When I was a kid, my nightmares involved tilted houses with floors you had to climb up against the incline, roosters crowing at the window, and a yawning, chthonian Immensity that Jung would have loved to analyze.
One in five children are having nightmares about climate change, according to a British survey on Tuesday, as students globally stage protests over a lack of action to curb global warming. About 17 percent of children in Britain said worries about climate change were disturbing their sleep while 19 percent said these fears were giving them nightmares. The survey of 2,000 children aged eight to 16, conducted by pollster Savanta-ComRes for BBC Newsround, also found that two in five, or 41 percent, did not trust adults to tackle the climate crisis.
The Jakarta Post (Reuters), March 3, 2020
While I suspect that the brand X prophecy of CO2 increases leading to “climate catastrophe” is little more than a psy-op, the more I learn about the end of the last Ice Age, which humanity somehow survived — while most megafauna did not — indicates that we can indeed encounter great climatic terrors and that those terrors can haunt humanity for millennia.
Indeed, I suspect that the notion of an underground realm of the Dead as well as the terrors of “the Tribulations” and our civilization’s fixation on the very idea of a Millennium could all derive from the strange thousand-plus years of the Younger Dryas, through which humanity may have had to live in caves to survive:
I reference here the Human Origin Project, which does not appear to be academically acceptable, because the academics have, so far, proved remarkably reticent about incorporating newly discovered facts into the stories they tell.
The kiddies, these days, are told stories about a counterfactual present and imaginary future by adults who pose as their authorities. From these serioso story time moments many quivering true believers are made.
It is not necessarily a conspiracy theory to conjecture that one reason modern academics routinely evade discussion of the astounding destruction that occurred a mere twelve thousand years ago is that by denying the facts they can better parlay pseudo-science to make plausible weak-tea terrors like “man-made climate change.”
What is going on in our current climate is mere urination into the wind compared to the fire hose of the end of the Ice Age.
It may be the job of us heretics and apostates to throw a monkey wrench into the Great Global Warming Psy-op: tell your kids and their friends that their tax-funded teachers are almost certainly misinformed, and that they should be skeptical of adults (as well as, of course, children) telling tall tales to scare them into demanding political changes neither their teachers nor they, themselves, understand.
There are plenty of real terrors we must all confront.
Including that great, chthonian enormity of our future non-existence.
Is it the wise man or the fool who offloads his folly onto his politics?
What if most of us suffer from responsibility homeostasis? That is, we have only so much capacity for responsible action: the more responsible in one area of life, our irresponsible daemons must burst out in some other domain, like imps of the perverse.
This might explain the hordes of competent people, successful folk, supporting insane social policy and political programs.
But the worst ideologues are themselves foolish every which way. Responsibility homeostasis cannot explain them, can it?
Perhaps their mastery of video gaming or hackey sack or farding face is where all their sense of responsiblity winds up.
A grown man defending, today, Castro’s Cuba while continuing a long history of communist apologetics is hardly different than saying, in public, that “Hitler did some things right.”
Now, honestly, nearly everyone in America save my fellow individualist compeers would have to confess that Nazi Germany did a lot of things right. The war and racial policies aside, most of the Third Reich’s domestic policies would fall closely into line with today’s trendy socialists’ favored policies of heavy regulation, bureaucratic management of corporate enterprise, and radically egalitarian wealth transfer programs. The commonality between “national socialism” and “democratic socialism” should be pretty obvious — if you have at all studied the economic policies of Hitler’s Germany.
But that is not quite the point. Most Americans have the sense to treat Nazis as tyrants and therefore as political poison. A person — a politician! — not having the sense to regard Castro and Ortega and the USSR as tyrannical doesn’t show the good sense of your modal voter. It should be impolitic to defend even the “good” programs of totalitarian communists . . . unless you honestly itch to be a totalitarian yourself.
So, Bernie Sanders’s continued hard-socialist apologetics and general commie defensiveness is more than a mere tell. He is raising the gonfalon of his hatred and wickedness. He is basically signaling to us that we will have no standing to complain when the goon squads are set free.
…a demonstrated preference?
Alternatives to the contagion-spreading handshake:
1. mutual bowing 2. Roman forearm shake 3. “American Indian” salute (in the movies, “how”) 4. elbow bump 5. hip bump 6. prayer-hands “Namaste” 7. tap-dance routines
It has been 16 years since an Apollo astronaut who walked upon the Moon publicly insisted that the government (which he had worked for) had recovered crashed UFOs and were studying the non-human and presumably extra-terrestrial bodies found at the crash sites.
It has been the same amount of time since journalists brushed right over that story as non-news. Nothing to see here.
Most people have no knowledge of how eminent are many of the people who have confessed to UFO knowledge.
Journalists were either too chicken (cowardly in the face of shaming campaigns) or too CIA-controlled (look at the Who’s Who of intelligence-agency interns in major media) to follow up on a HUGE story.
So draw the conclusion: we cannot trust most journalists to frame the stories we read or listen to daily, especially those about foreign policy, government accountability, or anything of a partisan or even merely controversial nature.
And note: itnis apparent that UFOs are of vital “foreign policy” interest — there is nothing more foreign than “aliens.” If aliens they be.
The best thing our current president has said was to characterize the major media outlets as “enemies of the people.” They are, basically, enemies of the truth, of inquiry, of freedom of speech and press as general rights rather than as special privileges of members of their messed-up guild.
And the legacy of the Apollo astronaut whistleblowers (yes, multiple individuals) on the post-war official line on UFOs is now finally leaking out into the public.
What the upshot of the whole thing is, I don’t know. But I do think we should not be cowards or government stooges, like journalists, generally, are.
If Bernie gets the nomination he seeks, then we should overturn Tim Russert’s psy-op and label, as traditional, the GOP ‘Blue’ and the Democracy ‘Red.’
My own color would remain off-spectrum; perhaps, per David Lindsay, ‘Jale’ or ‘Ulfire.’
If environmentalists really believe the world is ending in 12 — no, that is so last year: eleven — years, I expect lots of savvy folk to renegotiate their mortgages to obtain lower rates in exchange for a balloon payment due at the end . . . after our prophesied enviro-Armageddon.
Of course, as is often noted, were catastrophic global warming with massive sea-level rises and hurricanes abounding really in our future, in-the-know folks like Barack and Michelle Obama would not be buying multi-million-dollar beachfront property.
Climate change cultists would head for the hills.
My checkmark for Tulsi will not be counted, for I cannot honestly say I prefer the Democracy or am a Republican. So this goes into the trashcan.
The Following Comment Led to a Debate Requiring Me Actually to Order a Book on “Gender Theory” — Sad Day
I have a different take on this [joke image below], as many of you know: while gender is said to be a social construct, the very idea of gender is an ideological construct, and I reject the groundwork ideology on multiple grounds. We can pretend there are four genders or a thousand, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is sex, and how we handle it. So, this joke is not quite as funny for me as it may be for some others.
If you admit the official definition of gender, though, you cannot then decisively state that there are only two. The word you are looking for is sex.
But because we were all timorous/obnoxious children once, we tend to wince at that word, or blush, or guffaw, so we have unthinkingly let ‘gender‘ gain ground as a euphemism, wreaking havoc on thought and culture.
Still, marginally funny joke. But of most interest as a sign of the times.
I will not be using this on my tombstone:
Epigraph to In the Valley of the Kings (2009), by Daniel Meyerson.
Evidence of life, by the Pacific Ocean, November 28, 2019.
A stopped clock may be right twice a day, but a stopped military clock is right only once per day.
Just a reminder: the Russia investigation “was a nothing,” as my father used to say. No evidence advanced to show that any American solicited aid from Russia, and no evidence that the meagre “interference” on social media by a bunch of Russians affected any outcome, not so much as one vote:
There is no allegation in the indictment of any effect on the outcome of the election.
. . . There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge, and that the nature of the [allegedly Russian] scheme was that the [Russian] defendants took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists, even going so far as to base their activities on virtual private network [VPN] here in the United States so if anybody traced it back to that first jump, they appeared to be Americans.
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as recorded by CNBC, February 18, 1018.
The build-up to the final indictments in the Mueller Probe was relentlessly breathless, saying that Trump was doomed. And then? Nothing. Zip. Nada. All we had were pathetic prosecutions, the most ludicrous being of the named Russian “hackers.”
It is worth mentioning that the United States regularly intrudes on other countries’ elections far more thoroughly and effectively. The clutched pearls of the anti-Trumpers is so disingenuous.
And remember, one of the more recent elections that the U.S. Government interfered in was in the Ukraine.
So, naturally, as if led by an invisible hand with a wicked wit, Democrats, Deep State operatives, and the corporate media have pushed a bizarre Ukraine “interference” and “quid pro quo” and “bribery” allegation against the president for allegedly soliciting Ukrainians to “interfere” in our elections by investigating Joe Biden, Trump’s “political competitor.”
This is worth remembering as we gear up for the great fizzle that seems imminent regarding impeachment.
Although we do learn some of our history from hoaxes, we learn far more of it from sources that are unabashedly fictional. Rather than our quest for ammunition or enlightenment, it is our yearning for entertainment that most often leads us astray. A 2001 study, for instance, found that nearly two-thirds of high school students surveyed based their understanding of the Vietnam War on the movie Forrest Gump. The same pattern might hold for the First Thanksgiving if only Hollywood found it more interesting.
Robert Tracy McKenzie, The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us About Loving God and Learning from History (2013) .
The “freedom of assumption” lies at the heart of human ontology, and it is our consideration of non-facts that make us who we are, and even allows us to act:
Dale Jacquette, Alexius Meinong, The Shepherd of Non-Being (2015).
Note to praxeologists and “objectivists”: our values are determined by fancy as well as facts.
Meinong’s innovation is very similar to George Santayana’s doctrine of essences — which Santayana referred to as “promiscuous” in that the objects of our thought require no existence to be meaningful.
And from this line of reasoning we can see where the Ontological Argument fails.
This was my Thanksgiving message on Facebook, expressing my gratefulness for all the important objects of consciousness that do not exist.
The Fourth Estate relentlessly pushes political power, but has no interest in uncovering the truth for our benefit. If the journalists/papers/news channels were really interested in Story they would be all over some of the biggest stories of our time. But their interest in Story is circumscribed by their interest in partisan power-mongering. What they offer, instead, is Ideological Narrative. Not quite the same thing. Because of this, they are easily influenced by the CIA and the rest of the Deep State, and side with it.
And they have no interest in ‘protecting women’ or #metoo or anything even slightly noble . . . if it disrupts their narratives of expanding secular power and the subjugation of a free people.
As I understand the current impeachment case, it seems to have problems:
1. Neither the infamous quid or the notorious quo of the quid pro quo actually occurred — at best the case has it that Trump wanted to withhold aid to Ukraine in exchange for a promise to investigate the corruption of the Bidens, but the aid was eventually given and the investigation did not happen.
2. The Ukrainian president was most interested in a meeting with Trump, and appears not to have realized at the time of negotiations that aid was on hold. Negotiating for meetings is trivial b.s. not worthy of review by Congress. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying in a deposition, not for his special White House hotel grift.
3. Testimony from the prime witness has Trump explicitly denying, upon a request for clarification, the withholding of aid as a negotiating tactic.
4. Rep. Schiff and the pro-Deep State press (CNN, MSNBC, et al.) continually characterizes what Trump wanted as ‘investigating a political rival’ and not as investigating obvious and frank and even boasted-about [‘well, son-of-a-bitch’] corruption on the part Joe Biden and his son.
5. The continual denials of any evidence for Biden wrong-doing by Democrats and the Deep State press, is mere stonewalling and denial — lying.
6 The principle of the Double Effect is at play here: we expect more than one motive to go into any complicated maneuver like the disputed Ukraine negotiation. Since investigating corruption is entirely legitimate, that provides more than enough cover even to get what Trump may have wanted regarding his ‘political rival’ Biden.
7. The irony of charging Trump with trying to get foreign powers to help get dirt on a political opponent is PRECISELY what Hillary Clinton did with the Russian Dossier — how pot-and-kettle can they get?
8. And as for the sheer horror of investigating a political rival, that is what Barack Obama did to Trump’s campaign. Quite clearly.
9. The whistleblower heard nothing himself — it was all hearsay, and after the testimonies, that ‘heard said’ turns out to be mere unheard suspicion.
10. It is obvious from the very words and grimaces of testifying Deep State operatives that what they really objected to was that their beloved ‘interagency consensus’ was being derailed by the new president’s very different approach. Anyone with an ounce of skepticism about the FBI, CIA and ‘the interagency’ should not give one vermin patootie for their commitment to their policies — they are not supposed to be in charge. Why any American would be sympathetic to this crowd of professional liars and incompetents I don’t know.
There is more, but this is enough to make me utterly incredulous about the charges, which seem weaker and more indicting of the side marshaling the indictments than of Trump.
Talk about ‘interfering in our elections’! This story is out there, but does not seem to be getting much play:
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota-5th) was recruited by a foreign government, received funding from a foreign government, and passed sensitive information through intermediaries to Iran, a Florida court has been told, as The Jerusalem Post confirmed. Speaking to the Post, the office of the Congresswoman denied the allegations. The claims came during testimony by Kuwati-born Canadian businessman Alan Bender, who was giving evidence in the trial of Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad al-Thani. The Qatari emir’s brother stands accused of ordering his American bodyguard to murder two people, and of holding an American citizen hostage. His deposition, obtained by Al Arabiya English, was authenticated by the attorney for the plaintiffs, according to the publication. Speaking from Toronto by video link, Bender told the Florida District Court that he met with Qatar’s Secretary to the Emir for Security Affairs Mohammad bin Ahmed bin Abdullah al-Masnad and two other senior Qatari officials. According to his sworn deposition, the three officials told him: “If it wasn’t for our cash, Ilhan Omar would be just another black Somali refugee in America collecting welfare and serving tables on weekends.”Bender testified that the officials asked him to recruit American politicians and journalists as Qatari assets, and that when he objected, was told that several prominent figures were already on the payroll. Omar was described as the “jewel in the crown,” he said.
Donna Rachel Edmunds, “Ilhan Omar denies being ‘Qatari asset,’ witness confirms Jerusalem Post report,” Jerusalem Post, November 28, 2019.
But, that being said, if these accusations prove true, many crimes may have been made in all this. But not treason, since America is fighting no declared wars.
It is well known that the title Benjamin R. Tucker gave to Steven T. Byington’s translation of Max Stirner’s great German work, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, is far from a perfect analog of the original. The Ego and Its Own does not suggest the original meanings in anything like its fullness. That being the case, what would be a better title? Something, I think, like
The Self-Owner and His Property
The Self-Owned Self
The Properties of the Self-Owned Self
Oneself as Owned Self
The Self’s Own Liberated Property
A lot of self-help book titles come to mind:
Disowning Servility
De-Slaving the Self
Freer Selves Self-Owning
Taking Ownership of Oneself
And perhaps more scholarly visions could hail from the title:
Selfism from Max Stirner to Jack Woodford
The Properties of Property and the Ownership of Self
Oneself as Self–Proprietie: The Ownership of Personhood
And one that I’m working on:
The Self and Its Aptness
A friend suggests “aptitude” is a better word than “aptness,” but the primary definitions of “aptitude” scuttle the intended meaning, and so is not apt.
The above squibs have all been culled from my personal and professional Facebook page, from the last few days’ postings. The photo at top is something I snapped at Long Beach Peninsula today, a bright, sunny, cold day: seagull prints in the sand.
I know that most of my friends are somewhat alarmed at my recent interest in UFOs, are even embarrassed for me. My skepticism in this and related areas of thought had been long-standing.
Confession: What I realized, a few years ago, was that my skepticism was cheap, based mostly on a lack of knowledge — a nescience rather like that demonstrated by all those folks who scoff when they hear about comparative advantage and the case against protectionism: ignorance.
A profound ignorance coupled with a deep anti-intellectualism and lack of curiosity.
My excuse was understandable, because my past skepticism rested, in great part, on a common-sense heuristic in which I outsourced my judgment to experts. I had personally experienced no paranormal events, hallucinations not counting. Unfortunately, those experts in whom I had placed my trust engage in a pattern of evasion which, once you notice it, proves hard to unsee. Worse, the authorities who shored up and encouraged my sort of skepticism were incoherent, inconsistently pushing obvious disinformation one instance, and then acting as if what they had said were the opposite of the truth.
Then, when I took step back and scanned for a meta-view of the subject, its history, and my variety of skepticism in the context of the wider visions, I noticed that my skepticism served a social function.
That social function had nothing to do with a search for truth.
Worse, it became apparent that my sort of skepticism could easily be manipulated to serve a nefarious purpose.
Part of its social function was to shore up a class system based on belief, particularly meta-beliefs, which in turn tied to an agenda that had been pushed for over a hundred years: the establishing of a cognitive elite that would secure advantages for its credentialed members gained at the expense of people who could succeed without benefit of formal education.
I have been reading far and wide on subjects related to UFOs, recently. And Richard Dolan is one of the few ufologists whose stance in the discipline . . . exhibits epistemic discipline!
In this talk, which is sensible and worth considering carefully, he gets down to the central, core issue that may very well be the key to understanding the rationale for keeping secrecy going: what if the truth about the subject would be too unsettling for many to handle?
At 12:34, Dolan speaks of the “many hints” about the “deep, deep nature to this secret” that “would be too hard for the world to know.” Dolan says that someone whom he regarded as reliable told the tale how when President Carter was told the Big Picture Truth, he wept.
Indeed, that image, of James Earl Carter, Jr., crying upon learning a truth about our world, is what I have suspected for some time — and which crystalized for me when I extrapolated from what I was learning about the end of the Ice Age.
Most of the myths of the ancient religions — the in-toto rejection of which began our science and our general secular perspective — were not just human fantasy. They were half truths at the very least. And the half that is true might be as deeply unsettling to materialists as to the devout.
Which could be why Carter wept — if he had indeed learned anything.*
Concession: I do not know what the disturbing truth is.
Has our race been manipulated for eons by some Alien Intelligences, as Erich von Däniken famously pushes? Are we Non-Playing Characters in a vast holographic Simulation? Are time travelers from our distant future seeking to save their kind by learning where things went wrong in ours? Has there been a space-faring crypto-terrestrial civilization here on our planet for millions of years, often working behind the scenes? Or are we now witnessing a “breakaway civilization” that started in the 1850s, or the 1940s — the latter, perhaps, with stolen Tesla-tech?
Yet we live in a stefnal world, as Thomas M. Disch argued in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998). Disch himself would not be pleased with my recent speculations and doubts-about-doubting, for he regarded the UFO biz as just a bunch of lies. Nevertheless, when he confronted his own truth, whatever that was, he did not merely weep, as Carter is said to have done. Disch killed himself.
There are terrors everywhere.
At my level of knowledge, I cannot dismiss the vast amount of testimony and data about what seems to us as alien phenomena. Neither my youthful bigotries nor my adults ones can really be allowed to dominate.
This notion of a Deep Unsettling Truth is occult in some surprising ways: for its newness seems old-fashioned. In the Epistle to the Ephesians there is a passage that might give a hint about why Jimmy Wept:
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
It is worth noting, my anarchist friends, that the original Greek for what has been translated as “the authorities,” in the above, has itself an ominous ring: “The Archons.”
According to “The Hypostasis of the Archons,” a gnostic text, the “reality of the rulers” is a complex affair.
From The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Harper & Row, 1977), James M. Robinson, ed.**
And if any of that bizarre assemblage proves true, I can see why Carter might weep and Disch would blow his brains out — the latter event having taken place eleven years ago today.
twv
* From other sources I had been informed that, unlike Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan, Carter had pointedly not been briefed on the UFO situation.
** The introduction to the translation of this text is worth reading:
Alan Shepard was the oldest man to walk on the Moon, at least according to NASA (I love putting in that caveat). He was in his 48th year when he became the fifth Apollo astronaut to trod the lunar surface.
Charles Duke, the tenth to do so, was in his 37th year — and the youngest — when he became peripatetic so far from home.
Four of these temporary selenites still survive. Eugene Cernan, who was the last astronaut to have walked there, died two years ago.
Buzz Aldrin and Edgar Mitchell, the second and sixth lunar perambulators, along with Apollo 15 command module pilot Al Worden, claim to have seen UFOs while manning their respective Apollo spacecraft, and took (and “passed”) lie detector tests to add weight to their claims. Mercury and Gemini astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. — who was scratched from an Apollo mission — claimed, in his autobiography, to have seen UFOs not in space but as a pilot of an aircraft.
Meanwhile, your spaceflight dreams could be made real, if you have enough money, or (this is a longshot) drive some backroads late at night and wander into a UFO amenable to hitchhikers or especially interested in probing your nether regions. Always wear clean underwear.
Wirkman Comment 
