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Babymetal goes Indian

This is actually my favorite so far of their new songs off Metal Galaxy. Kano is no Yui, but she appears to work with Su and Moa better than the other two girls they’ve tried. And this new Indian theme, in combination with their shows with The Hu, makes me suspect that Koba-metal is actually attempting to conquer the world.

Henry Haller is a gamma

A fellow Hesse fan reaches a conclusion:

I’ve been reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse and something occurred to me. I first intended to ask what sociosexual rank you think Harry Haller inhabits, but then I got to this passage and started laughing outside the sauna:

For long during this night’s walk I had reflected upon the significance of my relation to music, and not for the first time recognized this appealing and fatal relation as the destiny of the entire German spirit. In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals instead of opposing ourselves to this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless. 

Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music, in wonderful creation of sound and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strangers to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has been so lamentable a one. Well, I had often pondered all this, not without an intense longing sometimes to turn to and do something real for once, to be seriously and responsibly active instead of occupying myself forever with nothing but aesthetics and intellectual and artistic pursuits. It always ended, however, in resignation, in surrender to destiny. 

The generals and captains of industry were quite right. there was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning.

I wish I would have read Steppenwolf years and years ago because I think that passage would have helped me as much back then as it did today. At that passage I realized that it’s a book written by a German for the German people to help us understand ourselves. Occasionally someone asks you if it would be a good idea to move back to his own ancestral homeland. It may be a good idea, but it’s equally good to start by reading one’s own people’s literature because it was written for you yourself as one of those people.

A German girl I met on vacation about four years ago recommended that I read Steppenwolf, I think now because she recognized me as being truly German and as such would benefit from it like other Germans have. I plan now on diving into Goethe, as my grandfather told me a long time ago that “Goethe is the German Shakespeare.”

I’ve always felt that it was a bit ironic that the band that recorded “Born to be Wild” called themselves Steppenwolf since if they had remained true to the novel, the song would have been named “Born to be Mild”.

And “a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning” is a fairly accurate description of the average intellectual today, except, of course, for the bit about talent.

Mailvox: convergence creeps in

A reader emails about convergence creeping in at Project Gutenberg:

For some time now, I’ve been a volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders (DP), which is the main site providing public domain e-books for Project Gutenberg. I had hoped this project would be somewhat immune to convergence as its mission is to preserve any and all works of literature in the public domain.

However, today the CEO of Project Gutenberg, Gregory Newby, published a notice in the forums for Distributed Proofreaders:

We recently updated the website with information about submitting public domain works to Project Gutenberg. There are two notable changes. The more important change, to me, is to firmly write that PG only accepts works in the public domain in the US. Historically, we’ve added a reasonable quantity of copyrighted works (perhaps a few {20631733b5a15c3694dbfcf360b60a1948a54005354f1d1bb00d126531fe1735}). But now, we send copyrighted submissions to http://self.gutenberg.org .. this change isn’t impactful to DP, since DP, also works exclusively with public domain works (with very few exceptions). The rationale for being firm about PD-only is twofold. Mainly, because there are many ways a contemporary author can distribute his or her works on the Internet (in the olden days, PG was one of few eBook outlets that would accept contemporary works for free, unlimited redistribution). Secondarily, because we were never very good at it: we don’t offer many services to authors, including the ability to post improvements, different formats, get stats on their readers, etc.

The other notable change is more impactful for DP, though still rarely an issue. This is to be more explicit about not wanting items that are hate speech or predecessors to hate speech, or items that are pornographic and obscene.

Hate speech or “predecessors to hate speech”? The latter is a new one for me. Fortunately, there was a speedy and overwhelming backlash… this time.

After a large outcry by the volunteers at Distributed Proofreading, the CEO of Project Gutenberg was essentially forced to walk back his decision and remove the language banning “hate speech” from the Gutenberg terms & conditions. He’s now pledged to uphold an open collection policy.

He needs to be forced out anyhow, though. Because he’s shown that he’s more than willing to cuck, given that he already did so without even coming under any external pressure.

Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney is out

And the reviews are already up:

Former DC Comics artist Ethan Van Sciver crowd-funded his Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney comic book to the tune of millions of dollars, and while fans paid a hefty price tag for the comic, unfortunately, it fails to deliver.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney comes up short in terms of story, as it comes across as pretty boring, dull and confusing — and just when it starts to get good, it ends.

I say not surprisingly because this comic book reminds me of something put out in the early days of Image Comics when the Marvel Comics artists left and formed their own company in the 90s. While all of the Image founders were stellar artists, they weren’t exactly the best writers (i.e. Todd McFarlane on Spawn; Liefeld, really, on anything). I think the same applies here to Ethan Van Sciver.

Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney read as more of an extended prelude with Bendis-style exposition and little action; there is no conflict for the first 16 pages, which is basically an entire comic book these days. The comic read to me as if it was a cliff-noted version of an extended story that we were already supposed to know about.

Psychoanalysis as pedocover

I’ve always believed that Freud and Freudianism were pure and unmitigated nonsense. But, as it happens, both the man and his pseudoscience were actually a good deal worse than I had ever imagined.

Freud, having stumbled upon the widespread reality of child abuse among his mostly Jewish clientele, covered it up with the theory that all little girls desire their fathers’ penis and all little boys dream of screwing their mothers — and named his theory after a Gentile myth….

Denial means projection: to protect the dirty secret of child abuse in Jewish families—including his own—, Freud projected an imaginary repressed infantile perversion on all mankind. Projection, in turn, means inversion: Freud’s close disciple Otto Rank claimed that Jews had a more primitive, and therefore more healthy sexuality than Gentiles (Rank, “The Essence of Judaism,” 1905). Freudians and Freudo-Marxists have systematically denounced Christian civilization as suffering from sexual repression. According to Wilhelm Reich, anti-Semitism is itself a symptom of sexual frustration, and could be cured by sexual liberation (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1934)—an improvement from Leo Pinsker’s theory that Judeophobia was a “hereditary” and “incurable” “disease transmitted for two thousand years.” In order to understand the psychological background of this Reichian messianic mission to cure the Christian West, and in order to see more clearly the projective nature of the psychoanalytical theory of repression, it is helpful to know the personal story of Wilhelm Reich, which reads as a caricature of Freud’s: At ten years old, when he realized that his mother was having an affair with his tutor, the young Wilhelm thought of blackmailing his mother into having sex with him. Eventually, he confided in his father about his mother’s adultery. In 1910, after a period of beatings from his father, his mother committed suicide, for which Reich blamed himself.

One of the most puzzling aspects of Jews’ relationship with their host nations is its ambivalence—patterned on biblical “history”: within Jewish thinking, saving the nations and destroying them are not two sides of the same coin, but one and the same, because what nations are supposed to be cured of is their very identity (their gods, in biblical terms). According to Andrew Heinze, author of Jews and the American Soul, Jews have shaped “American ideas about the mind and soul” with the preoccupation “to purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization.” It really started with Freud. In September 1909, invited to give a series of lectures in New England, Freud jokingly asked his companions, Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung: “Don‘t they know we’re bringing them the plague?” An extraordinary statement for a medical doctor pretending to have found a “cure” for neurosis. And a prophetic one: Freudism became a justification for a sexual “liberation” that can be seen in retrospect as a massive sexual abuse of the youth.

Sexual repression is not the problem. And the “sexual liberation” that is sought is nothing less than societal approval for incestuous child rape. Forget the Chinese, forget the Nazis, at this point I would take Quetzalcoatl-worshipping Aztecs over the Freudians and their devil dreams of Babel 2.0. By their fruits, ye shall know them.

And just to make things worse, if you actually trouble to read Keynes’s General Theory, you’ll soon discover that its all-important “animal spirits” are nothing more than Freud applied to economics. What this implies about the foundation of the global macroeconomic perspective of the last eighty years I leave it to the reader to conclude on his own.

Why China is on the rise

The rise of Xi Jinping to supreme leadership may explain the recent and dramatic shift against China on the part of the Learned Elders of Wye. Given its proven value as a predictive model, the entire Wikileaks report on Xi by an academic acquaintance from his youth is well worth reading.

23. Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such “moral evils” as drugs and prostitution, the professor stated. The professor speculated that if Xi were to become the Party General Secretary, he would likely aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class. 

And that is exactly what Xi has done, with a serious commitment to an anti-corruption campaign that has taken many by surprise. It may astonish Western readers to know that the Chinese government is now extremely popular with the people. Unlike the Western countries, in which various corporations and other organizations are reliably deemed to big to fail – which really means they are too corrupt to be permitted to fail – Xi has led a magnificently ruthless campaign against corruption in China on a scale that is absolutely unthinkable in the West.

To put it in perspective, imagine if President Trump had had both Hilary Clinton and Bill Clinton arrested and jailed, as well as two Supreme Court justices, two-thirds of the DNC, half the RNC, and numerous FBI, CIA, and IRS employees. That’s effectively what Xi has already done since 2012.

Upon taking office, Xi vowed to crack down on “tigers and flies”, that is, high-level officials and local civil servants alike. Most of the officials investigated were removed from office and faced accusations of bribery and abuse of power, although the range of alleged abuses varied widely. As of 2016, the campaign has ‘netted’ over 120 high-ranking officials, including about a dozen high-ranking military officers, several senior executives of state-owned companies, and four national leaders. More than 100,000 people have been indicted for corruption. The campaign is part of a much wider drive to clean up malfeasance within party ranks and shore up party unity. It has become an emblematic feature of Xi Jinping’s political brand.

Now THAT is what actually draining the swamp looks like. The greatest political mind of the 20th century, Lee Kuan Yew, described Xi as “a man of great breadth” and said he would “put him in the Nelson Mandela class of persons.” While there are certainly reasons to doubt the assumption that the 21st century will be the Chinese century, the fact that 1.6 billion people now have a leader of this reported rectitude and capability should not be discounted.

I’ve admired Xi since he publicly shot down Mark Zuckerberg’s public attempt to put him on the spot by asking Xi to name his child in 2015. This is clearly not a man who permits himself to be manipulated by anyone, for any reason.

This is what they call “crushing”

The sold-out show in Portland went extremely well. I talked to both the Big Bear as well as the director of the documentary and they said the energy of the crowd was off the charts; the director said it felt more like a rock concert than a comedy show.

A quote from one attendee: “I NEVER get star struck, but…holy hell he’s good!”

From another: “Thank you, Owen! What a great show last night. The excitement in the air was electric. It was awesome to see such a large turn-out in support of having a good time. Nobody is having more fun than us.”

Next stop: Idaho!

Bowties on the historical battlefield

Conservatives have always been spineless and without principle:

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.

What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted?

Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip.

No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
– Robert Lewis Dabney, 1871

Whenever someone is issuing dire warnings about how the Left will not like the consequences of their latest political monstrosity, you can be sure that a conservative is speaking, just as you can be certain that he will furiously denounce and disavow anyone who actually attempts to deliver those consequences.