#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
For anyone asking me “Maybe you should give up Crimea and Donbas in exchange for peace?” Before asking this question, name me the specific region in your country you would be willing to give up if Putin started bombing your cities.
Certainly. In order of preference:
And if Mr. Putin would be so good as to bomb them before the USA handed them over, so much the better.
The Big Bear drops some hard truths on us.
It dawned on me this morning that @realdonaldtrump is the last significant gatekeeper before Nationalism. They’ve invested so much into his brand that they can’t let him ride off into the sunset post 2020 and they desperately need him to hold the line for disillusioned Americans.
He couldn’t get Gab to submit to kushner’s (((speech codes))), Parler & GettR were duds and Truth Social is the laughing stock of the internet.
This is the last, best move to gatekeep Nationalism. Another branded investment ‘hero’ (Elon) swoops in to save the day & restore the Don on twitter.
You don’t need these false idols, fake heros. They don’t have the power to save you & even if they did there’s no chance they would. They don’t care about your interests.
The good news is, you can build your own future. You never needed them.
Putting one’s faith in a media celebrity because he says one or two things that you like is always going to end in disappointment. Every single time.
Alexander Macris provides a typically astute analysis of the evolution of the concept of the villain from ancient to postmodern:
In the introduction to his magisterial opus After Virtue, Alasdair Macintyre describes postmodern society as having fallen into a dark age, a post-apocalyptic state. But this is not the apocalypse of Mad Max. The apocalypse has destroyed, not our technology, but our morality: “We possess simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have… lost our comprehension of morality,” he explains. Postmodern society does not know what good is.
Being unable to understand good leaves society unable to understand evil; and so instead society pathologizes it. Evil becomes a psychological state that results from personal trauma, from some crucial moment when the world failed to show someone compassion, empathy, or trust, or left them exposed to the world’s cruelty. Every postmodern villain is a victim. Behind every figure of terror we find a terrorized figure.
Darth Vader appears as a towering tyrant in Star Wars IV. But the prequels reveal that Anakin Skywalker was a victim: enslaved as a child, separated from his mother, forbidden to marry the woman he loved, rejected in his aspirations by the Jedi council, dismembered by his former mentor, and then involuntarily made into a cyborg by his new one.
Hannibal Lechter appears in Silence of the Lambs as the quintessence of villainy, brilliant, cold, manipulative, remorseless. In the sequel Hannibal, we learn that he’s a victim: During World War II, the kind and gentle young Hannibal was forced to eat his sister by cannibal soldiers.
Lord Voldemort appears in Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone as the most powerful and evil sorcerer in the Wizarding World. But later we learn Tom Riddle was a victim, the product of abandonment by his mother. J.K. Rowling even says “everything would have changed if Merope [his mother] had survived and raised him herself and loved him.”
Kylo Ren enters Star Wars VII as a dark Jedi so powerful that he can halt a blaster bolt in mid-air. But Star Wars VIII reveals Ben Solo was a victim who felt abandoned by his father and betrayed by the paranoia of his mentor, Jake Skywalker.
The Joker, most infamous and vile of all of Batman’s foes, is revealed in his eponymous 2019 movie to have been a victim, too. Arthur Fleck is a mentally ill bastard rejected by his birth-father and humiliated by his coworkers.
Postmodern culture stops at nothing in its relentless transformation of villain into victim. Cruella de Vil is the most recent example. She appears in One Hundred and One Dalmations as a wealthy socialite whose life goal is to murder puppies so she can wear their skins. But the 2021 movie Cruella reveals that she, too, is a victim: Her birth-mother abandoned her and her adopted mother was killed by a pack of vicious dalmations. (I’m not making this up.)
The postmodern villain, then, is just a moral cripple. Psychological trauma has ruined the villain’s ethical system just as spinal trauma might ruin a person’s nervous system. We are meant to feel bad that they do bad. It’s not their fault.
I have to admit, I’m naturally prone to writing medieval villains, although I tend to put a modern spin on their self-perception. Anyhow, read the whole thing, it’s an interesting piece that will provide you with a useful analytical reading tool.
Donald Trump’s failure to cross the Rubicon is explained by his reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Former President Donald Trump admitted he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin was only trying to ‘negotiate’ when he sent troops to the Ukraine border and was ‘surprised’ when the Kremlin leader actually invaded the country.
‘I’m surprised — I’m surprised. I thought he was negotiating when he sent his troops to the border. I thought he was negotiating,’ Trump told the Washington Examiner during a Tuesday evening phone interview from his Mar-a-Lago estate. ‘I thought it was a tough way to negotiate but a smart way to negotiate.’
Trump, who seemingly developed a close working relationship with Moscow during his presidency, said Putin has ‘very much changed’ since the pair last worked together.
‘I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with — you know, like every trade deal. We’ve never made a good trade deal until I came along,’ Trump said. ‘And then he went in — and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.’
I’ve mentioned this observation before, but Trump’s character has never been demonstrated more clearly than by this comment about Vladimir Putin. Trump’s strength is that he is a legitimately great negotiator. However, as with all successful men, his weaknesses are related to his strengths. Trump is a talker, not a doer. He is a negotiator, not a warrior. He conflates speech with action. He’s not a fighter, and never having been punched in the face or thrown down another man in the judo ring, he doesn’t understand men who are.
Of course he thought Putin was negotiating by mobilizing the Russian Army, threatening an invasion, and issuing an ultimatum, because he thinks everything is a negotiation. Hence his failure to take action after the fraudulent election of 2020; there probably wasn’t any chance of him actually doing so even if the US military could have been relied upon to obey its Commander-in-Chief – something we can’t know either way despite what various people claim – because for him even an approach to the Rubicon would have been a negotiating point rather than the beginning of a military action.
Remember, the Senate was massively surprised when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome, because despite his military successes on the Mediterranean and in Gaul, they knew him to be a skilled politician and negotiator. And negotiators always prefer jaw-jaw to war-war.
So Trump is a negotiator and Putin is a fighter. What, one wonders, is Xi Xinping?
Don’t follow my path.
For the way you are walking
Was shaped by your past.
It’s almost certain that someone you know is going to die of the long-term adverse affects of the vaxx, if Karl Denninger’s calculations are anywhere close to the mark.
One in thirty. That’s my latest “best guess” when it comes to people who took the jabs for permanent and material impairment of their health.
One in thirty.
Incidentally that might be conservative; I would not be surprised if its worse than that.
My estimates in this regard keep going the “wrong” way; what was a couple months ago one in a couple hundred is now close to ten times worse than that.
This is yet another data set, this time from Israel and Pfizer which was intentionally suppressed and is still being intentionally suppressed.
1 in 30 is about 3% of all recipients. There will be a skew but exactly where it lands is not yet known. There is a furious attempt at present to deflect the most-obvious and outrageous examples of harm, specifically cardiac damage in young men, with the claim that “its transitory.”
That’s flat-out BS; heart damage is nearly always both cumulative and permanent.
What’s also in the data and extremely serious is this:
Roughly 24% of people with pre-existing autoimmune disorders, and 5%-10% of those with diabetes, hypertension, and lung and heart disease, also reported a worsening of their condition.
That’s not 1 in 30 — its anywhere from one in 20 to one in FOUR!
These are not transient problems folks; they’re disability-enhancing or even disability-causing health problems.
Nor is the one in ten women under 54 reporting menstrual changes. This is not normal and again is wildly greater than one in thirty.
This isn’t an abstract thing and it isn’t a joke. A member of my family – fully vaxxed and boosted – died at the age of 42 ten days ago of a pulmonary edema. And while the jury is still out concerning the official cause of death and we don’t actually know it was the vaxx… we all know it was the vaxx.
So, it’s important to be tranquil and mentally prepared about the transience of life, because the chances are pretty high that you know more than 30 people.
How admirable!
to see lightning and not think
life is fleeting.
Dominic Cummings shared some practical thoughts on his commenter’s notes on the obstacles that organizational Machiavellians always pose to the core objectives of the organization:
The succession problem to which he refers is tremendous, and it is one to which I have given considerable thought over the years. The three primary challenges that I have identified concerning it are as follows:
An analysis of those who are chosen by the elite reveals that it is not talent, ability, or cognitive capability that determines “success” by the elite’s worldly standards, but rather ruthless ambition and desire for external approval.
While I often assume that prestige is a big driver of human behavior, my poll respondents hardly admitted to putting much weight on prestige when picking experts. And many complain that I put too much emphasis on the concept. However, these elite employers strongly confirm my view, as they focus overwhelmingly on prestige when picking junior employees.
They only recruit at the most elite colleges, and they want recruits to be attractive, energetic, articulate, socially smooth, and have had elite personal connections, jobs, and extracurriculars. They don’t that much care about your grades, what you’ve learned, or what you did in your jobs or extracurriculars, as long as they were prestigious.
I noticed several interesting patterns worth pondering. For example, employers have little patience with candidates who didn’t pick the most prestigious possible college or job, but were swayed by other considerations. Such as topics of interest, limited money, or the needs of a spouse or family. A “serious” person always picks max prestige. Always.
Yet for extracurriculars, you are not supposed to connect those to your career plans, as “nerds” do. You must instead do something with no practical value, but that is prestigious. Like varsity athletes in lacrosse or crew, sports that are too expensive for ordinary folks to pursue. Excess interest in ideas marks you as a “boring” “tool”.
An interesting criteria is that you must tell a mesmerizing story about your life, a story told almost entirely in terms of choices that you made to pursue your internal goals, without external constraints having much influence. And even though you have been chosen for your very consistent lifetime pursuit of prestige, that is very much not allowed to be one of your main goals. You were instead pursuing other goals, and prestige just happened as a side effect. Lucky you.
The author convincingly argues that this is not that much of a “meritocracy”, in that the features sought are much easier for elite parents to promote in their kids, and many of them are not actually that useful to society.
The key phrase: “A “serious” person always picks max prestige. Always.”
I ruled myself out of the elite game the moment I chose Bucknell over Princeton, Yale, and Stanford. That was a unconsciously fortuitous choice, given the way in which events proceeded over the next 5-6 years. Because what the elite are selecting for is not intelligence or potential, but rather, one’s anticipated willingness to sell one’s soul to them.
Don’t ever envy those high midwits who are accepted to elite universities and offered every form of easy success at every step along the way. They are literally on the conveyor belt to Hell without having any idea what the path they have chosen is leading toward.
Politics is full of people who want to prove they’re the smartest person in the room but they almost never realise that the room they’re in rarely has any really smart people in it!
Dominic Cummings
The world’s smartest man responds to three comments:
Comment 1: “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”
Response: No, malice is more dangerous because of the associated intentionality.
Stupidity does not imply malice, but malice implies stupidity. That’s because a stupid populace is irresistable to a malicious ruling class – it’s much easier to deceive and control – which is why the populace has been methodically “dumbed down” by “the elite” using their proprietary indoctrination mills (public schools and universities) along with immigration policy favoring fast-breeding low-IQ migrants and mass-media idiocy including miscegenation propaganda directed specifically at White people.
Comment 2: “Better to reduce everything to power instead of money.”
Response: They go together. Here’s the definitive equation:
money = power, i.e., capital = power. That’s because money, or capital, is just generic human utility, abstracted and distributed as coinage, paper, or digital data. Money and power both come down to utility, so the equation is a lock. Either you get the power by force and then use it to steal all the money, or you steal the money and use it to bribe and threaten your way to power. Either way, it comes out the same.
Comment 3: “Monopoly capitalism isn’t new, and it doesn’t have a monopoly on capitalism.”
Response: Well, actually, it does, via the global banking system. The global money monopoly has not always existed, and now that it does, things have changed. Big Monopoly Capitalists have what amounts to a worldwide monopoly on the most important commodity of all: money. Money is the master-commodity, the commodity of commodities, Try to make your own, and they’ll lock you up and swallow the key. By the crooked reckoning of the global banksters, everyone owes them. Everyone’s on the hook. Everyone has to do what they say.
Correct on all three counts.
Scott Adams could benefit from some of the best advice ever given to Garrison Keillor:
Every time Chet came on the show, he’d sit backstage and jam with Paul and whoever wanted to join in, Johnny Gimble, Bill Hinkley, Howard Levy with a harmonica, Peter Ostroushko, and the tunes would flow along from old-time to swing, one tune emerging into another, “Just as I Am” into “Stardust,” Stephen Foster, George Harrison, “Seeing Nellie Home,” “Banks of the Ohio,” and maybe Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Boudleaux Bryant, “Freight Train,” one sparkling stream, it was all music to him. He held his guitar like a father holds a child, he was happy, the genuine article. He loved jamming backstage, where he wasn’t obligated to be Chet Atkins and could be a man in a crowd of friends. He had made his way in the country music business though his real love was jazz, and when he sat backstage with the others, a sweet equality prevailed in which strangers were old friends—the music made it so.
I envied that and asked Chet once if I should learn to play guitar and he said, “The world does not need another mediocre guitarist. Stick with the monologue. Nobody else does what you do.” So I did.
Chet gave me good advice: “Never read anything anybody writes about you. No matter what they write, you won’t learn anything from it, and you’ll probably read something that’ll be a stone in your shoe for months to come.” I could see the reasoning, which was the same as what LaVona Person told me in the eighth grade: It’s not about you. It’s about the material. Don’t make it be about you.
That Time of Year: A Minnesota Life, Garrison Keillor
The world does not need another mediocre political commentator, Scott. You’re not a great predictor. You’re not a great persuader. You’re not a great podcaster. You’re not a great hypnotist. You’re not an economist.
You’re a great cartoonist, one of the greatest ever. Stick with the cartoons.