WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Strange Daze: Saturday Review
byVanderleunonApril 23, 2022
Xi will persist against the virus, just as Putin will continue to batter against Ukraine,not in the hopes of actually solving the stated problem but because in ideological totalitarianism, fallibility is not an option. Because they are in violation of the First Law of Holes (“if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”) the problem unsurprisingly gets bigger. Russia has threatened to deploy nuclear weapons to the Baltics if Finland and Sweden join NATO — which Putin’s invasion impels them to do. China’s COVID controls may fail to control the virus but still succeed in damaging its economy and stirring up political unrest. But no matter, gods cannot err.
Southern Africa, 1 million years BP: Children play in the mouth of the ancient cave. They’re hunting bison, one on each side, just as we’ve shown them in the shadows by the fire. From here, the entire valley can be seen. Below, a woolly rhino crosses the river. Up here, each relative helps when they can in looking at the horizon and screening the neighbourhood. With great care, we keep advancing in the stonework, which shuns the hooves and attracts the claws. That’s why even in the day the fire lives. But it’s when the sun dies that it really grows. At the fire circle, relatives tell us about the flights they take at night. I want to learn to fly without fear of the harpy or the lioness. Last night my closed eyes saw the great fire. It was particularly beautiful, very strong and very beautiful, but then suddenly a gust of wind came in and the fire went out. The hyenas came and advanced to the entrance of the cave. The children ran inside and, when it was all about to end, my dead grandfather suddenly appeared. He yelled in a voice of thunder and lit the fire again. The hyenas burned their backs and disappeared into the night. I woke up and they were gone, and so was my grandfather. Only the fire was there.
How the Azovstal steel plant turned into the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol | International | The plant is an industrial complex in the southeast of the city, near the port, which extends for 11 square kilometers. It is made up of an intricate network of warehouses, rail tracks and subterranean tunnels, where Ukrainian troops and civilian defense teams are taking cover to survive the incessant bombings. According to Ukrainian authorities, there are close to 1,000 civilians at the plant, including women and children.
🇷🇺❌🇺🇦 — 🇷🇺 TASS: “Putin called the storming of the Azovstal industrial zone in Mariupol inexpedient and ordered to cancel it. The president also demanded to block the Azovstal industrial zone so that ” not even a single fly would not fly.” Putin explained the cancellation of the assault on Azovstal by the considerations of saving the lives of the Russian military. Vladimir Putin called the completion of combat work to liberate Mariupol a success and instructed to present the military for state awards.”
America and its partners in Western Civ resign from modern life and go medieval.Everything about America is looking more and more medieval — our rough living conditions, our lawlessness, our violent entertainments, our Hobbesian racketeering, our occult sexual preoccupations, our depraved elites, our quack science. Our center has not been holding for so long that hardly anyone even remembers where the center used to be. And now the bottom is falling out.
“Mainly we hate the Russian president for doing what he said he would do, acting like a man, literally having to set boundaries for the unruly children, like Daddy used to do.
America hates daddies. To America, all daddies are monsters (rapists!). That’s why America wants to turn all daddies into mommies. Anyway, we barely remember what daddies used to do. The context for daddies — the family — has been obliterated in America by every agency and institution in the land. The only role available these days is the chimerical creature known as a “baby daddy,” which is as much a baby as a daddy, developmentally speaking. Real daddies are men, which is to say: not babies. Mr. Putin acts like a man, especially having to do a dirty job that needs doing, without complaint. America can’t stand that.
“America’s president, “Joe Biden,” suits the current national script perfectly. He’s a mere prop for the drama queens. No one mistakes him for “Daddy.” He’s the old, impotent, intemperate, often confused “Grampy,” a figure of bathos and derision, a shell of a man who, in his prime, lived just to work his official positions for millions in grift. How, otherwise, do you account for his fortune? The Ukraine money laundromat was one of his favorite stops, managed carefully by cheerleaders Victoria Nuland, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and NSC official Fiona Hill, America’s foreign policy establishment there back in the day.
“But who, exactly, is managing Grampy now backstage in the White House? My guess would be Susan Rice because you never hear anything about Susan Rice or her role there: Director of the Domestic Policy Council of the United States. Wow! Sounds weighty. When was the last time you saw her name in The New York Times or cable TV news? You’d think they’d be interested in her doings. Yet I doubt that one-in-a-hundred US citizens could tell you who Susan Rice is and what she does. (Was that her the other day in a bunny suit at the White House Easter Egg Roll, assisting a confused Grampy offstage?)
“Somewhere in the White House there must be phone logs that record how many times a day Ms. Rice makes and receives phone calls across town to and from the Kalorama neighborhood of DC. Does that make Barack Obama America’s secret daddy? Or is he playing a somewhat different role… like, head of a cartel?”
Consider three goshawks (these hulking forest raptors have a magnetic appeal for nature writers). If you want a well-behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing. Give ’em the opportunity to kill things … Murder sorts them out. In Goshawk Summer (2021), the photographer and filmmaker James Aldred watches a ‘gos’ bring the severed head of a baby robin home to its own chicks: Its puffy red eyes are closed as if sleeping … It’s a pitiful sight made all the more poignant from knowing that the chick would have instinctively reached up to beg for food as the hawk’s shadow fell across it … For a goshawk, it sometimes seems as if life is simply nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.
His food purchase placed through the local neighborhood committee six days earlier had never arrived, and the hunger was giving him stomach cramps, he said.he said. “The neighborhood committee told me to ‘endure,’ I have endured four days. All that’s edible is gone except for water,” he told the police in a call, the recording of which he later posted online. “Every evening, when I tune in to the news at 7 p.m., all is portrayed as peaceful and well and brimming with a sense of security. I don’t know about this security.” But the police’s answer dashed any hopes for a food source. Even if he got arrested, they would just send him right back home, the officer said, noting that the police station couldn’t accommodate him either.
J.K. Rowling Compares Transgender Wokism to Soviet CommunismQuoting from The Power of the Powerless, Rowling went on to post: “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them — it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves.”Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it.”
Joel D. Hirst’s Blog Government for the people; the mighty power of the state wielded to improve the lives of citizens; the tremendous imperial armies at the service of the protection of butchers and bakers. These are not historic ideas of power. Power, imperial power, has never been concerned with the lives of citizens and peoples. Conquest, that has always been the main task of an emperor. Seizing pieces of land from others, subjugating them and placing them at one’s service. Feats of construction that tell tales of greatness: Peter the Great building the city that still bears his name through the toil of 500,000 serfs (read slaves) over 18 years – 100,000 of them buried under the walls of the “City of Bones”. And “public administration” over which we judge our own emperors? Keeping the power running; making sure the supermarkets don’t want for milk; that there are no holes in the roads? The role of book-keepers and bean-counters; of modern “administrators”, our new managerial bureaucracy seeking to justify their place as new aristocracy not through obeisance to the Tsar but through the anonymous organization of a life become increasingly complicated. But more than ever I think that this is only for us, here in the Empire Wilderness.
My guess is that Mr. Zelensky will be allowed to remain president of what remains on the map, minus Donbas and the region along the Black Sea coast from Mariupol to Odessa. Mr. Zelensky will not have a functioning military to make trouble with. Other patches of Western Ukraine may be distributed among Poland, Moldova, Romania, and Hungary, leaving a large rump of Ukraine between Lvov and the Dnieper River devoted mostly to the growing of wheat. A stable, agricultural Ukraine will be a benefit to a hungry world, while it will no longer be in a position to launch hostilities or be of much use as a money-laundering facility. In short, with some luck, Ukraine will cease to be a threat to world peace.
The sicko unfit “father” who allowed his boy to be sexually mutilated needs to be horse whipped
KCKApril 23, 2022, 9:39 PM
I can’t find the stats in a quick search, but The Battle of the Factory, in Stalingrad, chewed up multiple German divisions in WWII. Its the first thing I thought of when I heard about this (obviously faked news) factory battle in Mariupol.
FreddoApril 23, 2022, 10:39 PM
Meanwhile in the West we get mass immigration, massive inflation and the Official News(tm) according to Google. To paraphrase Trump: if this is what winning feels like, then I’m sick & tired of it.
ghostsniperApril 24, 2022, 4:11 AM
All this, “Putin’s gonna do this”, “Putin’s probably wanting to do that”, etc., it’s more than a hoon can bear.
Some call that “News”, others call it “fabricating news”, others still call it “rumor mongering”.
I call it criminal and those practicing it need to be beaten. severely
Remove the lies, in all it’s forms, and the world daily news can be summed up in about 4 or 5 sentences. But then, if the US was minding it’s own business, as all good countries should be doing, the news would not exist at all. Today, there is nothing in any of the news that is broadcast that is important to your daily life. None of it. Oh look, Johnny Depp slapped his big mouth bitch again!
George ChristiansenApril 24, 2022, 7:59 AM
The mantra of “Think global, act local.” has turned out to produce nothing but a complete disassociation from all things local and utter ignorance of all things global.
ghostsniperApril 24, 2022, 4:20 AM
Saw a home made sign in someone’s front yard the other day, “Be Kind”.
So, what do you wanna’ do for fun?
How about prank phone calls?
Caller ID makes that difficult.
How about play ding dong ditch- push someone’s doorbell, and run away?
Too much exertion.
Maybe write dirty words on a bathroom wall?
Could be fun…
How about annoying strangers on the internet?
WOW! COOL!
These massacres and casualty levels (on both sides) now mean that a negotiated peace is off the table. For Putin to make such an agreement would be seen by the senior military and civilian Russian leadership as an admission of Putin’s personal failure. And Putin would have to realize that making such a peace would be professionally and possibly personally lethal for him. Russians know good and well that the Czar/General Secretary/President is never the one who fails the country, ever. If Putin accepted a negotiated peace, everyone else within the senior reaches of government and the military would know that the scapegoating purges would come quickly. And Putin knows that they would know that. Who would act decisively first – Putin and his inner, purge-immune circle, or the intended victims?
Don, I used to estimate Putin as vulnerable within his own country, but once I learned that his national guard (formed after I got of the service) is North of 200,000, in effect, SS guards who protect the man, I changed my mind. I think he’s on reasonably safe ground whatever he does.
I believe we may have read the same 200,00 number with them separate and not answerable to the regular military. Unfortunately, he’ll most likely die of old age.
AnonymousApril 24, 2022, 8:28 AM
Noting the picture of the Aztec sacrifice- A thing that occurs to me is what the Spaniards did not find in the new world: technology. They came upon Indian civilizations living in these amazing megalithic structures, people who reportedly had sophisticated mathematics, and astronomy, but practicing one the most barbaric religions the planet has ever seen. Yet, as far as I know, the Conquistadors never saw anything in the process of being built. If the Spanish had seen machines capable of doing that work they’d have written about it. They’d have brought that technology to the old world. Think of what Europe could have done if the Europeans had the machines to shape, and move materials on the scale of Chichinitza, or Mach Pichu. My guess is the Indians who lived in the jungles of Mexico, and Central/ South America were not the ones who built. But that raises the question: Who was it, then?
I spent 40 years of my life researching, among many other things, the Indigenous civilizations of Latin America. For 14 years of those 40 I lived, worked and traveled in Latin America, visiting every nation but Surinam and French Guiana. I backpacked alone to many of the Mayan, Incan and Chachapoyan ruins that proliferate the lands below the Rio Grande. I have more than likely explored more of these ruins than any man alive. So…
The technology possessed by the Aztec was sufficient to build their capital of Tenochtitlan. This city was one of the largest on earth at the time (1519) and was one of the marvels of the world. The civil engineering talents of the Aztec enabled them to construct the city in the middle of Lake Texcoco—it seemed to be literally floating on water—and be connected to land by a system of causeways. Those conquistadors with Cortez were stupefied at what the Indians had done, thinking they were seeing a fantasy right out of their dream tales of “Amadis of Gaul”. Those who later wrote accounts of the conquest, such as conquistador Bernal Diaz who was with Cortez, said Tenochtitlan was the most astounding city they had ever seen.
“When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments…on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?…I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.”
It was well-known at the time by those Indians living around the lake how Tenochtitlan was built. After all, these people had helped in its construction. They themselves were no second-raters. In fact the largest pyramid on earth was built 63 miles from Tenochtitlan by the people of Cholula, a people contemporary to the Aztec. The total volume of that pyramid holds twice the volume of the Pyramid of Khufu. Like that pyramid, the Cholula pyramid was built by human labor, as was every single structure built in pre-Colombian America.
You wrote that the Spanish never saw machines used in building any Indian structure. But the Conquistadors did not venture to the New World to write books on civil engineering; they were there to conquer the New World. Once that was done the Spanish built their own cities in the same way the Aztec did theirs—with human labor.
You wrote that the Indians “reportedly had sophisticated mathematics, and astronomy…” Reportedly? The Mayan calendar is more accurate than our own, and these people came up with the mathematical concept of zero hundreds of years before Europeans did. Their cities were built with astronomical and mathematical precision. Their ruins in Mexico and in the jungles of Guatemala and Honduras have survived more or less intact for 1000 years. How long would would Paris survive if left untouched for a millennium?
The Inca are the only people in History to construct a civilization across almost every known
geographical environment. Their roads are still in use today, 500 years after their construction. I know. I have walked alone upon them with pack and tent for weeks. When Pizarro conquered Cuzco (1533), he built a Spanish city on top of the Inca city. After each earthquake, the Spanish city would be destroyed yet the Inca structures remained unfazed.
It is a common conceit of we Moderns to hold the ancients—especially the New World Indigenous—in disdain. But with all of our wiz-bang technology could we build anything like a Tenochtitlan? Or a Teotihuacan (500 AD)?
As a reminder the Assyrians who built Nineveh and once controlled half of the known world were some of the most violent people in History. Extreme violence and magnificent works of engineering to do necessarily cancel each other out. Witness the Italian Renaissance.
Tenochtitlan, Teotihuacan and Nineveh were built with human labor, as was the Great Pyramid at Giza, and in the same way. Recall that we could not figure out how that Egyptian structure was built until relatively recently. There is no need at all to wonder how and by whom the Indigenous civilizations were built. The people themselves did so. These vanished peoples were neither stupid nor lazy.
Noting the picture of the Aztec sacrifice- A thing that occurs to me is what the Spaniards did not find in the new world: technology. They came upon Indian civilizations living in these amazing megalithic structures, people who reportedly had sophisticated mathematics, and astronomy, but practicing one the most barbaric religions the planet has ever seen. Yet, as far as I know, the Conquistadors never saw anything in the process of being built. If the Spanish had seen machines capable of doing that work they’d have written about it. They’d have brought that technology to the old world. Think of what Europe could have done if the Europeans had the machines to shape, and move materials on the scale of Chichinitza, or Mach Pichu. My guess is the Indians who lived in the jungles of Mexico, and Central/ South America were not the ones who built. But that raises the question: Who was it, then?
JWM
whateverApril 24, 2022, 6:50 PM
Every dead Ukrainian moving forward is the fault of the Ukrainian government and NATO. Russia is the Terminator – no matter how much they’re injured they’ll just keep adding more troops, more weapons, more firepower, nothing will stop them from pouring more and more resources to achieve the same end result.
Russia offered several times to allow surrender to those in that basement, but the Ukrainian government won’t let them surrender. So who is the bad guy here? Who is commuting the atrocities?
Every person who advocates for more weapons is just advocating more dead Ukrainians with the same result happening later. Vietnam and Afghanistan all over again -the same end results in both places would have happened but with fewer deaths if the US hadn’t got involved. Like both those historical examples, the support today is for a corrupt government that commits as many atrocities against its citizens as the enemy, and every American advocating for more arms is just advocating killing more people without s chance in the same end result. The adjectives for these people are naïve or evil.
There are no good guys in this conflict, but everyone is brainwashed by the propaganda.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Xi will persist against the virus, just as Putin will continue to batter against Ukraine, not in the hopes of actually solving the stated problem but because in ideological totalitarianism, fallibility is not an option. Because they are in violation of the First Law of Holes (“if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”) the problem unsurprisingly gets bigger. Russia has threatened to deploy nuclear weapons to the Baltics if Finland and Sweden join NATO — which Putin’s invasion impels them to do. China’s COVID controls may fail to control the virus but still succeed in damaging its economy and stirring up political unrest. But no matter, gods cannot err.
Southern Africa, 1 million years BP: Children play in the mouth of the ancient cave. They’re hunting bison, one on each side, just as we’ve shown them in the shadows by the fire. From here, the entire valley can be seen. Below, a woolly rhino crosses the river. Up here, each relative helps when they can in looking at the horizon and screening the neighbourhood. With great care, we keep advancing in the stonework, which shuns the hooves and attracts the claws. That’s why even in the day the fire lives. But it’s when the sun dies that it really grows. At the fire circle, relatives tell us about the flights they take at night. I want to learn to fly without fear of the harpy or the lioness. Last night my closed eyes saw the great fire. It was particularly beautiful, very strong and very beautiful, but then suddenly a gust of wind came in and the fire went out. The hyenas came and advanced to the entrance of the cave. The children ran inside and, when it was all about to end, my dead grandfather suddenly appeared. He yelled in a voice of thunder and lit the fire again. The hyenas burned their backs and disappeared into the night. I woke up and they were gone, and so was my grandfather. Only the fire was there.
How the Azovstal steel plant turned into the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol | International | The plant is an industrial complex in the southeast of the city, near the port, which extends for 11 square kilometers. It is made up of an intricate network of warehouses, rail tracks and subterranean tunnels, where Ukrainian troops and civilian defense teams are taking cover to survive the incessant bombings. According to Ukrainian authorities, there are close to 1,000 civilians at the plant, including women and children.
America and its partners in Western Civ resign from modern life and go medieval. Everything about America is looking more and more medieval — our rough living conditions, our lawlessness, our violent entertainments, our Hobbesian racketeering, our occult sexual preoccupations, our depraved elites, our quack science. Our center has not been holding for so long that hardly anyone even remembers where the center used to be. And now the bottom is falling out.
“America’s president, “Joe Biden,” suits the current national script perfectly. He’s a mere prop for the drama queens. No one mistakes him for “Daddy.” He’s the old, impotent, intemperate, often confused “Grampy,” a figure of bathos and derision, a shell of a man who, in his prime, lived just to work his official positions for millions in grift. How, otherwise, do you account for his fortune? The Ukraine money laundromat was one of his favorite stops, managed carefully by cheerleaders Victoria Nuland, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, and NSC official Fiona Hill, America’s foreign policy establishment there back in the day.
Consider three goshawks (these hulking forest raptors have a magnetic appeal for nature writers). If you want a well-behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing. Give ’em the opportunity to kill things … Murder sorts them out. In Goshawk Summer (2021), the photographer and filmmaker James Aldred watches a ‘gos’ bring the severed head of a baby robin home to its own chicks: Its puffy red eyes are closed as if sleeping … It’s a pitiful sight made all the more poignant from knowing that the chick would have instinctively reached up to beg for food as the hawk’s shadow fell across it … For a goshawk, it sometimes seems as if life is simply nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.
His food purchase placed through the local neighborhood committee six days earlier had never arrived, and the hunger was giving him stomach cramps, he said. he said. “The neighborhood committee told me to ‘endure,’ I have endured four days. All that’s edible is gone except for water,” he told the police in a call, the recording of which he later posted online. “Every evening, when I tune in to the news at 7 p.m., all is portrayed as peaceful and well and brimming with a sense of security. I don’t know about this security.” But the police’s answer dashed any hopes for a food source. Even if he got arrested, they would just send him right back home, the officer said, noting that the police station couldn’t accommodate him either.
J.K. Rowling Compares Transgender Wokism to Soviet Communism Quoting from The Power of the Powerless, Rowling went on to post: “Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them — it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves.”Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it.”
Handy Mnemonics: The Five-Fingered Memory Machine – Illustration from Thoinot Arbeau’s 1582 volume of practical astronomy, demonstrating the use of a “hand calendar”
Joel D. Hirst’s Blog Government for the people; the mighty power of the state wielded to improve the lives of citizens; the tremendous imperial armies at the service of the protection of butchers and bakers. These are not historic ideas of power. Power, imperial power, has never been concerned with the lives of citizens and peoples. Conquest, that has always been the main task of an emperor. Seizing pieces of land from others, subjugating them and placing them at one’s service. Feats of construction that tell tales of greatness: Peter the Great building the city that still bears his name through the toil of 500,000 serfs (read slaves) over 18 years – 100,000 of them buried under the walls of the “City of Bones”. And “public administration” over which we judge our own emperors? Keeping the power running; making sure the supermarkets don’t want for milk; that there are no holes in the roads? The role of book-keepers and bean-counters; of modern “administrators”, our new managerial bureaucracy seeking to justify their place as new aristocracy not through obeisance to the Tsar but through the anonymous organization of a life become increasingly complicated. But more than ever I think that this is only for us, here in the Empire Wilderness.
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
The sicko unfit “father” who allowed his boy to be sexually mutilated needs to be horse whipped
I can’t find the stats in a quick search, but The Battle of the Factory, in Stalingrad, chewed up multiple German divisions in WWII. Its the first thing I thought of when I heard about this (obviously faked news) factory battle in Mariupol.
Meanwhile in the West we get mass immigration, massive inflation and the Official News(tm) according to Google. To paraphrase Trump: if this is what winning feels like, then I’m sick & tired of it.
All this, “Putin’s gonna do this”, “Putin’s probably wanting to do that”, etc., it’s more than a hoon can bear.
Some call that “News”, others call it “fabricating news”, others still call it “rumor mongering”.
I call it criminal and those practicing it need to be beaten. severely
Remove the lies, in all it’s forms, and the world daily news can be summed up in about 4 or 5 sentences. But then, if the US was minding it’s own business, as all good countries should be doing, the news would not exist at all. Today, there is nothing in any of the news that is broadcast that is important to your daily life. None of it. Oh look, Johnny Depp slapped his big mouth bitch again!
The mantra of “Think global, act local.” has turned out to produce nothing but a complete disassociation from all things local and utter ignorance of all things global.
Saw a home made sign in someone’s front yard the other day, “Be Kind”.
So, what do you wanna’ do for fun?
How about prank phone calls?
Caller ID makes that difficult.
How about play ding dong ditch- push someone’s doorbell, and run away?
Too much exertion.
Maybe write dirty words on a bathroom wall?
Could be fun…
How about annoying strangers on the internet?
WOW! COOL!
JWM
“… in ideological totalitarianism, fallibility is not an option.”
As I wrote early this month in, “The Ukraine War just got much, much bigger:”
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/01d7b24c57c8781bcd572d783822579f10ce328a6a935d2d712e13cf7d4706c8.gif
Don, I used to estimate Putin as vulnerable within his own country, but once I learned that his national guard (formed after I got of the service) is North of 200,000, in effect, SS guards who protect the man, I changed my mind. I think he’s on reasonably safe ground whatever he does.
Just my 2 cents, FWIW.
I believe we may have read the same 200,00 number with them separate and not answerable to the regular military. Unfortunately, he’ll most likely die of old age.
Noting the picture of the Aztec sacrifice- A thing that occurs to me is what the Spaniards did not find in the new world: technology. They came upon Indian civilizations living in these amazing megalithic structures, people who reportedly had sophisticated mathematics, and astronomy, but practicing one the most barbaric religions the planet has ever seen. Yet, as far as I know, the Conquistadors never saw anything in the process of being built. If the Spanish had seen machines capable of doing that work they’d have written about it. They’d have brought that technology to the old world. Think of what Europe could have done if the Europeans had the machines to shape, and move materials on the scale of Chichinitza, or Mach Pichu. My guess is the Indians who lived in the jungles of Mexico, and Central/ South America were not the ones who built. But that raises the question: Who was it, then?
JWM
I spent 40 years of my life researching, among many other things, the Indigenous civilizations of Latin America. For 14 years of those 40 I lived, worked and traveled in Latin America, visiting every nation but Surinam and French Guiana. I backpacked alone to many of the Mayan, Incan and Chachapoyan ruins that proliferate the lands below the Rio Grande. I have more than likely explored more of these ruins than any man alive. So…
The technology possessed by the Aztec was sufficient to build their capital of Tenochtitlan. This city was one of the largest on earth at the time (1519) and was one of the marvels of the world. The civil engineering talents of the Aztec enabled them to construct the city in the middle of Lake Texcoco—it seemed to be literally floating on water—and be connected to land by a system of causeways. Those conquistadors with Cortez were stupefied at what the Indians had done, thinking they were seeing a fantasy right out of their dream tales of “Amadis of Gaul”. Those who later wrote accounts of the conquest, such as conquistador Bernal Diaz who was with Cortez, said Tenochtitlan was the most astounding city they had ever seen.
“When we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments…on account of the great towers and cues and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream?…I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about.”
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/Tenochtitlan-4.jpg
And:
https://curiosmos.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Leon-Tukker-Pyramid-City-1536×911.jpg
This was no “megalithic structure”.
It was well-known at the time by those Indians living around the lake how Tenochtitlan was built. After all, these people had helped in its construction. They themselves were no second-raters. In fact the largest pyramid on earth was built 63 miles from Tenochtitlan by the people of Cholula, a people contemporary to the Aztec. The total volume of that pyramid holds twice the volume of the Pyramid of Khufu. Like that pyramid, the Cholula pyramid was built by human labor, as was every single structure built in pre-Colombian America.
You wrote that the Spanish never saw machines used in building any Indian structure. But the Conquistadors did not venture to the New World to write books on civil engineering; they were there to conquer the New World. Once that was done the Spanish built their own cities in the same way the Aztec did theirs—with human labor.
You wrote that the Indians “reportedly had sophisticated mathematics, and astronomy…” Reportedly? The Mayan calendar is more accurate than our own, and these people came up with the mathematical concept of zero hundreds of years before Europeans did. Their cities were built with astronomical and mathematical precision. Their ruins in Mexico and in the jungles of Guatemala and Honduras have survived more or less intact for 1000 years. How long would would Paris survive if left untouched for a millennium?
The Inca are the only people in History to construct a civilization across almost every known
geographical environment. Their roads are still in use today, 500 years after their construction. I know. I have walked alone upon them with pack and tent for weeks. When Pizarro conquered Cuzco (1533), he built a Spanish city on top of the Inca city. After each earthquake, the Spanish city would be destroyed yet the Inca structures remained unfazed.
It is a common conceit of we Moderns to hold the ancients—especially the New World Indigenous—in disdain. But with all of our wiz-bang technology could we build anything like a Tenochtitlan? Or a Teotihuacan (500 AD)?
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/82/69/ac/8269acb345dc265b95a6f843defeb986.jpg
Compare that with Nineveh in Mesopotamia (612 BC):
https://www.ancient-origins.net/sites/default/files/field/image/Nineveh.jpg
As a reminder the Assyrians who built Nineveh and once controlled half of the known world were some of the most violent people in History. Extreme violence and magnificent works of engineering to do necessarily cancel each other out. Witness the Italian Renaissance.
Tenochtitlan, Teotihuacan and Nineveh were built with human labor, as was the Great Pyramid at Giza, and in the same way. Recall that we could not figure out how that Egyptian structure was built until relatively recently. There is no need at all to wonder how and by whom the Indigenous civilizations were built. The people themselves did so. These vanished peoples were neither stupid nor lazy.
Noting the picture of the Aztec sacrifice- A thing that occurs to me is what the Spaniards did not find in the new world: technology. They came upon Indian civilizations living in these amazing megalithic structures, people who reportedly had sophisticated mathematics, and astronomy, but practicing one the most barbaric religions the planet has ever seen. Yet, as far as I know, the Conquistadors never saw anything in the process of being built. If the Spanish had seen machines capable of doing that work they’d have written about it. They’d have brought that technology to the old world. Think of what Europe could have done if the Europeans had the machines to shape, and move materials on the scale of Chichinitza, or Mach Pichu. My guess is the Indians who lived in the jungles of Mexico, and Central/ South America were not the ones who built. But that raises the question: Who was it, then?
JWM
Every dead Ukrainian moving forward is the fault of the Ukrainian government and NATO. Russia is the Terminator – no matter how much they’re injured they’ll just keep adding more troops, more weapons, more firepower, nothing will stop them from pouring more and more resources to achieve the same end result.
Russia offered several times to allow surrender to those in that basement, but the Ukrainian government won’t let them surrender. So who is the bad guy here? Who is commuting the atrocities?
Every person who advocates for more weapons is just advocating more dead Ukrainians with the same result happening later. Vietnam and Afghanistan all over again -the same end results in both places would have happened but with fewer deaths if the US hadn’t got involved. Like both those historical examples, the support today is for a corrupt government that commits as many atrocities against its citizens as the enemy, and every American advocating for more arms is just advocating killing more people without s chance in the same end result. The adjectives for these people are naïve or evil.
There are no good guys in this conflict, but everyone is brainwashed by the propaganda.