Category: Uncategorized

How to Trigger Trauma

It’s ever so much easier than you would tend to imagine.

High school is a difficult time for most kids. They’re becoming self aware. Exploring who they are, what their place in society is and what their interests are. If that’s not bad enough they also suddenly get raging hormones and have to learn how to deal with their sexuality.

High school is a period in which everyone feels insecure. Fitting in and being popular are very important. It is a place of navel gazing where everyone is constantly trying to see where they stand in the human hierarchy and where the opinion of others is super important.

In hindsight we know all of this is silly, but during high school we all feel the pressure. We’re placed in a lot of uncomfortable positions and we develop coping mechanisms to deal with them.

In hindsight we know all of this is silly, at least objectively we do. But humans aren’t really objective. They’re emotional. High school is a time of many emotions and most of us never process them. We never learnt healthy ways of processing things as kids so high school doesn’t get processed.

For many high school was not a good time. They weren’t a popular kid. They didn’t get the girl. Nobody looked up to them. Perhaps they even got bullied or excluded from the group (the worst thing that can happen to any 15 year old).

That’s a lot of repressed trauma/issues. So when I posted that photo of the stereotypical popular couple, it stinged for a lot of people. The couple on the photo represent the archetypical popular kids. They’re good looking, athletic, popular, probably from wealthy families, etc. They’re the kids everyone wishes they were. They seemingly had it all, and worst of all, it didn’t even seem to cost them any effort.

Which is why I tweeted that this photo invokes primal reactions in people. They are the couple everyone wishes they were in high school They represent the summun of popularity and success in high school. Those who fell short this ideal cannot help but feel the sting of envy. Even if they are way past their high school years.

Simply because they never dealt with their teenage emotions. Their self image took serious blows during their high school period and left wounds which never properly healed. My tweets resonated with their pain and it caused them to become very upset.

One of the things I’ve found fascinating about online culture is the way that damaged people not only don’t hesitate to expose their psychological scars to complete strangers, but more often than not, are completely unaware that they are doing so. As with the physical martial arts, it is very, very difficult to attempt a psychological attack on someone else without opening up and exposing your own psychology to them.

Hence my amusement when a self-appointed critic calls me “fat” or an “incel”, asserts that I’m insecure about my intelligence, or claims that Spacebunny doesn’t exist; the less an attack is focused on observable attributes or behaviors, the more likely it is that the attacker is engaging in psychological projection and revealing their own insecurities.

A psychologically healthy individual will tend to have a response to the image of a pretty cheerleader kissing her football-playing boyfriend that ranges from the positive to the indifferent. But a psychologically unhealthy individual will be readily traumatized by the mere sight of that which is good, that which is beautiful, or that which is true.

So, if you find yourself tending to react with negativity towards that which is positive, it would probably be a good idea to contemplate why that is, and what youthful trauma is troubling you.

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Europe Strangles

And nationalism rises as the failures of globohomo become more and more catastrophic with every passing month.

Household food bills across the EU have been rising dramatically in recent months, as galloping inflation keeps fueling the prices for important staple foods, with bread now costing more than ever.

In August, the price of bread in the bloc was on average 18% higher compared to the same period a year ago, according to data released by the EU’s statistical office Eurostat on Monday. “This is a huge increase compared with August 2021, when the price of bread was on average 3% higher than in August 2020,” Eurostat said.

The highest increases were recorded in Hungary, where they soared by 66%. Bread prices in Lithuania saw a surge of 33%, while in Estonia and Slovakia they grew by 32%. The lowest average increase in bread prices was recorded in France, where it was up by 8%. Both Luxembourg and the Netherlands saw an average price increase of 10%.

That which cannot continue will not continue. And annual 18 percent price increases for food staples cannot continue.

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The End of Beer

It’s hard to imagine that the Germans, Belgians, and English are going to be willing to give up beer for Ukraine.

UK brewers are facing tenfold price increases for the CO2 they use to carbonate and package beers, the Financial Times reported on Friday, also citing supply disruptions that could threaten brewing ahead of the Christmas season.

According to the report, the market disruption follows a warning from US fertilizer group CF Industries last month that it would shut down a major UK ammonia plant that makes CO2 as a byproduct. The company said its decision was due to soaring natural gas prices, which have made production unviable.

The report also pointed out that gas suppliers have been struggling to source CO2 from international markets because of ammonia plant closures in Europe. The energy price spikes and shortages have come as brewers prepare to increase production for Christmas. According to William Lees-Jones, managing director at JW Lees brewery in Middleton, Greater Manchester, the CO2 that had cost £250 a ton ($284) in June was priced last week at £2,800 a ton ($3,187).

Meanwhile, in Italy, the best case scenario involves more than half-a-million people losing their jobs.

Italy is at risk of losing up to 582,000 jobs due to the energy crisis and the resulting economic downturn, national media reported on Sunday, citing a study by the Confindustria Association of Industrialists. According to the findings, if the gas price stays at its current level (the August average was €235 per megawatt-hour), Italy’s economy will shrink 2.2% next year and the country will lose up to 383,000 jobs in 2022-2023. However, if the price hits €298 per megawatt-hour, which is the predicted level based on current gas futures, Italy may suffer a 3.2% decline in GDP and lose hundreds of thousands of jobs.

If Europe isn’t allowed to surrender by the US neocons calling the shots, the price is going to go higher than the predicted €298 per megawatt-hour, which means the economic damage will be even more catastrophic.

UPDATE: Ach du Lieber! It’s getting worse than I thought, faster than I thought.

A German bakery was slapped with a €330,000 gas bill after a new energy company suddenly terminated their contract which guaranteed pricing until the end of 2023, Junge Freiheit reported, citing Bild.

“Are they crazy?” said owner Eckehard Vatter, who says he has 14 days to pay the bill. “A year ago, we paid €5,856 per month in gas costs for our large furnaces and heating,” he added. Vatter said his new energy supplier hasn’t given him a reason for the 1,200% price increase.

This crisis is also demonstrating the inherent falsity of what passes for “contract law”. The contracts are often loaded with one-sided fine print that renders them essentially irrelevant, thereby demonstrating that “consent” and “contract” are fundamentally immoral weapons in the con man’s arsenal.

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He Paid the Price

The Dark Herald manfully suffers through the fourth episode of DEM RANGZ so you don’t have to. The least you can do is read through the whole thing, which you really have to do in order to grasp the full magnitude of the self-immolatory incompetence of the Amazon Studios team.

The smelting guild member is giving an incendiary speech about illegal elf immigrants sucking up their jobs and I’m not kidding in the slightest. It’s a “Dey tuuk r’ jubs” thing. The crowd is getting pretty worked up about these wet ears who work harder, never sleep, never need retirement benefits because they are immortal, and will soon storm the borders… Wait a minute. What borders? Númenor is an island and there is exactly one elf on it, and she would very much like to leave.

And just a reminder. What made the Men of Númenor come to resent the Elves was their immortality, (not their willingness to do the jobs Númenoreans wouldn’t). They wanted to be immortal themselves. The Men of Númenor had pretty long life spans too, one hundred years old was just hitting middle-aged maturity so far as the *Númenoreans were concerned. Which made this desire a bit petty.

Chancellor (gack) Ar-Pharazôn arrives and steals the guild master’s thunder by giving a populist speech that allays the crowd’s fears and gets them chanting his name in the media-approved Alt Right fashion.

Well, now we know the form of the destructor. In the legendarium, he was known as Ar-Pharazôn the Golden. He seized the throne by forcing his first cousin Míriel into a marriage with him against her will. In Tolkien’s world, she was a tragic figure rather than an annoying one. Ar-Pharazôn himself led a war against Sauron. Scattered his army of Orcs and took Sauron back to Númenor in chains. He was the kind of guy you would have hired Yul Brynner to play.

Even though, his later actions directly lead to the destruction of their beloved and beautiful homeland, Elendil’s surviving Númenorians erected a giant pillar as a monument to Ar-Pharazôn in Minas Arnor to honor his great victory over Sauron. When Sauron’s forces captured Minas Arnor the first thing he did, was to have the pillar destroyed.

Ar-Pharazôn was an Adonis. An Alpha’s Alpha who was ultimately brought to ruin by his pride and his own iron will.

In this version he’s Trump.

What were you expecting? Something good and/or original? These guys were trained by JJ Abrams.

They just can’t stop telling the same non-story again and again and again and again. Trump has been out of office for two years, and yet they’re still obsessed with him. Then again, their other stock bad guy, Adolf Hitler, has been dead for nearly 80 years and that hasn’t caused them to give it a rest, so this may only be the beginning of the trend.

On the plus side, Amazon is inadvertently making a strong case for why women have no place in government, be it democracy, republic, or monarchy.

Karen-Galadriel forces her way into the manager’s office to give the queen a piece of her mind, she has once again exchanged her resting bitch face for her active bitch face. The queen is as ever, unmoved by it.

The Elf Warrior Princess vociferously demands that Queen Míriel, on Galadriel’s, say so and nothing else, go to war out of the blue and invade the Southlands. She is to then put Not-Sauron, (a castaway hobo and bar room brawler, whose claim to the throne is based solely on the Southlands royal sigil he is wearing on a hunk of driftwood hanging on a piece of string around his neck) on the fucking throne of the Southlands. Which incidentally hasn’t had a throne for a hundred years or so.

I suppose this is their version of Aragorn begging King Théoden to send the Riders of Rohan to Gondor.

Míriel rejects this idea due to the fact that is fundamentally retarded. Karen-Galadriel demands to speak to the manager’s manager and orders Míriel to give her an audience with her father, the king. Míriel remains unmoved by Galadriel’s bitch-face.

Nope my mistake, she is moved enough to throw Galadriel in the clink.

I got to say it, I’m starting to warm to Míriel.

Now, what sort of person imagines that a foreigner should be able to simply show up in a country and demand that its rulers put their entire military forces at their disposal in order to invade a sovereign country to which neither the foreigner nor the rulers have any connection? What sort of person…

Sometimes you don’t even need to check Early Life On Wikipedia. And apparently, sometimes you don’t even need to know the name. Karen-Galadriel is bad enough. But Karen-Galadriel-Neocon?

To call this show an abomination and an insult to the legacy of Tolkien would be too kind. It’s also an insult to human intelligence.

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The End of Strategic Ambiguity

Joe Biden makes it clear that the US will fight China over Taiwan

President Joe Biden once again claimed that Washington is willing to use military force to defend Taiwan from Beijing, if necessary, while insisting that the US still adheres to ‘One China’ policy and is “not encouraging” the island’s independence.

During a ‘60 Minutes’ CBS News interview aired Sunday night, Biden was asked if the US would become directly involved to “defend the island” in a potential conflict between Beijing and Taiwan, including through the use of military force.

“Yes, if in fact there was an unprecedented attack…” Biden replied, before the broadcaster cut away to clarify the controversial statement.

Checkmate, Xi!

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I Suspect They’re Dragging Their Feet

And it’s going to take a lot longer than 30 months once the power goes out:

Germany has agreed to provide 18 self-propelled RCH-155 howitzers to Ukraine, on top of the heavy weaponry that Berlin has already pledged to hand over, Die Welt has claimed. However, the first shipment is at least 30 months away, the outlet reported Saturday, citing the manufacturer.

In 30 months, it’s entirely possible that neither Ukraine nor the EU will exist. And I’m not the only one who is skeptical that the EU can survive being used by the US neocons to fight an economic proxy war for them.

Orban again lashed out at EU sanctions imposed on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine, saying the bloc had shot itself in the foot with those curbs. The energy crisis, which occurred as a result of those restrictions, could force 40% of European industry to shut down this winter, he reportedly added.

In his speech, the Hungarian leader also allegedly revealed that European leaders are expected to decide on prolonging the sanctions for another six months later in autumn, insisting that an attempt should be made to prevent that extension.

The way things are going now, the eurozone and the EU itself could cease to exist by 2030, Orban was quoted as saying.

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Third-World USA

I fail to see how this is surprising in any way. The USA has endured the largest invasion in human history by a population that is considerably less intelligent and less civilized than its native population. So, naturally, the society has been shaped, and is continuing to be further shaped, by the present inhabitants.

The US is falling behind its developed-nation peers in checking the boxes of progress, according to a recent report from the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development. The country that last year ranked 32nd out of 193 UN member states has dropped 11 places in a single year and now trails even Ukraine and Cuba on the list, coming in just head of Bulgaria.

The ratings are based on a country’s progress in fulfilling the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, 17 metrics meant to epitomize societal progress. They include concrete achievements like “clean water and sanitation” and “zero hunger” alongside less defined aims like “quality education” and “responsible consumption and production,” but all are described on the UN’s website as critical to implementing the organization’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – something all member nations have agreed to do.

Scandinavian countries lead the UN’s rankings for 2022, with Finland at number one and Denmark, Sweden and Norway rounding out the top four. The first non-European country to make the list is Japan, which narrowly made the top 20 at 19.

The dirt is not magic. It never was. The fact that the criteria are ideological and inimical doesn’t change the fact that by every meaningful standard, the USA is worse off than it was 50 years ago. Which means it probably will not even be around 50 years from now. Or, as I have previously predicted, 20 years from now.

This is what happens when you don’t sink the ships.

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