With Martin Luther King’s birthday having just passed, my interest turns to the next month’s holiday. Here’s something from Office Holidays dot com:
Washington’s Birthday is a federal holiday celebrated on the third Monday of February. At a state level, it may be called President’s Day, with an apostrophe that moves about from state to state.
Though it may be technically incorrect, the federal holiday is often colloquially referred to as Presidents’ Day. The Associated Press Stylebook, most newspapers and some magazines use the form “President’s Day” as an alternate rendering of “Washington’s Birthday.” The name Presidents’ Day is also the more common version of the name when used internationally.
This confusion as to the name is that despite its status as a federal holiday, states are free to name this holiday as they wish or even whether or not it is observed as a public holiday in that state.
I live in Washington State, named after George Washington. I checked the state’s website. The celebration is called “Presidents’ Day.” I kid you not.
The politicians and government functionaries in my state are not to be honored. They cannot even muster the quantum of intelligence (or courage) to formally honor the man the state is named for.
From The Daily Wire we learn that Chelsea Handler once believed — or, at least, she said she once believed — that the Sun and Moon were the same object. “I didn’t know until I was 40 years old that the sun and the moon were not the same thing.” Her belief was that, “Honestly, I just assumed when the sun went down, it popped back up as the moon.”
What an odd belief. I guess she was trans before it was cool, and for her the Moon was just the trans-Sun, and vice versa.
What I don’t really understand is how, as a child, she was not inquisitive enough to research astronomical issues by herself. But this apparently never crossed her mind. She appears to believe that encyclopedias and other books are not relevant to childish inquiry: “at a certain age when you don’t know, you know, the answers to questions, it’s too embarrassing to ask questions. You know, you just have to pretend, you know.”
I find the incurious nature of most folks utterly off-putting.
But then, for my part, I never gathered around with friends for group masturbate-o-thons, like she famously did in her youth. So I guess she would think my modesty utterly puzzling and off-putting.
In honor, it is said, of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King: a new statute in Boston . . . so ugly that I hazard it must reference the preacher’s rapes.
Headless in Boston.
The woke, once again, send me into the cadre of anti-postmodernists.
If you are going to make a celebratory statue, make it classical, where the artist salutes and the art exemplifies achievement, nobility, justice, courage, and the like, not … whatever this … does.
But there is an “explanation”:
If a statue needs unfamiliar outside material to be understood what it represents, it is terrible public art.
I’ve lost track of two of the novels I’m halfway through reading, one by William Dean Howells and the other by Poul Anderson. Both are likely in my office, which I guess I’ll have to tidy up soon. So here I am well into the night and approaching morning, still wide awake, but tired, looking at a Poe collection, an elegant miniature hardcover from Könemann. I’m thinking of embarking on a formal essay on Nabokov’s Lolita, so Poe not surprisingly came to mind. There is a mystery behind Lolita, one uncovered a decade or so ago, and most of what has been written about it has been pishposh. And here it is, half after the beginning of the new day’s fifth hour, and I cannot remember having read Poe’s longest detective story. I know I read “The Gold Bug” in my teen years. But the others? I forsook Poe’s crime and horror fiction for his comedies, “The Imp of the Perverse” and “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” Now it is time, perhaps, to return to my reading roots.
Or finish this whiskey. I am not awake because of missing books, but because of pain. There is no position of recumbency that evades pain, tonight, so every position prevents sleep. So how to sleep? The whiskey may help.
I’ve been annoyed with Tulsi Gabbard’s past and repeated use of “aloha” massaging, but maybe I should judge it apt for a Hawaiian, and acknowledge that by her use of it she is reviving the traditional American principle of federalism, asserting a substantive localism into America’s pernicious nationalist culture that afflicts both left and right.
So, ‘Aloha’ all around. Except I am from the Evergreen State, the Chinook State, and our motto is Al-Ki — ‘by and by.’ Which means, I think: ‘maybe some day.’
Now that’s a motto, up there with ‘festina lente’!
I am a conspiracy theorist. I theorize about conspiracies. I construct and appraise conjectures about conspiracies. I am interested in the data that might falsify conspiracy conjectures. But I am also interested in the data and arguments that falsify (or at least undermine the applicability of) invisible hand theories.
Indeed, I generally oppose the meta-theories about conspiracies that are frequently promoted by invisible hand theorists. I am underwhelmed by them. I also consider them as possible expressions of an adaptive strategy to the conscious stigmatization of conspiracy theories, which have been promoted by bureaus of our federal government’s intel agencies. Which we know exist and which we know engage in stigmatization as a means of social control.
I consider this all so obvious that my usual reaction to quick-react anti-conspiracy “skepticism” is eye rolls.
Something I used to engage in as an invisible hand theorist.
One reason I changed my mind is that I noticed my own prejudices, and who was most served by them.
This all being said, I recognize that much of stigmatization on these matters is an invisible hand process. Spontaneous, you might say.
This is a good beginning for the New Year, a serious discussion of UFOs and parapsychology. Eric Weinstein makes epistemic points that I’ve been making for six years, but most of my friends simply ignore. I share Weinstein not because I like him — I don’t know him, and he often borders on pomposity — but because maybe my friends will listen to him since they won’t confront my points. Weinstein’s basic attitudes are close to mine.
Clarke’s Third Law is in play here:
It has been really helpful, in my case, to have always existed in a political-cultural minority. I can easily believe that governments do some things well but not others, while generally opposing governments, and therefore contemplate competence in the keeping of secrets.
What I find odd are all my fellow individualists falling for fairly obvious psy-ops, and for continuing a long legacy of government-managed stigma to protect government secrets. This latter I judge to be spooky.
People who want to rule other people are more dangerous than those who don’t. One problem with democracies is that they elicit leaders from all strata of society, and the most desirous ”to lead” are those with the strongest itch to rule. Over time and generations, more power accrues to narcissists and egoists and other shady people-pushers, and the spirit of ruling others suffuses whole populations, where greed and hatred and pride get covered over with the garlands and fig leaves of “morality,” but merely as disguise. So we have the desire for advancement encouraged, not curbed, by conscience — conscience becomes an excuse for outrageous enormities, and the people increasingly believe deeply perverse things, twisted.
Which is where we are at now.
“One idïôt is one īdîôt. Two īdíots are two ídïóts. Ten thousand ídíöts are a pòlitical party.” — Franz Kafka
A great “quote” that I stumbled upon in social media. But Kafka did not say this. The correct quote appears to be:
Fanfare, bandiere, parate. Uno stupido è uno stupido. Due stupidi sono due stupidi. Diecimila stupidi sono una forza storica. Leo Longanesi, Parliamo dell’Elefante: Frammenti di un Diario (1947).
The issues upon which I have most changed my mind in recent years are about how people handle “memes” (mimicked and repeatable behaviors) within institutions and organizations. I now believe there is no enormity a normal person in a privileged position in the academic, government, or medical realm will not help do, just so long as that person can go about calling him- or herself a ”good person” while retaining his or her position. They will fool themselves into thinking that the latest study must be correct (if it agrees with their political allegiances), censorship is free speech, or genocide is salvation. It will all be calculated in a series of nested marginal moral excuses, and they will send the Jews to the ovens, children to the castrator’s knife, dissidents to the gulags, and the farmers and their customers to starvation. The enormities of the 20th are now building up for an exciting and perhaps excruciating reprise. Though this time most of it will be covered over, a bit. The idea is to get the Jews to march into the ovens with eagerness; parents to sacrifice their children’s sexual futures with fervent hope of being ”in” while doctors receive their normal paychecks; dissidents to engage in self-shackling; and the farmers will be bought off, with their farms left to produce oil substitutes or . . . plastics . . . or open space for ”wildlife.”
So my medium-level alarmist predictions appear to be emerging as instantiations in reality. Remember all my arguments how insane a “vax“ policy would be in a new pandemic? I expected a number of negative outcomes. Here they come: excess deaths; mortalities labeled “unknown.” In one post, I guessed it’d be a clear pattern in three years. We’re one year in. The pattern is becoming fairly clear.
The malefactors at Facebook gave me a warning on fact checked pandemic info, but they are indeed liars, and they probably want you to die. Especially if you hold the wrong beliefs.
You see, humans are a cancer on the planet, and killing off a few billion is an entelechy buried deep within many moderns — leading to a death wish. Which nudges them at the margins of their consciences to commit genocide. An astounding thing.
Here is Paul Jacob on the subject, from his daily program:
The safety and efficacy of the coronavirus vaccines has been disputed from the beginning.
What this usually means is that those of a skeptical mind challenge the confidence of the pro-vax mantra — “safe and effective” ad nauseam — and, when they find stats that run counter to this official position, they publicize those stats. Then, major media outfits make a few carping criticisms of the new studies and quickly proceed to assuredly re-state as fact the original and now more-dubious propaganda.
Meanwhile, social media censors dissidents. And when more studies come out casting grave doubt on either the safety or the efficacy of the new drugs, those receive little public attention.
How Alex Berenson was treated is a good example of the methods of the orthodoxy. Take Wikipedia’s judgment: “During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-19 and its vaccines,” the article confidently runs. “He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown; once COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, he made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”
False claims! In olden times — why, it seems like just a few years ago — a major news and history resource would not baldly call some contentious matter “false” or “true.” It would state the claims and then let the counter-claims carry their own weight.
In the case of “the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines,” though, it has become clear: their efficacy wanes, diminishing quicker with each dose, leaving the unvaccinated with proportionally fewer infection and spreading events than the “boosted.”
The government has admitted that there are not infrequent sightings of anomalous UFOs (“UAPs”) that feature “the five observables”:
hypersonic speeds
instantaneous velocity
trans-medium travel
displaying stealth mode
positive lift
This admission — to Congress (what any president has been told is unknown) — blows the lid off of the Official Position from the Pentagon from the 1940s through the aughts. The scorn given de rigueur by academics to anyone who professes even mere agnosticism on the issue is now known to be either a cultic move to protect the dominant naturalistic paradigm, outrageously anti-scientific ignorance, or a lie.
The world may seem to be crazy, but this element of the crazy is at least understandably uncomfortable. And I reiterate what I’ve said before: the reason for the blanket of silence and prevarication directed (the evidence clearly suggests) by the CIA and the Pentagon is likely that it upsets two powerful groups: materialist scientists and religious people.
These two quotations remind me of Augustine’s confession of his younger days: “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!” Communism is the holding of orgies by those who insist upon the ideal of celibacy.
“We are waiting for the withering away of the state . . . The highest development of state power in preparation of the preconditions for the withering away of state power — that is the Marxist formula. Is that ‘contradictory’? Yes it is ‘contradictory.’ But this contradiction is inherent in life and it completely mirrors the Marxist dialectic.’” —Joseph Stalin
“‘Don’t you want to abolish state power?’ Yes we do, but not right now. Why? Because domestic reaction still exists, because classes still exist. Our present task is to strengthen the people’s army, the people’s police, in order to protect the people’s interests.” —Mao
The Netflix show Midnight Mass:
was not based on F. Paul Wilson’s vampire novel of the same name;
is a vampire story where the word “vampire” is never used and the lore is not ever discussed (thus is a de facto “alternate history” story where Polidori and Bram Stoker never wrote their most famous works);
is the most religious-based vampire story I’ve yet encountered (the religion in this case being Catholicism);
is more “daring” in its religion-referencing than even Dracula 2000, which I regarded as terrific;
has one of the best vampires on screen I’ve ever seen;
has really good writing and acting throughout;
has the best hymn-singing finale to a TV show (that I can recall);
nevertheless ends with a sort Buddhist/pantheistic message, but it is
not as overtly anti-Christian as it often feels like; and, finally,
has a chilling, Nurse Ratchedy-type character in the oh-so-sanctimonious Bev Keane, played by the brilliant Samantha Sloyan. But all the actors were great, definitely not excepting Hamish Linklater, who plays the bloody (yes, this is apt) priest.
Note: the most memorable figures in history, according to Pantheon.world, from Muhammad at #1 to Karl Marx at #37, are all of the male “gender” (read: sex), after which we get Mary, mother of Jesus (#38), Queen Elizabeth II (#40), and Joan of Arc (#49).
The order of famed composers descends from Beethoven (#5), to Mozart (#10), to Bach (#18). I would have thought that Bach was a bigger deal, even in the popular mind, than Mozart. But I guess I would have been wrong.
Of famed philosophers, Pantheon’s list runs as follows: Aristotle (#7), Plato (#11), Socrates (#16), Confucius (#28), Gautama (#32), Kant (#39), Descartes (#43), and — the only real surprise here — Avicenna (#48).
I repeat, for the inattentive — and apropos of my first paragraph — “male” and “female” pertain to sex, not “gender theory.” Which is a recent invention. This seemingly pedantic point is known and acknowledged by gender theorists, when they are being rational. That nearly everyone gets this wrong says something first about gender theory and quite a bit more about nearly everybody.
I suppose the “conspiracist” theory of Joe Biden would be that he was chosen by the globalists for a purpose: to destroy the power and prestige of the United States to make way for . . . world government . . . China . . . our alien overlords . . . something something something.
Biden certainly has left a dump on the floor and is making his followers eat it up. Still enjoying the cries from the coprophiles: ‘but look what Trumpians eat! What fascists! Racists!’
You cannot say this isn’t grimly funny.
Yesterday, in Walmart, a likely lad had a sneeze coming on — I could see it build — so he removed his mask to not mess up what he was breathing through.
Ours may be the first civilization to die off laughing at each other.
Beginning to realize why old people must die: to allow them their illusions about their replacements.
The cult of the omnipotent state is something I have been fighting all my adult life. But the cults of tribe and mob and Kultur? These I opposed in the third grade. The emergent property of groups — what Herbert Spencer called “superorganism” — is fascinating, sociologically, and when the social connections become faster and more complex, amazing things can happen. But I still insist that what matters to me is what The Individual takes away from the group and guides independent thought and action, not what the group does or what individuals do in tandem with the group. It is the civilization we carry on our shoulders, in private, that should be the standard, not simply that groups create new realities.
Individuals’ own realities, and the fantasies they create, in turn influence groups.
My dubiety about the vaxx mania is quite strong. And it increases when I hear things like this:
Folks who spit fire, wishing the unvaxxed to die, mock those same unvaxxed when they express suspicion that the vaxx has been designed to kill.
Vaxx proponents assert that the unvaxxed are causing new, more dangerous viral variants, just months after mocking Vanden Bossche for his warning that the vaxxes, which are not effective enough to induce herd immunity, will likely lead to immune escape, breeding new, more dangerous viral variants.
Almost no element of the pandemic does not contain some bizarrely spiked irony. Novel coronamemes!
Asking what color a person thinks his or her mixed-race-parented baby might be is not racist.
What, you ask? Even Ben Shapiro thinks that’s racist!
Well, Ben’s as fallible as anyone.
Sure, speculation on skin color may be about a racial marker. But one marker does not an ism make. Switch markers. Is it racist to speculate if your baby will be a redhead? No, it is not.
Such speculations may be engaged in by racists, but they are not necessarily racist. They may be indelicate. Sure. But who should care about such speculations? Many or most are innocent. To get worked up over it all?
If you tell me the Moon is made of green cheese . . . I’m going to laugh, of course, the idea being so preposterous. I could falsify the claim without much trouble, at least with extrapolations from facts and from theories well-established — like, you know, cheese is a product made of fermented milk, and we have no reason to believe in a lactose-heavy moon, etc. In addition, I would head you off at the pass, noting that the designation of our galaxy as “the Milky Way” can in no way excuse flights of fancy.
Now, were you to tell me that the Apollo lunar missions were all faked, I would express incredulity, again. But it’s not quite so far-fetched as the cheeze biz, and call me something less than a whiz, or wiz, I would have to take some trouble to process your claim. But I have looked into it, and can shoot it down. Though I admit, some of your points may continue to hold some interest.
But if you tell me that the Moon has a titanium crust and a much lighter, lower-mass core, and that it “rang like a bell,” seismically, when tested in the Apollo missions, and that this is recognized by scientists and NASA but not often talked about, and that our Moon is very strange all around, and, moreover, that it isn’t the only moon in our solar system to be extremely weird — Carl Sagan having speculated that Mars’s Phobos could be a space ship, its orbit being (how shall we say?) as puzzling as our moon’s, and sporting a monolith on its surface that (ahem) sticks out like a giant crystal or an intelligently-made building, and, further, that Saturn’s Iapetus turning out to look eerily like Star Wars’ Death Star — well, what do I do with all that? Not much. But the fact that we have these peculiar facts that don’t fit in easily with the Nothing-To-See-Here-Folks attitude of professional astronomers, who pooh-pooh any talk of anything paranormal as if their job were poo-pooing rather than exploring — all this does strike me as very odd, and evidence of something. I just do not know what.
Meanwhile, my experiments in writing long sentences proceed apace.
It is not sexist to acknowledge differences between the sexes. It is not racist to recognize differences among the races. It is not ageist to accept that you will grow old and die.
As anyone may have noticed, I’m not very big into “protests.” I turned on the idea of mass protest pretty thoroughly when I stumbled into Seattle’s 1999 WTO protests by accident, and then watched (from a safe distance) as the protests spiraled into mass violence.
Since I also opposed the WTO, you might think I would have been simpatico with the protesters. But no: they were mainly left-anarchist poseur hippie boys and their earnest, professional girlfriends, spouting contradictory and incoherent gibberish, unlearned and anti-factual and rather stupid.
The biggest difference never receives official attention: “right-wing” protests almost never lead to violence, “left-wing” protests almost always do.
This wasn’t always the case, and much depends upon how you define left and right, which I blogged about once again today. But in recent memory, left-wing protest tends to lead to rioting.
Remember just a few months and then weeks ago normal Americans — mostly but not all white — were promoting the Second Amendment in Virginia and then protesting the lockdowns in Michigan? In both cases the major media freaked over the weaponry on display. But there was zero to scant violence, during and after.
The main complaints were “I saw a Confederate Flag!” and “They aren’t social distancing!”
But media folks — they don’t mind seeing commie and anarchist flags, pointing their cameras elsewhere, and I haven’t heard any umbrage taken about the protesters in Minneapolis not wearing medical masks.
There were mask-wearers, of course, but those appeared to be rioters — and the Men in Black who were instigating mayhem.
So, one reason there may be violence associated with left-wing protests is that right-wingers sabotage them. But that isn’t the full story, for the anarchists at the WTO riots, and antifa and BAMN at more recent protests, are very, very left-wing, and very, very violent.
And do a lot of instigating.
While being institutionally supported by George Soros.
Further, masses of leftists seem more violent than masses of rightists.
The lack of objective reporting by the press is interesting.
It could be ideological: we rah-rah our side, we boo their side!
But it may be more craven: the media likes to cover violence, so encourages the protests that give corporate heads the stories that help with the bottom line.
I have never denied that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely dangerous. Why, it makes even the uninfected go mad.
Does it need to be said? No matter who instigates a destructive riot, riots are bad. No matter who casts the first stone, so to speak, does not let off the hook the second thrower, or the third, or the fourth. We can make judgments about people who attack innocent people and their property. Condemnation is the standard, traditional, and quite justified judgment.
“Outside instigators of violence” should worry those who think their protests are legitimate. If they go ahead and protest, and do not patrol their ranks, and their peaceful protest breaks out into looting and arson and street violence, then that’s a tragedy. If, however, every time a protest of your cause ends up that way, and yet you organize protests, you become complicit (to some extent) in the horrors of the crime wave.
I have seen credible (but not certain) accusations of instigation to violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere of undercover/off-duty police and of antifa and other anarchist groups, and much speculation about criminals, political groups, etc. What if it were a perfect storm of influences, from left, right and center?
Would it matter to protesters? If what they do is set off violence, then what they do is at best counter-productive.
Something other than protests need to be thought. I have suggestions.
But because they are rational suggestions, irrational people will not engage in them, now, will they?
Defending “peaceful protest” is fine, but if it always ends up violent, the defenses are inapposite.
Remember Martin Luther King, Jr.? Somehow, he took a lot of care to make his marches peaceful.
Today’s protests generally repudiate the principles of MLK. Yet everyone claims to admire him.
Par for the current course, though: seemingly earnest pieties are regularly repudiated in action.
Were you aware that notorious pick-up artist Roosh V. has repudiated his past and now preaches traditional Christian ethics?
I first became aware of him as he began undergoing his transition. It has been interesting to watch. I was of course aware of “the game” for many years, but had never really followed it. Roosh, however, is an interesting case.
So, the challenge is here: the famous anti-HCQ study is probably a fraud.
I had seen someone else make the case yesterday. On Twitter or Gab. Somebody else other than this linked author who deals with data on a regular basis was utterly incredulous about the data set described:
If you’re following at all the search for COVID-19 treatments, and possibly even if not, you will have seen the flurry of media coverage for the observational study in The Lancet ‘Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis. It made the news not least because hydroxychloroquine is the drug President Trump says he is taking in the belief that it will reduce his chance of catching COVID-19. This view is not backed up evidence until some randomised trials come in. Getting in before the trials, the Lancet study used propensity score matching to try to control for the non-random treatment. It found that taking hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were associated with an increased risk of heart problems. I am highly skeptical of the powers of hydroxychloroquine with relation to COVID-19 (‘skeptical’ in the sense that I have suspended judgement for now – there simply isn’t evidence either way). But I want the test of its properties to be done properly, with random controlled trials. And if we are to use observational studies (which I do not object to, they just aren’t as useful as an experiment where you can manipulate the treatment), they have to use real data. The data in that study, and in at least one preprint on a second treatment, were provided by an Illinois firm called Surgisphere. Allegedly the data represents the treatment and health outcomes of 96,032 patients from 671 hospitals in six continents. However, there is simply no plausible way I can think of that the data are real. I’ll say that again – I believe with very high probability the data behind that high profile, high consequence Lancet study are completely fabricated.
Peter Ellis, “A health data firm making extraordinary claims about its data,” free range statistics, May 30, 2020.
So, a major journal accepts a study on a highly politicized subject and — if this charge holds — scandal ensues.
This is par for the postmodern course, from what I can tell. We do not have as much actual science going on as we are led to believe. Much of it is scientism — pseudoscience. I assume you are aware of the replicability problem that has been dogging the heels of institutional science for the last decade. Many journals have also become corrupt or, at best, inefficient. (I just read the abstract of a paper co-authored by Dan Klein about “the paucity of theory in the Journal of Economic Theory.” Hilarious.) Much of the academic world has lost its way. The “scientific method” is not in practice when the “public testing” element is institutionally scuttled.
The problem, I believe, is government funding. For that puts science into the whorl of special interest incentives, and makes the subject area liable to something very much like “regulatory capture.”
Whole domains of science seem untrustworthy to me:
climatology paleontology ancient history economics
. . . I could go on and on.
Only when academics are held accountable on objective grounds can they be saved from corruption by politics and funding. And since the academy is by definition an exclusionary institution, accountability has to be imposed. It is imperative that non-academics speak up.
And let us be frank: this case is in part about TDS.
To what extent is COVID-19 panic driven by class insecurities? Most illnesses the well-off can avoid or pay for. The panic began when being rich did not seem to help, while lockdown mania grew as it became clear that the well-off were less negatively affected than the proletarian middle and lower income groups.
twv
The startling horror of wearing stripes with plaid made me go crazy with the filter. Still: stripe v. plaid!
Wirkman Comment 