Negativity Again

 

Outlands

 

The Orb from their classic Ultraworld album from 1991. And below a remix of the album track Spanish Castles in Space.

When I Ran For President

I took this screenshot from somewhere recently of a Twitter post by Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, in which she reminds her readers of some great promise she made when she ran for President. It seems that after ALX responded with “Wrong account bro”, she deleted the tweet. I presume, as is her most sacred and sane right,  she was identifying as the President when she wrote it, but then perhaps the feeling of identification left her after ALX’s somewhat cruel response. 

“But she’s a black woman! How could she seriously imagine herself to be Joe Biden?! He’s white, a man, and the President. She’s none of these things!”

That’s just the kind of fascist response I’ve come to expect from some quarters these days.

Anyway, if to go a bit deeper into ALX’s theory that she actually meant to post this to the Twitter account of the President - which, let’s admit it, is plausible - I hope that sharp and honest individual, Mr Biden, realises the security of his Twitter account may be compromised. This Jean-Pierre person could be writing any kind of stuff, and he wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on. “Did I really write all this? It doesn’t ring any bells. Maybe I’ve got dementia and that’s why I don’t remember any of it. I better see a doctor.”

negative 2

 

negative 1

 

The negative of one of my art pieces.

Gateway, Thought

It is said of marijuana that it can be a gateway drug, leading to harder substances - and which, regardless of the substance marijuana in itself, so to speak, is a pretty unarguable fact or aspect of it. I imagine very few people end up in the realms of the harder drugs without in some sense coming via the route of marijuana. 

I’m just interested here though in the gateway notion, and specifically how we should look at thoughts in the same manner. At the more obvious level seemingly benign thoughts can function as stepping stones onto more and more extreme thoughts; that there can be an internal logic at play here in these invisible directions. 

This internal logic justifies itself as progress, goes something like, “The first thought was good. It was liberating (And maybe in some sense it was.) This was thought led to the second thought. That must be good also, And that led to the third step. Good again.” And so on and on. The progress is sanctified! And there are certainly people who end up with things like heroin addiction via something very like thus route.

Similarly a looseness of behaviour, seemingly relatively harmless, can, through this looseness and lack of alertness or self-awareness and discipline, be a gateway to other less benign forms of behaviour in a very general sense.

The importance of alertness!

ground

 

leaves and stone

 

View from a bicycle

 

Though in truth, I may have gotten off the bicycle to take the photo.

Up the road again

 

Half-science, Dostoevsky, Re-education, Cult

“Half-science is a despot such as has never been seen before. A despot with its own priests and slaves, a despot before whom everything has bowed down with a love and superstition unthinkable till now, before whom even science itself trembles and caters to.”

That is from Demons by Dostoevsky published in 1872, and spoken by the character Shatov, someone who has renounced his former progressive/liberal/socialist ideals. Under socialist principles, obviously the entire focus and the only morality is that which serves the realisation of the socialist state, via whatever means - revolution, corrupting of existing society so it can be overthrown via revolution or from within through the implanting of its ideology into that society. Though supposedly strictly materialists, in which case one might imagine a strict adherence to material reality, what is key here is that ideology and its goal are immeasurably higher than reality, which according to the ideological fantasy is actually itself progressing through history towards the ideological goal. 

So everything and everyone that serves this somehow built-in progress is good, everything that hinders it is bad, and must be eliminated/cancelled - and thus one can see for example Engels, the co-writer with Marx of The Communist Manifesto, with obvious pleasure to the point of sensuality, repeatedly talk of “exterminating” everything/everyone hostile to the triumph of the coming Revolution. Everything therefore is to serve as propaganda for the cause, even “material reality” and “science” which can now be altered at will to serve the cause. And so we arrive at the astonishing penetration of Dostoevsky and this ideological despotic “half-science”, as time has ‘progressed’ leading to ‘birthing persons’ rather than mothers, and so on. It’s not a question of science! It’s half-science where the declared parameters of reality can be bent and twisted unto whatever shape to serve the cult and its ideology of utopian progress. And from the same novel, the utterance of the despotic revolutionary figure Pyotr Verkhovensky sums up so much of the progressive spirit of our age and how people’s qualms are overcome: “I can get them to go through fire if I just yell at them, “You’re not liberal enough!”

So anyway I have a sister who was adopted, having been born with spina bifida and to some degree learning difficulties due to extremely unethical nuclear testing near her city of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan under the progressive, communist utopia of the Soviet Union, and where the local population, insofar as they were a concern, were pretty much used as guinea pigs to see how they responded to the radiation. Very serious birth defects were rife in the region as a consequence. 

Anyway, all these years later I witnessed her this last year be asked by a helpful educator in a third-level institution whether she was a boy or a girl or transgender or neutral. Until very recently this of course is not a question a sane person would ask an obvious girl. From her wheelchair my sister answered she was a girl but was bewilderedly asking me afterwards, in her innocence, what the hell was wrong with the woman. Was she mad? (Fortunately no one overheard or she may have been taken away and arrested for hate speech.) I can’t remember if I tried explaining that the wise educator, at the very cutting edge of progress, was part of a deranged, megalomaniacal cult.

So now to the issue of pronouns where my sister, if she had felt like it after enough successful indoctrinating or “re-educating” - as the Soviet Communists used to say - could say she was a boy, and only a bigot could question this mighty truth of “half-science.” Language has now become “fluid”, and meaning need not correspond to reality, but instead the parameters of reality and meaning are at the whim of half-science’s ideological priesthood.

It’s helpful to see more clearly what is happening here intellectually if we transfer this methodology and attitude to language into the field of mathematics and science. Imagine for example a team of scientists involved in serious mathematical and atomic investigations, which of course require the utmost discipline and precision. Now however the individual scientists are at liberty to view numbers as unfixed, and so perhaps one scientist for some reason had an antipathy towards even numbers, perhaps due to some childhood trauma - maybe he or she was attacked by an even number of vicious dogs - and so this scientist chooses, for the sake of their personal wellbeing, their inner safe space, to identify the number 6 as 5 or 4 as 3 and so on, depending on where their mood is taking them. This would of course be all very beautiful, but unfortunately these atomic investigations would not go very well. Perhaps catastrophically.

Obviously the entire discipline of mathematics completely falls apart if under the sway of such a perverse and infantile intellectual spirit. The integrity of the language is intentionally violated, and meaning departs. And in the same way if a culture treats language in this arbitrary and meaningless manner, then since meaningfulness and language are inseparable, such a culture is on the path of and to idiocy and madness. This is the spiritual spirit of antichrist transferred to the intellectual realm. The debasement of truth enthroned.

One final thing to add is from a book called The Saint of the Prisons about life in Communist prisons in 1950s Romania. Some of what happened there to break people’s spirits, particularly if the target was deeply Christian, was so demonically and almost unimaginably evil I won’t go into, particularly the methodologies of what was termed “re-education” carried out at Pitesti prison. Why I bring this book up though is to quote from the excellent foreword to the book, with my particular focus on the re-writing of language under communism.

Romanian communists chiefly followed a number of objectives that, according to their line of thought, would have allowed them to create the “new man,” re-educated:

  - to destroy the traditional social order . . .  in order to separate people from their past and to remove their roots. A man with no roots is easy to manipulate. . . . (Thus) to replace traditional society with A. Huxley’s “Brave New World” [the envisioning of a society fully enslaved to the cult of ‘Progress’] and atheism.

… - to alter knowledge and to limit the thought horizons by manipulating and confiscating the language. “Of all the monopolies enjoyed by the Soviet State none would be so crucial as its monopoly on the definition of words. The ultimate weapon of political control would be the dictionary.” (Robert Tucker ‘Stalin and the Uses of Psychology, 1956). It is interesting to note the out-of-the-ordinary intensive activity to write and re-write dictionaries taking place in the USSR after 1950.

And that should put into focus things like “mis-gendering” and choosing one’s pronouns, which is now become an integral part of education/indoctrination, and to a degree people who haven’t glimpsed it firsthand might find hard to fathom.

Perpetual Dawn

 

By The Orb from 1991, and this a remix by the late Andrew Weatherall.

struggles

Various stages of a picture I’ve struggled with. It’s the worst kind of thing to have to try to work on - which feels far from some cohesive, balanced whole but at the same time feels like it has enough going for it to try to get it to hopefully somehow stumble upon some more unified state. It might be so far removed from this harmonious, worthwhile ideal though that the attempts to get to this hoped for state are not much more than pointless stumbling about.

The lighting in which they were photographed may make the versions appear a little more dramatically different than in reality. 

Fight

“I don’t want to fight anymore. I just want peace.”

“Life isn’t so convenient. Just because you don’t want to fight doesn’t mean your enemy doesn’t want to fight.”

The Time

 “The time has now come for the prophecy of St. Anthony the Great to become reality: ‘A time will come when men will go mad. If someone is logical, they will call him crazy’. And this, simply because he won’t be like them”.

Saint Paisios

up the road

 

in the garden

 

July, Anomaly

I just did a search on July weather in my home county of Cork, and it seems, just up the road, the records of the weather station at Cork Airport show that we’ve just had the coldest July since 1988. In spite of the out of control heat, the coldest July in 35 years. Now that’s crazy weather. (I didn’t in truth seem to physically experience much of this out of control heat I’m mentioning, but on a psychological level I’m perfectly willing to attest to its existence.)

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/irish-weather-last-month-wettest-6198701

That article also informs that the weather station at Dublin Airport recorded its coldest instance of a July temperature since it opened in 1942. Again, in spite of the heat.

Frightening Fact

Literally hundreds of pregnant men are dying of climate change every single day. And that number is only increasing. 

Watch and enjoy as any of your science-denying friends struggle to digest that fact.

Respite?

Dare we hope? Today the skies are more peopled with clouds. For now could it be that they shield us a little from the monster of the sun? The heat, though still a furnace, has hints of moderation at its edges. Just hints, but still . . . Perhaps there is a chance. Or is this a false dawn, yet another mockery?

Nightmare Continues

I feel like one of those doomed figures writing their final diary entries as they forlornly await rescue after shipwreck, or hopelessly try to return to safety from some tragically misjudged polar expedition . . . 

But anyway, here we are around 9:30 in the morn of August 6th, south coast of Ireland. The temperatures are relentless. The sky as you see, though not without wisps of protective clouds, is mostly clear so we are nigh on naked beneath the destructive rays of the remorseless sun.

We are rapidly losing hope. Breathing is difficult, the air oppressive. There is a air of despair and lethargy amongst the population. No one needs to say how we feel. Our dead eyes speak all too clearly of our situation. Perhaps we will see out another day. Perhaps not. That this nightmare may somehow pass seems less and less likely with each awakening day.

As you see, besides everything else we have a yellow warning for potato blight - as  if things were not already too dreadful for human imagining . . . though in truth there will probably soon be few of us left to eat any potatoes . . . for we, at 9:26am, have already attained an almost unimaginable 15 degrees Celsius (59 Fahrenheit). Not yet 10am and already 15 degrees . . .

This may be my final missive.

edit: 11:20 am. Our worst imaginings are being realised. Two hours later, and the temperatures have continued to climb. Sixteen degrees.

Potato blight is still a threat.

Millet

 

By Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875). I’m not succeeding in finding this painting in searching at the moment, but having taken this screenshot a good while ago, I think it may have simply been called “Peasants” and has that deep, heavy calmness that Millet’s works could exude, whom this spirituality and dignity attained within this human life especially called to the yearnings of someone like Van Gogh who created several versions or copies of quite a few of Millet’s works.

(Having written that, I have the feeling I previously made the exact same point in posting something by Millet!)

Responsibility

My sense of responsibility is undimmed, and here is the latest from our summer weather. First a shot of outside; nice and sunny you might think. It induces a pleasant feeling, this blue sky. And yes, now it is sunny. But when I see sun and blue skies, my mind quickly thinks of heat. Excessive heat. And catastrophe. So after the pleasant blue sky, look at a screenshot of our temperatures, and see if the pleasant feeling remains.

13 degrees Celsius, real feel 7 degrees. Yes, it really is that hot.

Regret

 

More Scary Irish Weather

We need your thoughts and prayers here in the south coast of Ireland after another terrifying and scorching day. Here we are in early August, very much our summer season, and temperatures got up today as high as 15 degrees Celsius (59 Fahrenheit), though thankfully the real feel was a little cooler again. Now as we approach 9pm, and even though things are down to a more manageable 12 degrees Celsius (53.6 Fahrenheit), real feel 9 Celsius, still it has to be said, things can’t go on like this. Am I the only one awake to what’s happening?

(You might think those kind of temperatures are way cooler than one might reasonably expect in summer,  but that would be wilfully irresponsible and even treasonous thinking.) The Accuweather screenshots below at around 5pm and 9pm show those crazy hot temperatures that have had us scurrying for every available spot of Irish shade. This is truly apocalyptic. In a bad way.

Walk

It’s time to reach into your pockets to support a worthy cause, as it’s just been announced Bill Gates is undertaking a sponsored walk to raise money for pronoun awareness. 

“All the money raised will go where it’s supposed to go,” assured a Microsoft spokesperson.

Underbelly, Latest

I’ve just heard strong rumours from the underbelly of the industrial entertainment complex - a domain where I habitually crawl about - of the next outpouring from the Corporate Whore franchise (and let’s face it, we’re all hopelessly addicted to its current series, Corporate Whores Light Up the World). 

I have to be honest though - and you can’t imagine how much it pains me to say this - but I’m not sure this will have the wow factor we’ve come to expect from this conveyer belt of entertainment gold. Anyway, regardless, it seems this newest emanation is to be called: Corporate Whores Have Breakfast. 

Maybe the allotted budget was quite low or something, but still, come on, remember they haven’t disappointed us yet, so let’s wait and see what comes out before getting too down about things. It might well prove to punch way above its weight.

Powerful Argument

I’d normally avoid the mainstream media and its figureheads like Piers Morgan like the plague, regardless of whether he seems to be running with the hares or hounds with whatever issue is at hand, but just to respond to his disingenuous line that Zelensky being of Jewish background just wipes away the very easily substantiated accusations of far right ideology against that regime  - for instance, the Azov Battalion. For one thing, Zelensky is a comic actor formerly playing the part in a tv series of the Ukrainian President. The idea he is to be taken as a serious political figure rather than an convenient, and opportunistic puppet figure for the people behind him is what’s laughable. 

But beyond that -  and it’s pretty sad even having to deal with this kind of intellectual level - let’s imagine a Sicilian mafia head and some of his henchmen are on trial for serious crimes in Sicily. Here comes the defence from the slick lawyer:

“You’re accusing this man and his enterprise of committing all these crimes and acts of intimidation against Sicilian people? Against his own people?! This is laughable! He’s Sicilian himself! And so are his colleagues!”

“Mr Gandolfini and his colleagues can go free.”

There, that was one powerful argument. 

Where’s My Climate Change

 

James O Keefe, formerly of Project Veritas, showing secretly shot footage a while back from a PV video of a CNN technical director talking of how after Covid would be exhausted as an agenda, the media and the broader system would move on massively to the agenda of climate change. 

You’ll be glad to know that meanwhile there’s been precious little sign of climate change in Ireland. In fact, it’s been apart from one very good spell around June, it’s been pretty mediocre stuff. And as you see, this August morning at 9am we’re basking in the heights of 14 degrees Celsius, real feel 10 degrees. 10 Celsius is 50 Fahrenheit, by the way. Wow. I don’t want to be unfair though, and Accuweather is saying we might, if all goes well, get up to as high as 18 degrees later, real feel 16 degrees. If it gets that high I might have to take off a layer in celebration. Or who knows, maybe put an extra one on - the heat can do funny things to people. 

And anyway the forecast is saying that how it will also be in the days ahead, and has been in the many days before now also. This really is terrifying stuff. 

“How can you be so flippant?! What about the really hot stuff elsewhere?!”

“Forgive me for my lack of humility, but I’d like us to be counted as part of the globe also. We’re not excluded just because its not a good look. We’re not in some offshore zone apart from planet Earth and all its weather.”

And actually it seems for several years now, spring has kind of disappeared here. Is that  because summer is starting early with all this global warming?  No, it’s not. It’s more that winter seems to be going on much longer, and finally we then go straight from winter to summer, with spring having been mostly bypassed.

But as for the point again, what about heat elsewhere? I live here. Here by the way is on the coast, and guess what, there’s been zero rising sea levels here after all these decades about being told of the impending catastrophe of rising sea levels. Any day now though . . . 

Update: I take it all back. We’re now in early afternoon, in the midst of the fearful noonday sun, and things have gotten a bit scary:

Nostalgic

 

Deep State Cabal have just recorded a new song which, depending on how it is received by close friends in the industry, may become their next single. It is called I Like You (Do You Like Me?) It is said to possess a kind of nostalgic Eurovision vibe, evoking simpler times and innocent pleasures. 

The b side is an alternative version of their classic Leave Our Pedos Alone.

Coherent

“The thing takes shape, Watson. It becomes coherent.”

The Hound of the Baskerville. Actually from listening to this rendering of it below: