“Hello! My name is Izas Manu VI”

January 8, 2023 //

That’s “the Historical Jesus” To You.

In my third online discussion with Ralph Ellis, we focus in on the name of “Jesus” — where did it come from? What was it exactly, prior to all the translations?

Leading up to this chat, I had directed Mr. Ellis to the YouTube channel Religion for Breakfast, where host Andrew Henry discusses the current academic consensus on the name of Jesus, in two videos.

Andrew Henry, host of *Religion for Breakfast* on YouTube.

Mr. Elllis, who has written three books with “Jesus” in the title, offers his rather different take.

Also prior to our chat, I had asked Mr. Ellis about what he thought of the name of “Joseph” — the Gospel Jesus’ father. Or “worldly father,” as we might have called him in church, when I was a kid. Since Ellis believes that the historical Jesus’ natural and quite real father was King Abgarus Monobazus of Edessa, where did the name “Joseph” come from? I had suggested it was just impishly inserted into the gospel story. But Ellis thinks it may very well have been Abgarus’s adoptive, “Jewish” name. Why? It turns out he has an interesting theory about this, and it is completely plausible. Indeed, it is congruent with the rest of the story as he’s explored it in his many books:

As always with Mr. Ellis, our conversation runs wide, and deep into the history. In the video version of the podcast I have tried to make it easier to follow, with a few visual aids:

My dog only interrupted once.

As always, I now have more questions. Perhaps I will invite Mr. Ellis back onto the program — I am very curious about Judas, for instance, and it was Judas of Gamala who really started the movement that became the Jewish Revolt. The more I read Josephus — and his four works (The Jewish War, The Antiquities of the Jews, The Life and Against Apion) provide quite the kick — the more impressive Mr. Ellis’s interpretation seems to me.

twv

N.B. The YouTube version is now up.

Categories History, iTunes, Podcast, religion, SoundCloud

Bitch “Scientist”

January 3, 2023 //

Ah, word choice: “been with.”

And “trans canine” is indeed a gruesomely hilarious result of the gender movement, and the left’s desperate anti-natalism which I see lurking behind its insane forms of trendy identitarianism.

Shakespeare’s Polonius advised: “To thine own self be true.” But few seek this kind of individualistic humanism any longer, and the cultural path led us to a place where fewer and fewer bother cultivating their own selves with any degree of success. So, as if to turn poor Polonius on his head, they have reversed day and night to become false to all people.

“I just want friends and a crowd” — this does capture the group categorization frenzy that youngsters seem unable not to engage in. Though this statement would have been more apt had she used “pack” instead of “crowd.”

Bestiality farded up as “trans caninism” is at least funny.

I haven’t been reading many satires recently since the artless satires of our reality appear daily for our amusement.

The cult of freak-flag sexuality seems to be approaching stefnal bizarrerie. And I confess: I am not in the least interested in coercing her not to fuck her dogs. I assume that if a male dog will eagerly go at it with her, it is consensual enough for me. But it remains absolutely vital for the main run of society to mock this bitch and laugh at her antics, and warn children from becoming as horrific as she is eager to become.

Of course, this could all be a joke: a sick, twisted joke. A parody of leftist transgenderist identitarianism. Or some come-on for an OnlyFans account. Hers is the first naked pussy I have seen on Twitter, so the chance that this is some form of put-on is quite high.

If so, congratulations? Made us look:

But the best part of all may be “her” claim to be a scientist, and thus smarter than the rest of us:

Would a practicing scientist say such a thing?

Not likely. Though Fauci came close. But that merely proved he was a trans scientist. Not a real one.

twv

Categories Ideological currents, sexology, Twitter

New Year Squibs

January 1, 2023 //

Tulsi Gabbard 10h ·

On this New Year’s Day, I send you my deepest aloha—respect, love, and best wishes—in the new year. May you be blessed with a joyful, purposeful 2023. Aloha

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.

Categories Facebook, Random musings

Decadence After the Sexual Revolution

December 24, 2022 //

My late friend Noel used to say that the real division in society was between those who thought “we should pay and pay and pay for sex” — by which he meant sexual intercourse — and those who thought that “sex should be ‘free.’”

The first time I heard him say this, I minimized its profundity. I immediately translated this maxim as being about sexual responsibility, and I did not see why one couldn’t be free and responsible.

Of course, I was thinking as an individualist, and most people are not individualists. The “right,” by and large, thinks responsibility can only be inculcated in society by limiting sexual freedom, while the “left” seeks to reduce the burden of sexual responsibility in the pursuit of freedom. Individualists, on the other hand, tend to find both attitudes a bit hard to take.

The sexual revolution was launched as a liberatory enterprise, but chiefly succeeded in reducing the bite of responsibility with a handful of innovations:

1. improved contraception and prophylactics, decreasing the pinch of natural consequences for multiple-partner sexual activity;
2. increased frequency of abortions, through legalization, which made it easier for sexually active members of both sexes to avoid the burden of taking care of the natural by product of heterosexual unions; and
3. extensive “welfare” benefits given to women without spouses but with children.

These three things allowed the sexual revolution to really take off. But the political elements of these three developments — and the second and third are largely political in nature — were not demanded by the masses. They were pushed by the elites, who themselves, historically, tend to lean left on cultural and sexual matters.

But driving this idea was not merely that perennial and quite ancient temptation, freedom-without-responsibility. Deep in the heart of modern life another idea lurked, hidden just barely: over-population worries.

The sexual revolution has been pushed by elites as part of an anti-natalist agenda, a frank and sometimes cruel demand for general population reduction. Pushing the ideology of hedonism and the legal policies that helped help thrive served to curb population growth. Especially among whites, which allowed post WWII eugenicists to feel less Nazilike and more racially altruistic. Many elite thinkers and politicians frankly pushed an anti-Caucasian agenda as part of their neo-eugenics.

The arc of the implementation of this agenda has been breathtaking to watch, but I do have two predictions.

1. I think that now, with trans, we’ve arrived at the penultimate absurdity — the ultimate having been described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, but which I don’t think we can advance towards at present, because of limitations of current biotech. And trans will seal the end of the sexual revolution. It is too ridiculously absurd as well as manipulative of decadence: it too frankly defies the basic habits that maintain the civilization that encourages it. In ten years it’ll be worse than a deep embarrassment. There will be a crisis of consequences, yes (I predict suicides and mass revenge murders), which will lead to no longer being promoted. And the politico-cultural left will have suffered its second major comeuppance, after the fall of the Soviet Union (which itself echoed the post-socialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — see David Ramsay Steele’s book on Orwell).

2. But the elites will not give up. Their commitment to population reduction is classist and a matter of “identity.” So they will continue to support their agenda in the revolution that is now following the sexual revolution: the death revolution. Canada has already taken it up in a big way: the promotion of medically assisted suicide in a big, bureaucratized way.

We’ll see a lot more on encouraging suicide. Time to read Gore Vidal’s Messiah again, or watch, for the umpteenth time, Soylent Green.

Decadence is not just a matter of sex. It is food and death, too. Cannibalism and entomopophagy, and a whole lot more, too, will likely feature large in the near future. Our civilization seems to sport a death wish. And it is going to get ugly before it turns around.

twv

Categories Ideological currents, sexology, sociobiology/evolutionary psychology etc

Democracy & Anti-Democracy at Twitter

December 23, 2022 //

One theory of democracy is that it’s a stunt — a way to suck people into accepting more government than they would otherwise accept. Voting in elections is seen by these conspiracy theorists as fake, as a con job.

This is distinct from the idea that many elections are faked. Communists had an obviously fake form of democracy, where the outcome was nearly always known going in. It helps to have only one candidate, for example.

To discover that one or two or an alarmingly high number of elections are controlled not by voters but by hidden forces does not prove the conspiracy view of democracy, but it does suggest it. Which is why the Democratic sector of legacy media — most networks and news programs — is not reporting on the ongoing Twitter revelations much at all. Because Elon Musk has shown that social media interference in the dissemination of opinion and news during the 2020 presidential election was destabilized the integrity of that election, this is a topic too hot for propagandists to handle. It’s blankout time.

The Twitter Files, as subcontracted out by Mr. Musk to a handful of independent journalists, has been very instructive. Recently, we’ve learned that the FBI had a huge presence in Twitter’s employee ranks, with hundreds of former federal law enforcement and intel agency personnel swelling the ranks of the company. They even had their own employee server and new former-fed employee welcoming parties. And it turns out that the government paid Twitter to censor in partisan ways.

And Elon Musk has point-blank stated that the same sort of things were going on in other social media outfits.

This is not “regulatory capture,” where corporations imperialize bureaus by swapping personnel. This is partisan government-worker capture of business, not much different than how Nazi Germany worked: one party planting operatives in every major business.

Meanwhile, Mr. Musk has continued his goofy online polls. Earlier he had let Trump and “all” banned users back onto Twitter because of polling results. On the 18th he polled his audience about whether he should continue as CEO, saying he would “abide by the results of this poll.” A greater-than 14 point spread favored his resignation.

And then someone suggested that only paid blue-checkmark people should vote in such polls, and he accepted the idea.

The latest tweet of @elonmusk’s that I have read stated, “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!”

Stunt!

twv

Categories information vs misinformation vs disinformation, Institutional Reality, journalism

The Wrench in the Works

December 15, 2022 //

Terrorism may be switching gears.

In The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907) by Joseph Conrad, a terrorist saboteur named Adolf Verloc seeks to wreak havoc on England’s industrial base. Looming in the background? A historical target: the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

In Britain, Europe and America of that period, terrorism was on the rise. Anarchists and socialists were at the forefront of the activity.

In our time, on the other hand, terrorism has centered on Islamism and . . . school shootings.

Just how organized has this terrorism been? A matter of debate.

Now, the older form may be coming back in style: infrastructure terrorism — attacks upon our civilization’s most basic technologies. Monkey-wrenching, as Edward Abbey called it in 1975’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel about environmentalist terrorists.

But what’s going on now isn’t all that novel.

In February, three Midwest men pled guilty to planning attacks on civilian infrastructure, including power stations. Reason? White supremacy, the government tells us. In November, two power stations received gunfire, and there were six separate attacks on power stations in the Pacific Northwest. In early December, two powers stations in North Carolina were shot at, causing power outages, and a few days later someone shot a power station in South Carolina.

But federal intel agencies had been warning about this sort of thing at the beginning of the year — “DHS Warns That Right-Wing Extremists Could Attack Power Grid” was one headling — and I can imagine many people wondering if the Ohio prosecution may not be the result of another FBI set-up job.

We can think of all sorts of reasons for the return to attacking things, not people. The main point of terrorism is terror, of course, but is it a generalized terror or terror with a point? Or is some foreign power trying to send a message to our government, that the U.S. is easy to wound?

That was my first thought.

But the general worrry about civilizational collapse could be inspiring such attacks, causing them as a sort of “memetic contagion.”

Could infrastructure attacks be “the new school shootings”? For a different set of whackos?

Or is the government up to something, something so heinous that we are unlikely to believe it . . . thus making us sitting ducks for precisely that kind of ploy?

More questions than answers. So far. As futurist Bryan Alexander put it in his treatment of the topic, “this is an emerging story without a lot of documentation. It’s also potentially frightening.”

Yes. It is.

Should we hope for a memetic contagion explanation, and the idea that this is “merely” the next form of expression of rage, frustration, and anomie that has led to several decades of spree shootings in America and elsewhere?

I am afraid I don’t really “do” hope. I find hope in this context kind of pathetic and funny. We will see how the story evolves.

twv

Categories terrorism

Is It Finally Unravelling?

December 4, 2022 //

From the first rumblings of a vaccine to combat “the virus” I was skeptical. It’s not merely that I am skeptical of Big Government/Big Business relations, and that Big Pharma companies have really bad track records, and that the whole of the medical establishment has been on the wrong road for a long time — witness the ill health of the majority of Americans. It was not just that. It was that early on we learned of the spiked proteins, and that they were themselves dangerous to our health, and that the Big Pharma companies were producing vaccines that instructed recipients’ bodies to produce spiked proteins to induce an immune response. But those spiked proteins were themselves harmful, so why focus on spiked proteins? It seemed nuts to me. Dangerous.

But then, the whole thing seemed nuts to me. I had thought that established medical opinion was against introducing vaccination into an epidemic. I also looked at the basic risk factors, which could be mapped on several vectors, and thought: getting the whole world to accept a new gene-therapeutic medicine without proper study was to risk Flipper Baby results. It risked mass extinction, even. Via adverse effects ranging from cardiovascular disease to sterility. It’s as if the whole argument for proper testing of drugs was thrown over by elites and the masses at the same time in their panic over a new disease which they themselves felt more comfortable panicking about than studying.

And my fellow libertarians were, in the main, worse than no help. Accepting their own ignorance of the specifics, they forgot to apply skepticism about the distribution of knowledge and all their learned theories about government’s pernicious influence and swallowed, instead, the typical progressive’s gullible trust in The Experts.

But now the evidence is becoming clear beyond the attention of us stock skeptics:

In the summer of 2020, I was at the local Dollar General and the county commissioner I had voted for was there, wearing a mask like I was. I complained about the stupidity of the masks. I mentioned that they did not work as touted. He immediately responded with the need to “hold the course” . . . until (get this) “a vaccine can be rolled out.”

I looked at him as if he were a crazy man. But he was not. Is not. He is just someone who believes what the experts tell him, and he lacked the courage to doubt and inquire and resist folly farded up like a lipsticked pig.

I did not vote for his re-election.

We got the vaccines, and the mask mandates eventually came down. And I blocked a few “friends” on Facebook who were praising lockdown measures. Now, how long will we endure deaths due to myocarditis and other heart-related and clot-related diseases, obviously induced by the mRNA treatments, and just as obviously ignored by the people who think they are smart. But who do not possess any horse sense whatsoever. The kind of people who will be easily led to their slaughter, or accept the slaughter of millions of others.

twv

Categories A Journal of a Plague Year

Freedom of Speech & Press

November 23, 2022 //

Free speech wouldn’t confuse people so much if they thought a bit more about this term of art in the context of “freedom of the press. ”

Like freedom of speech, everyone — not just “journalists” — has free press rights. But that doesn’t mean that you get to go into the pressroom of your local newspaper and print out your favorite recipes, rants or porn. Your free press rights relate to your owned technology that can be used for transmitting ideas.

If you have a camera, printer, xerox, mimeograph, web press, Internet server, whatever, your free press rights pertain to what you own and may legally control. If the bank comes in and confiscates your press because you have defaulted on the loan, it’s not abridging your free press rights. Though such an act would hinder your press workings, by freedom of contract the bank is OK to do affect your ability “to speak” via the press.

Arguably, though, if the local mafia barges in and steals it, it does abridge those rights — the mafiosi’s theft is more than mere theft if done to squelch your printing about the mafia’s workings. And, by convention, this applies even more to governments, the traditional enemy of freedom of the press.

Freedom of the press is merely freedom of speech translated into the realm of transmitting speech beyond the reach of your vocalizations.

And, like freedom of speech, freedom of the press is not a fundamental right, no matter how primary a concern it be.

Both are terms of art, and one must have some knowledge of the social world to make sense of them. Not all speech is free speech, and not all press activities are free press actions — but the people who make this point most vociferously usually do so to suppress free speech and press. Which is why the issue is difficult.

twv

Summary Postscript: Both rights depend on property and custom. They are both instances of the basic human right to liberty, which includes the right to acquire, maintain, and divest property on whatever terms you may negotiate.

The Twitter-Pepe image, above, is by
Who Knows found on the You Know What.

Categories Basic Principles, Constitutional Concerns, Law, Lexicography

Suicide Bombers Are Rational!

November 17, 2022 //

When the New Atheist Movement became all the rage, after the events of 9/11/01, I was so jaded about the subject that I paid it scant attention. I was more than familiar with Richard Dawkins’s work, true enough, especially The Selfish Gene, and was mildly interested in his new stance against not only Christianity but Islam. Few dared say negative things about Islam, so I considered him something of a hero. But not an awe-inspiring one.

The second major figure in the New Atheist Movement was Christopher Hitchens, my favorite socialist. Or quasi-ex-socialist. He was glib, a first-rate writer, fast on his feet — or tongue — and did a good job in debates. But his book God Is Not Great sported what I thought of as such a horrible thesis — spelled out in one of its subtitles, How Religion Poisons Everything — that I had to distance myself a bit, no matter how atheistic I may be. Indeed am. Further, his reaction against “Islamofascism,” as he called it, led him to support the West’s jihad against Muslim countries, thereby stirring the nest and exacerbating the situation, or, as F. Marion Crawford put it long ago, “sew dragon’s teeth.” As I argued at the time, exactly the wrong policy: if Islam is so dangerous, best not to poke it over and over again.

The third figure in this movement is perhaps the most important, philosopher Daniel Dennett. But, as near as I could make out, Dennett suffered from being wrong on the issues in which he carved out somewhat unique positions. I was more a John Searle man.

The fourth “horseman” of this atheistic quartet, said to be so revelatory as to be “apocalyptic,” was Sam Harris. And he was my least favorite. He spoke well. He seemed thoughtful. He was obviously smart enough. But his most interesting positions were, like Dennett’s, ones in which he was clearly wrong. And, like Hitchens, his political stances seemed, uh, worse than reactionary: exacerbatory! So I never really paid him much attention.

But the man is influential. And he is a part of the “regressive” left, even if he wishes to see himself as against that movement.

Be that as it may, I mention my initial impressions of Harris early on in the latest LocoFoco podcast, featuring David Ramsay Steele:

Steele is preparing a book of “Critical Responses” to Sam Harris, so Lee Waaks invited Mr. Steele to talk with us on the LocoFoco Netcast, which you can view on Rumble:

I encourage you to go to Rumble and Locofoco.Locals.com and sign up for my feeds. Or even send me money, to encourage me to make more videos. Whereas I know I am just learning this craft, you have to admit that Lee’s and my guests are always interesting. Very interesting. Yes?

twv

Categories podcasts, Rumble, SoundCloud, terrorism

“Hello! My name is Izas Manu VI”

That’s “the Historical Jesus” To You.

Bitch “Scientist”

New Year Squibs

Tulsi Gabbard 10h ·

Decadence After the Sexual Revolution

Democracy & Anti-Democracy at Twitter

The Wrench in the Works

Is It Finally Unravelling?

Freedom of Speech & Press

Suicide Bombers Are Rational!

Goodreads

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