —
Don’t brag and say,
“Hey, ain’t life sweet?”,
Cause I’ll just whip up some new inventions…

… Like advertising, television,
Global Warming, or Prohibition,
(It’s all in a day’s work to me, you see)
Or Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama
(They’ve season tickets to my sauna).
It’s clear this job will be the death of me.

I introduced Yoko and Juan.
I even elected Kennedy, John,
And followed him up with Willy, and Barry and Joe.
I’ve done plagues and piles and itchy feets,
Afghanistan and New York streets.
There’s still more up my sleeve. Ya want some mo?

Oh, I’m that bloody Prince of Darkness
Who’s shoved the World out on the brink.
I’m flashy Nick! I’m Super Scratch!
But you can call me Captain Kink.
What you throw into the ocean
comes back home with the tide.
Life’s just a play! Live for the day!
And so long, suckers, thanks for the ride.

From the New American Digest comes Nordstream Redux: A Correction

The wise and venerable Lawdog offers a much more mundane and rational explanation of the evaporation of the Nordstream pipeline than the reports echoed here a few days back concerning a stealth attack by the US. This is not to say that such an attack did not happen but only as a caution to myself and others; a caution that reminds me yet again to, as the old saying goes, “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by simple stupidity.”

Of course, the other old saying about “the fog of war” holds true as well. Lawdog himself experienced this after the “discovery” of his “theory” brought him some extreme attention from some giants of the Right Commetariat such as Instapundit and PJM. This “attention” blew him right off the internet itself

READ THE WHOLE THING From the New American Digest comes Nordstream Redux: A Correction BEFORE YOU READ THE WHOLE THING AT LAWDOG’S.