You want to see the future of South Africa? Watch this video from University of Cape Town. about "decolonizalizing science" and purging the "western modalities" from education. One might hear the same kind of thing at an American university, but the difference is that in South Africa, the young woman leading the panel, or someone like her, is likely to be in a position to enforce her opinion across the society in the near future.
Imagine the same panel five or ten years hence, but it is now a tribunal for relocation and removal of all post-colonial influences in South Africa, including anyone of white skin. The young men on the end are now carrying weapons. Asking the wrong kind of question gets you a death sentence. "Truth and Reconciliation" have become "Purification and Racial Justice."
You think I'm wrong? I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to see it play out differently. But look at how they react when one (white) person dares say "It's not true." They already know they have authority.behind them. They act with the swagger of knowing that others must obey them. Now imagine them with guns.
One of the disturbing and unreported trends in world news recently is the growing violence against Whites in South Africa, especially Boer farmers. I've been following several Twitter accounts from South Africa that keep tabs on the murders---a gruesome list that grows day by day, with photos of the farmers killed. In official crime reports these are listed as "robberies gone wrong," but it is apparent that many people know exactly what is going on.
It appears from this and other trends in the country that we have reached a watershed moment in South African history. The post-apartheid feel-good era of a "nation for all races" is going by the wayside. In its place is arising the new ideology, that South Africa belongs to black people plain and simple, and that white people need to be purged from land. The government policy of seizing land (which was the policy in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe) is in parallel with growing open calls for violence on social media from young black South Africans, that the only good white person is a dead white person.
Don't expect to see much about this in American people. The idea that white people need to be purged from the earth entirely is a becoming a standard subtext of the academic left, and the de-whitening of America is openly celebrating in the popular media and in Pop Culture. Any sympathy for white South Africans is going to be hard coming.
South Africa is the "canary in the coal mine" for what I saw described on social media as "a global version of the Haitian Revolution." From the Twitter accounts I follow, I get the sense that in South Africa we are approaching a point of inflection, however, in which things may get so bad in South Africa that the world will have to notice. Once a certain momentum of violence starts, it picks up steam rapidly, like an avalanche in which suddenly the solid ground turns to liquid. The white South Africans will not go down easily. Many are well-armed. But I predict that within a couple year's time, it will be common knowledge that an open race revolution is occurring there, one with the goal of purging white people form the African continent.
We know who the Left will side with. They are perfectly comfortable with the idea that certain territories and even entire continents are the property of certain indigenous races. A land belongs to people who live there historically, unless of course they are white Europeans. Then their land belongs to everyone else, and keeping their land to themselves is evil.
In the West, we live in a world in which war is a distant thought, disease is mostly eradicated, and hunger is known to only a small few. Yet in many respects---for both young men and young women---there has never been a worse time to be alive.
This is because the ideology of the West over the last century has been a destruction of the existing civilization on a levels. We have all been pushed to tear down everything that once existed, brick by brick, out of a sense that it was oppressive and evil.
Among the things to be torn down was any form of traditional morality in regard to sexuality. The ideal for young women is the past was the preservation of chastity and innocence until marriage, and then the blossoming into the joys of motherhood.
We are now supposed to see motherhood as a burden, one from which women are to be liberated. Instead they are to find joy in being a career drone alongside men. Moreover, chastity and innocence regarded not only as quaint but as downright evil, as they hold back the natural impulse of young women to fulfill their desires, and anything that holds that back must be destroyed.
We have moved towards a society in which we accept as normal the idea that a young woman can and should explore her sexuality throughout her young adult life, having and enjoying as many sexual partners as she can find, even if that means her tally of lovers exceeds the three-digit mark by the time she is thirty or thirty-five. When she is ready to settle down, some man will wife her up and support her, and she will have a child or two if she desires, but more important is that she fulfill her role in the career workplace, because anything less would be oppressive.
As such, we have built a society of miserable women, and it is only taking off. The current cohort of Millennial women will probably be the most miserable and unhappy that the West has ever produced.
But there is no retreat, apparently. Anything back towards traditionalism is move against the prime directive of the ideology of the 20th century, which was destruction of all tradition, especially anything Christian. The victory over Christianity is not yet complete. More women must be sacrificed to the cause, even if it makes them suicidal in the long run. They are pushed towards this by their peers and by the older generation, out of a sense of justifying their own life choices. It is age-old tenet of human tenet that the fallen seek to drag others down with them. The only joy for the miserable is to corrupt innocent youth by convincing them to follow in their own footsteps of misery.
In short, society cries out for a return to some form of traditional morality, yet it can have nothing that smacks of traditional forms of traditionalism. It cannot be Christian. It cannot appear to support anything that looks "right wing." It has to be progressive. It has to be seen as moving forward towards the goal of destruction of the past.
Enter Islam, the perfect solution for the West. It offers the harsh and immediate imposition of traditional morality, such that a young woman can go from one day being a camwhore stripping so that a thousand men can masturbate to her, to the next day putting on hijab and declaring herself pure and innocent again. She can do this without any form of submission to traditional Christian western forms of morality. She can do this while being progressive.
For many young women trained in Leftist politics, there is almost no downside to this route, which is why I expect it to become popular as a trend. Furthermore, because Islam is a religion that demands only outward forms of obeisance, and does not demand any inner transformation, one can go from secular SJW to Muslim while still remaining just as angry and judgmental as before. In fact, one has license to become even more of a warrior, to shout even louder, and to even threaten others righteously with death unless they obey. A young woman can shuck off her degradation and then immediately take to the streets to scream for the same things she did before, even declaring herself "feminist." What's not to love?
Most people in the West know, or have known at some point, someone who was raised Muslim. Perhaps they were a foreign exchange student, or a someone in their dorm in college. Or perhaps a college professor, or a co-worker.
If you're like most liberals, you probably have thought about this person as a living rebuttal to charges regarding the danger of the spread of Islam. I know Muslims. They are peaceful normal peaceful who just want to practice their religion. What's wrong with that?
The flaw in this line of reasoning is the belief that Islam, like Christianity, is a religion of individuals. If you are thinking that, you are thinking with the bias of a Westerner.
Islam is not at all a religion of individuals. It is a societal religion, akin to a political ideology. In many ways comparing to Christianity (and other religions) is comparing apples to oranges.
Islam has little meaning practiced in isolation in the Western world. In that situation it is but a set of interesting harmless rituals and holidays. But this is not Islam. It is just the just the solitary practice of a Muslim.
Islam is only truly Islam when it is the majority religion within a community or a nation. It is a set of outward practices in conformity with a societal norm.
Isn't Christianity the same? Well perhaps it can be, but it is not a core tenet of the Christian religion that it must be, or even expects to be, a majority within a society. Christianity can be practiced just as legitimately by solitary individuals, or by a tiny minority within society, arguably more easily than if it is the majority religion. This is because Christianity concerns the inner being, rather than the outward public practice.
The question to ask in regard to isolated "good Muslims" in the west is: how they behave if they were in a Muslim majority society? In almost every case, a good Muslim will conform to all the beliefs of a Muslim society must be, including the death penalty for apostasy.
One might compare this to the charming hippie "Communist" harmlessly selling fruit at a farmer's market. But how this person be, if dropped down in the middle of crowd in the Cultural Revolution of China? Communism in individuals is meaningless. It only makes sense as a collective ideology. The same is true of Islam.
The Muslims who came to the West fifty years ago were often academics comfortable in a secular world. The ones coming today are a different type of person. They don't want to integrate. They want to immediately be among other Muslims, because for most Muslims to be outside a Muslim community is to be outside of Islam itself. They think the rest of us should ultimately play by their rules as well. They believe we ultimately will play by their rules because God wants that to happen. God will make their communities grow until they can dominate the nations of the West, and we will play by their rules whether we want to or not.
For several years running now, one of the great mysteries of political analysis has been the curious alliance between western SJW Leftists and Muslims advocating Shariah Law. The fact that the two are so far apart in ideology on many points (e.g. that Shariah laws advocates the execution of women for being raped, or for anyone having homosexual sex) seems to be of no concern to Leftists, who may easy alliance with Muslims who openly express their desire to transform the western world into an extension of the Arab one, something they see as their ultimate goal and destiny.
On the surface, this can apparently be easily resolved by resorting to the principle of the "enemy of the enemy is my friend." To wit, both SJW Leftist and Muslims desire to tear down the remnants of the Christian-dominated west and replace it with a society of their own imagining. The idea among many Leftists perhaps is that Islam will never really have much traction in the west beyond a subculture, and in time they can be introduced to progressive ideas as well.
But I don't think that addresses the entire issue. I think something deeper is at work that speaks of a deeper transformation going on in western society, namely the end of progressive culture altogether. As I write this, I would assert that western civilization has fallen into so much decay and cultural rot as to have left the majority of its people in a feeble and miserable condition, rootless and bereft of meaning in their lives.
Progressive Leftists feel this as much as anyone else, and this is why they scream for ever greater acceleration of changes to accommodate more degradation, especially anything having to do with sexual license and the erasure of any constraint on sexual behavior (except among straight men).
In the conservative (Christian) viewpoint, such a course only leads to great misery, but the path of sin is one that makes the sinner believe that even greater sinning is always the answer. The Leftists (libertine) response to this is something along the lines of "f@ck you and your morality," accompanies by a "Hail Satan" for good measure.
Yet they do yearn for a way out of the misery. The soul hungers for some kind of salvation from the desolation of postmodern existence. Where does it come from?
This is where Islam enters the picture. It offers all the convenience of a stern morality that demands submission to a set of rules, but without the horrible inconvenience of a surrender to the hated Christians. In one feel swoop, a young woman who has spent year youth accumulating sexual partners can don a hijab and declare herself morally clean again. Although this hasn't happened yet en masse among millennials, I believe that as a group, progressives recognize the appeal of this, and are fascinated by this possibility of salvation from their madness.
We begin to see the fascination grow, bit by bit. SJWs announce "I'm a Muslim too" on Twitter with a hashtag, partly as a rebuke to Trump and his followers, but also with a deeper sense of putting one foot towards an option towards future conversion to Islam. They stand at hushed attention in Times Square as the Muslim call to prayer is broadcast.
They yearn for purity and salvation. They are tired of Satan worship. Islam begins to seem like a possibility. It does not demand that one change one's inner being at all. One can still be as judgmental. In fact, one is encouraged to be a warrior, and to force others to submit. This is something that SJWs love. There is almost no downside.
Sure they have to jettison the concept of sexual immorality, abortion, homosexuality, etc., but this is exactly what they are actually yearning to do. The women have to submit to the patriarchy again, but likewise this is something most feminists secretly yearn for in any case.
Things are moving fast. By next year I predict all these trends will be common knowledge in the cultural discourse.
Yesterday we were privileged to welcome more guests to our house in FountainHills, this time in the person of Red's cousin and his girlfriend, who live in the Los Angeles County community of Glendale, which if you know anything about the geography of the area, is a municipality of rather small size but which is located near the opening between the Los Angeles Valley proper and both the San Fernando Valley to the Northwest as well as Pasadena to the East. This makes it readily accessible to a great many locales in the region. Not surprisingly its also the nexus of a several of the major freeways that serve as arterials.
Both of our guests work in animation. They are both originally from Ohio, where they went to art school before relocating to Southern California. Red's cousin works at a large and well-known movie animation studio that is not far from their residence. His girlfriend works at a large and well-known online game studio, the name of which I had not known but which I am told would be readily familiar to anyone who engages in gaming on a regular basis.
We had a very pleasant dinner last night at Flower Child in Scottsdale, which is one of our favorite casual places where one can be served a meal that suits just about any healthy dietary restriction. At home we sat around the propane fire pit where we the current state of Hollywood and moviemaking.
Later on, I took over the conversation, describing my interest in Hollywood history.
"To the lay person, a movie is all about the actors. In the case of film students, one learns about auteurship and it's all about directors. But from watching TCM for so long, I learned that for real movie buffs, the history of Hollywood is all about the studios."
Our guests brought the rain with them. It came in overnight and we woke the patio was soaked. We had coffee out on the patio again, with water replacing fire as the dominant element of the moment.
By that time I'd realized that there was a fourth level of appreciation of the history of moviemaking, beyond studios and producers, which is the technologies. Real movie buffs can tell you about the various systems of sound that were invented in the late 1920s, and about the history of Technicolor.
Behold my second Youtube video of this series (made with iPad), a very short short in the style of the Edison studio c. 1898.
The inspiration found immediately traction in my mind, and transformed into a resolve almost immediately. As all such inspirations usually have as the origin some expressible motivation, int his case mine could be formulated as "I want to understand how it all works."
That is, it occurred to me how much Youtube (and other platforms of user video) are really kicking the ass of the old media. As in the past, when I've joined other social media platforms (including this very one I'm using to type this post), I have often done so out of curiosity for "how it all works." That is, the world is changing through technology, and I want to know how the gears and pulleys are operating in a basic sense. This has been a very fruitful strategy in the past for revealing the underlying dynamics of the change, and given me great peace over time. I had long resisted making videos, thinking I had no talent nor desire to share thoughts and experiences this way, but last night I guess I finally reached the threshold where my curiosity got the better of me.
So without further ado, here's my first little video, just a spontaneous narration of my intent of this project while looking out over our back patio in Fountain Hills. I better post it now before I lose my nerve out of repulsion for the sound of my own voice, that universal revulsion we all seem to share in the era of recorded sound (I wonder if Richard Burton and Ronald Colman felt the same way).
Please note the sky is rather dark this morning, because a huge storm front is coming through from the East. How appropriate.
Deep State Emerging. A year ago, it was tinfoil hat. Now the entire Twittersphere is talking about it. Everyone assumes that the Deep State took down General Flynn. Even the Lefties and Neocons acknowledge this and are cheering on the Deep State to do their wishes against Trump.
The Trumpistas are gleeful. The Deep State is the ultimate enemy. The Deep State is the swamp. The Deep State is the Establishment. Everything else (the Media, Pop Culture idiots, Academia, the GOP and Democratic Party are just adjuncts to the support of the Deep State). Trump is taking them on. It is more than any of his supporters could have hoped for.
Chuck Schumer basically told Trump that if he took them on, he would be very sorry. Thankfully Trump didn't listen.
The Flynn episode, many are now realizing, was a sting by Trump to expose them. Of course nothing illegal, even unethical happened.
Flynn was never meant to be National Security Adviser for long. His resignation was a planned sacrifice to expose the leakers left behind by Obama, perhaps with clear intent to do exactly what they did, which is try to trap the Trump administration with illegal activity.
Flynn ran the Defense Intelligence Agency. He's a master spy. He knew he was being listened to. Probably the whole thing about lying to Pence was made up. In any case now Trump and his intelligence community loyalists, and the new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, know who the leakers are.
The Establishment press is going hog wild with stories about skullduggery and crimes by Trump. In reality it is projection. We are perhaps going to see just the reverse unfold.
Forty-eight hours ago it looked like Trump was on the ropes with the Flynn takedown. Now it seems Trump is triumphant and that Obama or his henchmen may have fucked themselves into a federal criminal indictment.
Trump is the master. He doesn't have to be 47 steps ahead because his opponents are stupid. He lets them underestimate him, and in their blind rage, they fall for it over and over. It is beautiful.
Absolutely the best part is that the Deep State is now exposed. It can never be what it once was. It is now visible. The leakers were small potatoes all i all, but the paradigm has shifted. The world has changed.
Great interview with Joe diGenova, one time United States Attorney, District of Columbia.
Bring the hammer down on them, Mr. Sessions... They have declared war. Destroy them.
Meanwhile the pedophile arrests continue. Over 1500 arrests since Trump's inauguration...
This morning I started my day as I like to lately, by going out on the patio to engage in a little rebounding.
I do this using the QiBounder that I purchased last fall over the web. The QiBounder, which bills itself as the "Rolls Royce" of rebounders, is manufactured by a German company and costs about twice as much as standard rebounders. It took about six weeks to arrive in the mail after I ordered it.
I chose that brand because it is the kind that Tony Robbins, the self-help guru, uses. We saw him using a rebounder in his Netflix documentary I am Not Your Guru. I said, "If it's good enough for Tony, it's good enough for me."
Rebounding was new to me, but Red was already a fan, so she was excited when it came, and has used it much more than I have. Lately, now the frigid nights have passed here in Arizona, I've tried to make a habit of doing it first thing in the morning, usually right after I put on the water for coffee. People do lots of intricate motions while QiBounding, but I usually just bounce up and down on my feet while looking out over the hills towards Red Mountain in the morning sun.
I get in a little bouncing before the water is hot for coffee. It really gets the blood (and lymph) flowing, and makes me want to get the day underway. Then I sit down and write my blog. At least that's what I did today.
Many, many rumors are swirling at the moment regarding impeding mass arrests that will bust wide open the pedophile and child sex slavery rings among the powerful elite, including high-level D.C. politicians of both parties.
Just ten days ago, we saw the arrest of 474 people in Southern California, busting up a pedophile network there. The question many are asking if these are the foreshocks of a much bigger, much more explosive revelation about to come.
The basic premise that many have put forth for decades is that pedophile networks are rampant among the global elite. According to many allegations, it is the default tool which by politicians in the U.S. and other countries are controlled. They have high level protection and immunity from prosecution. In return they do what they are told.
The rumor is that Trump is ready to bust this wide open, and many new arrests will be made as soon as Jeff Sessions is confirmed and takes office as Attorney General. This is one of the reasons they are throwing the kitchen sink at him, to try to stop him. There is enormous pressure to stop the upcoming arrests. This is the story floating about, at least
I can't speak for what the truth is. I am only reporting the swirling rumors. But if they turn out to be true, it is the last stand of the old Establishment. It is hard not to think that our entire political edifice as we know it would be shaken to its core, and that the nation would never be the same.
Bill Still, who is a good barometer for what gossip is percolating in D.C., hears the drumbeats.
As I mentioned, at times much of the discussion we had with our housemates centered the issues of being an uncover Trump supporter in a liberal area, to the point of fearing for one's physical safety. Along these lines, Erika and Rick had many observation regarding both Oregon and California.
But at least in Oregon, that wasn't the only threat they faced. As it happens, while they were living in Eugene, the car that Erika owned was a battered well-used Toyota Prius that he had more or less inherited from a friend who had recently passed away. The car bore California plates, which is not uncommon to see in Oregon.
Of course, as anyone who has lived in Oregon knows, there has long been an antipathy towards Californians that has ranged from manifestations of "Oregon Pride" (such as appeared in the 1986 gubernatorial campaign), to downright contempt of those arriving from south of the border (the Oregon-California border that is, not the U.S.---Mexican border of course!).
But as with the hub-hub over White Supremacy winning the Super Bowl, I had not anticipated how bad things had gotten in regarding to this issue. What has simmered below the surface is now breaking into overt expression. Rick and Erika reported two separate incidents in Eugene that occurred while they were in traffic, in which a nearby motorist had rolled down their window to express extreme displeasure at their presence, manifestly because of their license plates.
These incidents were but one of the factors that made Rick and Erika reconsider their entire plan of buying property in the Northwest. Everything around Eugene seemed too expensive.
"The owners are just sitting on things, waiting for the Californians to arrive and pay top dollar," said Rick.
In any case, they were both relieved when the deal they set up in Eastern Washington fell through, forcing them to reboot their entire plan.
Moreover, the Prius is now history, having been sold while they were in Santa Cruz to empty Erika's storage unit.
While the packed up their recently purchased SUV in our driveway yesterday, almost ready to hit to the road, I mused about their destination, which would take them many days of driving to reach.
"It's sort of ironic that you're going to Maine," I told Rick. "It goes back to an old nativist Oregon thing, called the James G. Blaine Society."
I explained that Blaine was a one-time U.S Senator from Maine in the late 19th century. At one time he was nominated as the Republican candidate for President, to run against Grover Cleveland. During the campaign, Blaine visited every U.S. state except for Oregon.
Then in 1960's, when many native Oregonians felt the state was becoming too crowded with newcomers (in a way that was ruining the natural environment), a well-known Oregon historian formed a tongue-and-cheek society named for Blaine as an encouragement for others to avoid visiting the state.
I added that I had visited the Blaine mansion in Augusta. "It's right across from the capitol," I added, pretending as if I were welcoming them to Maine. It's such a pleasure playing host to good folks.
Last night was Rick and Erika's last night as our house guests here in Fountain Hills. Since it was also the Super Bowl, I decided it would be a good idea to buy some premium rib-eyes at the supermarket and grill them on our backyard Weber bar-b-cue. Actually it would Rick who would wind up doing the honors of cooking. Not only is he a far superior chef than I am, but he very much enjoys it. It was a pleasure to have him in the kitchen for the last week.
Toward the end of the fourth quarter of the game we were getting a bit hungry, so we decided it was time to start the coals. By the overtime came around, Rick was on the patio by himself, tending to the steaks. When the game was finally over, I had to go outside and tell him. Later he told me he was glad to left alone outside to tend to the grill.
Red wanted to watch the post-game, including the trophy presentation, so we paused the DVR while we ate our steaks and enjoyed a bottle of wine. Afterwards we started the telecast again and watched the celebrations and highlights while we sat around with tablets and laptops, surfing social media.
Rick and I indulged in the new American past time of sharing Tweets about the game that we had discovered in our feeds. Despite my anticipation of political messages in the commercials and the half-time show, the latter which never materialized, I was stunned by the degree to which so many people had politicized the game itself.
Of course I knew that Tom Brady, the quarterback of the New England Patriots, was a Donald Trump supporter. Likewise the coach and owner of the team This would be a knock against the Patriots in the minds of many on the Left, I realized, but I figured that natural team loyalties would dictate most of the social media buzz.
Whew. Was I ever wrong! There seemed to be no end of tweets by folks who had chosen to cast the game last time as a replay of the 2016 Presidential election, with the Atlanta Falcons representing Hillary and the Patriots representing Trump. Many Righty posters gleefully shared Lefty tweets from half-time, when the Falcons were blowing out the Patriots, and then reveled in the schadenfreude of the rage induced among the same posters by the unprecedented comeback by the Patriots.
Likewise there was many Lefty tweets expressing something akin to the same mixture of rage and despair as on the day after the recent election. Atlanta was Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ, all rolled into one. Tom Brady and the Patriots were White Supremacists and Nazis. They represented evil. "Punch Tom Brady" became a meme.
Of course there were many tweets that played off humorous analogies with the election. For example, there were ones claiming that the Falcons vote the popular vote, and that Jill Stein was challenging the results on the field.
As I read off some of the best tweets to Red and our guests, I said, "I didn't want to care about this game, but I guess I have to."
I wonder what it will be like a year from now. In any case, I now have a two-year-running tradition of watching the Super Bowl with Rick, the biggest football hater that I know. After the game, I repeated the question from the previous night, that having just watched the game, whether he could name, for a theoretical million dollars, at least one NFL player besides Tom Brady and Colin Kaepernick. He fumbled for a moment and came up with the last name of the Falcons' quarterback. Only the last name, however. "Ryan?" I said that was good enough. He wins the million.
As I write this, we are sitting around on a very sunny Arizona afternoon waiting for the Super Bowl to start. Neither Rick nor Erika is a football fan. Rick despises the NFL. Last night sitting around the propane fire table by the pool, he volunteered that he knew the names of two professional football players----"Tom Brady, and that guy, uh, Kaepernick?"
"I couldn't name another one for a million dollars," he said. I volunteered the names of a few more that he might know, getting only one correct hit out of him.
Despite his loathing of football, he is up to watch the Big Game today out of the party spirit. After all, as I pointed out to him, it's pretty much a tradition now, as he watched last year's game with us in our apartment on East Burnside in Portland, when he first came up to Oregon.
We have been discussing the upcoming game this morning---not the actually football game itself, but rather the halftime show by Stefani Germanotta (who goes by a more well-known stage name, but I'm adopting Rick's attitude of refusing to go along with the persona that these folks want us to buy).
Ms. Germanotta is well-known hater of all things Trump, and even appeared with Hillary Clinton while clad in something resembling a SS uniform (in tribute to Michael Jackson, to the Third Reich). She bullhorned Trump Tower after the election.
After much speculation about her intentions, Germanotta has pretty much admitted that she will indeed be making a political statement during her half-time.
"How could she not?" I said. "She's speaking out against the new Hitler, after all. If she didn't speak out, it would be tantamount to endorsing him."
The question is what kind of protest would it be. To me it was obvious that it involve something pro-Muslim. Would she don a hijab at some point? I joked that if she really wanted to make a strong statement, she would proclaim the shahada and convert to Islam on the spot during the performance, and urge the audience to follow her example.
"The Left is going all in for Islam," I said. "They have really boxed themselves into the corner on this, and there is little way out."
I said that I expected that the coming fawning adoration for hijab-clad women by the Left (as means of showing how non-racist and "welcoming" they are) will soon give way to stronger statements. In the near future I expect to see, coming from Leftist friends, an admission of fascination for Islam itself. Maybe there is something good about Sharia that we should look into. Perhaps Islam offers a path of spirituality that fits my lifestyle and needs.
This will followed by outright conversion in some instances. I feel so liberated wearing the hijab. It will be the ultimate way to say F@CK YOU to Donald Trump and his supporters. What's not to like? After all, there isn't anything bad or negative about Islam, is there? Is there?
Islam is perfect for many on the Left as it has all the benefits of an established monotheistic religion (hard and fast rules to follow, unlike squishy creeds of the East) but without the "racist/homophobic/hateful" baggage of Christianity, nor the ethnic exclusivity and other issues of Judaism.
I think we are closer to this trend than people realize. Certainly I think it will become noticeable among college students within the next year I think, and then move to other age groups. The trend will accelerate as each additional person is greeted on by a warm applause on social media akin to that previously reserved to people coming out as gay.
Because of this, unless Germanotta goes all in for Islam during her show, it's going to seem tame by the expectations that people have. Just in the last few hours, I have seen others on Twitter anticipate that she will do something along these lines.
So if she is going to be an edgy artist on the forefront of trends, she had better up her game. It's the Super Bowl, after all!
EDIT: Red's verdict on the Halftime Show was "Very good. She stayed in her lane." I was disappointed in the lack of strong political statement, of course. But how could you top the social justice message in over half the commercials?
As it happen, on the evening of the second day of the visit here by our friends, the news feeds erupted with reports of riots on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, right in Erika's hometown.
Already it had seemed like a whirlwind day of events concerning actions of the new Trump Administration. By 6 p.m. it felt like a full day of news had occurred, but we hardly knew that the bulk of the days events had yet to play out.
Most of the Righties on social media had already figured out that many on the Left had gone all in on the idea that Trump supporters are Nazis and therefore deserve no quarter. What played out in Berkeley, which was a rampage of the members of the "Antifa" faction to (successfully) shut down a speech to be given a flamboyant gay Jewish immigrant Trump supporter, who has made a name for himself attracting attention this way.
The reaction on social media was rather predictable. For the first 24 triumphs, many voices on the Left were crowing with triumph about having prevented the speech. The basic maxim was that the speech itself was a form of violence, and that violence by the Antifa demonstrators was actually a form of free speech in response.
I saw very few Leftist voices (in fact none) condemning the actions of the Antifa group. But then something rather predictable started to happen over the next day. Somehow there was an awareness among the Left that they had screwed up and crossed the line. But the Left is never able to admit such things. Anyone saying that the violence was over the top would be susceptible to being called a Nazi appeaser at this point.
So instead came the predictable response that in fact the violent Antifa crowd were not in fact Leftists at all, but were rather secret Trump supporters who were pretending to be Antifa in order to discredit the Left.
This is about as close as possible as the Left gets to admitting they made a mistake. It signals a temporary retreat from the fervor of recent days, and a roundabout way of condemning the violence without actually condemning the result.
It won't last, of course. The fire has been lit. College campuses are the new battleground. We are in for a long haul of this thing. They have drawn the line regarding the people they see as evil: they shall not speak.
As it happens, both of our houseguests---my friend Rick and his girlfriend Erika---are native Californians. In Rick's case, this is somewhat misleading, since he left the Golden State when he was less than a year old and subsequently grew up in the boondocks of New Jersey, where he acquired a very East Coast outlook on life. A couple years ago I wrote a blog post here about how I had the ironic pleasure of giving a tour of San Francisco to a native of that city.
Erika, by contrast, is the real California deal. She was born in Berkeley in the early 1970's and spent most of her life in the Santa Cruz area, living temporarily in Kauai and Oregon, which are places that hardly dilute one's Californianess.
As I mentioned, they met in Eugene and lived there for a year before they decided to move on. Most recently there were back in the Santa Cruz area for a week while Erika emptied out her storage unit there.
On the first night they arrived, we spent a long evening discussing life in both Eugene and Santa Cruz. Since both of them are Trump supporters like Red and me, much of our discussion consisted of the humorous comparison of notes of living in area in which it feels downright dangerous to admit holding that particular view.
According to their observations, most of the people in Eugene were, not surprisingly, enthusiastic Bernie Sanders supporters who grew melancholic and surly during the fall as they were forced to come around to support Hillary. Now liberated from that burden due to Clinton's loss, they have reverted to a rather open hostility that is confrontational towards anything pro-Trump. But since "everyone" in Eugene is anti-Trump, this mostly consists of griping to others, while assuming that everyone agrees with them.
Not so in Northern California, they said. In Santa Cruz, they said they felt a surliness that was several notches higher in intensity than laid-back Eugene.
"California feels like it's going to blow," Rick said.
We had a good time sharing humor about life in an independent California. Among other things, I made a tongue-in-cheek prediction that after seceding, California would of course fling its borders wide open to all newcomers, but that this would be only temporarily. After a brief interlude, there would come an "oh crap" moment and the Cali borders would be locked down even tighter than ever.
"After all, the open borders thing would have accomplished it purpose with secession, and creating a majority Latino, minority white nation," I said. We'll see what happens, but at this point, little would shock me that way.
The last three nights we have the pleasure of playing host to my friend Rick and his girlfriend Erika, whom I met for the first time when they arrived at our driveway in her Toyota SUV, laden with all of their possessions (mostly her stuff, as Rick travels very light).
The last time I saw Rick was last June, when he was working as a cook at Camp Tamarack in the Oregon Cascades near Bend. He got canned from that job after complaining after the quality of the food being served to the kids---he's too much of a troublemaker that way. The good result was that he would up back in the hostel in Eugene, where he had been living before his adventure in the Cascades.
There he met Erika and shortly after that they moved in together, so that he finally had a bit of stability after the months of chaos following his abrupt ejection from his previous home in Fresno. In fact, as I pointed out to him, it was almost exactly a year since he arrived in sorry shape with his meager belongings at the bus station in downtown Portland, and I drove him out to our place on East Burnside, before checking him into a motel.
"You look soooooooo much better," I told him. "Ten years younger." It was true. He looked like a broken old man a year ago. He was taller and straighter, and with more color in his cheeks.
"You saved my life," he told me, soon after his arrival here, as we mused about the weirdness of the recent events in our lives. "Who would have known that the next time we saw each other it would be in Arizona?"
I was so pleased that they had made it here to our house in Fountain Hills. Despite my vociferous and repeated invitations, I was not sure I would see them here. Rick had said that on their way East they wanted to the take the "southern route," but I feared they would cave to the "shortest route" principle and cut across Nevada instead. I was happy to be proved wrong.
It was only a couple weeks ago that they were holed up in a cheap motel in Troutdale, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia, waiting out the snow and ice storms. At the time they were attempting to negotiate the purchase of an old gas station (with living quarters) in a tiny town in Eastern Washington on the highway between Spokane and Pullman. It looked like almost a sure thing. But the deal soured, as it turned out that they might not be able to live on-sight after all. I was a bit relieved myself when it fell through, as somehow it didn't seem right for them.
Then followed another attempt at a house in rural Eastern Washington, but it turned out to lack basic amenities such as running water. Not a good start for a potential AirBnB business. They had some cash to play around with for upgrades, but it is not infinite.
After another week, in which they cooled their heels in Troutdale, they changed plans radically. They were both tired of the Northwest and decided to look for something very far away to the East. A short search found an ideal property on a house that is almost 200 years old, and which seems ideally suited for turning into a AirBnB property, as it on a tourist circuit. The location of this I will not divulge for now, since I don't feel it is my prerogative to do so, suffice it to say that is very far away from the Pacific Northwest.
"That's right, Nazi boy!" (I remark that the Greek chorus-like chanting of "Peaceful Protest" at around 2:37 by the hitherto silent and unseen female attendees of the event reminds me of an insight garnered recently from an astute blogger on the web, whose name unfortunately escapes me, that the chanting of these words, so routine in such circumstances, is in no way meant as an attempt to pacify the crowd, but rather as a hypnotic exhortation to the media and to viewers of the video as to how they are to report the event).
Last spring, when we were still in the early stages of the Presidential primaries, and when Red and I still lived in Portland, she had the idea of scheduling an evening out in conjunction with a visit to a book signing for author whom she had read, and who had just then released a new nonfiction book about building a successful business as an entrepreneur.
At the time Donald Trump had won his first primaries, but he was considered mostly still an object of humor more than a serious threat to win the nomination by most in the media. Nevertheless there already had been an ugly incident in a building at Portland State in which a meeting of Trump supporters in a classroom had been violently interrupted by a Leftists who could not abide such a thing transpiring on "their" campus.
The book signing, for which advance tickets were required, was to be held on the premises of an apparel boutique in downtown Portland, the character of which might be easily described by that adjective trendy, which everyone seems to recognize in meaning but which elusive to the point that few have ever nailed down a permanent definition.
We arrived ahead of the schedule time waited but a few minutes in the line outside on the dark rain-soaked sidewalk in order to have our tickets scanned, which allowed us to enter. The ample crowd was already visible inside through the large glass windows of the apparel boutique. I didn't relish the idea of spending time squeezed into the awkward space, but I was up for the challenge.
I didn't know the author, and thus would not have recognized him. Red pointed him out to me, easily locatable by the attendees around his personage in the corner of the shop next to the booth where the alcoholic refreshments (one free glass of wine per event ticket) was to be dispensed. The dispensation of this liquid commodity had not yet commenced as well, since such things are choreographed in conjunction with the author's speech in a formula well time-tested through the recent eras of Internet promotions. The female bartender was just still setting up for her task, and was forced to repeat the same disappointing announcement to thirsty attendees every twenty seconds or so.
While waiting for the events to begin, and having nothing else to do within the claustrophobic space of the boutique, we chose to peruse the wares on sale, which consisted in a large part of a line of proprietary shirts, caps, and accessories, all of them dark in hue and many emblazoned with words in the same brazen sans-serif typeface declaring the owner of the item to be any one of various categories of social justice warrior, e.g FEMINIST.
Red picked up a cap with this last word across the front and held it up to me. "Just what you need," she said, in a playful neutral tone that concealed the slyness of the inside joke to me.
Her success at the neutralness of her delivery was evinced by the immediate injection into our conversation from a young black woman next to us whose eagerness gave evidence of her being the proprietress of the owner or perhaps even the designer of the clothing line.
"Yes, it would look great on you" she said, with that blend of purely capitalistic sales alacrity and leftist feel-goodness which is the lifeblood of the New Portland. "It's a popular item."
I even tried it on for a moment. Red got a big kick out of seeing it on my head. But I decided to pass on buying it.
After the wine was finally dispersed, we quickly sidled up to get our share of the refreshment in the form of one plastic glass each. Knowing full well of my tendency towards clumsiness in such situations, especially within a crowded shop, and wishing in no way to be the cause of an incident in which the liquid in the glasses were to come into contact with the precious items within the shop, I directed Red to stand with me in the corner where my arms might be free of random jostling.
It was not long before others of similar introverted nature found themselves in the same corner of the shop, in a quiet eddy amidst in the noise, and we engaged in pleasant conversation with a few of them as they came and went.
Among the people we spoke with was a young white woman, apparently just out of college. She asked what we did for a living, and we gave our replies.
"I write software," I said with over-earnest eagerness, which of course prompted no follow-up interest on her part.
"I'm a naturopathic physician," said Red, which of course prompted several subsequent questions from the young woman.
When it came time for her to respond in kind, she described her work as being the coordinator of a government-funded program to re-bio-engineer the landscape of local businesses for better resource usage using crews consisting primarily of Somali immigrants.
I remarked how matter-of-factly this description rolled out of her mouth. There was not a hint of boasting about the prestige of such an occupation on the scale of social justice. She said it was if everyone else in the world had a similar job, or at least everyone she knew.
It was a pleasant evening, all in all. We eventually got our signed books and heard the author speak for a few moments, although we bailed fairly quickly to keep our dinner reservations, and to escape the crowd.
But before we left, as we still stood in the corner sipping our wine, I remarked in a low whisper to Red that I wondered what the reaction would be among those to whom we spoke, if I were to casually announce that I was a Donald Trump supporter.
As I have mentioned, Trump was still far from the nomination, but Red agreed with me that the conservation would take a sudden chilly turn.
I opined that were to have mentioned such a thing to woman who attempted to get me to buy the FEMINIST hat, that it might well play out like this: she would turn silent and walk away, and then a few moments later I would be accosted by a hitherto unseen large burly male who would quietly tell me, "Sir, you are making people here uncomfortable. I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
Thinking about this event from the ancient days of a year ago, and watching the video above (taken at the Portland Airport just two days ago) makes me wistful for that old Portland, now vanished into the pages of history. It was so civil back then.
"We will...punch some people in the face...We will do it all with soul, with heart..."
From an anthropological point of view, this is a fascinating video. Have you ever seen, in your lifetime, a more enthusiastic endorsement by a crowd of a call for violence than this? I haven't. Even liberals wouldn't claim he is speaking metaphorically anymore. In the old days, they would have pooh-poohed it away. We are beyond that. Everyone knows that only real blood will satisfy them.
Everyone knows too that liberals know they are 100% in the right. They are gleeful that they get to challenge "evil." They savor a future of no-holds-barred confrontation against their enemies, i.e. the Nazis. For their opponents have no soul and no heart.
It's a vampire-like hunger that they have tasted. History shows that once it reaches a certain stage, there are two ways it is eventually satisfied (1) by mass killings of millions of their enemies (i.e. the Cambodia scenario), or (2) by getting bloodied and hurt themselves (i.e. getting punched back).
Are we yet at that point of no return? It's getting harder to say that we aren't. In the event of Scenario 1, it is important to remember than the blood lust doesn't matter if the enemies that are destroyed are the enemies that they originally wanted to kill (since they want to avoid Scenario 2). In the end, any enemy will do. Even you.
"White people, give your fucking money, your fucking house, your fucking property. We need it fucking all..."
(It's interesting to imagine her saying all this in the video with a loaded gun. That's probably coming soon.)
What days we are living in. Last night Red was kidding me about how I had planned to scale back my attention to news ("the Twitter", as she calls it) now that Trump was in office. But that was way back in the ancient era when, as Paul Joseph Watson pointed out, we were all expecting to be holding Trump's feet to the fire to get him to follow through on his campaign promises.
How can one not be glued to the Twitter feed? When Red accused me of being "addicted," I pleaded guilty. The closest thing I've experienced to this in the past, I told her, was the old days in Europe before the Internet, when all the news came through the International Herald Tribune. In the Greek Isles, as late as 1999, it was such a delight to walk to the sundry store and find a new copy on the metal rack. A small purchase was worth an entire afternoon, evening, and next morning sitting on bed pouring over every little article, down to the smallest one-column-inch display ads.
What a strange world we lived in, when it possible to actually disconnect.
Back in the ancient days of, say, just a couple years, when secession was associated with anti-federal government conservatism, the Left considered the idea to be nutty and racist.
Now that the Left has embraced the concept, what is the response of the Right? Go for it. Please.
It seems to be the one thing the entire political spectrum can rally behind---that California needs to leave the Union ASAP. Note: this does mean there will be only 49 states, however. Many counties in California will choose to remain in the U.S., and provided they are peacefully allowed to leave the control of Sacramento, they will actually form several new states, increasing the number to 51 or 52. When secessionist California is reconquered and readmitted to the Union, it will not be reunited, but remain in several pieces, just like Virginia (which is two states to this day). So in any case, we are living in the last days of the united California as we know it.
So many interesting things have been happening in the world lately. So much to observe, and think about. Once upon a time in this blog I used to write about the personal things in my life, but I hardly feel the time to do that lately. My own life seems small and unimportant compared all that is going on, not in a bad or depressing way, but in a peaceful way. Sitting here in my office and looking out the window, I feel at times like Pu Yi attending to his pet crickets, while the Cultural Revolution swirls about him. I feel as if I have lived many lives already in one---too many lives to get too hung about the present moment.
Arizona is green right now. The hills around where live have sprung vegetation from the ample rain. It seems as if every time I go out into the back yard to check the rain gauge, it has collected another half inch. I guess it was worthwhile buying the gauge after all at the local hardware store. At the time I thought it would be a whimsical purchase. Not so.
As I tell people, I have no intuition about the seasons here, about what is normal and what is abnormal. It takes at least a year of living in a place to develop that, and that is only a start. I depend on others to inform me that this year has been wetter and colder than usual here.
I feel the coldness in the house. I purchases four space heaters---they came one day from Amazon Prime in a giant crate on the porch---and we have them running much of the time, in one room or another. Last night it was down in the Thirties. Portland weather, I tell my colleagues, over the video conference. They don't believe me. Of course Portland has had weather that is more like Colorado.
If the Democrats have any horse sense at all, they will ignore all the voices that call for populist reform of the Party, especially of the Presidential nominating process.
Instead of decreasing the power of the superdelegates, they should increase it, so that they can nominate this guy in 2020.* That's probably the only way it will happen.
He's the good kind of white male, and the Davos crowd (the real caucus of the party) loves him. Hickenlooper is a governor of state that has actually been trending blue lately, and which went for Clinton over Trump by a margin that was greater than the polling projected. He would represent a "sane" restoration of the pro-globalist Establishment. His environmental record is not one that makes the enviros jump for joy, especially in regard to the all-important issue of fracking, but he would sign any global Climate Change agreement in a heartbeat. (source)
