The great historian Carrol Quigley identified the birth of the Establishment as occurring in 1891 in England, and initially consisted of a quasi-secret conspiracy led by Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, with the purpose of re-integrating the various part of the British Empire, including especially the United States of America and South Africa.
Initially this core group, whom Quigley documents thoroughly, were mostly Oxford graduates and were heavy with politicians within the Cape Colony itself. The quasi-secret is used here because although the existence, membership and minutes of the society were secret, its goals, as well as the fellowship of its members were not concealed but were open.
In the view of these of the followers of Rhodes, the new British-led cooperative group of nations would be ruled in benevolent wisdom for humanity by an elite educated and skilled class centered in England which had the prerequisite access to the refined background and training to be to lead and manage such an enterprise in a beneficial way.
After World War I, in which the British Empire was preserved but greatly damaged in many ways, this Rhodes-influenced group moved increasingly to the center of British politics, wielding great influence upon policy. They did this without holding office directly by the creation of extra-political "round table" groups were pitched as composed of wise insiders who could offer counsel to governments of both parties without the disruptions of party politics itself.
By the time of World War II, the Establishment had accomplished a great deal towards achievement of its program of reintegrating the spheres of influence among the powerful people in Britain and America. By the end of the war, the Anglo-American cooperative would accepted by people on both sides of the Atlantic as a matter of faith in foreign policy.
Because of the result of the Second World War, in which British Empire was further greatly damaged, and the resources of the home islands greatly exhausted, the original group of British Establishment insiders had largely gotten what they wanted (integration of the British and Army military and political structures) and was superseded by the group of American insiders who brought a new vision of the purpose of the Establishment itself,
These new insiders came largely from members of the upper class of Americans who acted as diplomats and envoys between the Anglo- and American- sides of the Atlantic. This group enjoyed great initial political stability because of the war and the long duration of the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.
Around this new group of American insiders would form the nucleus of the new Post-War Establishment, with new expanded goals for America and the world at large.
During the War, starting in 1943, this new group of American "wise" insiders came together in most unlikely place---Moscow.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Friday, December 30, 2016
How World War II Might Never Have Happened
It is taken as article of certainty among historians that World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland.
But in the first couple weeks of September 1939 after that event, it was not yet certain that this conflict would become Great War resembling the one of 1914.
Because of treaties the Poles had signed with the French and British, committing those nations to defend Polish independence, the German invasion of Poland caused Germany to be at war immediately with France and Britain as well.
Because of treaties the Poles had signed with the French and British, committing those nations to defend Polish independence, the German invasion of Poland caused Germany to be at war immediately with France and Britain as well.
But Britain and France didn't want a war with Germany. Britain had no motive for a continental war and its policy was to avoid it as completely as possible, while retaining its leverage as master of the High Seas.
Meanwhile, although in 1914 France (at least the French leadership in the Defense Ministry) had desperately wanted a war with Germany in order to regain Alsace and Lorraine (this is Clarke's thesis in The Sleepwalkers), now France had no stomach or desire for a real war with Germany.
Meanwhile, although in 1914 France (at least the French leadership in the Defense Ministry) had desperately wanted a war with Germany in order to regain Alsace and Lorraine (this is Clarke's thesis in The Sleepwalkers), now France had no stomach or desire for a real war with Germany.
France had all the territory in wanted in Europe itself. So when the French were forced into war with Germany after the invasion of Poland, nominally coming to Poland's aid by invading Germany from the west, their invasion was lackluster, almost a formality to show the Poles that they were fulfilling their obligation. They got about ten miles into the Saarland and decided that was far enough. The British press called it The Phoney War.
Poland, meanwhile, even without a French invasion on the other side of Germany, was not at all a pushover for the Germans,
It is true that many forward units were overrun by the initial blitzkrieg, but the Germans had not perfected this technique, and the Poles put up fierce and stubborn resistance in complexes of hill-top bunkers that had built, inside Poland, as resistance to invasion. These were more than a little successful, and slowed the advance of the German Army in no small way, even when vastly outnumbered.
It is true that many forward units were overrun by the initial blitzkrieg, but the Germans had not perfected this technique, and the Poles put up fierce and stubborn resistance in complexes of hill-top bunkers that had built, inside Poland, as resistance to invasion. These were more than a little successful, and slowed the advance of the German Army in no small way, even when vastly outnumbered.
In short, the myth that the Germans overran Poland in September 1939 is completely wrong. For one thing, the Polish Army was one of the largest in Europe. It would be no picnic for any army to beat them. Moreover, the Poles had a pretty good strategy for a long-term war against Germany.
It was called the Romanian Bridgehead. It took advantage of the fact that Poland, at that time, stretched southeastward from its current boundaries and included a small common border with the nation of Romania. The two then-bordering nations had in fact signed a defense pact in 1921, right after World War I.
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| The Second Polish Republic (1918-1939). Poland and its ally Romania shared a common border. This was the chokepoint of the entire Polish strategy to survive and repel a German invasion. |
Poland's strategy was to use this common border, and the fact that Romania had a port on the Black Sea, to provide a means to resupply the Polish Army in the event of an invasion from Germany. They would be able to do this with the support of the British and French fleets in the Mediterranean.
The strategy looked especially good since the terrain of then-southeastern Poland near the Romanian border, to which the Polish Army would retreat as a last redoubt, was rather easily defensible. The Poles planted many ammunition dumps in the rough country there, in the marshes around the Dniper River, to keep them shooting at the Germans until supply lines could be activated.
As part of the plan the Poles had decided to send their entire navy out of port, so as not to be captured by the German in the first wave of the invasion. They actually did this step, right at the end of August 1939, in the days leading up to the Germany invasion. The Polish Navy ships were sent to British and French ports, so they could be used in the resupply effort to the Polish Army (in Southeastern Poland) through the Romanian port of Constanta on the Black Sea.
But the Poles failed at one element in this plan, and it is the reason that the war became a Great War. The waited too long. They fought hard for two weeks until their commander gave the order to retreat toward Lwow, the city in southeastern Poland amidst the rough country near the Romanian border.
The order was given on September 14. Then three days later, something happened that would change everything, and the Poles never got to activate the Romanian Bridgehead, and never got o make a long stand against Germany. Instead Poland would be completely overrun, and would cease to exist as nation within a month.
The Poland Army barely even resisted this last wave. They didn't see it coming. When the Soviet Red Army crossed the border, many Poles even thought that the Soviets were coming to their aid, to fight alongside them as ally.
It is foolish to think that Stalin would have done anything else than he had done, by invading along the entire border, and quickly grabbing the area along the Romanian border before the Poles had a chance to retreat there.
Stalin had basically tipped his hand to his intentions on August 23, with the shocking treaty he had signed with Hitler. The Americans even knew about the secret protocol to divide Poland between them. Even if the Poles weren't tipped off to this (they may have been), they would have foolish not to see it coming. It was certainly not because they trusted Stalin, but perhaps they quaintly believed that it would be Stalin's interest to do things the old fashioned way, by coming to Poland's aid.
In the poignancy of this moment is the flash of the loss of twenty million lives in the coming war. Perhaps the Poles were doomed by a Russian invasion in any scenario, but perhaps if the Polish Army had been able to retreat towards the Romanian border, and activate the resupply line through the Black Sea in such a way as to compel the French and British to protect it, it would have been much more difficult for the Soviets to wipe out the Polish Army in a still-existing "Free Poland," even as it dwindled to a small corner of the country in the southeastern marshes.
Just having a still-fighting Polish presence there would have made the entire concept of "giant-front" war between Germany and Russia, along their (later) common border, would have been much more problematic for both sides. Moreover the French and British would have been involved in Polish resupply effort, and their (probable) direct active presence would have essentially acted as power buffer between Germany and Russia in a way that a mere treaty obligation. There is no way that Britain could have refused to aid the Poles in this scenario without a loss of honor unacceptable at the time, because it involved operations on the sea. Britain would have forfeited its status as a Great Power by such an abdication.
Stalin would have instead enjoyed seeing Germany grind its Army down fighting a war of increasingly diminishing returns against the Rump Polish State in southeastern Poland. It would have been useful to see the ways the Poles effectively neutralized aspects of the blitzkrieg, and found weaknesses in the German Army.
Moreover, he could not have attacked the Polish Army directly (which he would have needed to do in this scenario), without directly looking like the bad guy to the western powers (instead they looked the other way. There were many supporters of the Soviet regime in the western government and the western press, so the fact that the Soviets snuck their way into conquest of Poland could be easily overlooked compared German atrocities.
Of course there still could have been a Great War by other means, but without the direct German invasion of the Soviet Union, it is hard to imagine it playing out in as horrifically destructive a way as possible.* In the end the rapid fall of Poland (which was caused by the failure of the Polish Army to retreat swiftly enough towards the Romanian Bridgehead, and left their southeastern flank exposed to easy Soviet conquest) that made this catastrophe almost inevitable.
In this alternate reality, perhaps the Warner Brothers release of Constanta wins the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1942.
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| Instead, in reality, the bridgehead had to be established on the west coast of Africa. |
*Would Stalin have invaded Finland just six weeks after the fall of Poland in this scenario? This was naked aggression on his part, as much as Hitler's invasion of Poland, but it was not awarded the status of a war crime on the same status, for all the various same reasons that the west excused Soviet actions as reasonable and justifiable on some level. Would Stalin have taken such a step, at that time, without the cover of Germany already the designated villain of a continental conflict?
The Long Tail End of the Golden Age
Watched the tribute to the late Debbie Reynolds on ABC's 20/20 this evening. Among the interviewees was Robert Osbourne, long the host of Turner Classic Movies. Osbourne said something that I could have said word for word, namely that Reynolds was essentially the last big star from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
For the last decade, as the last of the great names died off, the ones who had come up through the studio systems of the 1930s and 1940s, I would always remember: "Debbie Reynolds is still alive."
The Golden Age of Hollywood was terminated was several factors, among them was the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision that all-but dismantled the existing studio production chain.
It's not a coincidence that the Golden Age of Hollywood ended around the time that the Establishment began, namely in the late 1940s. The biggest factor was the advent of broadcast television networks in the United States. This destroyed movie studios, but it created the Establishment as much as anything else.
What an odd twist, among all the celebrity deaths this year, that the ultimate one would be one the last surviving members of old Hollywood. What a turning of the ages we are experiencing.
Note we still have Doris Day, who had her first #1 hit two weeks before FDR died, while the Battle of Okinawa was raging in the Pacific.
For the last decade, as the last of the great names died off, the ones who had come up through the studio systems of the 1930s and 1940s, I would always remember: "Debbie Reynolds is still alive."
The Golden Age of Hollywood was terminated was several factors, among them was the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision that all-but dismantled the existing studio production chain.
It's not a coincidence that the Golden Age of Hollywood ended around the time that the Establishment began, namely in the late 1940s. The biggest factor was the advent of broadcast television networks in the United States. This destroyed movie studios, but it created the Establishment as much as anything else.
What an odd twist, among all the celebrity deaths this year, that the ultimate one would be one the last surviving members of old Hollywood. What a turning of the ages we are experiencing.
Note we still have Doris Day, who had her first #1 hit two weeks before FDR died, while the Battle of Okinawa was raging in the Pacific.
 |
| Doris Day at the Aquarium Jazz Club, New York (1946) (source) |
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Thinking Like Grant
Ulysses Grant is one of the singularly interesting figures in United States history. Renowned as the victorious commanding general of the Union Army at the end the Civil War, and also as a President, his fascinating story is in his memoirs, which I've been reading lately, thanks to a tip from my friend Adam.
It is easy to see him only in his glory, as the conqueror over the slaveholding states of the South. But his memoirs show a more nuanced story. I'm particularly fascinated by the campaign he waged through Kentucky down through Tennessee and into Mississippi, initially inland (having taken Memphis), but then creeping from the west side of the river through the bayous, bypassing Vicksburg, and making a daring live-off-the-land raid inland to seize Jackson, the capital, outflanking all of the Confederate defenses along the river itself.
The more fascinating part for me has been in the role that railroads of those aforementioned states played in Grant's strategy to storm through the South. The movement of his troops, keeping together supply lines inland from Memphis is wartime and violent echo of the way through varied railroads were originally planned, chartered, financed and built. The same kind of thinking went into both processes somehow.
Friday, December 23, 2016
The Fleeting Dream of a World Without White People
The election is finally over. Now begins the Season of Hate.
Everything about Donald Trump, and what he represents, must be confronted in the starkest and strongest of terms with condemnation.
Meanwhile overseas in Europe, after the Berlin attack, the Christmas markets are suddenly in the crosshairs. Anyone who has been to Europe recently with open eyes could see this coming. Two years ago Red and I delighted in the autumn markets in Basel, Barcelona, and small towns in France. One could see the conflict coming. Since then, a million immigrants from Africa and the Middle East have entered Germany.
In London, on Christmas eve, I strolled through Hyde Park. I saw more women completed covered, Saudi Arabian style, than with their faces uncovered. That evening I went to the Christmas market in Leicester Square, humming with lights and joyful activity. Something had to give.
My observation is that when Muslims come into a country, they tend to clump in communities, where they can essentially re-create a situation as close as possible to their homelands. But beyond that, they tend to take over and dominate the public squares especially after dark. I saw this in Gothenburg, Sweden. During the day, the downtown mall near the train station was filled mostly with groups of white young women. During the evening, they were replaced by groups of Arab young men.
Something had to give.
Christmas Markets are a direct challenge to the takeover of nighttime public spaces by the immigrants. Christmas is an "in-your-face" affront to the religious sensibilities of many of them. In their homelands, such displays would not be tolerated, where Christians live in subservience to the majority culture of Islam. European Christians must learn to live in this way as well. Immigrants are outright encouraged to feel outrage by many native Germans, Britons, and Swedes, whose attitude is that "it is we who have to change our behavior, not the immigrants."
The can of worms is now open. Whether there is another attack on the markets this season, we are surely facing the same thing next year and beyond. This will be on-going. It will be the new normal for a while. Christmas displays will be guarded by armed policemen. After each attack, Europeans will be reminded by their governments and by the press that any backlash against Muslims will not be tolerated.
Please welcome the replacement citizens of your country. You are now outdated because you are white, and that makes you scum.
White people need to die off. White people are what is wrong with the world. White people have caused the majority of the world's ills. Without white people, the world can finally experience true social justice, peace, and universal prosperity.
That statement I wrote in the last paragraph is pretty much the gospel of most state universities in America lately. You can get your degree without learning any science, math, or foreign languages, but by gum, you are going to learn that white people need to go. To utter a phrase such as "I think white culture is fine, and I think white people have an inherent right to live and exist" is considered tantamount to cross-burning by many college administrators at this point. Such sentiments must be extinguished with extreme prejudice, and anyone uttering such things must be put through diversity training and to rid themselves of their thought crimes. Anything less is "doing violence against other races."
Having said all of that, I actually believe we have reach Peak Anti-White Hate. The hatred for white people, white culture, and white civilization is, to my mind, a core philosophic tenet of what I label as the Establishment as it has existed since World War II. That we are at Peak Anti-White Hate, with the open declaration that any defense of white people is tantamount to a desire of genocide of the other races, is a sign that the Establishment is in its death throes, and that the tide is turning in a massive way.
We MUST become a brown nation. WE ARE GOING TO BECOME A BROWN NATION WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. Darker skinned people are simply culturally and morally superior to white people. We will all benefit as the population shifts to darker hues of skin over time.
One is likely to hear this quite loud and insistently from Establishment supporters over the next year, as they attempt a rear guard action to stop the great turning of the tide that is underway. They can sense that they have lost the mandate of history in the fight against Whiteness, one they have held since the Second World War, the lesson of which (we are now told) is that all white people, including all white Americans, are responsible for all of Hitler's crimes.
I love the Communist-style doublethink that goes into this line of reasoning. One of my favorites is that it is impossible to be against white culture, because white culture doesn't exist. Likewise one cannot be against White People because whiteness is a pure social construct (this is best articulated with a trendy sophisticated accent). These people have no idea how stupid and bigoted they are going to look in the eyes of later generations.
It has been long time that we have lived under this ideological regime. But nothing lasts forever. The change will be traumatic for many, especially those who have bought hard-core into the tenets of Communism and the idea that they can always take a easy morally superior stance by condemning White people and Whiteness. This stance will continue to work among their fellow travelers, but in the arena of the culture at large, it has lost its reign in the bully pulpit. No longer will they have the public sphere to themselves. From now on, there will be pushback, no matter how much they disclaim it as "White Supremacy."
But they will not go down without a fight. It's going to be frenzied and very loud. Ideologies that have been in place for the better part of a century will not go down easily. But there is no going back. Never again will we have unchallenged Anti-White Hate as we have had over the recent decades, especially since the 1990s.
This is my main prediction for 2017, I think, everything I just wrote above. It's the main point of my trend analysis. I didn't see this coming at all. We'll see if I'm right.
Everything about Donald Trump, and what he represents, must be confronted in the starkest and strongest of terms with condemnation.
Meanwhile overseas in Europe, after the Berlin attack, the Christmas markets are suddenly in the crosshairs. Anyone who has been to Europe recently with open eyes could see this coming. Two years ago Red and I delighted in the autumn markets in Basel, Barcelona, and small towns in France. One could see the conflict coming. Since then, a million immigrants from Africa and the Middle East have entered Germany.
In London, on Christmas eve, I strolled through Hyde Park. I saw more women completed covered, Saudi Arabian style, than with their faces uncovered. That evening I went to the Christmas market in Leicester Square, humming with lights and joyful activity. Something had to give.
My observation is that when Muslims come into a country, they tend to clump in communities, where they can essentially re-create a situation as close as possible to their homelands. But beyond that, they tend to take over and dominate the public squares especially after dark. I saw this in Gothenburg, Sweden. During the day, the downtown mall near the train station was filled mostly with groups of white young women. During the evening, they were replaced by groups of Arab young men.
Something had to give.
Christmas Markets are a direct challenge to the takeover of nighttime public spaces by the immigrants. Christmas is an "in-your-face" affront to the religious sensibilities of many of them. In their homelands, such displays would not be tolerated, where Christians live in subservience to the majority culture of Islam. European Christians must learn to live in this way as well. Immigrants are outright encouraged to feel outrage by many native Germans, Britons, and Swedes, whose attitude is that "it is we who have to change our behavior, not the immigrants."
The can of worms is now open. Whether there is another attack on the markets this season, we are surely facing the same thing next year and beyond. This will be on-going. It will be the new normal for a while. Christmas displays will be guarded by armed policemen. After each attack, Europeans will be reminded by their governments and by the press that any backlash against Muslims will not be tolerated.
Please welcome the replacement citizens of your country. You are now outdated because you are white, and that makes you scum.
White people need to die off. White people are what is wrong with the world. White people have caused the majority of the world's ills. Without white people, the world can finally experience true social justice, peace, and universal prosperity.
That statement I wrote in the last paragraph is pretty much the gospel of most state universities in America lately. You can get your degree without learning any science, math, or foreign languages, but by gum, you are going to learn that white people need to go. To utter a phrase such as "I think white culture is fine, and I think white people have an inherent right to live and exist" is considered tantamount to cross-burning by many college administrators at this point. Such sentiments must be extinguished with extreme prejudice, and anyone uttering such things must be put through diversity training and to rid themselves of their thought crimes. Anything less is "doing violence against other races."
Having said all of that, I actually believe we have reach Peak Anti-White Hate. The hatred for white people, white culture, and white civilization is, to my mind, a core philosophic tenet of what I label as the Establishment as it has existed since World War II. That we are at Peak Anti-White Hate, with the open declaration that any defense of white people is tantamount to a desire of genocide of the other races, is a sign that the Establishment is in its death throes, and that the tide is turning in a massive way.
We MUST become a brown nation. WE ARE GOING TO BECOME A BROWN NATION WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. Darker skinned people are simply culturally and morally superior to white people. We will all benefit as the population shifts to darker hues of skin over time.
One is likely to hear this quite loud and insistently from Establishment supporters over the next year, as they attempt a rear guard action to stop the great turning of the tide that is underway. They can sense that they have lost the mandate of history in the fight against Whiteness, one they have held since the Second World War, the lesson of which (we are now told) is that all white people, including all white Americans, are responsible for all of Hitler's crimes.
I love the Communist-style doublethink that goes into this line of reasoning. One of my favorites is that it is impossible to be against white culture, because white culture doesn't exist. Likewise one cannot be against White People because whiteness is a pure social construct (this is best articulated with a trendy sophisticated accent). These people have no idea how stupid and bigoted they are going to look in the eyes of later generations.
It has been long time that we have lived under this ideological regime. But nothing lasts forever. The change will be traumatic for many, especially those who have bought hard-core into the tenets of Communism and the idea that they can always take a easy morally superior stance by condemning White people and Whiteness. This stance will continue to work among their fellow travelers, but in the arena of the culture at large, it has lost its reign in the bully pulpit. No longer will they have the public sphere to themselves. From now on, there will be pushback, no matter how much they disclaim it as "White Supremacy."
But they will not go down without a fight. It's going to be frenzied and very loud. Ideologies that have been in place for the better part of a century will not go down easily. But there is no going back. Never again will we have unchallenged Anti-White Hate as we have had over the recent decades, especially since the 1990s.
This is my main prediction for 2017, I think, everything I just wrote above. It's the main point of my trend analysis. I didn't see this coming at all. We'll see if I'm right.
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Diagnosis: Collective Schizoid Russophobia
Despite, or perhaps because of, the implications it has for ginning up an impeding catastrophic military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia---something the two nations managed to avoid all during the Cold War---I find myself absolutely fascinated by the "Russia did it" madness now sweeping through liberals and the mainstream media regarding the absurd and easily debunkable claim that somehow Putin and his henchmen interfered in the recent U.S. presidential election in a way that tipped the balance of the Electoral College to Donald Trump.
Throughout much of my recent life, I've been as fascinated by conspiracy theories as anyone, and but without exception, such claims must at least pass a basic smell test of being with the realms of feasibility on some level, and must have, if not proof, at least some kernel of rudimentary evidence to begin an investigation towards the truth.
I need at least a wee bit of traction if something is going to sit on my radar screen of interest. In this case, I'm not even sure what the claim is supposed to be, and yet the cable airwaves and Twitter is filled with pundits screaming for vengeance and justice based on absolutely conviction of what supposedly happened. What did happen, exactly? Do tell!
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Over the last two years, I have after all, kept repeating that "many will lose their minds" in the days ahead. But each new level of the madness still catches me off guard, and this one certainly is a type I did not foresee, although it makes perfect sense in retrospect.
The Establishment must do anything to hold onto power, and moreover Hillary and the Left must do anything possible to avoid accepting any sort of responsibility for losing the election, and (most importantly) any sort of self-examination that may lead them question their underlying assumptions about the world. Together these add up to recipe for just about any scale of delusion, it seems, even one that might lead to nuclear war.
To wit:
Watching the above rant from an old failed sports pundit whom I hadn't heard from in years (does he still throw he papers up in the air at the end of each segment in that hip ironic way?), I feel like a psychiatric researcher, clad in a white lab coat, taking notes about a new form of mental disease while observing a patient behind a two-way mirror. If I didn't think the guy was serious, I was consider it brilliant self-promotion as a career revival. Stephen Colbert by contrast is rather hamstrung from going to this level of emotion, given the format of his show.
Only two weeks ago, as the Recount Phase was petering out, I had almost convinced myself that my prediction of widespread madness had been a tad hyperbolic. Now I'm releasing I was more correct that I could have realized. I just could not see what forms this madness would take, and the time frame over which it played out. Madness is always breathtaking in the arrogant way its shocks the senses. One must remember this. Moreover, it seems to be able to come pretty much out of nowhere to destroy all vestiges of sanity within a matter of days on a collective level, as this example shows.
I have now come to see that the road ahead will be one of a slowly, unfolding train-wreck of emotionally-charged collective delusions and denials of reality, each stage probably more weird and outrageous than the last.
Mimicking the Trump movement itself (because imitation is what liberals do well), the Lefties (serving as the shock troops for a shattered Establishment) will consider this all to be a form of a resistance against tyranny. But in fact it will make things easier for Trump.
As of two weeks ago, many of his hard core supporters were slightly de-energized by the horrifying thought that maybe Trump would pick Mitt Romney as Secretary of State and confirm their worst fears that he was selling out to the Establishment, and would be just another "mainstream Republican" in the end.
This latest round of weirdness has wiped that all away, and pretty much everyone is back to the mindset that if Trump's victory is causing this much insanity and this much chaos, he must surely be the real deal after all. Those who had begun to harbor doubts about him are with him 100% again.
Throughout much of my recent life, I've been as fascinated by conspiracy theories as anyone, and but without exception, such claims must at least pass a basic smell test of being with the realms of feasibility on some level, and must have, if not proof, at least some kernel of rudimentary evidence to begin an investigation towards the truth.
I need at least a wee bit of traction if something is going to sit on my radar screen of interest. In this case, I'm not even sure what the claim is supposed to be, and yet the cable airwaves and Twitter is filled with pundits screaming for vengeance and justice based on absolutely conviction of what supposedly happened. What did happen, exactly? Do tell!
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Over the last two years, I have after all, kept repeating that "many will lose their minds" in the days ahead. But each new level of the madness still catches me off guard, and this one certainly is a type I did not foresee, although it makes perfect sense in retrospect.
The Establishment must do anything to hold onto power, and moreover Hillary and the Left must do anything possible to avoid accepting any sort of responsibility for losing the election, and (most importantly) any sort of self-examination that may lead them question their underlying assumptions about the world. Together these add up to recipe for just about any scale of delusion, it seems, even one that might lead to nuclear war.
To wit:
Watching the above rant from an old failed sports pundit whom I hadn't heard from in years (does he still throw he papers up in the air at the end of each segment in that hip ironic way?), I feel like a psychiatric researcher, clad in a white lab coat, taking notes about a new form of mental disease while observing a patient behind a two-way mirror. If I didn't think the guy was serious, I was consider it brilliant self-promotion as a career revival. Stephen Colbert by contrast is rather hamstrung from going to this level of emotion, given the format of his show.
Only two weeks ago, as the Recount Phase was petering out, I had almost convinced myself that my prediction of widespread madness had been a tad hyperbolic. Now I'm releasing I was more correct that I could have realized. I just could not see what forms this madness would take, and the time frame over which it played out. Madness is always breathtaking in the arrogant way its shocks the senses. One must remember this. Moreover, it seems to be able to come pretty much out of nowhere to destroy all vestiges of sanity within a matter of days on a collective level, as this example shows.
I have now come to see that the road ahead will be one of a slowly, unfolding train-wreck of emotionally-charged collective delusions and denials of reality, each stage probably more weird and outrageous than the last.
Mimicking the Trump movement itself (because imitation is what liberals do well), the Lefties (serving as the shock troops for a shattered Establishment) will consider this all to be a form of a resistance against tyranny. But in fact it will make things easier for Trump.
As of two weeks ago, many of his hard core supporters were slightly de-energized by the horrifying thought that maybe Trump would pick Mitt Romney as Secretary of State and confirm their worst fears that he was selling out to the Establishment, and would be just another "mainstream Republican" in the end.
This latest round of weirdness has wiped that all away, and pretty much everyone is back to the mindset that if Trump's victory is causing this much insanity and this much chaos, he must surely be the real deal after all. Those who had begun to harbor doubts about him are with him 100% again.
The Weeks of Haze Behind and Ahead
The last month since the election has found yours truly seeking some level of normalcy in life, and draw-down from the height of the emotions from the end of the campaign. This has been largely thwarted by the fact that the campaign did not in fact end on November 8, but it is fact ongoing, as many Democrats and liberals are still determined to prevent Trump from taking office on January 20.
In effect, the most interesting things to follow have not been what Trump will do, but what others are trying to do to stop him. These have been highly fascinating to someone like myself who is a long-time student of elections. Nothing like this has ever happened, so I am forced by my nature to pay close attention to it.
There have been three phases so far:
1. The Riots (first week after the election). Concentrated in cities such as Portland, Oakland, and New York (the usual suspects). Some of it possibly organized and promoted with funding by Soros (to create an American "color revolution"), and some of it no doubt spontaneous. These petered out when it was evident that they would serve no other purpose that the immolation of random vehicles.
2. The Big Recount (mid-November to late November). Remember how I predicted last March that you would be hearing a lot more about the obscure person known as Jill Stein (see Young Sanders-Stein)? You didn't believe me then, did you? Now, after all the ballots were cast, she was finally in her glory, again possibly with Soros backing and Hillary's tacit approval, trying to erase her image among liberals as election spoiler and become the stalking horse for a Hillary victory after the fact. The liberal media shunned her before November 8 but now they couldn't give her enough attention. Of course, it didn't work, as Bill Clinton seems to have warned his wife, amidst her tantrum. This second phase came to a climax over the weekend after Thanksgiving, as the Democrats in Pennsylvania unloaded their last salvo of absentee votes, in an attempt to convince a federal judge to overrule the state law regarding recounts. The attempt failed and even backfired, as most things do that try to take down Trump. The Wisconsin recount buttressed the existing result, and the partial one in Michigan served only to uncover what is most likely widespread vote fraud among the heavily Democratic precincts of Detroit (where it seems it is common practice to run the votes through the optical scanners multiple times).
3. The Electoral College Coup. The current phase is to try to convince enough Republican electors of the Electoral College (which votes on December 19) to "vote their conscience" and cast their ballots for someone other than Trump. This would ideally have the effect of lowering his count below 270, thus throwing the election to the House of Representatives. The rules there favor the Republicans, but perhaps they can choose John Kasich (amazing we are still talking about that guy). This concept is being promoted by the sudden emergence of a claim of the election being hacked by the Russians somehow (something the mainstream media assured us was impossible just six weeks ago). The way that the liberals are losing their minds over this issue is one of the most pitiful sights I have ever beheld in all of my years following American elections since 1972.
As I said, all of this is very fascinating from an electoral point of view. By its sheer novelty, it is forcing me to pay attention. Of course it's not going to stop Trump, but the point of it, as many have suggested, is to create the basis for a stance among liberals that he is not a legitimate president. This will likely serve them about as well as the stance that he was not a legitimate candidate in 2015. But it will allow them to feel righteous, which to liberals is the most important thing, even as they set themselves up for another round of electoral disaster. So be it.
The biggest thing that concerns me is Step 4, which we will enter after December 19 when Trump wins the Electoral College vote and officially becomes "President Elect." What will the Establishment, and their liberal and conservative shock troops, do then?
Things are so weird that I've temporarily lost my ability to see down the road very far. We are living in the haze of novel battlefield, and few of us can see the terrain very far. I can only go by what the Tweets are saying, and the one that seems to come up over and over, as far as the next step, is
4. War with Russia (late December, early January, during the waning weeks of the Obama Administration). This seems preposterous, but the groundwork has certainly been laid for this to happen, in public opinion among the media, and even among Establishment Republicans in the Senate (or "traitors", as the Trump supporters call them). If one assumes that the Establishment will do anything to stop Trump, whom they see as the living apocalypse of their control, then one can easily conclude that this option is not off the table. In the minds of many Trump-supporting analysts, this is exactly what Hillary was going to deliver during her presidency, and now they must have it, as soon as possible. They have until January 20 to start it. They will have, apparently, the means, motive and opportunity to achieve it.
I really hope this doesn't happen. I really hope that by January 20 this semi-prediction will appear to have been foolishly alarmist.
But the only thing that doesn't surprise me lately is normalcy.
In effect, the most interesting things to follow have not been what Trump will do, but what others are trying to do to stop him. These have been highly fascinating to someone like myself who is a long-time student of elections. Nothing like this has ever happened, so I am forced by my nature to pay close attention to it.
There have been three phases so far:
1. The Riots (first week after the election). Concentrated in cities such as Portland, Oakland, and New York (the usual suspects). Some of it possibly organized and promoted with funding by Soros (to create an American "color revolution"), and some of it no doubt spontaneous. These petered out when it was evident that they would serve no other purpose that the immolation of random vehicles.
2. The Big Recount (mid-November to late November). Remember how I predicted last March that you would be hearing a lot more about the obscure person known as Jill Stein (see Young Sanders-Stein)? You didn't believe me then, did you? Now, after all the ballots were cast, she was finally in her glory, again possibly with Soros backing and Hillary's tacit approval, trying to erase her image among liberals as election spoiler and become the stalking horse for a Hillary victory after the fact. The liberal media shunned her before November 8 but now they couldn't give her enough attention. Of course, it didn't work, as Bill Clinton seems to have warned his wife, amidst her tantrum. This second phase came to a climax over the weekend after Thanksgiving, as the Democrats in Pennsylvania unloaded their last salvo of absentee votes, in an attempt to convince a federal judge to overrule the state law regarding recounts. The attempt failed and even backfired, as most things do that try to take down Trump. The Wisconsin recount buttressed the existing result, and the partial one in Michigan served only to uncover what is most likely widespread vote fraud among the heavily Democratic precincts of Detroit (where it seems it is common practice to run the votes through the optical scanners multiple times).
3. The Electoral College Coup. The current phase is to try to convince enough Republican electors of the Electoral College (which votes on December 19) to "vote their conscience" and cast their ballots for someone other than Trump. This would ideally have the effect of lowering his count below 270, thus throwing the election to the House of Representatives. The rules there favor the Republicans, but perhaps they can choose John Kasich (amazing we are still talking about that guy). This concept is being promoted by the sudden emergence of a claim of the election being hacked by the Russians somehow (something the mainstream media assured us was impossible just six weeks ago). The way that the liberals are losing their minds over this issue is one of the most pitiful sights I have ever beheld in all of my years following American elections since 1972.
As I said, all of this is very fascinating from an electoral point of view. By its sheer novelty, it is forcing me to pay attention. Of course it's not going to stop Trump, but the point of it, as many have suggested, is to create the basis for a stance among liberals that he is not a legitimate president. This will likely serve them about as well as the stance that he was not a legitimate candidate in 2015. But it will allow them to feel righteous, which to liberals is the most important thing, even as they set themselves up for another round of electoral disaster. So be it.
The biggest thing that concerns me is Step 4, which we will enter after December 19 when Trump wins the Electoral College vote and officially becomes "President Elect." What will the Establishment, and their liberal and conservative shock troops, do then?
Things are so weird that I've temporarily lost my ability to see down the road very far. We are living in the haze of novel battlefield, and few of us can see the terrain very far. I can only go by what the Tweets are saying, and the one that seems to come up over and over, as far as the next step, is
4. War with Russia (late December, early January, during the waning weeks of the Obama Administration). This seems preposterous, but the groundwork has certainly been laid for this to happen, in public opinion among the media, and even among Establishment Republicans in the Senate (or "traitors", as the Trump supporters call them). If one assumes that the Establishment will do anything to stop Trump, whom they see as the living apocalypse of their control, then one can easily conclude that this option is not off the table. In the minds of many Trump-supporting analysts, this is exactly what Hillary was going to deliver during her presidency, and now they must have it, as soon as possible. They have until January 20 to start it. They will have, apparently, the means, motive and opportunity to achieve it.
I really hope this doesn't happen. I really hope that by January 20 this semi-prediction will appear to have been foolishly alarmist.
But the only thing that doesn't surprise me lately is normalcy.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Why the Establishment is Truly Destroyed
Q: Why is the Era of the Establishment now over, just because Donald Trump won the election?
Good question. After all, this is just one election, and Donald Trump is only one man. So far, moreover, he has appointed multiple people to his cabinet who come straight out of the old Establishment. He seems to want to make peace with them to some degree. Looking down the road into his administration, at least in the short run, maybe his policies won't differ that much from a mainstream politician of either party.
So what has changed, really, of such monumental significance? Why can we say that the Great Wheel of the Ages has Turned?
A: Things have changed permanently and irrevocably because according to the rules of the Establishment, Donald Trump as a major party nominee, let alone as President of the United States, could never be allowed to happen.
The Establishment (c. 1947-2016) as a system of politics and a structure of power, depended utterly on being seamlessly coherent, pervasive and uninterrupted in scope. It was, in the true sense of the word as discussed by Carroll Quigley and others, an imperium, in that it successfully became a cosmopolitan encompassing whole which embraced and infiltrated the totality of society.
A key phrase about the Establishment that comes to mind is the one that was employed during the Second Gulf War by Dick Cheney and others: full spectrum dominance. In the way that Cheney meant, it implied that the United States has complete mastery of all phases of the war, including on the battlefield and off the battlefield. This included, among other things, complete domination of the world media, so that American propaganda was taken as the objective historical truth by default.
The Second Gulf War was arguably the apotheosis of the Establishment, during its latter New World Order phase. But the concept of full spectrum dominance has long been one of the cornerstones of the Establishment from its very beginning. The Establishment rose to power and thrived within America, and eventually the world, because it held utter mastery over the entire message and the process, throughout the all the channels of society that mattered.
The world "spectrum" hear may be taken literally to refer to the electromagnetic spectrum of the radio and television airwaves. In the Establishment system of power, all voices within the spectrum were ideally to be those endorsed by the Establishment. Just as the radio band was confined to a narrow range of possible frequencies, so the range of acceptable voices were to be confined with a band of Right-to-Left politics, all of which buttressed the Establishment from various angles, while seemingly offering choice to the public at large.
Just as frequencies outside the narrow AM/FM band were not receivable by standard radio equipment in the U.S., all voices outside this acceptable Right-to-Left spectrum range were to be deemed "extremist" by the Establishment. The standard weapon of the Establishment in this regard has been to conflate any unacceptable opinions with, say, Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan (in the case of the right wing), and to Communists (in the case of the left wing).
In the last few decades, however, as the Left has completely capitulated to the Establishment, leaving only the Right as the dissident faction, the charge of "Communist" has lost nearly all its power as a shaming tool and has been embraced as a cuddly and benign label by many Leftists without consequence within the Establishment system.
This, by the way, is why the ultimate challenger to the Establishment had to come from the Right (as Donald Trump did), instead of the Left. Bernie Sanders proved this fact by his surrender at the end of the primaries, sheepdogging his followers into the Clinton campaign (many refused to follow, of course).
This means the Left has a lot of work to do, to built up a true post-Establishment movement to challenge Trump and his followers, who have an enormous head start. For the time being, many Leftists who have anti-Establishment sympathies are nevertheless still enamored of such things as "global governance," which is in fact the very cornerstone of the Establishment structure of power. The mention of such things as "climate change" are enough to send many Leftists running straight back to the Establishment as the savoir of mankind.
The shattered pieces of the Establishment remain potent within the politics of the world and America, but they are no longer form a seamlessly coherent and unchallengeable structure. They cannot be reassembled as such, for the illusion of inevitable mastery has been destroyed completely. There is no "forgetting what has happened." This is what Donald Trump's election has accomplished above all else.
Among other things, we know that the media no longer has the final say over political candidates. We know that candidates no longer have to bend their knee to the great organs of Establishment power, in order to avoid being shamed out of the public arena.
Above all, we now recognize that there is such a things as the Establishment, and that it can be beaten. This is by far the most significance change of this year.
It took a self-financing billionaire with contempt for the mainstream media in order to bring this about, but it some ways it was inevitable at point, given that the Establishment was in advanced state of decay after many decades of interrupted dominance and success.
For the time being, the Left hates this situation, because it has brought to power the very "right-wing extremists" that they have been trained to hate with Pavlovian instinct by the Establishment. But in time new factions will find its own true anti-Establishment voice. There is plenty to oppose Trump about, and still be very anti-Establishment. Moreover, the entire Right-to-Left concept of politics will soon be seen to be a relic of the Establishment itself.
No matter what happens going forward in the Trump administration, it will be a golden era for new, vibrant political movements. Donald Trump will have given all of us that gift. Most people just don't know it yet.
Good question. After all, this is just one election, and Donald Trump is only one man. So far, moreover, he has appointed multiple people to his cabinet who come straight out of the old Establishment. He seems to want to make peace with them to some degree. Looking down the road into his administration, at least in the short run, maybe his policies won't differ that much from a mainstream politician of either party.
So what has changed, really, of such monumental significance? Why can we say that the Great Wheel of the Ages has Turned?
A: Things have changed permanently and irrevocably because according to the rules of the Establishment, Donald Trump as a major party nominee, let alone as President of the United States, could never be allowed to happen.
The Establishment (c. 1947-2016) as a system of politics and a structure of power, depended utterly on being seamlessly coherent, pervasive and uninterrupted in scope. It was, in the true sense of the word as discussed by Carroll Quigley and others, an imperium, in that it successfully became a cosmopolitan encompassing whole which embraced and infiltrated the totality of society.
A key phrase about the Establishment that comes to mind is the one that was employed during the Second Gulf War by Dick Cheney and others: full spectrum dominance. In the way that Cheney meant, it implied that the United States has complete mastery of all phases of the war, including on the battlefield and off the battlefield. This included, among other things, complete domination of the world media, so that American propaganda was taken as the objective historical truth by default.
The Second Gulf War was arguably the apotheosis of the Establishment, during its latter New World Order phase. But the concept of full spectrum dominance has long been one of the cornerstones of the Establishment from its very beginning. The Establishment rose to power and thrived within America, and eventually the world, because it held utter mastery over the entire message and the process, throughout the all the channels of society that mattered.
The world "spectrum" hear may be taken literally to refer to the electromagnetic spectrum of the radio and television airwaves. In the Establishment system of power, all voices within the spectrum were ideally to be those endorsed by the Establishment. Just as the radio band was confined to a narrow range of possible frequencies, so the range of acceptable voices were to be confined with a band of Right-to-Left politics, all of which buttressed the Establishment from various angles, while seemingly offering choice to the public at large.
Just as frequencies outside the narrow AM/FM band were not receivable by standard radio equipment in the U.S., all voices outside this acceptable Right-to-Left spectrum range were to be deemed "extremist" by the Establishment. The standard weapon of the Establishment in this regard has been to conflate any unacceptable opinions with, say, Nazism and the Ku Klux Klan (in the case of the right wing), and to Communists (in the case of the left wing).
In the last few decades, however, as the Left has completely capitulated to the Establishment, leaving only the Right as the dissident faction, the charge of "Communist" has lost nearly all its power as a shaming tool and has been embraced as a cuddly and benign label by many Leftists without consequence within the Establishment system.
This, by the way, is why the ultimate challenger to the Establishment had to come from the Right (as Donald Trump did), instead of the Left. Bernie Sanders proved this fact by his surrender at the end of the primaries, sheepdogging his followers into the Clinton campaign (many refused to follow, of course).
This means the Left has a lot of work to do, to built up a true post-Establishment movement to challenge Trump and his followers, who have an enormous head start. For the time being, many Leftists who have anti-Establishment sympathies are nevertheless still enamored of such things as "global governance," which is in fact the very cornerstone of the Establishment structure of power. The mention of such things as "climate change" are enough to send many Leftists running straight back to the Establishment as the savoir of mankind.
The shattered pieces of the Establishment remain potent within the politics of the world and America, but they are no longer form a seamlessly coherent and unchallengeable structure. They cannot be reassembled as such, for the illusion of inevitable mastery has been destroyed completely. There is no "forgetting what has happened." This is what Donald Trump's election has accomplished above all else.
Among other things, we know that the media no longer has the final say over political candidates. We know that candidates no longer have to bend their knee to the great organs of Establishment power, in order to avoid being shamed out of the public arena.
Above all, we now recognize that there is such a things as the Establishment, and that it can be beaten. This is by far the most significance change of this year.
It took a self-financing billionaire with contempt for the mainstream media in order to bring this about, but it some ways it was inevitable at point, given that the Establishment was in advanced state of decay after many decades of interrupted dominance and success.
For the time being, the Left hates this situation, because it has brought to power the very "right-wing extremists" that they have been trained to hate with Pavlovian instinct by the Establishment. But in time new factions will find its own true anti-Establishment voice. There is plenty to oppose Trump about, and still be very anti-Establishment. Moreover, the entire Right-to-Left concept of politics will soon be seen to be a relic of the Establishment itself.
No matter what happens going forward in the Trump administration, it will be a golden era for new, vibrant political movements. Donald Trump will have given all of us that gift. Most people just don't know it yet.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
The Big Wind-Down
In the last few days I have been overcome by a great exhaustion, not only of body and mind, but of spirit as well. It feels like an exhaustion years in the making.
The election is over. The intensity recedes. The great turning of the ages is underway, and will keep being underway for the foreseeable future. In the meantime the news turns to the everyday give-and-take of the political arena.
I feel an overwhelming desire to withdrawal from it all, not because I don't find it interesting, for surely I do, but because I simply crave a feeling of normalcy in the flow of my life that I haven't felt in a long time. At the very least, I have no desire to comment on the day-to-day of politics. That was never my intention. I will let others do that, who are much better suited at such type of commentary.
No one gets to decide that life will be normal. In both the personal sphere, and the public sphere, events can dictate the pace and timbre of life beyond our ability to choose how we live it. I know I'd be foolish to think that "things will be normal" now in any sense. Maybe they will.
But I can at least take a break, from writing here on this blog, at least about anything related to current events and history. I think that's what I will do, at least for a few weeks or a few months, or least until there is something I feel compelled to say.
If I keep writing here, I think I will turn my attention to the small, normal things of life for a while. If I write at all, I want to write about the quiet things, that bring peace to my mind.
Yes, that's what I will do.
The election is over. The intensity recedes. The great turning of the ages is underway, and will keep being underway for the foreseeable future. In the meantime the news turns to the everyday give-and-take of the political arena.
I feel an overwhelming desire to withdrawal from it all, not because I don't find it interesting, for surely I do, but because I simply crave a feeling of normalcy in the flow of my life that I haven't felt in a long time. At the very least, I have no desire to comment on the day-to-day of politics. That was never my intention. I will let others do that, who are much better suited at such type of commentary.
No one gets to decide that life will be normal. In both the personal sphere, and the public sphere, events can dictate the pace and timbre of life beyond our ability to choose how we live it. I know I'd be foolish to think that "things will be normal" now in any sense. Maybe they will.
But I can at least take a break, from writing here on this blog, at least about anything related to current events and history. I think that's what I will do, at least for a few weeks or a few months, or least until there is something I feel compelled to say.
If I keep writing here, I think I will turn my attention to the small, normal things of life for a while. If I write at all, I want to write about the quiet things, that bring peace to my mind.
Yes, that's what I will do.
Friday, November 18, 2016
The Long Revolution Ahead
 |
| In reference to this statement by West on Nov. 17. Both Scott Adams and Mike Cernovich have been among the most clued-in people about the election over the last year. Both of them knew Trump would win (belying the media notion that "no one knew".) You may like them or not, but ignore them at your peril. |
We are in the opening act of a long drama. Everything has changed. Well, perhaps not everything, but as close to that as possible.
So much has changed, and most people have no idea how much. As of now, most people are reacting to the election through the lens of the present and the past. We are focusing on the usual things, such as the effects of Donald Trump's specific policies, and his cabinet picks, and the pendulum swing from liberal to conservative.
All of these are important to be sure, but this is old-type micro-thinking. The underpinning of most of the discussion is the assumption that things will go on as they did before somehow. Politics will return will to the way things have been done for so many decades. We assume this, because we know no other way that things could be done.
So we talk about how the Democrats will cope, and whom they might run as a nominee in 2020. So much jiberish. We will look back and realize how hopeless we were at this moment, to anticipate the magnitude of the changes. As I write this, the moribund media, mortally wounded by this election, is trying a desperate and hopeless rear guard action to delegitimize the new alternative media, which as brought real truth-telling journalism back to America.
One of my favorite recent television shows is Downton Abbey. I watched part of the first season, but I really only got into it during the last season. When I began watching it as it aired, I immediately realized the deep appeal. It is a well-produced show, and impeccably researched as a historical drama (very inspiring), but what really attracted me to it is the story of people living through a very confusing time of change in history, in which so man of the rules of life are shifted underneath them (in this case, because of the rapid modernization of World War I and its aftermath). The characters struggle to adapt to all the new rules. Some do so better than others.
We are all like the people on that show. The ground has shifted underneath our feet. We barely realize how much. We should feel VERY LUCKY that this has happened so far in a peaceful manner, instead of through a massive war and the creation of tens of millions of dead across the continent of Europe and the world, as it did a century ago. If that isn't progress, then I don't know what is.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Bankers Have to Live Here Too
Outstanding video by Bill Still, one of my favorite Youtube commentators, regarding Trump's possible picks for Secretary of Treasury, and by extension about the entire transition process underway. Must see if you want to understand what it going on right now.
We are truly in the throes of a Second American Revolution, and everything, even the most fundamental issue of money creation is up for grabs. If Bill Still is right, we have the opportunity to overthrow a century of banker domination which has seen the ability of the financial sector to basically create its money supply and thus to buy out the rest of the world, and force the country into its debt bondage along the way.
It is possible we may see this era finally end. At least this is our best chance so far. If we cannot do it now, we may never be able to overthrow this. It seems Trump wants to do this, but it will require cooperation, at least tacitly from the big banks. We'll see.
Still: "I'm betting there are plenty of bankers who would be satisfied with something less than 90% of the world's income, especially if it saved America..."
On a related note of "draining the swamp", Trump supporters cheered in no small way to see Mike Pence take over the transition team and clear out the lobbyists that Chris Christie hired. This came only 24 hours after Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had sharply criticized the hiring of these lobbyists. This kind of nimbleness in responding to legitimate criticism is something Trump supporters have seen repeatedly in the past, and to which have they grown accustomed. The rest of the nation is about to learn about it as well.
As far as Christie, no one has fallen more within the Trump campaign than he has. His incompetence allowed subordinates to actually go to prison in Bridgegate. Disgusting. He is basically persona non grata at this point at Trump Tower now. It's yet another reason among Trump supporters to be thankful for the Pence pick.
We are truly in the throes of a Second American Revolution, and everything, even the most fundamental issue of money creation is up for grabs. If Bill Still is right, we have the opportunity to overthrow a century of banker domination which has seen the ability of the financial sector to basically create its money supply and thus to buy out the rest of the world, and force the country into its debt bondage along the way.
It is possible we may see this era finally end. At least this is our best chance so far. If we cannot do it now, we may never be able to overthrow this. It seems Trump wants to do this, but it will require cooperation, at least tacitly from the big banks. We'll see.
Still: "I'm betting there are plenty of bankers who would be satisfied with something less than 90% of the world's income, especially if it saved America..."
On a related note of "draining the swamp", Trump supporters cheered in no small way to see Mike Pence take over the transition team and clear out the lobbyists that Chris Christie hired. This came only 24 hours after Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had sharply criticized the hiring of these lobbyists. This kind of nimbleness in responding to legitimate criticism is something Trump supporters have seen repeatedly in the past, and to which have they grown accustomed. The rest of the nation is about to learn about it as well.
As far as Christie, no one has fallen more within the Trump campaign than he has. His incompetence allowed subordinates to actually go to prison in Bridgegate. Disgusting. He is basically persona non grata at this point at Trump Tower now. It's yet another reason among Trump supporters to be thankful for the Pence pick.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
New Focus for the Blog, Update #1
New focus for the blog. Less philosophical and historical for now. I'm going to save that for the writing project. In case you hadn't figured it out, it's essentially a History of the Rise and Fall of the Establishment, from its origins until the present day. Finally I know how it turns out. No need to write about it here. I'd just be diverting energy.
Instead I'm going to focus on something more akin to direct day-by-day reporting. Things are happening so fast. I'm going to chronicle events and tell you about the Trump Movement as it unfolds like a reporter. I have as good an insight into it as anyone else, who is not directly involved. What I don't have in close-up contact, I more than make up for in historical insight. I think I have proven this, if nothing else, from my posts over the last year and a half.
A week after the election. The fight is raging. A few insights at the moment:
1. Most Trump supporters are still extremely happy about the election results and how Donald Trump has handled himself since then. There was a small rumble about RNC chairman Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff possibly not being the optimal pick, but overall the consensus is that it was brilliant and correct. Part of the reason for this acceptance of Priebus is experience from the Pence VP choice last summer.
Pence was not universally acclaimed as being the right choice at the time. There were lots of WTF's, but since then, there has grown near universal agreement that Trump knew exactly what he was doing after all, and that it was the perfect choice, one that helped him win the election in no small way. This has buttressed an overall feeling that Trump knows what he is doing with his personnel, and that he should be given the benefit of the doubt, even if it is doesn't seem perfectly obvious at the time. That said, Priebus earned tons of cred by sticking with Trump through Pussygate, and essentially risking it all to stay on the Trump Train. There is a feeling that he will be awesome and shepherding the Trump agenda through Congress and the bureaucracy after January 20.
As far as Trump's choice of Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist goes, everyone is backing him and loves him because he drives liberals crazy. Every Trump supporter knows that they are going to be lumped in the KKK at this point, and they have come to expect it, so there is an attitude of "bring it on," and "you know you're over the target when you are taking flak." There is a sense that Bannon will keep the Trump agenda on track, and keep things from getting "lost in the swamp."
There was also initial concern among some when Trump named several lobbyists, including one from Goldman Sachs and another from Pfizer, as part of his transition team. But there is a realization that in order to drain the swamp, it will be necessary to employ people who know the swamp. The basic concept is "who will they work for?" In the old system of the Establishment, they would have been ambassadors representing outside interests. For example, they essentially bought their way into Obama's administration through large cash donations. Trump didn't take money from them.Huge difference. He owes them no favors, and now they are working for Donald Trump.
The idea among Trump's followers is that Trump is wise aenough to know how to use these people to achieve his agenda, and until proven otherwise, Trump should be trusted to chose the right people, the idea is. It is acknowledged (for example with Pence) that Trump plays the whole game on a higher level that is inscrutable to mere mortals (4D chess), and that whatever doesn't seem to make sense at the time will make sense later. So far, so good, among his followers. He has not let them down yet.
The only huge concern remaining is that, following rumors in the press, John Bolton will become Secretary of State. Bolton is a famous knuckle-cracking neocon from the Bush Administration, and even though he supported Trump in the campaign, he is widely loathed among Trump supporters because of the taint of Bush and Neoconservative warmongering. His appointment would be seen as perhaps letting the scoundrels back in. As many have pointed out, the only info about this possible pick are rumors, however, and Trump himself has said to ignore such rumors, because they are coming from liars within the media. But until Bolton is officially out, there will remain a sense of uneasiness among his followers. If he is appointed, it would be by far the most challenging name that his supporters would have had to swallow.
2. There is widespread consensus among his followers that although many of the protestors act spontaneously, much of the energy and impetus of the street protestors is coming from George Soros-funded organizations.This is supported by evidence on the street regarding bused-in protestors, and preprinted signs, among things. Soros is now regarded as World Enemy #1, the Kingpin. Much of the meme energy is now directed straight at him as the Dark Lord who must taken down.
3. There is widespread chagrin, but not surprise, that the media is fabricating a fake wave of hate crimes by Trump supporters and correspondingly ignoring real violence being directed at Trump supporters across the country.
4. As of today, there is apparently a purge underway on Twitter of widely-followed alt-right and Trump-supporting accounts. Twitter went after some of the most innocuous ones at first, and many other big names are waiting for the ban hammer to fall on them. There is a consensus that Twitter is dying anyway, and that this may actually be the catalyst for the alternative platform Gab to take off.
5. There is a small but growing concern that Julian Assange has not actually been seen or verified to be in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since Oct. 17 when his Internet was cut off. This is despite supposed interviews since then, but in them Assange apparently does not reference any events that have happened since then. There is speculation that on the night of Oct. 17, he may have been spirited away and is being tortured. Not every one is on board with this idea (for example Kim Dotcom, as of last week), but the buzz on this took a huge uptick in the last 24 hours with the release of Wikileaks files with crypto file hashes that did not match the ones that pre-released on Oct. 17 as part of the routine dump of hashes (in layman's terms this means that perhaps the files are compromised). Supposedly Assangee was interviewed by Sweden today, the country that wants to arrest him, but the interview was handled via embassy personell. "Where is Assange?" has suddenly become a question that more people are asking. The swirling speculation has buttressed the idea among many that the remaining Wikileaks files hold things of such horrendous magnitude that they would essentially bring down the United States government (something Assange himself onceclaimed hinted at).
Instead I'm going to focus on something more akin to direct day-by-day reporting. Things are happening so fast. I'm going to chronicle events and tell you about the Trump Movement as it unfolds like a reporter. I have as good an insight into it as anyone else, who is not directly involved. What I don't have in close-up contact, I more than make up for in historical insight. I think I have proven this, if nothing else, from my posts over the last year and a half.
A week after the election. The fight is raging. A few insights at the moment:
1. Most Trump supporters are still extremely happy about the election results and how Donald Trump has handled himself since then. There was a small rumble about RNC chairman Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff possibly not being the optimal pick, but overall the consensus is that it was brilliant and correct. Part of the reason for this acceptance of Priebus is experience from the Pence VP choice last summer.
Pence was not universally acclaimed as being the right choice at the time. There were lots of WTF's, but since then, there has grown near universal agreement that Trump knew exactly what he was doing after all, and that it was the perfect choice, one that helped him win the election in no small way. This has buttressed an overall feeling that Trump knows what he is doing with his personnel, and that he should be given the benefit of the doubt, even if it is doesn't seem perfectly obvious at the time. That said, Priebus earned tons of cred by sticking with Trump through Pussygate, and essentially risking it all to stay on the Trump Train. There is a feeling that he will be awesome and shepherding the Trump agenda through Congress and the bureaucracy after January 20.
As far as Trump's choice of Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist goes, everyone is backing him and loves him because he drives liberals crazy. Every Trump supporter knows that they are going to be lumped in the KKK at this point, and they have come to expect it, so there is an attitude of "bring it on," and "you know you're over the target when you are taking flak." There is a sense that Bannon will keep the Trump agenda on track, and keep things from getting "lost in the swamp."
There was also initial concern among some when Trump named several lobbyists, including one from Goldman Sachs and another from Pfizer, as part of his transition team. But there is a realization that in order to drain the swamp, it will be necessary to employ people who know the swamp. The basic concept is "who will they work for?" In the old system of the Establishment, they would have been ambassadors representing outside interests. For example, they essentially bought their way into Obama's administration through large cash donations. Trump didn't take money from them.Huge difference. He owes them no favors, and now they are working for Donald Trump.
The idea among Trump's followers is that Trump is wise aenough to know how to use these people to achieve his agenda, and until proven otherwise, Trump should be trusted to chose the right people, the idea is. It is acknowledged (for example with Pence) that Trump plays the whole game on a higher level that is inscrutable to mere mortals (4D chess), and that whatever doesn't seem to make sense at the time will make sense later. So far, so good, among his followers. He has not let them down yet.
The only huge concern remaining is that, following rumors in the press, John Bolton will become Secretary of State. Bolton is a famous knuckle-cracking neocon from the Bush Administration, and even though he supported Trump in the campaign, he is widely loathed among Trump supporters because of the taint of Bush and Neoconservative warmongering. His appointment would be seen as perhaps letting the scoundrels back in. As many have pointed out, the only info about this possible pick are rumors, however, and Trump himself has said to ignore such rumors, because they are coming from liars within the media. But until Bolton is officially out, there will remain a sense of uneasiness among his followers. If he is appointed, it would be by far the most challenging name that his supporters would have had to swallow.
2. There is widespread consensus among his followers that although many of the protestors act spontaneously, much of the energy and impetus of the street protestors is coming from George Soros-funded organizations.This is supported by evidence on the street regarding bused-in protestors, and preprinted signs, among things. Soros is now regarded as World Enemy #1, the Kingpin. Much of the meme energy is now directed straight at him as the Dark Lord who must taken down.
3. There is widespread chagrin, but not surprise, that the media is fabricating a fake wave of hate crimes by Trump supporters and correspondingly ignoring real violence being directed at Trump supporters across the country.
4. As of today, there is apparently a purge underway on Twitter of widely-followed alt-right and Trump-supporting accounts. Twitter went after some of the most innocuous ones at first, and many other big names are waiting for the ban hammer to fall on them. There is a consensus that Twitter is dying anyway, and that this may actually be the catalyst for the alternative platform Gab to take off.
5. There is a small but growing concern that Julian Assange has not actually been seen or verified to be in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since Oct. 17 when his Internet was cut off. This is despite supposed interviews since then, but in them Assange apparently does not reference any events that have happened since then. There is speculation that on the night of Oct. 17, he may have been spirited away and is being tortured. Not every one is on board with this idea (for example Kim Dotcom, as of last week), but the buzz on this took a huge uptick in the last 24 hours with the release of Wikileaks files with crypto file hashes that did not match the ones that pre-released on Oct. 17 as part of the routine dump of hashes (in layman's terms this means that perhaps the files are compromised). Supposedly Assangee was interviewed by Sweden today, the country that wants to arrest him, but the interview was handled via embassy personell. "Where is Assange?" has suddenly become a question that more people are asking. The swirling speculation has buttressed the idea among many that the remaining Wikileaks files hold things of such horrendous magnitude that they would essentially bring down the United States government (something Assange himself once
The Establishment (1946-2016)
Well it's over. Whatever happens from this point forward, we are certainly in a new era of history.
I was writing as much last year, in anticipation of this, knowing it was about to happen, but now I am only one of many thousands saying these words.
So it is incumbent, if my statement has any meaning at this point, to remind people of what I meant when I first said this, and why I was so sure of it last year and last spring, and why I am so sure of it now.
By Establishment, I mean the international, and eventually global, system of political, financial, and personal relationships that formed the power structure of America, and eventually the world, in the wake of the Allied victory in the Second World War, and which came to dominate the world in the second half of the Twentieth Century, and which became increasingly unstable after the turn of the Millennium.
Moreover, by that term I refer, especially in the early years, to specific nameable individuals who formed the nucleus of power around which this structure was consciously organized and preserved.
This kind of system was unique in human history, and it did not arise spontaneously, but was the fruit of many years of planning by individuals who cooperated to create exactly this kind of power structure. The individual who planned and organized the original birth of the Establishment at the end of World War II were varied in character, but shared many similarities in their philosophies of the world.
Nevertheless, it is fair to assert that the Establishment as it came to exist in the late 1940s, and carried forward for the next seven decades, reflected in large measure the character of the individuals in whose care this system was entrusted by fate and by design.
As I've mentioned before, the Establishment can be described in many ways, but I think without argument one must assert that it was enormously successful. The fact that the second half of the Twentieth Century is regarded as one of American dominance, characterized by a global peace, eventually yielding to a pan-globalist "New World Order" of international cooperation, is the irrefutable proof of the success of the design of the Establishment.
To believe that this all came about by the chaotic zigzags of history is, in my view, one of the ridiculously naive notions that one could hold. Yet this is the view often proffered to the common people. I have friends who assert this. I don't try to correct them. I just nod along as they tell me I'm foolish for saying the things I do. I realize it's very difficult to explain certain things, so usually I don't try. That's what writing is for.
The Establishment failed at this point in history because it could no longer be sustained. The original genius that created it, for whatever combination of good and evil one can ascribe to those people, is long gone. We have been living in the last wave of people who knew the original founders, and who shared the life experiences that formed their vision.
Mostly in recent years the Establishment has been running on sheer inertia, and the cooperation of millions of people simply doing what they see is their duty, their role, their job, to preserve it, even as they can't quite articulate it exactly as that.
But now it is over. The Establishment was not the first "world order," just the first of its type. It won't be the last. It's fall doesn't mean that human nature will change. It doesn't mean that will live automatically in either a dystopia or a utopia.
It just means the Establishment is over, and is never coming back. For some folks, that's a huge trauma.
I was writing as much last year, in anticipation of this, knowing it was about to happen, but now I am only one of many thousands saying these words.
So it is incumbent, if my statement has any meaning at this point, to remind people of what I meant when I first said this, and why I was so sure of it last year and last spring, and why I am so sure of it now.
By Establishment, I mean the international, and eventually global, system of political, financial, and personal relationships that formed the power structure of America, and eventually the world, in the wake of the Allied victory in the Second World War, and which came to dominate the world in the second half of the Twentieth Century, and which became increasingly unstable after the turn of the Millennium.
Moreover, by that term I refer, especially in the early years, to specific nameable individuals who formed the nucleus of power around which this structure was consciously organized and preserved.
This kind of system was unique in human history, and it did not arise spontaneously, but was the fruit of many years of planning by individuals who cooperated to create exactly this kind of power structure. The individual who planned and organized the original birth of the Establishment at the end of World War II were varied in character, but shared many similarities in their philosophies of the world.
Nevertheless, it is fair to assert that the Establishment as it came to exist in the late 1940s, and carried forward for the next seven decades, reflected in large measure the character of the individuals in whose care this system was entrusted by fate and by design.
As I've mentioned before, the Establishment can be described in many ways, but I think without argument one must assert that it was enormously successful. The fact that the second half of the Twentieth Century is regarded as one of American dominance, characterized by a global peace, eventually yielding to a pan-globalist "New World Order" of international cooperation, is the irrefutable proof of the success of the design of the Establishment.
To believe that this all came about by the chaotic zigzags of history is, in my view, one of the ridiculously naive notions that one could hold. Yet this is the view often proffered to the common people. I have friends who assert this. I don't try to correct them. I just nod along as they tell me I'm foolish for saying the things I do. I realize it's very difficult to explain certain things, so usually I don't try. That's what writing is for.
The Establishment failed at this point in history because it could no longer be sustained. The original genius that created it, for whatever combination of good and evil one can ascribe to those people, is long gone. We have been living in the last wave of people who knew the original founders, and who shared the life experiences that formed their vision.
Mostly in recent years the Establishment has been running on sheer inertia, and the cooperation of millions of people simply doing what they see is their duty, their role, their job, to preserve it, even as they can't quite articulate it exactly as that.
But now it is over. The Establishment was not the first "world order," just the first of its type. It won't be the last. It's fall doesn't mean that human nature will change. It doesn't mean that will live automatically in either a dystopia or a utopia.
It just means the Establishment is over, and is never coming back. For some folks, that's a huge trauma.
Monday, November 14, 2016
Portland After Trump
Amazing compilation of footage from the riots in Portland over the last few nights. Worth watching if you want to see the reality. Recognized many locales on sight, notably multiple locations along my recent work commute to Albina.
I couldn't help find it ironic, the rioters overturning and setting on fire the newspaper kioks of Willamette Week and the Portland Tribune. One of the my memories from my last week there, was sitting down at the bus top (one which they ravaged in the video) and seeing the WW kiosk with the smiling picture of future President Hillary on the cover.
I can't help feeling like I got out just at the right time.
Monday, November 7, 2016
I Have Seen Him in the Watch-Fires of a Hundred Circling Memes
You will not have to fight this battle. Take up your positions; stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you.
2 Chron. 20:17
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| Mens cujusque is est Quisque" – "Mind Makes the Man". The bookplate of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). (source) |
One more day to go until Election Day---most likely my last blog post before the polls close.
Eight years ago I started this blog to post movie reviews as I drove around the country in self-imposed internal exile, on what amounted to a long personal quest I had undertaken during a period in my life.
The movie watching was a hobby I had undertaken at that point in my life, as something to do that kept my focus day to day, when I needed that. Simply put, I had decided to see every movie that came out, and eventually that included visiting as many different movie theaters around the country as possible. I kept it going that way for two years before I couldn't take it anymore. It was a marvelous time, although I would never want to repeat that experiment again, for many reasons, not the least of which is that I simply don't have the time
But even from the start I always intended to express much more than movie write-ups in this blog. It always was connected to the larger goal I had in my mind, and in some ways I feel as if the entire thread of what I have written so far here (well over a million words by now) has been leading up to this moment.
In regard to tomorrow and the election, I've made my predictions and thoughts clear, so I won't rehash them here. Instead I want to make some observations about this moment of history in the broader sense.
Whatever happens tomorrow, and in the days ahead, I can say this has lived up to all my expectations and exceeded them. Yet in some ways it feels as if it is all just getting underway.
One big takeaway from this, as I was just telling a friend, is a stark realization of how my viewpoint of the world, and of reality itself, diverges so much from so many people I have known. I have been aware of this for some time, and have grown accustomed to it to some degree, even having lost close friends along the way because of it, but the chasm now seems so great that I wonder how many years must pass in the future before I can hold a pleasant and unguarded conversation with many old friends and acquaintances, without feeling as if we are living in two different universes.
You haven't really lived until you've had an old friend look at you as if you were a Martian, for some innocent remark.
This observation alone is fascinating is how it points out the degree to which human beings can differ in their perceptions of truth and reality. It raises the question: how does one that one is perceiving reality in a way that is anywhere close to the truth? How does one know one is right, if others believe so differently, yet also believe themselves to be as correct as you?
Why is one's own reality better than someone else's, if they can differ so much?
If I have no grounds to settle this question, then how I can be righteous in what I do and what I say?
In moments of contemplating these questions, I fall back on my faith, including the scripture of other religions. In that regard, I'm reminded, as I have been so often in life, of the plight of the warrior-hero Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu epic. I first read this a long time ago when I was a freshman in college, for a course on Asian Civilization. It made a big impact on me even then.
In the midst of a great battle between two mighty and rival armies, the hero Arjuna becomes disgusted and discouraged, in part because of this very type of uncertainty over the meaning of what he is doing. Why does all this chaos have to happen? Why must I personally take part in this war?
Arjuna thus stops his chariot and throws down his arrows, refusing to take any further part in the battle.
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| (source) Arjuna, dressed in courtly costume with a quiver slung over his shoulder and sword and buckler at his side, folds his hands in anjali mudra and kneels before his charioteer, Kṛṣṇa. |
So I have no problem doing my part, in a spiritual sense, and knowing that others are doing their part as well, even if it to oppose me with all their might and being.
Yet in many ways this ferocious war we are in right now doesn't even feel like my battle anymore.
Looking across this great battlefield we are in, and this conflict in full glance, I can assert that something massive has taken place over the last year, something far more significant than an election. It is nothing less than a breathtaking and unparalleled shift in the collective center of gravity of the awareness of the nation and the world as a whole. There has been nothing like it in my lifetime, and perhaps there will be nothing like it again.
As a means of contrast, four and half years ago, in June 2012 I stood on the curb outside a hotel in Fairfax County, Virginia with 300 other people screaming our rebukes at the most powerful people in the world---names that most people would know---who were arriving in limousines to a conference. Then we chanted slogans at them in their conference rooms on the other side of the fence during their meetings.
I had driven all the way across the country to be there, as the call went out. Most of well-known people in the alternative media were there, and I got the pleasure of meeting many of them.
It was exhilarating like nothing in my life to that point. We felt like a tiny little group making a stand, for free humanity against those who would bring about global enslavement of mankind on many levels---the Establishment, if I can use the term in sense I have regularly invoked it in my blog. At least that's how we saw it, and it was clear we were all of like mind.
From our secret sources the inside of the hotel, we learned that we had taken the folks there quite off guard and that we had truly rattled them. We caused severe interference in their vibe. Over the next couple years I was proud that we had driven them out of North America, at least that particular regular meeting of them, and they never have come back (so far).
Now it has all changed. Where once there were thousands of us aware of this, now there are tens of millions, yelling and cheering exactly the same message we were yelling four years ago. Somehow it has all come together in a way I never could have foreseen, at least in such a peaceful way. This has been the real significance of the Trump campaign, and why it has not been about him really at all. It's clear from his speeches that he was not even aware of this himself until perhaps a couple months ago. Now he seems to know what is going on. The people following him certainly do.
But like I said, the campaign is only a vehicle. It goes far beyond that now. So many have woken up to so much, especially among the younger generation, that it is too late to go back.
It tells me that the isolating and exile part of the struggle is over for many of us like yours truly. It is time to move onto other responsibilities. I'm happy about that.
The kids coming up right seem to have arrived with a built-in awareness about so much that was completely opaque to my generation. The future for America looks very good, even at there may be many tribulations and hardships to come during this transition.
On the other hand, this destabilization of the center-of-gravity of collective awareness has left many people, especially in my own fossilized generation and older, in a state of dire unease that their reality, and their concept of the flow of history itself, is no longer being "enforced" in the way that allows them to continue within the parameters of stable awareness to which they have long become accustomed. What is happening around them feels to them like an insult to the psyche. I have been there. I know.
Among them, during the intensity of this election, I sense a growing brittleness of awareness, and contraction of the spirit, as they hunker down to preserve the existing reality as much as possible (with the aid of the cocoon Establishment media and Pop Culture, which was largely designed to precisely this).
Not surprisingly, most of the rhetoric they offer is in the form of fear and hatred, and the hurling of robotic insult, all the while proclaiming that they are "battling fear and hatred." Such is the nature of psychological projection in these states of duress. To me, the uniform predictability of this reaction (which is lately effectively only in being risible) is a sure sign that they are losing.
They were promised a New Age for the new Millennium, and in fact we are certainly at a great turning of history. But this is not the one they thought they were getting. They thought they knew the shape it would take, because it was promised them by leaders of a revolution.
But history does not work like that. The concept of the future they were promised was partly true, but was also the dream of false prophets who assured them history was on their side.
No one gets to decide that. No human being at least.
The earth will keep turning on its own despite all your will to stop it. The question you face is will you be the nail that tries to hold its rotation in check, that gets ripped out mercilessly without the slightest dint in the momentum of the world?
I don't wish any of these folks harm. They are doing their own part, playing their own role, after all, based on their own perception of reality. Mostly I pity them, because they are missing out on experiencing one of the phenomenal shifts in human consciousness in a very long time.
I don't seek the slightest iota of vengeance, for I understand them. I don't want to "crush" them personally, although I think it would be very helpful if the election itself is landslide that breaks the will of Establishment to fight for a least a brief while, to give us a all a little space as the Wheel of the Ages turns into a new formation.
I wish I could do more to help them directly, because I know the days and years ahead are going to be increasingly psychologically stressful for them in ways they cannot anticipate now, no matter how the election turns out. The reality they believe in is disintegrating, and there is nothing that can be done to preserve it at this point.
I know that is not my role in this to help them directly like that, person to person, at least not anymore. I was never very good at that kind of thing anyway. Many people I know (especially people of my own age that I met in high school and college) react with a polarity against the opinions I offer them. Once I realized this about myself, I changed my style of rhetoric drastically to account for it, in a jiu-jitsu style of persuasion. The Postmodern Age is the Age of Irony, after all.
So for years I simply told myself that one day it would all come to this, with "reality" disintegrating, and perhaps for one person I knew, I could be that person they once knew, who said all those strange things that didn't make sense at the time at the time, but perhaps I said something that stuck in the back of their mind, and could be remembered by them as that person who somehow "made it to other side" with his psyche (mostly) intact.
Because that's how it worked for me. One of those people, who helped lead me to where I am, was once a bitter political foe, when I was a progressive liberal and he was a conventional neocon conservative. We lost track of each other for years, and in the interim (2004-2011), both of us underwent a huge awakening that changed our points of view to be radically altered but now nearly identical in many ways. We got a great many laughs about it.
When we found each other again, on the other side of the continent, we agreed about nearly everything. He is now my closest friend, because he is one of only a few people in the world to whom I can be completely frank about many things, and whom I know that will understand what I am saying.
The truth converges. I don't need to see eye to eye with my friends, but in the end, I guess I have a hard time fully trusting anyone who hasn't, at some point in their adult life, undergone a complete upheaval of their beliefs about the world, amounting an effective overturning of their reality, to the point of believing nearly the opposite of many things they once believed to be true.
As for me, going forward, part of me wonders if I need to keep writing this blog anymore after eight years. Maybe it has served its purpose for me. I truly don't know.
Certainly it has been very useful lately as an open workshop for the project that now calls me, which has been the purpose of my long exile and quest, and which must become the center of my creative attention, at least the writing part of my creativity.
I suspect I'll keep going writing it in some form, since it is useful for me, and there are people who like it. I have never wanted a big audience, at least not for this forum. Intimacy, even in public, was important for me. I have often thought that I was simply leaving a record of one person's thoughts to be discovered in the distant future long after I am gone. I've been happy with that idea.
But things probably will get too interesting not to comment. Yet even Samuel Pepys, who lived through very extraordinary times, and left such a marvelous legacy for people in later centuries (which I have been reading lately), eventually stopped writing his diary at some point.
We'll see how I feel on Wednesday morning.
Peace and love to all.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Seismic Shift Away from Hillary by the Elite
Wow. Douglas Shoen disavows Hillary.
It took me a few days to process this, as people were talking about it. Now I realize they were right. This is huge. Can't emphasize this enough.
If one didn't know better, one would think that it was just the random opinion of a Fox New contributor, cutting Hillary loose. Fox News. Need I say more?
But Douglas Shoen is not just any Clinton supporter, or t.v. pundit. Not only is he a long-time associate of the Clinton Foundation, but he is a very-high level operative within the globalist network, and connected closely to the kingpin himself.
On the chessboard of geopolitics, Shoen is like a bishop serving the folks most forcefully pushing for a war between Russia and the United States. Hillary Clinton was essentially hired by them to deliver this war within her term as president.
Shoen would not make such a statement unless it had the blessings of very powerful people. He was, in effect, signaling their will to many others in the know.
Evidently Hillary is so toxic now, and the globalists are so backed into a corner by the heinous nature of what is coming out, and about to come out, that it appears that they finally are coming to inevitable conclusion that for the good of their own cause, she must be thrown to the wolves.
They are not going away, of course, but there is little they can do at this point but surrender the field. And to think, just a year and half ago, it was supposed to be Bush vs. Clinton, the ultimate Pepsi vs. Coke election for the globalists. Now it is all blown to pieces. Even if Hillary got elected at this point, she is toast. Checkmate.
It is thus not coincidental that the mainstream media has backed off the virulent anti-Trump messaging over the weekend, and even the New York Times has debunked the absurd Trump-Russia connection that the Clinton camp was pushing. A week ago they would not have bothered to do this.
It may well mean Hillary will get no pardon from Obama on the way out, and will likely wind up going to prison.
The election will still play out, of course. None of that changes. But it means that it will do so under conditions that actually may resemble a fair fight.
It took me a few days to process this, as people were talking about it. Now I realize they were right. This is huge. Can't emphasize this enough.
If one didn't know better, one would think that it was just the random opinion of a Fox New contributor, cutting Hillary loose. Fox News. Need I say more?
But Douglas Shoen is not just any Clinton supporter, or t.v. pundit. Not only is he a long-time associate of the Clinton Foundation, but he is a very-high level operative within the globalist network, and connected closely to the kingpin himself.
On the chessboard of geopolitics, Shoen is like a bishop serving the folks most forcefully pushing for a war between Russia and the United States. Hillary Clinton was essentially hired by them to deliver this war within her term as president.
Shoen would not make such a statement unless it had the blessings of very powerful people. He was, in effect, signaling their will to many others in the know.
Evidently Hillary is so toxic now, and the globalists are so backed into a corner by the heinous nature of what is coming out, and about to come out, that it appears that they finally are coming to inevitable conclusion that for the good of their own cause, she must be thrown to the wolves.
They are not going away, of course, but there is little they can do at this point but surrender the field. And to think, just a year and half ago, it was supposed to be Bush vs. Clinton, the ultimate Pepsi vs. Coke election for the globalists. Now it is all blown to pieces. Even if Hillary got elected at this point, she is toast. Checkmate.
It is thus not coincidental that the mainstream media has backed off the virulent anti-Trump messaging over the weekend, and even the New York Times has debunked the absurd Trump-Russia connection that the Clinton camp was pushing. A week ago they would not have bothered to do this.
It may well mean Hillary will get no pardon from Obama on the way out, and will likely wind up going to prison.
The election will still play out, of course. None of that changes. But it means that it will do so under conditions that actually may resemble a fair fight.
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Everything is Now in Motion as Predicted
Today was certainly the day. The battle is now in full swing. Coup against counter-coup as we speak. Patriots against traitors. Brave men and women have been putting their careers and their lives on the line in the fight, and now the moment of truth has arrived. So many years in the making.
The future of the republic is in the balance, whether the nation will continue as an effective democracy or be subsumed by the worst levels of thuggishnes and corruption it has ever seen. The future of mankind is in the balance as well, since the wrong result will probably lead to cataclysmic war. I know what side I am on, and which side I am betting on as well.
The future of the republic is in the balance, whether the nation will continue as an effective democracy or be subsumed by the worst levels of thuggishnes and corruption it has ever seen. The future of mankind is in the balance as well, since the wrong result will probably lead to cataclysmic war. I know what side I am on, and which side I am betting on as well.
The Eminent Papermaker of Hemel Hempstead
So if you ask the right question, answers will follow.
Things are coming together. This happens when you are on the right track, I have found. After years of research, I feel as if the entire narrative is falling into place, right at a most auspicious hour of history.
Last month, after reading Jane Austen, and spending of the novel wondering about questions I thought I could never answer, such as: how did William Harriman (of London) meet Frances Holmes (of Hemel Hempstead)? Austen (and Goldsmith) gave me clues as to how this might have happened, but everything was a pure guess on my part. Perhaps, I thought, somewhere they met through social circles when she was in "town" (i.e. London), in the early 1780s. I could fill in a possible story, but nothing more.
Then a tiny whim of Internet search on Edward Holmes (Frances' father) led to one of the amazing episodes of research, when things just seem to fall out of nowhere into your lap. All of a sudden, many pieces of the story came to light, and although I still will need to fictionalize many details, if I want to tell a story, I now have a much greater grasp on how to make it legitimate in regard to the known evidence.
The most amazing thing about this is that none of what I uncovered seem to be known to any of the previous Harriman biographers to this point. If they known any of this, they surely would have mentioned it. Yet now it was all in public records, available to me from my office here in Arizona by the Internet. But of course just a few years ago, it would have taken many years, dogged diligence, and great expense of travel to uncover what it took just 48 hours to find, all without leaving my desk.
This is exactly how Thor and I pieced together much of the Harriman story of the 20th century, starting back in 2005. We were constantly amazed at how easy it was to find information and put it together, all the while knowing that had we tried to do the same thing just a few years early, it would have been practically impossible.
In any case, here is a summary of what I found, that is not in any current Harriman biography:
So now we know almost certainly how William Harriman met Frances Holmes. Almost certainly it was through the fact that William Harriman and Edward Wilson Holmes were connected through business. One could assert with near 100% certainty that Harriman supplied the linen rag for Holmes' mills in Hemel Hempstead. When Holmes retired, it is quite possible that Harriman lost his biggest customer. This was probably one of the biggest motivations for why he left for the New World in 1795.
At this point, after eleven years of research, I feel like I now have enough to begin writing the story of the Harriman dynasty. More research will follow---books to be read, for both factual background and fictional inspiration, but any delay at this point in beginning the story would be counterproductive.
1806 Henry Fourdrinier of Hemel Hempstead is granted a patent for his Fourdrinier machine (based on designs of Louis-Nicholas Robert and brought from France to England by John Gamble). It is the world's first automated process for the manufacture of paper to be put into practical usage on an industrial scale.
1803 Frogmore Mill lease acquired by Fourdrinier Brothers who install a second papermaking machine there (source).
1801 Saint-Léger Didot of Paris, having recovered the papermaking machine process from Louis-Nicholas Robert, sends his son-in-law John Gamble to England with the intention of demonstrating the machine process for use there. The Fourdrinier Brothers make further developments and improvements to the machine in the following years, installing one at Two Waters Mill at Hemel Hempstead.
1798 Louis-Nicholas Robert applies for a French patent on his continuous papermaking process developed at the Didot publishing house in Paris. His patent is granted the following year. The Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers paid Robert three thousand francs to build a model for permanent display at the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
1796 Aug 31 Edward Holmes dies, at Portman Place (Edgware Road) in London. His obituary states that he was a longtime noted papermaker who had resided in Hemel Hempstead. (source)
1795 (April) William Harriman, a London stationer, sells his wholesale rag business in the City of London and leaves for America with his family.
1795 (April) Expiration of Edward Holmes' oeiginal 21-year lease at Frogmore Mills.
1792 The Fourdrinier Brothers (Henry and Sealy) take over the Two Waters Mill adjacent to Holmes' Frogmore Mills. This mill is described as “a house, water corn mill and paper mill.” They begin to convert it manufacture of paper in competition with Holmes. (source)
1790 Origins of industrial papermaking. Louis-Nicholas Robert of France, having finished his military career, becomes an indentured clerk at one of the Didot family's renowned Paris publishing houses, well-respected establishment had a history dating back to 1355 and supplied paper to the Ministry of Finance for currency manufacture. Robert "was spurred to look for a mechanical solution to the manual labour of the paper-making process."
In his book Papermaking: the History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, Dard Hunter reported that:
1785 Edward Holmes, papermaker, Frogmore End Mill, Hertfordshire, 1785. Sun policy 503653, £300 (source)
1779/1780 Edward Holmes, papermaker, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, Sun policy 424738, £600, 1779/80 (source)
1774 (April) Edward Holmes, papermaker of Rickmansworth, takes lease on the Frogmore Mills at Frogmore End, Hemel Hempstead from Thomas Tower for 21yrs at £100. The lease includes the millhouse, buildings, watercourses & appurtenances, and meadow ground near the mills. He subsquently converts the mill from a corn flour mill to a paper mill, and establishes himself as successful in the manufacture of paper (source)
1772 Edward Holmes, papermaker, of Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, takes on apprentice Richard Simmons at rate of £10/10/00. IR/1/27, fo. 134. (source)
1769 Birth of Rosamund Holmes in Rickmanworth.
1761 Birth of Frances Holmes in Rickmansworth.
1757 Edward Holmes, papermaker, of Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, takes on apprentice Mary Pewey at rate of £5/00/00. IR/1/21, fo. 044 (source)
Things are coming together. This happens when you are on the right track, I have found. After years of research, I feel as if the entire narrative is falling into place, right at a most auspicious hour of history.
Last month, after reading Jane Austen, and spending of the novel wondering about questions I thought I could never answer, such as: how did William Harriman (of London) meet Frances Holmes (of Hemel Hempstead)? Austen (and Goldsmith) gave me clues as to how this might have happened, but everything was a pure guess on my part. Perhaps, I thought, somewhere they met through social circles when she was in "town" (i.e. London), in the early 1780s. I could fill in a possible story, but nothing more.
Then a tiny whim of Internet search on Edward Holmes (Frances' father) led to one of the amazing episodes of research, when things just seem to fall out of nowhere into your lap. All of a sudden, many pieces of the story came to light, and although I still will need to fictionalize many details, if I want to tell a story, I now have a much greater grasp on how to make it legitimate in regard to the known evidence.
The most amazing thing about this is that none of what I uncovered seem to be known to any of the previous Harriman biographers to this point. If they known any of this, they surely would have mentioned it. Yet now it was all in public records, available to me from my office here in Arizona by the Internet. But of course just a few years ago, it would have taken many years, dogged diligence, and great expense of travel to uncover what it took just 48 hours to find, all without leaving my desk.
This is exactly how Thor and I pieced together much of the Harriman story of the 20th century, starting back in 2005. We were constantly amazed at how easy it was to find information and put it together, all the while knowing that had we tried to do the same thing just a few years early, it would have been practically impossible.
In any case, here is a summary of what I found, that is not in any current Harriman biography:
The Harriman ancestor Edward Wilson Holmes, father of Frances Holmes, and father-in-law to William Harriman (the emigrant), was actually an important figure in the history of papermaking. Although he had made his home in Rickmansworth (where Frances was born), in 1774 he acquired the lease of a mill in Hemel Hempstead, where he manufactured paper, apparently for the next several decades, until 1795 (shortly before his death, and the year that William Harriman left for America).
His business there (at what is now called Frogmore Mills), overlapped the early phase of the industrialization of papermaking. In fact, his mill business was acquired after his death by the firm that would institute the first industrial manufacture of paper in history.
Moreover, he apparently owned or leased a residence along Edgware Road in west London, where he died after retiring from the paper-making business.
So now we know almost certainly how William Harriman met Frances Holmes. Almost certainly it was through the fact that William Harriman and Edward Wilson Holmes were connected through business. One could assert with near 100% certainty that Harriman supplied the linen rag for Holmes' mills in Hemel Hempstead. When Holmes retired, it is quite possible that Harriman lost his biggest customer. This was probably one of the biggest motivations for why he left for the New World in 1795.
At this point, after eleven years of research, I feel like I now have enough to begin writing the story of the Harriman dynasty. More research will follow---books to be read, for both factual background and fictional inspiration, but any delay at this point in beginning the story would be counterproductive.
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Papermaking through eighteen centuries, by Dard Hunter (1930)
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| Schematic of the Fourdrinier machine, invented 1806 (source). |
1806 Henry Fourdrinier of Hemel Hempstead is granted a patent for his Fourdrinier machine (based on designs of Louis-Nicholas Robert and brought from France to England by John Gamble). It is the world's first automated process for the manufacture of paper to be put into practical usage on an industrial scale.
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| Detail of the area around Hemel Hempstead on map of Hartford Shire from 1749 (source) |
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| Location of Two Waters, just south of Hemel Hempstead, on Ordnance Survey Map, First Series, 1856.(source) |
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| Location of Frogmore Paper Mill (Two Waters) on contemporary map of Hemel Hempstead |
1803 Frogmore Mill lease acquired by Fourdrinier Brothers who install a second papermaking machine there (source).
"In 1803 the lease was acquired by the Fourdriniers who installed the machine based on the model invented by Monsieur Louis Robert, which had been much improved by Mr. Bryan Donkin. A second machine, much larger, made by Donkin was installed in the following year and a third improved machine was started in 1805 at Two Waters Mill, a few hundred yards up the river Gade. This also was leased by the Fourdriniers.
1801 Saint-Léger Didot of Paris, having recovered the papermaking machine process from Louis-Nicholas Robert, sends his son-in-law John Gamble to England with the intention of demonstrating the machine process for use there. The Fourdrinier Brothers make further developments and improvements to the machine in the following years, installing one at Two Waters Mill at Hemel Hempstead.
1798 Louis-Nicholas Robert applies for a French patent on his continuous papermaking process developed at the Didot publishing house in Paris. His patent is granted the following year. The Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers paid Robert three thousand francs to build a model for permanent display at the Musée des Arts et Métiers.
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| Obituary of of Edward Holmes, father-in-law of William Harriman, from The Gentleman's Magazine (source) |
1796 Aug 31 Edward Holmes dies, at Portman Place (Edgware Road) in London. His obituary states that he was a longtime noted papermaker who had resided in Hemel Hempstead. (source)
Portman Place, named for the Portman Estate which was part of the Marleybone Distrct in London, was once the name of part of Edgware Road. Addresses of that time were often denoted as "Portman-place, Edgware-road" (This is distinct from nearby Portman Square, which was the location of the residence of Mrs. Jennings on Upper Berkley St. in Sense and Sensibility)
This page told me that 422 Edgware Road was once numerated as 33 Portman Place.
Edgware Road I had already identified as the probable route that one would take from London out to Hemel Hempstead, where the Holmes resided in the country. So this makes perfect sense. Many of the buildings today there date from the Georgian era and are being restored. I have no been able to locate the specific address, but the information I now have is probably enough to satisfy me.
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| Possible pproximate location of the Holmes residence on Portman-place (Edgware Road) in London (within one-quarter mile north and south along the road). Much of the Marylebone District to the east in the area inhabited by the characters in Sense and Sensibility, which Austen wrote at nearly the same time that Holmes lived there. Note the location of the U.S. Embassy at the bottom of the map, at the west side of Grosvenor Square. The embassy has been located on the square since 1938, and will go on to play an important role in the Harriman story in that era. |
1795 (April) William Harriman, a London stationer, sells his wholesale rag business in the City of London and leaves for America with his family.
1795 (April) Expiration of Edward Holmes' oeiginal 21-year lease at Frogmore Mills.
1792 The Fourdrinier Brothers (Henry and Sealy) take over the Two Waters Mill adjacent to Holmes' Frogmore Mills. This mill is described as “a house, water corn mill and paper mill.” They begin to convert it manufacture of paper in competition with Holmes. (source)
"The growth in trade and general wealth of Britain at the time resulted in an increasing demand for paper and many mills in river valleys around cities of the industrial revolution, especially London, became involved in the paper industry. All paper was then made by hand, the papermaker dipping a mould into a vat of fibre and water, the water being drained off and the resulting sheet of paper pressed and left to dry. The process was slow, expensive in terms of labour, and the size of the sheet of paper limited to that of the hand held mould." (source)1790 Birth of Orlando Harriman, son of William Harriman and Frances Holmes Harriman.
1790 Origins of industrial papermaking. Louis-Nicholas Robert of France, having finished his military career, becomes an indentured clerk at one of the Didot family's renowned Paris publishing houses, well-respected establishment had a history dating back to 1355 and supplied paper to the Ministry of Finance for currency manufacture. Robert "was spurred to look for a mechanical solution to the manual labour of the paper-making process."
In his book Papermaking: the History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, Dard Hunter reported that:
“ [Louis-Nicolas Robert] declared that it was the constant strife and quarrelling among the workers of the handmade papermakers' guild that drove him to the creation of the machine that would replace hand labour. ”
1785 Marriage of William Harriman and Frances Holmes at Hemel Hempstead.
1785 Edward Holmes, papermaker, Frogmore End Mill, Hertfordshire, 1785. Sun policy 503653, £300 (source)
1779/1780 Edward Holmes, papermaker, Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, Sun policy 424738, £600, 1779/80 (source)
1774 (April) Edward Holmes, papermaker of Rickmansworth, takes lease on the Frogmore Mills at Frogmore End, Hemel Hempstead from Thomas Tower for 21yrs at £100. The lease includes the millhouse, buildings, watercourses & appurtenances, and meadow ground near the mills. He subsquently converts the mill from a corn flour mill to a paper mill, and establishes himself as successful in the manufacture of paper (source)
"Frogmore Mill, once called Covent Mill, was in use for paper-making in 1774 when Edward Holmes was the occupier. He leased it from Thomas Tower for £100 per annum and he was allowed to remove the flour milling equipment to make way for hand paper-making." (source)
1772 Edward Holmes, papermaker, of Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, takes on apprentice Richard Simmons at rate of £10/10/00. IR/1/27, fo. 134. (source)
1769 Birth of Rosamund Holmes in Rickmanworth.
1761 Birth of Frances Holmes in Rickmansworth.
1757 Edward Holmes, papermaker, of Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, takes on apprentice Mary Pewey at rate of £5/00/00. IR/1/21, fo. 044 (source)
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| Detail of the area around Rickmansworth on map of Hartford Shire from 1749 (source) |
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| Location of Rickmansworth (red pin) relative to Hemel Hempstead (yellow star to the north), as well as the London address of William Harriman on Thames Street. |
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