Concepts, Wonder

Concepts create idols. Only wonder grasps anything.

Gregory of Nyssa.

Franklin, Safety and Freedom

“Those who give up freedom for safety deserve neither.” 

This was said by one of America’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, which encompasses the thought that a spirit of compromise by the individual will guarantee the erosion of freedom at the state level. “Safety” is a typical Trojan horse used to accomplish that erosion by those with very different ideals. “Give us some of your freedom and we will protect you from …[whatever]”

“This is not about freedom, this is for your safety.” Joe Biden.

“Screw your freedom.” Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold not in this case uttering one of those iconic, thought-provoking lines from his films, but here speaking more as a political figure. 

Imagine someone punching the air in ecstatic agreement upon hearing this from the former governor of California, “Yeah! Screw my freedom! That’s what I want to hear!”

Underneath the Gloss

 The shiny veneer and the underbelly.

Which

“Which do you prefer - fake news or fake science?”

“I’m big into both of them, to be honest. It’s hard to say which I prefer.”

Purify

“How do we purify the vehicle of ourselves?”

“Well I suppose we try to put in the right fuel for starters.”

Out for a Walk in Belgium

 

The numbers out walking maybe reflective of a cultural memory of certain things happening in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century.

Sarcasm

I think I could possibly be said to have something of a talent for sarcasm, which of course in the wrong hands could be an unpleasant thing, but fortunately I’m not actually a naturally sarcastic person and so in my case, if and when this sarcasm manifests itself, it is benevolent sarcasm.

Why Can’t Progressivism Stop Itself

Why, you might be wondering, does progressivism have to get so unhinged? Why can’t it stop at some relatively decent point which respectable, educated people can be happy to support and get behind, and feel pleased with themselves while doing so - it’s a mark of their development, their sophistication. But no, the progressivism has to spoil everything by abandoning this elegant bourgeois encampment, so to speak, and it moves in full voice on ever further into more and more unhinged territories; and for all your desires to go along with them - because all this had seemed so daring and sophisticated - now you know deep down - and it’s not all that deep - it’s none of these things (sophistication, etc) - no, it’s just deranged.

So why couldn’t the progressives, the ones at the forefront, simply have pleased everyone and, as said, stop at some respectable point of development, agree that here was far enough, and there was no need to go any further? Everyone is satisfied, no one is embarrassed, we can bask in each other’s glow.

Well, it’s all very simple and obvious. It’s all in the name: progressivism. What does progressivism have to do to remain itself? It has to keep progressing. Itself is itself in motion. It can’t stop or else it’s no longer progressive. So if you want to be loyal I’m afraid there’s no getting off, else you’re immediately a reactionary, a traitor to the cause. “But I went so far!” You can never go far enough. (Still maybe you can just try quietly getting off and if you’re very lucky no one will notice.)

Clever

This won’t be clever at all - that is there won’t be any effort to be clever. Why not? Well, maybe if I tried to be clever I’d not have succeeded anyway, but even if I did succeed, maybe underneath this pile of cleverness, concealed by it, might in truth be nothing but stupidity. Better honest stupidity any day than clever stupidity. 

So anyway if you were wondering why this doesn’t even have the appearance of cleverness, never mind the substance of it, that’s the reason: it’s an unwillingness to deceive, or, for that matter, to be deceived. It’s bad enough to be fooled by someone else’s stupidity, it’s worse again to be fooled by your own.

Malfunction

Fantasy land. Maybe the clockwork mechanism was wound up wrong.

Tintoretto - Divine and Secular

 Tintoretto was apparently genuinely deeply devout and unworldly, and his paintings combine this intense feeling with the immense technical and intellectual advancement of the Renaissance. On this technical level, for example, the scale of what is going on in this painting is just staggering. A very gifted artist could for example plausibly create a fake ‘original’ Van Gogh or Impressionist work by more or less anyone, but I don’t think they could seriously do that with someone like Tintoretto - it’s just far too advanced in things like composition, perspective for someone who isn’t at the heights of a Tintoretto to pull it off. The comparative technical demands to create a plausible Impressionist or Van Gogh are far less, which  isn’t to say though that someone should prefer the Tintoretto. So anyway at a technical and intellectual level we’re at some kind of summit where the artist like Tintoretto are intensely involved in applying ‘secular’ expansions in knowledge like mathematics and perspective to their art. 

There is generally a positive value judgement made about this progress in Western art, into greater realms of realism, and there are amazing direct feelings that can result where the viewer can have the experience of not just seeing the painting as a three dimensional space, but actually somehow having a mind altering experience of being in that space! However the pinnacle of focus for someone devout is the divine, and holy simplicity being integral to this world. One of the key enemies to this is intellectual pride, embodied in the notion of the Tower of Babel, of man through his own knowledge and advancement overthrowing heaven; and so all the intellectual advancement that a Tintoretto gloried in could easily become precisely such a temptation. There is an incredibly powerful dynamic of elements which may be wrestling with each other rather than necessarily in sync, such as the obsessive concern to create a plausible three dimensional reality, using the very advanced theories on perspective, which you could say the viewer is coercively dragged into; and then one can ask how does this fit into the highest ideal of devout feeling, which must be highest concern. 

This might all sound quite abstract, and making an issue out of not much but I think it is made very clear with the painting below, Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet. Look at the ridiculous, monumental space Tintoretto has created for the scene! And why has he created such a strange environment to house the spiritual scene, with those massive arches and that endlessly receding space? Through mastery of perspective, to create the very advanced illusion of a three dimensional space, and which the viewer can not just see from apart but have the very strange and powerful experience of being sucked into. This concern far outweighs holy simplicity and resonance with the spiritual reality of the scene, which in terms of actual plausibility should be a very very different kind of room! So what kind of reality is the artist in service of? It could be said to be the intellect,  the exaltation of man’s reasoning powers. Tintoretto would presumably argue, as a devout believer, that this in turn exalts God, but this painting particularly shows how unbalanced the results of such a process can easily become. It is actually be seen as a form and artistic incarnation of progress idolatry. 

One final thought is it’s obvious within movements like surrealism that, given the intentionally unrealistic worlds created by people like Dali, that we can talk about strangeness, but actually here with someone like Tintoretto we may be dealing with a much deeper strangeness, where the dynamic of competing sensibilities, of the intellectual or secular and the divine, surrender and self-exaltation are wrestling far more strongly. The surface realism may conceal or mask this strangeness, but just look at this painting below! “But it’s just a realistic painting.” It’s not realistic at all!

Parameters

What are the parameters of oneself? What do I mean “the parameters of oneself”? I don’t really know. I just came out with it as I thought it sounded good. The parameters of oneself … Where I end and everything else begins, I suppose. Those are the parameters. My mind, that’s my private self. So I hear something from beyond my parameters, and then for example if say it, this sound is human language I then transform, interpret it into its inner intellectual substance, and then I perhaps evaluate this substance and come into agreement or disagreement with it and act accordingly, re-engaging again with that world beyond my parameters.

 Those parameters I have to say seem quite porous. I see something external but where do I perform the seeing - in my mind within my parameters. Same with hearing. And other people with their individual unseen consciousnesses, witness me and I, in some sense, unwittingly and innocently invade their parameters. Other people mightn’t be so innocent with their invading. They might invade these parameters intentionally and not innocently. They don’t recognise they’re stepping into sacred ground - whatever about how porous the parameters are, it’s still sacred, this inner ground - they might even want to colonise this private inner property. One should maybe have guard dogs, in some sense or other, and hunt them off. Don’t let them step across. Of course these parameters aren’t so fixed but all the more reason then for not letting anyone or anything either come wandering in with their dirty boots. But on the other hand this pure privacy beyond these fixed parameters is a myth also - I create it with my own thought - so you can’t be worried and obsessed about keeping everyone out either.

Zingg

 

A painting by French artist, Jules Emile Zingg (1882-1942), known for his rural scenes.

Blair News

The much loved and still useful former Labour Party leader Tony Blair has formed a new music group, Tony Blair and the War Criminals. They just had their debut gig live on the BBC where they performed several original Blair compositions to an invite-only audience - who also had to have digital proof of having completed an academic education at a respectable institution. The first song was the funky My Skin May Be White but My Soul Sure Is Black, followed by Working My Ass Off for the Under Classes (My Kind of People). Then after a champagne break came the wistful Iraq Feels a Long Time Ago, and finally the upbeat and defiant Me and George High on Cocaine Watching the Bombs Drop. Following desperate pleas from the excited but well-dressed audience, an encore consisted of Proud to Serve the Cabal.

Tony Blair and the War Criminals ended the gig by wishing all responsible citizens everywhere a most happy and safe holiday season, and calling the unvaccinated idiots and enemies of the people. And then, their spirits full, everyone spilled out and disappeared into the winter night.

Aba-Novak

A painting by the very interesting and original Hungarian artist, Vilmos Aba-Novak (1894-1941), whose first principle I think could be said to be truth rather than beauty. Ideally of course those two components coincide, but truth is certainly the higher value.

Betrothal

We are proud to announce far left propaganda outlets the BBC and The Guardian newspaper are engaged to be married. The happy day of officially recognised union will be the 22nd of April, in honour of Vladimir Lenin, the patron saint of Gulags, whose birthday fell on that same day just over 150 years ago.

Last Minute

Remember, if you’re stuck for Christmas present ideas, you could always get that special someone The Fact Checkers’ new book, All I Want for Christmas is the Facts.

A Fresh Infilling

 

Truth and the Market Place

“Truth stumbles in the market place, and justice cannot enter.

Yes, truth fails, and whoever turns from evil makes himself a prey.”

Isaiah.

Isaiah I think dates from the eighth century BC, but it’s amazing how modern he or that book can read.

Why Totalitarianism Should Never Be a Surprise

In life there are many people who could be called controlling. They like to try to control other people’s behaviour. This is not some bewilderingly alien psychological territory. I presume many people very much dislike this if we feel it being imposed on us. It feels like a violation. Now in terms of psychological terrain, what kinds of people are especially likely to be attracted to domains like politics where they get to exercise control over others? Yes, that’s right - controlling people! I’m afraid there’s no prizes if you guessed correct. Totalitarianism is simply that psychological drive of controlling people pushed to the level of the state - though it can be an obvious reality in all kinds of ordinary environments, like the family, work, social clubs, etc.

Machiavelli wrote “the people are everywhere anxious not to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles are out to dominate and oppress the people.” This he considered simply the way of things. Within democracy the greatest heresy is to see democracy as something which arose as part of the natural flow of things, and that it then naturally flows onwards, secure in itself once established. This is to magically wipe away human psychology! Democracy arrives, now we are cleansed, and enter a new innocent era of human reality! 

Democracy theoretically at least equates to the people breaking free of the domination and oppression which the nobles/ruling elites are attempting to exert, according to Machiavelli, as a matter of course. If democracy emerges and survives, it does so in intense conflict with this completely contrary force. These people and their drives towards control don’t simply meekly surrender once democracy, the reality or veneer of it, comes along. This dynamic Machiavelli mentions should be considered a given, that is unless we’re dealing with a completely different species where suddenly everyone in possession of power is supposed to have become reasonable and benevolent.

America: What Time is Love?

Were The KLF (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) really all that unique is a question most people ask themselves at least once every couple of weeks. Regardless of whether the song below is exactly everyone’s cup of tea, I think the video gives the definitive answer to that question which plagues so many of our waking moments - and even maybe some of our sleeping ones. Below that video is the superb Pure Trance version and video of the same song, going back I think to 1988.

Cancel Culture, Margarita

What is cancel culture, and what does it reveal about its impetus? Within totalitarian ideologies and realised systems, opposition is not tolerated. It is cancelled. Thus cancel culture. Totalitarianism seeks to takes control of everything, including all thought and artistic vision, so when you see this cancel culture, you know it’s the natural outpouring of a totalitarian ideology or desire. Totalitarianism tolerates, or seeks to tolerate, nothing but itself.

Obviously there can be a sane degree of self-regulation within a society, and so for instance pornography might be felt to be a toxicity society could well do without - for the reality of that “industry” itself and the evil it inflicts on for instance even children targeted and trapped within it; and also its effect on society as a whole. You’ll notice though this is not the kind of target aimed at by modern cancel culture! In fact it would probably be appalled if that world were targeted. It would be presumably declared a great intolerant blow to freedom were it “cancelled.”

This might be going off slightly on a tangent, but here below is an extract from an interview with Russian author Victor Pelevin talking of the effect of the novel Master and Margarita upon someone like he who grew up living within the the USSR: “The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.”

More Grim

 This was the original version of It’s Grim Up North. The vocal is by someone else, not Bill Drummond of the KLF, and to be honest I much prefer Drummond’s more energised delivery. It also lacks the great symphonic end taken from the classical piece Jerusalem, but I love the crazy, primal, raw wildness of the sound of this one.

Not Very Protected

It’s probably the worst vaccine in the world. I think that should be the advertising slogan.

It’s Grim Up North

 The KLF are of course one of the most glorious incarnations within the sphere of music that allied itself with electricity, and here they are with It’s Grim Up North from 1991. Below that is their Top of the Pops appearance with the same song, which is well worth a look. In case of confusion, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and The KLF are one and the same. (If there’s one thing I don’t ever want to be - besides a fact checker - it’s a cause of confusion.)

Money

A few thoughts around money:

Money is a symbol representing kinetic energy - the ability to do things with it, in which case one exchanges one’s store of kinetic energy for actualised energy, e.g. a product one buys or one pays someone for their time and effort regarding some cause. So work within a money based system is the acquirement of kinetic energy.

Money is power = money is a symbol for potential power. “Your money is no good here.” Your symbol for power here has no power! 

“You can’t take it with you” - as in bringing this money with you into a next world. Think of someone who does manage to take it with them into a next world. They are delighted with themselves but then are told “Your money is no good here.” They are left with a symbol that doesn’t represent anything!

Counterfeit money is a fake or illegitimate symbol for power. It has power if it is wrongly ‘recognised’ as real; has no power, or even negative power in terms of consequences, if it is recognised as false. The same with lies. Think of the fake/propagandist news!

All money has power only if it is recognised as real. Once that recognition goes, like a dead language, it dies. Someone is rich because they possess large recognised amounts of a symbol for potential energy. In a cashless society, someone is considered an “enemy of the state”, and these stores of potential energy can disappear at a digital stroke. Think of a suddenly very prescient thought: “No one will be able to buy or sell without the mark.” In other words, they are excluded from participation within the economic world. Their money is no good - they don’t have any money! Thus the idea of the desirability of such “enemies” to have parallel economic worlds, as one might see mentioned but wondered a little about what is meant. This extending into spheres such as their own educational and informational worlds and so on.

Anyway, I’ll stop myself here.

Collaboration

Tony Blair, a bit late to the party, has in a vaguely surprising collaboration, teamed up with lovable, messy haired Boris Johnson, and together are releasing a song for the Christmas music market: I Never Knew Living in Fear Could Be Such Fun (One day you’re gonna know it too). The song-writing credits ascribe this to Blair-Johnson, while the B-side is accredited to Johnson and Johnson-Pfizer Blair, whatever that precisely indicates. That song is titled Beat Me with Your Love Hammer (Don’t Stop), and is said to be inspired by th golden years of Motown, but with an English pastoral twist. Lyrics, leaked to us from an unnamed source, below:

You say you see through my bullshit

But I don’t care

I’ve got messy hair

Fear, Freedom, Paul

Since therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has power over death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. 

Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews.

What exactly is going on now in the world from those in authority? (the authorities/authoritarians) The enslaving of people by the fear of death. So in relation to the above passage this exactly energetically and spiritually equates to the demonic, and freedom from its imposing of the fear of death to the spiritual.

Rebels, Dostoevsky

 Rebel - one who recognises existence of an authority and rebels against it. I suppose this could be divided into those who consider this authority legitimate but who rebel anyway. Here might is right, the possession of power is its legitimacy. You could even include teenage rebellion as within this - the stirrings of individuality need to rise up, however seriously against the world of adult authority, before later submitting or joining the same world.

The other type, who would be more under the banner of idealism, considers the authority illegitimate, and it is his forced duty to rebel and defy it. The demarcations obviously between these two groups may not be so clear cut, which isn’t to belittle or besmirch the idealism and the situation that provokes it.

Then there is another figure for whom this authority means so little, he  doesn’t feel the instinct to  rebel. His rebellion is in the eyes of the authority, not of himself, and for the world of authority and hierarchies of power he is the more guilty since they feel how little they mean to him. If he was kicking against them, they would be more or less on the same energetic plane. This in an inner sense is a very advanced being but that’s not to say he is necessarily better. He may have precious little lust for power over others, but that can easily become indifference  and unfeeling and disengagement from the world in a negative sense.

In Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, the devious and amoral revolutionary figure of Pyotr Verkhovensky is a mixture of the first two types above - greedy for power in itself but also full of a warped idealism. Idealism can be extremely warped! Feeling passionately about something isn’t enough to make it a good something. Nikolai Stavrogin, the true central figure of the novel, is an extreme instance of the third type. He is a ‘higher being’, though his inability to find a natural place in the world has led him into extremes of wasteful, sometimes cruel behaviour and even dreadful depravity, not even out of a love of debauchery but almost from indifference - that the extremes at least feel more real and give the sense of more intense engagement with the world in those moments. However, ultimately this is a terrible dead-end for him, and also particularly one awful incident (which the publishers wouldn’t allow Dostoevsky include, and thus significantly hurt the balance of the book) has haunted his conscience to the point where he needs to either  somehow find salvation from his guilt or else know himself damned. (Modern editions of Demons generally include the omitted chapters at the end, and I think anyone reading the novel now should read them where Dostoevsky intended them to be. It makes far more sense of Stavrogin’s character and inner situation.)

But anyway - after digressing far more than I wished! - Verkhovensky, for all his vanity and revolutionary zeal, knows himself ultimately a mediocrity in the spirit, he does not possess that which will irresistibly inspire people simply through his very person - though in the more perceptive loathing may ensue. Stavrogin though, the third type of rebel, is to an extreme this higher being, even amidst the chaos of his life, his indifference to the world somehow includes in itself a huge magnetic draw from the world. As described at the start of this, Verkhovensky is of the world and simply inspires feelings in sync with that world; whereas Stavrogin, not of and higher than it, evokes passions of aversion or adoration. And so Verkhovensky’s great dream is that Stavrogin will lead, or agree to step into place at the  right time as the leading figure of his revolutionary movement. Largely through indifference Stavrogin half goes along with this thought - though again as much because it means so little to him he doesn’t bother rebelling against it - but ultimately this indifference, and the lack of attraction that world has for him, mean it barely exists for him as an active temptation.

So that went way beyond the brief few lines I’d intended …

Truth, Deviation, Return

What is the most important duty or task of truth for it to remain truth?

“To accommodate itself to falseness? Then it could bring more people to the truth?”

No! Then it would no longer be truth. The most important thing for truth to remain truth is for itself to remain in its truth. And it is literally impossible for truth to deviate from itself, as deviation is only possible to falseness. It’s like in mathematics, if the mathematical reasoning deviates from truth then it is no longer true. And it’s not enslavement to truth, it is being wholly in truth. We could say this is the nature of God: devoid of the possibility of deviation from truth, not because of narrowness of spirit, but because of being absolute spirit. Without a drop of neuroticism, or the possibility of such a drop.

Deviation is possible to creatures of free will where falseness is a possibility, and importantly they are granted such freedom of inner movement, along with the inner consequences. I can’t speak too much about  the consciousness of angelic or spirit worlds (putting it mildly) - however one feels about such worlds - but in theologies beyond just the Judaeo-Christian, not just humans but also angels had such freedom, or freedom to deviate from truth. So they weren’t just slaves of God, who was absolute truth, but were granted self-autonomy, though, in contrast to the human world, with it seems absolute negative consequences in the angelic domain for the choice of deviation. There’s little point in trying to judge this judgement in their deviation as fair or not from a human standpoint as it’s presumably not a like for like reality, and in the world it seems to equate to a definitive choice of rebellion of self against God, for the dethroning of God to be replaced by glorification of the deviant self. And that’s why demons are so demonic! They are wholly committed to the deviant self! 

In various ancient texts, this angelic rebellion then leaks into the human world, with it being bound up in the world of temptations and deviations, but with the massive greater freedom of spirit and movement open to people by repentance and openness to receiving truth, which always remains open to flood in. However much we deviate, God never does, and so you could say, however deep a hole we dig for ourselves, the sun keeps blazing away regardless.

I didn’t intend writing something long like that - I thought I’d just throw out some smart one or two liners - but anyway that’s what came out.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

 

Quasarsphere

 

In name by German band Ash Ra Tempel from 1975, though the band here simply consisted of guitarist Manuel Gottsching.

Holocaust Survivor on How the Process Goes

 

Scandal

 An unlikely and unpleasant incident occurred at a recent MTV music awards ceremony involving members of the groups Fake News Shitstorm and Deep State Cabal, both of whom were present at the time. Everything in the ceremony was going smoothly; there was music, jokes, erotic dancing by the girls of Depopulation Agenda during what appeared to be some kind of strange occult ritual, there were women and a few men wearing dresses made of meat - elegance and good taste abounded. But, in the very midst of all this serenity, things were about to kick off. Brace yourselves.

After an ad break it is alleged the drummer of Fake News Shitstorm did not have his mask properly fixed to his face during a time period when it should have been, and this was in full view of the public for several minutes as he came in and out of shot - the MTV producers and camera people somehow not awake to the issue. During the next ad break, Klaus SSchwab, lead singer of Deep State Cabal, angrily confronted Fake News Shitstorm for the inappropriate behaviour of their band mate, whilst also, in German, berated the MTV team in an oratorical style vaguely reminiscent of that of a well-known former German  historical figure from the 1930s and 40s. 

After an initial awkward and shocked silence, Fake News Shitstorm accused SSchwab of being a megalomaniacal bully, always pushing people around, and it wasn’t the job of Fake News Shitstorm just to bow down and serve the interests of Deep State Cabal - to which SSchwab responded, or rather roared, this was exactly their role. (The two groups are part of the same record label, Deception, and perhaps SSchwab was referring to internal politics and priorities of said label.) 

All this chaos and scandal may well have simply been in the heat of the moment - these award ceremonies can be very tense and demanding affairs - but the dispute escalated to the point that MTV were forced to continue the ad break for an uncomfortably long time. When coverage returned, the drummer was double masked, kept in place with what looked like duct tape, and was socially distanced to an apparent and obvious degree. The camera lingered on him for a few seconds, perhaps to help make some subliminal point to the viewership.

The Fact Checkers, who were also present, have offered to look into the available footage to try to assess and offer impartial judgement regarding the full truth of things. 

When pressed for a comment, the lead singer of The Populace, who were sat in a dark corner in the back somewhere, said he and the band had no clue what was going on but they were glad anyway to have just got an invite.

Higher than the Sun

From Primal Scream’s 1991 album Screamadelica. The first mix is the best known version and more of a song, mixed by The Orb, while the second, A Dub Symphony in Two Parts, is much more we’ll say abstract and much less of a song, and with Andrew Weatherall at the helm. Primal Scream were before this a pretty normal and I don’t think too inspiring pop band, and what they would have come up with without the remixers/producers would have been nothing like these end results.