The Simplest Type of Ambiguity

 Notes from Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, published 1930. (for background on Empson, see Fry, Lecture 6)

Empson, quoting Herbert Read as a starting point:

"...metaphor is the synthesis of several units of observation into one commanding image; it is the expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, not by direct statement, but by a sudden perception of an objective relation."

Empson: 

"The simplest type of ambiguity is...that a word or grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once." (emphasis mine).

This definition of ambiguity "covers almost everything of literary importance."

Examples discussed for this type of ambiguity:

The "bare ruin'd choirs" in Shakespeare Sonnet LXIIII.

"...the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry."

Empson provides an illustration of ambiguity in poetry in how we tell young students that "one day you will understand this poem." It doesn't mean that the student lacks information that can be provided to him. It means that the person cannot yet apply his own life experiences to the poem in a suitably ambiguous way to bring the poem to life inside one's mind. Young people don't have enough appreciation of ambiguity.

Sir William Empson (27 September 1906 – 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930.

Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest".

One Crazy Trick to Understanding Quantum Mechanics

As every physicist knows, the ability to understand quantum mechanics often depends on the ability to keep in mind that real physical quantities can be represented in equations by complex numbers, and thus by imaginary numbers.

Moreover, it is very useful to keep in mind, when plowing through quantum theory, to hold in your head the idea that the quantities in equations, whether real or complex, can be represented by infinities.

On the surface this sounds ridiculous, but it is quite true and quite practical. It means that everything that can be represented as a variable in an equation can be represented as an infinite series of terms added up.

You might think of it this way in concrete terms. If you are asked to measure someone's height, you might glance at them and say "about six feet". Six feet would be the first term in the sequence.

That might be a good enough answer. Then someone might ask you to be more precise, and you get out a tape measure and quickly ascertain "five foot ten."

So now you have two inches less than six feet. You have adjusted. The minus two inches is the second term of the series.

Then you are asked to measure again, more precisely, and you say "five foot ten and a quarter," so the plus quarter inch is the third term in the series.

And so on, getting more and more precise. In principle you could imagine an infinite number of terms, each smaller and smaller, added together to get an ever more precise measurement.

It's a great mental trick. to be able to look at an equation and see each variable as a sum of an infinite number of terms that way. As leas for me, the ability to see such an infinite series underlying all quantities can give me great ease in grasping an intuition of the computational power of the equations. 

It means that no matter how complicated the equation looks, I can remind myself of how to break it down into these little pieces. The key is that in physics, often you only care about the first couple terms in the series. You can't even measure any more precise than that.

For complex systems, physicists resort to infinite series so often to crank out real-world predictions that in physics the general approach is often called by the simple name analysis. 

In graduate school, we had to take a course in advanced analysis, called Mathematical Methods. My professor was a barrel-chested wild bearded hippie-looking type, a throwback to an earlier caveman type of physicist. When he got mad because his normal methods of solving an equation failed, he called the most brute force form of analysis getting out the hammer and tongs.

Complex Numbers in Quantum Theory

The representation of real measurable quantities sometimes requires the use of imaginary numbers.

In physics pure imaginary numbers are rarely used on their own. They are always used alongside real numbers as a complex pair, with one part real and the other part imaginary.

But a complex pair is more than just a pair of numbers.  That one is real and one is imaginary means they can cross multiply across the pair, the two parts multiplying with both parts of another complex number.

Every complex number has another complex number than when they are multiplied together, make a real number. If you want to produce a real number from a complex number, this is how you do it---you multiply the number by this other special number. 

These real numbers obtained this way from complex numbers give rise to many measured quantities in the physical sciences, especially in quantum theory.

The Secret to Success in Control Theory

 It is possible to get an intuitive understanding of control theory from the vocabulary alone, but to understand how it works, or to use it, you must get into the mathematics of it.

Frankly the mathematics of control systems is, on the surface, very challenging. The equations are often ghastly differential equations, meaning that they are relations between quantities arising from Newtonian Calculus. The quantities are typically rates of change, and rates of change of rates of change, and so on. They typically depend on each other through complex functional relationships which are classified as nonlinear (implying they are very difficult to solve except in special cases).

Then, as with everything in engineering, after one learns this fact about the difficulty of the mathematics that describe the systems involved, one learns that for a great many such systems, including most if not all of the ones that that one is interested in, it is possible, through what seems like a magical trick*,  to simplify these ghastly equations into mere algebraic ones, which can often be solved using the techniques one learned by eighth grade.. Moreover, in conjunction with these simple-to-solve equations, one can often resort to graphical diagrams to infer most of what one needs to know to design a good system.

This kind of drastic simplification of the mathematics makes the design and solution possible for a wide variety of types of real world systems. It is the reason one can design many of the wonderful conveiences that have given us the modern world: transistors, solid.state amplifier circuits, computer chips, jet airplanes, modern eco-friendly car engines, etc.

Even with this simplification, there are still numbers involved, and that is enough to scare a lot of people away. Others are not scared away but have mathematical aptitude and are curious to learn more.  Those people, if they carry through on this curiosity, can be great students, educators, and technicians,. They can provide valuable opinion in other fields where actual knowledge of the engineering and science is required to translated to general public (instead of just relying an intuitive understanding).

As many have pointed out, to be very good at engineering or physics, and to make it your true profession, you need to have a burning desire to understanding, even to see, the underlying mathematical workings of the real world in action. You have to want to pursue the beauty of that mathematical understanding of the world.

It doesn't mean you have to "think in numbers". Any Hollywood image you have of that kind of thing is wrong, because it was given to you by people who don't understand the mathematical curiosity I'm talking about.  

Mathematics isn't just numbers and equations with symbols. Of course can be geometry too, but that is also a limited case. The mere connectivity of things one to another is a branch of mathematics. Whether surfaces are punctured with holes or fold back on themselves is mathematics. 

The grouping of things together, and the exclusion of things one from another is considered among the most fundamental areas of mathematical thought, as fundamental as counting. Together they have yielded many of the great advancing in computing over the last half century, that have created the Millennial world.

To see the world in mathematical beauty is to look at various parts of it, that are in front of your understanding and consciousness, and to know at once that many different branches of mathematics may describe various parts of what is going on, and that underneath it all, beyond one's ability to see it all at once, is a giant mathematical machine, predictable or otherwise, at work. To investigate even just a tiny portion of that reality in mathematical terms, and to truly see the mathematics at work, can be a full-time, lifetime pursuit.

*The Laplace transform. 

The Laplace transform is named after mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), who used a similar transform in his work on probability theory. Laplace wrote extensively about the use of generating functions in Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (1814), and the integral form of the Laplace transform evolved naturally as a result.

The Vocabulary of Control Theory

 

(source)

Control theory, or more formally the theory of control systems, was the critical advance that brought for the Jet Age, and then the Space Age, as advances in the civilizational mastery of technology. 

It was not that we simply tinkered our way to better, more-advanced machines. We discovered how to predict the best possible systems, across a wide variety of things in the physical world, or even in the space of social systems, it was thought. For example, business systems can be described and optimized from control theory principles---some the same ones used for physical systems.

The key to understanding control theory is thus appreciating that it is the search for principles of control and optimization which apply not just to one instance of a system, or one specific type of system,  but  which apply across multiple types of systems, including physical ones (such as engines) and non-physical ones (such as the business process of engineering itself).

As in all disciplines, is a specific vocabulary of control theory that one must learn. These include

Input

Output

Input signal

Output signal 

They sound like something electronic, and indeed they often mean that.  But they can refer to the flow of oil in an engine, or to a business process. They could refer to many different specific things in the world, physical and non-nphysical. For now it is best to just familiarize yourself with them.

Other words to become familiar with include:

Feedback

Feedback signal

Feedback control system

Control action

Actuating error signal

Like the ones above, these words might refer to any number of different types of systems. Just become familiar with the sight of them, so that when you see them, you know you are referencing something fundamental.

Advanced vocabulary for now includes

Closed-loop control systems

Open-loop control systems

The meanings of these last two ares not as intuitively accessible as the ones above it, but they are easily explained in terms of words more accessible in meaning.

A Bit of Control Theory

source

As every engineer knows, the essence of modern engineering is control theory. 

At the core of control theory is the concept of feedback loops. Without an understanding of how to use feedback loops to design systems, the marvels of the late Twentieth Century world would not have been possible. It is what separated the scattershot engineering of the pre-World War II era to precise engineering of the 1950s and beyond.

Engineers in almost all fields spend a lot of time mastering these concepts, because without them they could not design anything worthwhile.

A little bit of history is in order. 

Control theory dates from the 18th century work of James Watt, who invented the modern steam engine. The most common units of power, as that which is measured in a light bulb or a generator, are also named for Watt.

To invent a practical steam engine that was useful under varying loads, Watt needed also to invent a means by which the engine is regulated in a feedback, such that its operation stays within a certain range no matter what load is applied to it. 

Watt accomplished this by the invention of the governor, which is a spinning centrifuge, driven by the engine, that rotates to regulate the intake of fuel, by the same means that a figure skater has control his body's rate of rotation. In this way, the engine was safely operated in practical conditions without destroying itself.

Later advances in control theory relied heavily on mathematics to design feedback mechanisms. In the early 20th century it was discovered how to use mathematics to predict a feedback loop to keep ships on course while they are at sea (Minorsky, 1922). 

The great advances in control theory came when it was discovered to how to cope with arbitrary inputs in the system. For reasons that are quite lengthy, it turns out that the input of many systems, no matter type they are in the physical world, can often be described the sine wave that most people are familiar with. By the 1930s it was discovered mathematically now to predict certain feedback loops from these types of sine inputs for whole classes of systems.

In 1934, it was discovered by Hazen how to apply control theory to servomechanisms, which control  positioning of robots and other devices.

It the 1940s, it was discovered for certain systems how to use simple diagrams to make control theory predictions without the need to solve the mathematical differential equations. This is a tremendous advance that forms the basis of control theory education for engineers.

By the 1950s, the advances and simplifications in control theory were such that control theory was fully established in the driver's seat of engineering. The change can be described by Okata as causing a shift in the fundamental task of engineering.

Previously the task of engineering had been the design of a system that satisfied the requirements. After the 1950s, the task became one of the design of the optimal system that satisfied the requirements.

Pop Culture at Nadir: Feelings in Space

 Gary Buechler, a formerly liberal former San Franciscan former Comic Shop owner former cocaine addict and ex-felon, is the tip of the spear in the war against Toxic Woke Culture. 

He calls it like he sees it on his Youtube channel,. You can agree or disagree. If the tone of this review comes as a shock to you, know that  like it or no, .he speaks for many, many people who ought to have been fans of this series.

I have not seen a minute of the subject of this hilarious review video, a television show that just concluded its third season on a major paid streaming service.  

If you want to take a break from politics and turn towards ridicule of the state of modern Hollywood, take the time to watch it.

You don't have to be a fan of, or know anything about, the original Star Trek beyond the cultural images everyone knows.  It will brighten your day to realize how pathetic our cultural enemies are.

When Anything Could Happen

 

People think that the Sixties is when everything changed. That is true, is a civilizational sense. But the changes didn't impact American psyche in a deep sense until the Seventies. The Seventies is when the rapid change happened.

I was telling J about the years around when she was born. I remember the election of 1972. It was in Second Grade. It was almost the same time as the last Apollo mission to the Moon, right before the Miami Dolphins won the Super Bowl in the only perfect season to date.

Nixon won in a thundering landslide that surprised no one. The nation rejected McGovern and the Democrats soundly, showing their ineptitude in connecting to ordinary Americans. McGovern won only effete liberal Massachusetts. 

We were living at the time in a small town in northwest Iowa, in the county along the Minnesota border. Our television stations came from three states, including stations from Mankato, Sioux City, and Sioux Falls. 

It was in the region called the Iowa Great Lakes, which are a small cluster of lakes that are the the southernmost tip of the giant region of pothole lakes stretching down through Minnesota and crossing the border into Iowa near the headwaters of the Des Moines River, to give Iowa a small resort region it otherwise would have.

We lived a block from one of the lakes. We lived at the corner where the street alongside our house dead-ended at the lake. In winter it froze and one could walk out onto it. In summer one could push small craft into it, and go fishing. 

I was one of two people in our class to vote for McGovern in the class election. The other person was a girl named Jean. Everyone else voted for Nixon. 

How quickly everything changed. By the end of that Presidential term, two different individuals held the Presidency and the Vice Presidency, neither of whom had been elected to national office. 

It all happened between November 1972 and December 1974, just a little over two years. It was during those two years that America re-defined itself as a nation in decline. It was as if the hammer blows of the changes in the Sixties finally caught up to America, and the national psyche collapsed under the weight of the changes, and began to mutate.

After that, any kind of change seemed possible for a while. Those of us who remember the late Seventies remember the feeling of cultural instability, and wondering if it would ever stop. By 1979 the era of American confidence seemed far in the past.

We were all a bit surprised that in the Eighties things seemed to stabilize a bit. The momentum of rapid cultural change slackened, at least on the surface. Even those of us who hated Reagan and his brand of America-is-not-in-decline hopium appreciated how that decade felt like a breath of fresh air from melancholy weary chaos of the decade before. It was great to be young then, because youth culture was ignored for a season.

Underneath the stability, the Eighties provided the cementing of all the changes that had happened in the Seventies.  Even the "conservative" parts of America embraced many of the radical ideas from the Sixties. The Eighties let these changes gel into the New America that emerged in the Nineties, and that we have lived in since. Our current Woke Era is the tail end of that era playing out. 

President Gerald Ford (right) and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller (center) in the White House with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The Funniest Feeling

 I had the funniest feeling waking up this morning. I was looking forward to learning what would transpire today, in regard to the outrageous actions of the Phony Biden Administration.

I can only see it as comedy. I can't explain why. It's an uncanny feeling many on our side have, especially among the hopium addicts. Trump's behavior since the 20th gives us great confidence. 

We are all looking forward to the Impeachment proceedings in the Senate. It is such a delicious spectacle that it is downright sinful to contemplate for too long. Possibly it won't happen---it would be too awesome perhaps---and we will have to be patient for the next big window for Trump's inevitable counter attack.

No doubt the substantial parts of it are already it place. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is that Trump is holding it back.

One of the essences of courage is the delay of the counterstroke, which must be delivered at the right moment. If not, momentum is handed back to the enemy, and the effort is squandered.  

This is what caused the disastrous ending in Cooper's story. Chingachgook was impatient, needlessly costing his own life and that of his beloved. Had he waited for Hawkeye and Uncas, they would have defeated the entire column. 

The World's Greatest Civics Teacher

Instead of being chastened about the failure of his prediction of Trump forcing Biden out before the inauguration, Wictor is emboldened. Instead he doubles down. It confirms to him that Trump has something huge on them. It's so huge that Trump can afford to let Biden and Harris get sworn in before he reveals it.

Wictor claims he figured out at least one full-proof way Trump could still get back to the White House in the very near future. But Trump is way smarter than he is, Wictor says. The way Trump does it will be even better.

The key mistake we made was not thinking big enough about Trump. Trump is taking his time because what he will reveal will result in an instant zeitgeist change overnight. Geopolitics will be re-arranged in any instant. It is a weighty matter, and Trump gave them every opportunity to avoid it, and they chose to persist in their crime. Now they are bent on wiping away the old America as quickly as possible. Most of what they are doing at the moment is easily reversible. 

Wictor insists Trump is firmly in charge. He's a teaching us all lesson in what happens if we let the country sink this far into corruption and cultural rot. He is insisting that we stand up and take the reins of Democracy as people once believed they were doing in America. He is the greatest civics teacher in American history. The long-neglected subject is making a comeback.

All-Time Low

 Yesterday afternoon I went into the rain to inspect the dry wash. On the way back the pounding rain turned into Arizona sleet. As I came up the sidewalk to the gate, I realized I had turned for home at just the right time. 

The half-melted drops pounded hard even through thick legs of my outdoor trousers. With no rain pants on, I was glad to get indoors and sit next to heater, having barely seen the start of the worst of it. From cozy indoors, we watched as the windows facing west became thick with a slushy coating, until one could barely see out through the panes.

After a half hour it turned back into rain, which eventually slackened. By evening the soaking rains had returned, which was comforting to fall asleep to.

J read online that it had been the all-time coldest afternoon temperature ever recorded in this area.

The Three Types of Hopium

 From my observations, the three types of Hopium are:

1. Belief that God will act to restore Justice to the nation by some intervention (example).

2. Belief that Trump cannot have been outsmarted by them, and that he is still in effective control of the situation, waiting to bring the nation out of its nightmare. Wictor is the best example. He claims he uses no secret sources, only published ones, including Trump's own books.

3. Belief that a secret cabal of military officers within the government has been operating for the overthrow of the Establishment since the murder of Kennedy, that they have helped elevate Trump to the Presidency for this, and that they are still in effective control (along with Trump), and waiting for the moment to make their move.

They are not necessarily in conflict, although Wictor despises the folks in #3, who have taken a beaten lately among other folks on our side.

There is a backlash against the folks in #3, as it is believed they contributed to the mania that led people on our side to participate in the incident at the Capitol, and that moreover (and much worse) the whole notion of #3 was perhaps a psy op from one of the three-lettter agencies in our government, modeled after one that the Bolsheviks pulled after the 1917 Revolution in Russia. The idea is that you create a fake underground movement among your enemies to deceive them into passivity, as they believe that there are powerful forces already taking care of things.

Personally I don't know what to think about #3. I didn't know that what I wrote above was the basic concept behind it all until just recently. I figured that Seventeenth Letter source was someone passing on scuttlebutt they heard, that may or may not be true.  But what do I know?*

Of course there are plenty of Hopium-averse people on our side. They won't hear about any hope in terms of Trump coming back.

These latter folks are the Trump supporting voices on social media who have embraced "the bitter pill of reality" in some form, which is the notion that Biden is President and that perhaps justice will never served. It is best to "go on," which usually has some implication of action based on that sentiment. 

Among the Hopium averse folk are Saul, the curator of the underground forum. When Saul and Wictor get together in their podcasts, they can't talk about the election, however, as Youtube would strike them. They have to talk about it peripherally. On the forum, however, they can give free rein to their opinions. Wictor has been cagey about what he thinks might happen but he has dropped hints, pointing people to various articles with some commentary. I think I know his opinion about a timetable for a Trump comeback. 

*Thor and I actually solved the Kennedy murder by 2008, using only public sources on the Internet and in libaries. We even convinced Agnes of it. It was a satisfying result that made perfect sense. Thor later told his uncle, who had worked for a three-letter agency supplying montagnards in Southeast Asia, about our solution, including the name of the obscure individual behind it, and his uncle's response was "Yeah, that's what the Germans who trained me said." Over the years, not one bit of information I have seen has weakened my conviction that we solved the crime.

Hidden Sun, Heavy Drops

 Yesterday as the storm was approaching in the late afternoon, the proto-thunderhead clouds billowed in the brilliant setting sun like columns of smoke from a massive fire, static in backlit orange in their grey forms. One would have thought Phoenix was on fire.

Today is much different. The sun is hidden. The rain is cold and the wind is brisk. The feel of the droplets on one's face is bracing. The low grey ragged clouds scurry like a team of rodents sideways to the rotation center of the great storm.They come off the mountains leaving them dark crisp silhouettes against the grey formations that stretch to the east.

A Winter Soaking

 A soaking rain came to us over the weekend. The front came in a couple days ago, yielding grey skies and sprinkles. The smell of rain came to one's nostrils as one opened to the door. 

Yesterday the skies opened up in a downpour from a winter thunderstorm. The rain came heavy and persistent. Thunder filled the sky. The sound of rain was like a music.

In mid afternoon the sound changed. We looked outside and we saw pea-sized hail bouncing on the roofs nearby. It filled the streets like snow. Children came out to play in it, with their parents taking photographs, and scooping up handfuls of the hail to hold up in selfies for social media.

I had seen the storm clouds coming in while walking earlier that day, out in my undeveloped desert. When the rain started coming, I thought of venturing out to see the dry washes turn into flowing streams, as I like to do. But the rain was cold and I wanted nothing but to stay inside and feel cozy while the earth absorbed the moisture.

By the time I got outside in late afternoon, after a break in the rain, the flow had receded into the ground. I inspected the bed of the wash around the ironwood to see the swirling patterns left by the recent flow. In recent weeks I had noticed how the wash there had filled up my footprints, from my meditative pacing.

Now the sandy wash was freshened with a popcorn texture from the pounding of the hail. Gone were all of my footprints, and any trace that I had spent any time there. Somehow that was pleasing.

It was just before sunset. The ceiling of the storm clouds was breaking up a bit, and the lowering sun was hitting the clouds at an oblique angle as it approached the horizon, casting tangerine hues over the mountains and the trees. It was the rare light that one seeks and cherishes.

Holy Hopium

 Despite my high spirits, there are moments after I rise in the morning in the dark when it hits me that Biden is in the Oval Office and it feels like a leaden weight.

Then I remember that God is sovereign and that I can put my faith in Him to see us through this. God has seen me through times that would provoke despair and brought me to the other side. This is bigger version it seems, because it involves not just myself, or even the people I love, but the whole nation and the world, and civilization itself. God is still in control on this level. I have put my full faith in Him.

On social media, especially among Trump followers since the election, faith goes by another name: hopium (as in a metallic element named for Hope). Many of the folks on the underground forum and elsewhere use the hopium about themselves in a self-deprecating manner. 

Wictor admits he is spitballing, as he calls it. But he sees interesting things in the published facts. I am not going to share or comment on them. Even if they come to nothing, God will see the faithful through this.

There is a sense that it goes beyond faith in Trump the man, but in God. Over what time scale can we expect God to respond? We cannot know, yet we know He will.

Banned From LinkedIn

 Well, I'm not banned quite yet, but I expect to be any minute.

My offense? First, let me explain that I was planning on ditching that platform anyway. Everyone knows it's lame. It's a way for corporate recruiters to gather their contacts without doing any work. It lets speaking of corporate jargon and purveyors of business punditry demonstrate their chops to others of their kind. So it does serve a purpose. For me it was a way to build some personal contacts.

But in the flush of recent events, having deleted multiple social media accounts on major platforms, I turned my eyes to LinkedIn, and for a moment I thought of doing away with the account, but I decided for the moment to keep my contacts but to remove as much information from my profile as possible---all identifying photos, my background, my resume (ugh---I had this up in public!?), my educational background, etc. 

Once I started deleting, it was easy to delete almost everything except the essentials that would let my few old contacts know that it was me and not someone else with my first and last name (of which there are many, it seems).

I even changed my occupation to "Retired Physics Professor," which is technically true.

Then last night I decided that I'd change tactics. I changed the background image in my profile to the old timey front script of 1776 (originally from the Declaration of Independence, I think) but that is on the navy blue cover of President Trump's 1776 Commission Report issued last week. Biden canceled the commission on his first day. 

I also took a grinning updated photo of myself for my avatar. With everything else still deleted, I changed my profile headline to "MAGA-friendly Software Development for the Web."

The minute I did so, I felt free. What's the thing they want of us? To be afraid of them. They want us afraid that unless we do and say what they way, they will crush us, deplatform us, cancel us, etc, so that we cannot even make a living, or conduct normal financial transactions.

Meh. Others have faced much worse in history and come out OK. I know a few people who probably would have little problem hanging all 75 million of us who voted for the real winner of the Presidential election, but I don't think we've gotten to that level of derangement yet in the wider public.

One reason I felt free is that I realized that there is actually a market for what I just declared myself to be---a possibly very large market. If I really wanted to continue in this line of business, being a remote software consultant, I would probably be able to convert this into an enormous income in the Trump Parallel Economy that is going to be built, and which will be impervious to them, as the original DARPA Internet was meant to be impervious to nuclear attack.

Still I figured LinkedIn, like all tech companies, is staffed by Wokistas who can't bear the thought that heir precious platform could be used for purposes which violate their sacred Groupthink. I could be wrong about them. I'm just playing the averages of what I know about tech companies, which are among the Wokest of the Woke segments of the economy.

But I couldn't be satisfied with just that. I figured I wanted to make a statement on the wake out the door. The opportunity came this morning in the form of a post from my undergraduate Alma Mater in Oregon, a small liberal arts college in the Willamette Valley. 

I have seen their posts over their years in my LinkedIn. You would never know  from thethat back in the old days (the Eighties), it was considered a conservative school. All I see now is a failing university (because they are all failing now) trying desperately to justify its existence and exorbitant tuition by becoming the Fountain of Wokeness in every online statement. It's as if they handed their feed over to the teenage girls on Tumblr to design the perfect world where unicorns shit rainbows.

Evidently students are assigned their educational tasks by their skin color. White students who are gender fluid are encouraged to learn about their gender fluidity. White students who are not are supposed to be into the environment, the last refuge of Whiteness.

All of this has been a horror to me because it's exactly what I wanted to happen, in some future utopian America, when I was student there in the Eighties. I felt like the sole Cassandra Lefty on a campus of conservative small-town Oregon folk who just didn't know enough about the world to know that they needed to become Leftists like me.

This morning the post from the Wokistas who curate my Alma Mater's feed was one of Bernie Sanders in spotted around campus. It was fake photos of him wearing a mask at Biden's inauguration. It's been a meme for the last couple days. Lefty memes are lame, as we know, because they cannot really laugh at themselves. Their egos are too fragile. They make a point of saying how fragile their egos are and they cannot bear humor.

That was it. I have no more use for them in my feed. So I commented, using my brand new persona and profile description, "Where can I send back my degree?"

I hope someone I know sees it and gets a kick out of it. I hope I brightened someone's day. Most of the time no one comments, because LinkedIn is lame for that, but perhaps someone will get righteous on me and take me to task. How I'd delight in being lectured to by little students at my Alma Mater again after these years. In any case, I suspect I've violated some Terms of Service on LinkedIn by this remark, of hurting people's feelings, so it happens to come to the attention of one of their moderators, perhaps I'll be tossed.

Losing the Government, Winning America

 One of the ideas that the Leftist surge in the Twentieth Century gave us is the idea that politics is supreme. Everything in life is political, and thus the control of the government is equal to the control of society. 

I thought about this idea this morning as I woke up. Many people have remarked how the Left has gotten even more deranged since the election. If they "won", where are they so crazed? This is not how they acted after Obama won. In 2008 and afterwards, they had a smug coolness that embodied the notion that it didn't matter what their opponents believed. They were going to do what they wanted anyway. All the momentum was with them.

I was expected the same thing this time after their phony "victory," but to my surprise, and to many people's surprise, they are acting more like they lost (which of course they did, but one would think they would be happy enough to have the levers of governmental power back in their hands).

Nothing seems to satisfy them now expect our complete destruction. Why is this so?

The notion that below it all they know they "won" by fraud certainly must haunt them. More deeply, they know they have lost the nation.

For four years they did nothing but assault Donald Trump and his followers with lie and after lie. They had complete monopoly over the media. Even the "conservative" mainstream network was anti-Trump much of the time. They put forth the idea in their that no sane and decent person supported Trump. He was unpopular and disliked. Only a fringe group of "deplorable bitter clingers" (to use both Hillary and Obama's terms for us) were in his corner. Even "sane" Republicans opposed him.

Yet Trump blew them away on election night. The polls were exposed as fake. They rage: how could this have happened?

I suggest it happened because we have reached the turning point in the long Culture War. The Left was winning the Culture War for decades. Their opponents could manage only rear-guard actions. Even conservative movements during this time amounted to forms of Right wing Leftism (see previous post). Libertarians mouthed support for "weed and guns," but most of the Libertarians I know I too attracted to Leftist cultural paradigms. The ones I know voted for Biden. Leftists should be proud to welcome them into their camp.

No, this is something deeper. I can't place my finger on it yet but I have a deep sense that for the first time in my lifetime, the Old America---the real American Revolution---is on its way back. Even as the traitorous Biden invites the Chinese to take over our power grid on his first day, and enslaves the U.S. to binding accords to destroy its industrial base, it doesn't seem to matter. Somehow it seems fleeting, as if the entire Left is running on fumes.

The Left's grand strategy in the Culture War was to replace the old American culture with Pop Culture, which they control, and which exists only in the Postmodern realm of the imagination (and is therefore never beholden to reality). With all Americans pulled into Pop Culture, America could be re-formed and re-designed into whatever they wanted because of the essentially malleability of the Dramaturgical. We would all live in a backstage open-air nationwide Hollywood backlot, moving about as "extras" while they ---via the "talent" of celebrities, including journalist celebrities---told us all what to do. At the end of the day we cashed our meager paychecks and came back for the next day's shoot.

All of this has failed. It failed because it was essentially phony. Pop Culture is dead. It has degenerated into pseudo-pornography that can do nothing but glorify the sinless base nature of humanity, or express the most ridiculous cloying Woke sentiments.

Pop Culture is over. It was Godless and meaningless. It produced a society of miserable, unhappiness people (the Leftists), who can get no satisfaction except for dragging others into their misery (another sure sign that their energy is demonic in nature).

We will have address the election fraud in a serious way. How that is done, I don't know, but it will be done. Like many on our side, I have felt the serene confidence that God will show us the way if we ask Him.

In the meantime, with each passing day, we get stronger and they get weaker. They know this and this is why they are losing their minds even in "victory."  It is no longer fashionable to be on their side. I have noticed this on Youtube, where suddenly it feels as if the cool thing to do is mock the Democrats, and not in the "they didn't go far enough and elect Bernie Sanders" sort of way, but in the way that suggests they are on our side.

Globalism is a Right Wing Revolution

 We see that Leftism as a term is not meant to posit it in opposition to "Rightism", which does not exist, but simply as the ideology of the Left-Right divide itself, in which there is Left wing Leftism and Right wing Leftism.

This division is very powerful, because once it gets established as the political spectrum, as it did in America, then all political change is towards greater Leftism. 

Right wing Leftism is sometimes called Fascism, both by its original proponents (such as Mussolini) and by Left wing Leftists in the current era. By this standard, Right wing Leftism usually includes a strong component of nationalism, whereas Left wing Leftism promotes internationalism. 

In the past, Right wing Leftism sought a popular revolution that preserved the existing national orders,  and the power structures and economies within them. In Germany, for example, the Right wing Leftist revolution sought to include the old German aristocracy into its power structure, one that was for the benefit of the German people. 

Left wing Leftist revolutions seek internationalism primarily because they want to tear down the existing national power structures and replace it with a new one of their own making. They want to become the new aristocracy. Much of it is driven by class jealousy.

By this definition, over the last fifty years, and since World War II, we have been witnessing a Right wing revolution on a global scale, in the guise of a Left wing revolution. It is Right wing because it not only preserves but amplifies the power of the already-powerful. The most powerful and wealthy people are pushing its ideas, and driving the fashionability of its doctrines. They learned long ago that the masses will follow the Already-Powerful if they are convinced that by doing so, they are "speaking truth to power" in invoking a revolution against the true lower classes, and against national structures (like America) which are now mid-level power structures. 

The Left wing useful idiots of today can't wait to hand over power to as many large corporations and powerful people, because the powerful have learned to mimic the rhetoric of teenage girls on the Internet. The have a whole cast of celebrities to be idiots and make it fashionable.

It is a beautiful system. It worked fantastically up through the Obama years. It brought them within a scary distance of destroying America completely.

The most pathetic thing about the Criminal Biden Regime is that they think they can pick up where they left off. 

Left With No Right

 Q. By using the term Leftist to describe our enemies, does that mean we are on the "Right."

Answer: No. The Left-Right divide is itself a Leftist invention. What the Left usually means by the term "Right wing" is another form of Leftism.

Q. How so?

Answer: Right wing movements are mass movements organized for political action. They seek the building and maintaining of large secular organizations that are centralized, and which spread an ideology throughout a nation or group of nations.

Pro-life tip: If your political movement can be expressed by a fist raised in anger, whether that fist is closed or carries a weapon, then even if you are "Right wing", you are a Leftist movement, 

All Leftist movements glorify something secular. What the Left means by Right wing is the Leftist movements which glorify America itself, or something else that they hate. 

Many on our own side get confused by this, and fall for "Right wing" rhetoric. The Left needs this happen, as it keeps the entire political battle within the field of Leftist rhetoric itself. 

Of course they throw us into the mix with the Right0wing Leftists, and throw all the historically heinous Right-wing Leftist labels at us. That allows them to justify hating us, even though we are not who they think we are. They think we the Right wing buffoons they hold as caricatures in their minds. They've got plenty of examples of it to tell you about, people they have met who are exactly the stereotype. They seek these people out.

In reality the caricatures they imagine as Right wingers are themselves, unrecognized in the mirror. It is their own ignorance, and repressed anger of hypocrisy, projected onto "those people out there."

Q. But isn't the American Revolution itself, which you seek to restore, just another example of this kind of movement?

Answer: No. It was an attempt to create an organizational structure of government which ensure maximum Liberty over time.  This meant it had to be not only decentralized, but centralizing on multiple scales. It was believed at the time that this could only be achieved by a Rule of Law that recognized God as Sovereign, as only God can ensure Liberty over time.

Q. Didn't this result in slavery being allowed to continue past 1776?

Answer: Yes. The system wasn't perfect. Let's acknowledge all the horrible things about America that Leftists (and explicitly Communists) want us to acknowledge, and feel grief over. Let's admit there is a case to be made there that America was horrible and deserves to be wiped from history.

Let's admit this is because we are all fallen and sinful, even those who made America in its founding. We can do better than our sinful natures by appealing to God. This is what the founders did, and this is why America "succeeded," if you believe that it did.

Q. Isn't the attempt to restore the American Revolution (the Revolution of 1776) a Right wing movement by your standard, and therefore Leftist?

Answer: Let's admit too that there became too much of a Cult of America---the secular America that cannot be the Kingdom on Earth, but only an attempt at it. The Cult of America was already well established by the 1840s. The deification of George Washington was followed by that of Lincoln and others.

These were mortal men, however, so deification necessarily required a de-deification at some point, which is what has been happening in America over the last fifty years.  

The Left wants us to think this process is just getting started. They are late to the party. It's been going on for decades to the point where the Founding Fathers have been de-deified to the maximum degree. That is why Trump's July 4th speech at Mount Rushmore felt like a Last Stand. In a way it was. The question is: what becomes of those guys now?

I suggest that America is actually coming back. It cannot be the Old America, which by consensus of what I see in social media threads, is known directly only by people born before 1970, or who somehow came of a consciousness of the world before about 1975. 

This is the America that almost achieved harmony between the races within it, to the point where it seemed feasible that all of that injustice could be placed in the past. That's as close as we got that in my life time certainly.

It is as if we got up the point of "solving our racial problems," but a giant switch happened, which said, "no, you get to move beyond that," and we decided that keeping all the old grievances alive for as long as possible was the right solution.

Q. Doesn't Liberty just mean people starve to death without government help?

So we're back to this canard? Most of us are not Libertarians, if you're looking for that.  Some of us are. Some not.

Some of us believe that t because he world is very different from 1776, so the attempt to restore the American Revolution in 2021 and beyond will not necessary take the same shape as it did then. Many of us, including President Trump, believe in the need for strong Federal government that takes bold action on a national level.  But Trump at the same restored federalism in a way that even his own supporters have yet to realize. The nation of the United States as a compact of States was almost destroyed, but it is now been restored. Unfortunately it let the Globalists invade the U.S. via the States themselves, so now we must fight back against that.

Q. If we can't go back completely to a 1776 model of American government, how will we know what shape to make it going forward?

We can rely on the old models and advice as a starting point, to be sure. But like many people, I believe none of this will work until we recover the spiritual aspect of the American Revolution. This requires humility as a nation, expressed through prayer. It requires begging God to forgive us for getting so off track, and helping us find a way back. God's way forward is neither Right nor Left. 

The Real Ending of the Hunger Games

 In the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Ghost. Amen

Henceforth my go-to response to any criticisms or attacks from the Left will be: Get thee behind me, Satan.

You are a white supremacist terrorist! Get thee behind me, Satan!

You're a racist hate movement! Get thee behind me, Satan!

You're violent extremist seditionists who stormed the Capitol! Get thee behind me, Satan!

Why not? Many Leftists themselves have embraced the Dark One and his ideology. They do so openly in many cases. 

Of course many, if not most of them, would tell you its not real worship they offer. They are above believing in such things. It's all done to make a point. It's all just archetypes and mythologies anyway. Such mythologies are to be used, in the Blakean sense, as tool in the revolutionary struggle.

So that is how they convince themselves that by worshiping the Dark One, they are not really worshipping the Dark One. They believe they can joke away the meaning of it by consciousness of its irony. They are doing it to humiliate their enemies, I think they would agree. 

Humiliation is a key tool in Communism as well. We are seeing this now in the appointment of key figures in Biden's team, including several people who are openly mentally ill, and who openly savor the complete overthrow of the old traditional American culture.

What Leftists don't realize is that all the things that happened under the eight years Obama were done with the cooperation of all of the rest of us.  Old America, White America, etc.---went cheerfully along with much of Obama's program because they thought it would bring the country in racial justice. We believed the lies. We let them have their head of steam for their "progress." 

What it did was teach all Leftists the manipulations over us to keep and hold power, and to destroy us.

They will not get cooperation now. They will get scorn, ridicule, and derision at every derision for their illegal occupation regime. 

Even children will come to loathe and mock the Zoom school lessons where they learn about social justice. They will learn that all the people teaching them those things are rank frauds. They will see the rot of America from the ground up. They cannot know what the country was like before the Leftists started destroying it, but they can understand the result.

Biden cannot re-create Obama cultural momentum. It's not going to happen. It has played out. What we saw in 2020 is the tail end of the Wokeness Revolution, not the beginning. 

Now it will turn on itself. People in Portland got up yesterday morning to realize that it was never about Trump. The thugs are never going to go away until they get their way, or they are broken. 

They got their criminal "President Snow" sworn in as Occupier-in-Chief. I thad hought of Biden that way, as the old villain from the Hunger Games who was played in the movie by Donald Sutherland. Then I learn he brought the stars of that movie to his pathetic criminal swearing in!

Gady Lala, the greatest vocal talent and biggest degenerate of her generation was on hand to sing the national anthem while the movie starts made gestures indicating victory. 

Perfect. The kids will love that. No bad imagery there. Not like the kids will see it as President Snow having captured the Hunger Games stars and parading them as trophies for his celebrity courtiers while they ninny around in their finery.

We all know that the Katniss character comes from Trump's America. Jennifer Lawrence's early characters (including Winter's Bone), are the epitome of the Trump Backcountry, where he gets ninety percent support.  This is the America I spent years traveling through, and curing myself of the mental disease of Globalist Leftism.

That movie came out in 2012. It was one of the few movies I saw after giving up my project in 2010. At the time it felt like the Old America felt like it was living its last days before dying out. That America was dead.  The Hunger Games was in the aftermath of that death.

How anyone can read that series otherwise is mind-boggling, but devil worship has warped the minds of Leftists where they can believe and spew the weirdest illogical opinions without blushing. 

Get thee behind me, Satan.

I admit, It's a harsh phrase to say aloud to someone, especially someone you know. But Our Lord said as much to his closest disciple.  God commands that we rebuke and confront the Dark One, whom the Leftists have chosen to worship and represent. 

Were I to confront one of my former friends with it, I expect nothing but spewing hatred in return from them. For some leftist former friends, it would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. They would use it as an excuse to explode in rage to me. I could be surprised., but I think they would enjoy it that rage. They have all their guns trained on us already. All they lack is ammunition. 

But it wouldn't matter to me. Their opinions of me carry no weight. They forfeited the rights and privileges of friendship that would allow me to care what they think of me. I would treat them the way I would treat a homeless mentally ill person screaming at me on the streets of a city. I would look on them with pity and disgust, but their rebukes are meaningless to me. In fact the more they scream in anger at me, the more it buttresses my conviction that our side is the righteous side.

If you don't believe this could happen, I assure you it already has happened to me multiple times.  They've already trained me well how to treat them.

I would listen to them again only if they offered a sincere apology, one that comes with humility and repentance, for that is the only way to break the hold of the demonic. Only then will I give ear to their opinions. That will never happen as long as they cling to Leftism, but the essence of Leftism is Pride.

Since Leftists must understand everything through Pop Culture,  I will give them movie image to explain how I have come to treat them---Father Merrin in The Exorcist wiping the projectile vomitus off his spectacles as his proceeds onward with the ritual. The power of Christ compels you.

That was only a movie, but the Dark One that the Leftist worship is real. I pray God protects me from such malignant forces. I will leave that to those trained in that combat 

But as a great pries has pointed out, Leftists today don't need to be possessed by the demon. They volunteer.

The Golden Age of Mocking Leftists

When Kamala says: Bring equity to race
We will Heil! (pffft) Heil! (pffft) right in Joe Biden's face

Yesterday was J's birthday. "What a birthday to remember," she joked. In addition to all that went on in Washington, D.C., we also found out that her stepfather tested positive for the virus. He went in after having symptoms. He's advanced in years, and not in particularly good health, so he has been wearing masks constantly. So much for that. 

He thinks he got it from a previous visit to the testing center, when a woman next to him was hacking and coughing. In any case it's a probably a real case, and not a fake one, as the big globalist health organization is now admitting the case numbers may be vastly inflated. They issued the press release within hours of Biden being sworn in. Someone on the underground social media forum commented that they will probably change the testing procedure now and the case numbers will case. Dear Leader Joe saved the day!

This is the way Leftists think. Actually results don't matter. They aren't intelligent enough to understand the difference between words and reality, I've come to see. All of my Leftists former friends are in this category of rank stupid. Looking back, I have little respect for their intelligence, after years of trying to find common intellectual ground. It was a pose, I now realize. I knew that my cohort (including the current Vice President) are poseurs and fakers, and I've understood why since I was a child, but part of me didn't want to believe it. Now it is revealed in the stark light of day.

J was working remotely, and between the business calls and the personal well wishes, she tallied three that people (all of them women) told her something along the lines of "it being an especially hopeful day."

 One of the well wishers who said this was a co-worker whom she barely knows. We laughed about that. I've gotten the same thing from the Portland folks I used to work with. What it must be to be a Leftist and issue that kind of blather to someone else. They assume that if you are reasonable person, you agree with them about everything. You are a conformist to their idea of "goodness."

Only words count. That nothing they do actually solves any problems, but only makes things worse over time is not of concern to them. It's about making a statement, you see.

We need to make a statement that such-and-such is good, and such-and-such is bad.  It is a parody of meaning. But they cannot wrap their minds around this because they are surface thinking. Their knowledge is a parody of knowledge and learning. 

Their motto, which might as well be the motto of my cohort, is the famous alleged quote by Einstein, "imagination is more important than knowledge." What Einstein perhaps meant by that in the context of physics, if he indeed said that, I think I know. What it means to Leftists is they can ignore reality and simply redefine the world into what they want. 

This kind of thing demands absolutely conformity to the "imagined" outcome. They can't stand verbal dissent.  They can't stand being mocked, because they are an empty shell. It's going to be a grand time for mocking them.  They bought this outcome. Now they get to pay for it.

If the Leftist movement were in its vibrant youth, with muscular energy and strong momentum as it was in the middle Twentieth Century, I would feel scared about the future. But Leftism is a limp-wristed shell of itself. They remind one of the ornately clad Persian sissy-warriors who fled the battlefield leaving their Emperor unprotected once they met actual opposition. 

They know we are stronger, which is why they won't actually do anything substantial to us. They will talk as if they can march all 75 million Trump voters off to re-education camps. They can only snipe at us and try to passive aggressively take us down the way junior high school girls do to each other.  

Their attempts to cram Communist thought-training down our throats will inspire the most delicious mocking of all time. Subjected to this heavy-handed browbeating, young kids, at least the ones who are not mentally ill, will understand intuitively that everything about their movement is fake. We will win converts to our side in increasing numbers each day.

Their inability to get to us will infuriate them. We'll show you. You will be made to say the words of our consensus reality. We will unperson you, cancel you, and drive you out of society if you do not comply.

Yet we don't need their media anymore, which is exposed as phony. After a six months of North Korean-style hero worship of the new criminal regime, the only one watching them will be people stuck in airport lounges.

Their social media platforms are declining in power with each passing day. Being exiled from these online spaces was a godsend. We will bypass them, as we will bypass the old media. We will make them irrelevant.

As I've mentioned, ten years ago many of us in the American Revivalist movement thought we were a tiny number trying to "wake up" the American people. Now we are awake. Everyone on our side is laughing at them. We are going to enjoy the laughter.

Does this sound mean? Perhaps but it's war now, one they declared on us. We have actually been holding back until now. I have tried for years to build bridges to them, but not a single instance has worked. They got every chance possible to avoid the insanity they have fallen into. Finally they signed on to the theft of a presidential election. 

I have Leftist former friends, people I used to be very close to, whose company I still miss at times. But there is no way I could speak to them in the near future without an apology on their part. It is not because I need that for my ego, but because I don't trust them. I know from experience that Leftists will feign an attempt at peace when in reality they are looking for some kind of angle to attack you. They want you to open us and admit your thought-crime, so they can smugly say,  I knew he was one of them.

Until they break out of their trance, however, expecting apologies from them is like expecting a vampire to hand you a crucifix. They can't do it, because apologies are words, and words are everything. That''s why I demand one---because it is the only way to make sure they have gotten over their mental illness. Ironically if they offered a true apology, I'd be the first to say "That's ok, I fell for their lies too." Our side doesn't punish. They have to punish because their conformity of speech, and the pretend world they think they can imagine into being, is all they have.

You want a statement? I got your statement right here.

Beyond Trump

 As I paced on the sand of the wash this morning, I ruminated on the catastrophe that had befallen the nation.  The President's farewell speech the day before, the las tone from the White House, had made no sense to me.

As a historical record of his achievements, it was a perfect outro video that future generations can watch to understand what happened. But as encouragement for his followers, it felt like a disaster. 

He spoke with pride about his having restored the connection between the American people and the government. He elaborated on that. I felt stunned hearing him say this, considering how I and a good portion of the country felt. We felt just the opposite.

Nothing about both the Democrats and Republicans being universally crooked surprised me. That much I had known and absorbed long ago. We all knew they were out to get him, the outsider candidate who came from America, and not filtered through the Globalist acceptance ranks, trained to serve the World first and America second, because the President of the U.S. must be a World Leader first.

What surprised me was that they beat him. Apparently they did. Even seeing it coming, for several years. It was obvious after 2018 in the California House elections, what they would try. It was on a breathtaking scale this time, but nevertheless he knew they would do it. He saw it coning.  He warned us on election night, in the wee hours after the returns had come in, when in any other year the networks would have declared him the winner. He could he have failed?

Nevertheless he did, it seems. Yet during the speech in his voice was confidence in what he had done. At the rally in Dalton, Georgia on January 5th, he had stated flatly that restoring election integrity would be his greatest accomplishment. At the time we thought we understood what that meant. It meant proving he had won in a landslide on November 3, and stopping the crooked Biden-Harris usurper-thieves from taking the oath of office.

Of course the next day we were hijacked again, in the grandest possible way, when the bold protestation of Arizona's electoral votes----my vote---was interrupted by the still-mysterious trampling over the Capitol. Whatever it was, the optics had given the Left all the blood they needed to go insane with glee at their justification to destroy us. No Trump Second Term now, of course.

Was that it? Was January 6th the point at which Trump actually lost, and did he lose it because of the Capitol stampede? If so, that's quite a tragedy, one that America may never get over, as it will leave a wicked cabal in the White House and in control of all levers of government. America has never had anything like this happen. It is quite a wound for us to suffer it.

But something about that is still fishy too. It is almost as if Trump knew it was going to happen, and purposeful let he and his followers be blamed for it. But why? The result was the bizarre lockdown of the District of Columbia and its occupation by 30,000 troops, now under personal command of Joe Biden apparently. Did Trump engineer this occupation by leveraging the Democrat's predictable demand for security, which otherwise they would have ascribed to Trump's madness?

Why the troops? What was the threat? Did Trump save the country in a way that we don't know about by preventing something that would have otherwise taken place? For that he leaves the stage and hands the government over to traitors and crooks.

How could he do that? Did he never have enough "proof" that he won the election in a landslide? Was he prevented from releasing the dirt on Biden, that would have forced Biden to cave and concede, by some force? Do they have something on him? Did he keep that information close to vest out of some strategy that only he knows?

In light of his claim at the Georgia rally that he would deliver on cleaning up our elections, the part of his farewell speech where he asserted he had done something close to it felt downright sickening and bizarre. He must have known how we would hear it, given the information we have available.

To say there are things Trump knows about the situation that the rest of us don't know is to say that water is wet. Of course that is true, and perhaps we would understand in a heartbeat, if we too could see the information he knows.

But it sure feels like a bummer. It feels confusing. As the creepster Biden and broken-down Harris slink about the Capital, Trump is back in Florida, having been greeted by the throngs. We will give him a couple days off, but we will look forward to hearing from him in the near future. What will he say, if anything?

In many ways, I don't mind that he is no longer President. A second term was a beautiful dream, and would have truly restored America, maybe back to before the damage of the disastrous Wilsonian reforms of the early Twentieth Century.  Perhaps we can still get there.  Trump would have been done as President after 2024.. We would have needed to find a way to go beyond him. We just need to do that sooner than expected.

Yet this idea remains, like a taunt in my mind---what if he's right? What if he did fix our elections. We just don't know it yet. Maybe that means that the movement to restore the American Revolution will only get stronger, until its victory is inevitable. We will take a page from the Marxist book, who fought this way through the decades. Now the Left is old and feeble, a ridiculous plastic-surgery-twisted parody of the righteousness that once fueled it. Its youngsters have been show to be poseurs. All of the momentum of history is with us.

Is that what Trump means? He knows he has accomplished this, and it won't matter even if they "get away" with rigging a nationwide presidential election. Moreover they got caught. Yet none of the legal and Constitutional safeguards worked. Was there no one who could defend the Republic?

We didn't get a simple, straightforward Trump second term as President because that would have been too easy for us. We haven't suffered the lash of tyranny enough to scare the beejezus out of us, to make sure we never get close to this again. We are so corrupted in our culture, so degraded, so degenerate, that a tougher road back will be necessary. Perhaps it will take generations, maybe two or three, since it took at least that to get where we are. 

Thankfully the momentum is in our direction. The Woke Tide has crested. Everyone knows what a joke it is. Biden is clown. His administration will seem scary but it will be nothing but a blip. The wretched Paris Accords, a Globalist Trojan horse to formally yoke America into a globalist governance framework, mean nothing. No one will remember them in ten years time.  

Black Lives Matter is a joke. All the television commercials are black people, meaning we are about two months away from the insane Wokesters realizing this is "corporate blackface" and demanding that corporrations never use black people in any commercials.

Universities are shutdown. Most small liberal arts colleges, breeding grounds for Wokester Communists, will shutter in the years ahead.  Everyone knows teachers unions and public education is poison. Teachers don't want to ever go back in the classroom. They want to teach from home using Zoom, with a glass of wine off camera. Schools as we know it are dead.

Pop Culture is at nadir. Hollywood is gone and will never come back. Movie theaters are gone. Pop Music is a pablum, serving mostly as a soundtrack for millennial officer workers and Apple commercials. Rappers mumble in commercials.

Everyone hates all the celebrities. Even the Leftists hate the ones they worship, because Leftist can only hate and cannot love anything. The Twentieth Century is gone. America has no more swill to export via it cultural flatulence.

All of that was necessary to sustain the Left. It's blown up. Biden is a joke, Harris is a shrew, the perfect epitome of my cohort who learned that fakery was more importance than substance. They will leave little mark in history. Trump will leave a huge one.

The momentum of history is with us.

I believe someday we will learn Trump was right about having restored our elections. Someday.

Once More to the Ironwood

 In a few minutes, I'm going to take a walk out to the little patch of undeveloped desert, where the ironwood stands by the wash, with the saguaro and the palo verde close by. I will look out over the mountains to the west and appreciate their ruggedness, as I do. I will feel lucky to have this little bit of the desert that is not mine, but which I get to enjoy in solitude when I need that, which is frequently.

Big changes are coming, however. A couple weeks ago I came out there to find city work crews surveying the land just to the west. It is part of the big development plan by the city, that was approved in December. We have known from the signs that they were planning to make this part of a park complex, with sports fields with bright lights at night, and parking lots. Most of that kind of development will be further to the south, in the part of the desert past the power lines where I have often walked. But this little parcel next to where I go to walk is to have a landscaped makeover. 

Within a few months, it will have walking paths. Joggers and people with dogs will now get to traverse it, whereas only hardy souls like me, as well as rabbits and roadrunners, once did. I don't think they will do anything to ironwood, and my "grove," as it is in a dry wash, but I can imagine that soon it will not be suitable for me to linger there, as I will be an interloper in areas of a "park" that are off the paved path.

I'm enjoying the last few weeks before the crew shows up to begin the work (I asked one of the crew about their timetable). I've been so lucky to have my desert for as long as I did, just as I've enjoyed writing this blog on and off for 12 years.

We are already discussing moving on to our next destination and our next abode, although it will not be until I see the end of my solitary desert. I have been lucky indeed.

The Need for Perpetual War

 By the start of World War II, America had already established a government run mostly by managers outside the political process. This had been the great revolution of the early 20th century.  By the end of the war, a group of people within the managerial class would take the lead in developing a secret managerial component of American government.

They knew it was important to convince open-government-loving Americans of the necessity for secret managerial government on some level, This was not so difficult, as even civilians were schooled in keeping secrets from the enemy.

Part of the effort and convincing Americans involved showing them the consequences of not embracing this change. To the American secret managerial class, the best way to do this convincing was to show Americans the horrible consequences of a confrontation between itself and the Soviet Union. This might come about by the same forces of chaos between nations that had produced two world wars. It had to be stopped.

If these people did their jobs right, then America and the world would survive. The state of "pseudo-war"----an extended contained conflict that never escalated past a danger threshold---might be extended, perhaps decades and generations, creating a new era of stability in a dangerous world.

Simply put, unless secret perpetual wartime power is maintained in their hands, they asserted, and moreover that they have some form of veto power over the workings of the open part of government that Americans cherish,  then the world might easily spiral into annihilation from populist passions and whims of the public. It was quite a threat they confronted, perhaps the biggest one in history.

This viewpoint was famously lampooned in Orwell, who ridiculed the concept that "War is Peace" by his depiction of the mentality of the post-war western alliance. But this is precisely what intelligent people knew was necessary. 

When America Went Secret

  The various factions of the early American Republic would not have tolerated secret government, as they would not have trusted each other. For this reason, the American Republic was designed to be open to outside inspection, at least on the official level of functioning.

Open government evolved into one of the fundamental precepts of American society in the Eighteenth Century. This was successful until the introduction of the railroads, which brought forth the necessity for corporations created for the public good, through internal improvements and public works. Despite the corruption of this, however, Americans continued to think of their society as an open one, and that this openness was the essence of American freedom.

By the early Twentieth Century, Americans came to accept that government functioning in the modern era required large cadres of managers outside the political process. The curation of the ranks of this bureaucracy has been one of the great political balancing acts throughout the history of the country. 

Even after the managerial revolution, and the vast expansion of government under Roosevelt, Americans continued to believe that their government must be an open one. 

World War II changed that at last. 

The pervasive and culture-shifting experience of the war caused Americans of all political type to embrace the doctrine that the avoidance of a repeat of Pearl Harbor, as well the new responsibilities of America in the post 1945 world, required the country to be on what could be called a permanent wartime footing.

Update

 God have mercy on us all and forgive us our sins.

Literature

 O che sciagura d'essere senza coglioni.

Ephemera

 

Bold Encouragement

 Stay strong.

To Future Generations

 May God bless the United States of America in this hour of our need. May God keep us free and independent among the nations, a nation where the Liberty of its citizens, enshrined in Law, reflects magnificent of God's Glory in His gift to us of this Liberty.

May America continue to be a shining example of this principle of the enshrinement of God's essential Liberty into Law. May America continue to be in control of its own destiny among the nations, and not be subsumed in authority into any other earthly power, until the day that the Lord has ordained to establish His true kingdom on Earth. 

In this hour may God protect and guide all those who are fighting for this nation. May God help them achieve victory and save the nation. May God grant them confidence in decision and precision in action. May God spare the world carnage, slaughter, destruction, and disaster in this hour, and let it pass while guiding the nation to a new stage of the appreciation of its Liberty enshrined by God in Law.

We Uphold Our Ancient Heroes

 

Avitos Juvamus Honores The 182nd Infantry Regiment is the oldest regiment in the United States Army. The regiment traces its history more than 230 years, when it was a colonial regiment of foot of the British Crown in Massachusetts. It is one of several National Guard units with colonial roots and campaign credit for the War of 1812. 

For someone about to metaphorically hanged for treasonous wrongness, Wictor is upbeat on the underground forum. The fact that Pence has called to congratulate Harris, and that Trump has spoken of the "Biden Administration" is treated by him as surface deception by Trump. Leftists only care about what you say, he says. It makes it easy to deceive them. Trump has to deceive even his own followers.

Biden is, he reminds us, the legal President-Elect, given the counting on January 6 in the Capitol. Trump is following the rule of law and the Constitution. But all of that can be turned around in a day, he says. Congress could meet to re-certify the Electoral College on Tuesday, declare Trump the winner based on the alternate slate of electors, or invoke the 12th Amendment, which would also lead to the House electing Trump just in time to be inaugurated for his second term.

D.C. is armed camp swarming with troops, all of them called in by Trump. The oldest unit in the Army, the 182nd, has announced it is coming. Wictor has noticed Marines arriving in helicopters in the posted videos. He scolds those who want him to say they are there to arrest the Democrats. No evidence for that. All we can say is that they are there, but we know not for what purpose.

Trump does, however. He personal command of them via his direct control over the District of Columbia National Guard (as the District has no Governor, and the Mayor of Washington has no power to call them in).

What on earth is Trump up to? Just making a big show of force, locking down the District like a military complex with razor tape fences around the Capitol? All of this to slink off to Mar-a--Lago and leave Biden in command of this giant deployment of over 25,000 men? Why would he do that?  It seems like way too many for any legitimate threat from either his own supporters or the other side? Even the Mayor of D.C., a Democrat, has said as much.

Perhaps it is just to have a beautiful ego-driven military send-off as he flies away in Marine One, to go to Air Force One for one last trip, to drop him off in Florida. It will be a big version of the halftime show at the Army-Navy game last month, which was played in West Point for the first time since World War II (it is usually played in Philadelphia). 

The crowd that day gave Trump a massive cheer as he came onto the field before the game. The enlisted military and the junior officer corps is one of the few quarters of American society where one can be openly pro-Trump without fear of reprisal. The senior officer corps is different. My impression is that higher up you go, the more likely you find anti-Trump swamp creatures in uniform.

Trump has spent much of his first term re-organizing the military for this moment. He created new branches that effectively bypass the entire previous swamp-creature chain of command, including the civilian Secretaries. He gave control over one of them to Mike Pence and another to Christopher Miller, both of them seemingly the perfect men for the job at this moment.  

At the way to that Army-Navy game, Trump met with the Director of National Intelligence, who probably told him about the foreign involvement in the election. Later the DNI gave him an official report. On January 7,  the DNI signed a letter confirming his belief in foreign interference in the election, specifically by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The DNI specifically mentions that previous statements from the intelligence community (IC) that The CCP party was not involved were made at the suggestion of Chinese analysts. 

D.C. as Underground Theater

 Saul, the Argentine immigrant who maintains the dissident forum on servers he pays for,  has come to Wictor's point of view: Biden is not going to inaugurated on Wednesday. The massive military presence in the District of Columbia, under the auspices of the D.C. National Guard, is providing fuel for long threads of discussion. Wictor is watching the videos of the troops still pouring in---Florida National Guard troops getting off a bus. Many uniformed troops slipping on the bare floors of the Capitol itself.

A massive fence with razor wire now surrounds the capital. Traffic in the District is restricted in at least fifty internal checkpoints, with traffic restricted in and out of the perimeter.

All this is in plain sight. Wictor rails against "Q-anon idiots "who fell into the Democrats' trap on the 6th. Saul bans anyone who introduces Q points into the forum. No secret inside sources allowed.  

"The view from 30,000 feet," one of them calls it, referring to their method of analysis. It means looking at Trump and who he is, and using the facts that the media is ignoring to draw a logical conclusion. Ultimately such a conclusion is a guess. Wictor is defiant against those salivating for his comeuppance when things don't play out as he predicts. There is a sense we will go on no matter what. All of us wander what life will be life after Biden and Harris over, if that is what happens. 

The gravity of that opens the mind to reconsider again the facts on the ground, and rebuild a conclusion anew, one that may offer hope. One knows that one might be wrong, and that is sobering for multiple reasons. We know that no amount vengeance against us will propitiate our enemies at this point, short of our total annihilation. 

In the meantime, we are all waiting on what those troops are going to do. Are they theater? Most of us are glad we are watching this from far away.