Horrible day on Wall Street.
I tried to call my broker, he had changed his number!
*.*
Demi Moore has teamed up with digestive health company Wonderbelly to promote the normalization of flatulence.
No, I'm not pulling your finger.
*.*
PYONGYANG — Olympic fever swept over the Hermit Kingdom faster than a winter famine this year as the nation celebrated the astonishing accomplishments of the North Korean Olympic Team in Paris. To date, the team, composed exclusively of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, has reportedly been awarded “all the gold medals,” according to state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun.
“The divine athleticism of our Dear Leader has shocked the war mongering West, who reek of gun powder and Gatorade, and brought honor and glory to the people of True Korea,” said Kim Il-guk, President of the DPRK’s Olympic Committee and Concentration Camp Manager for Families of Losing Athletes. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
He then went into great detail about how, despite a torrential downpour and bolts of “heavenly lightning that cowed everyone else,” the North Korean leader executed flawless, gazelle-like leaps during the 110- and 400-meter hurdles.
*.*
Top 5 Possible Slogans for the Upcoming Democratic Convention:
"Ignore What We Said Earlier. We're going with this one!"
"We're The Party Without Those Two."
"Done Watching the Olympics' Disaster, Check This Out!"
"Anyone Know We're Even Doing This?"
"It's Pronounced KAM-uh-luh"
*.*
I sat quietly with my own thoughts today.
Remind me never to do that again.
Quote of the Times;
Americans and Afrikaners are “colonizers” on “stolen land” despite 400+ years of presence in America and South Africa. But the Rwandan immigrant who murdered British children is “Native Welsh”. - @Klaus_Arminius
Link of the Times;
Candace Owens: ‘Blackmail Ring Has Been Running the World’:
https://vigilantnews.com/post/candace-owens-blackmail-ring-has-been-running-the-world/
Issue of the Times;
The Hollow Kingdom by Christopher F. Rufo
A dispatch from London on the brink of chaos.
I have spent the past week in London. The city’s transformation, which I had followed only abstractly in the newspapers, has prompted a visceral shock.
“I haven’t been to London since I was a student,” I told a group of British journalists. “What the hell happened?”
“The fact that you would ask such a question,” one responded, “is an act of racism.” The others laughed.
The unstated premise of the joke was that everyone knows what the hell happened—mass immigration—but no one is allowed to speak about it. The statistics reveal the general trend. Since my last visit nearly two decades ago, the White British population of London has declined from 60 percent to 37 percent. Meantime, the Muslim population of London has nearly doubled, and migrants from South Asia and Africa have entrenched themselves throughout the city.
Anglos have been a minority for more than a decade. What I’ve observed in the city this week has amazed me. Women’s eyes peering through the slit of black niqabs. A procession of sub-Saharan Africans traversing Westminster Bridge, waving the flags of their homelands and demanding reparations. Street corners that could be confused for Peshawar or Islamabad. Districts in which one could pass an entire day with barely a glimpse of an Englishman.
These are facts. There is nothing inherently racist or antiracist about them. The question is one of perspective. England’s progressives would have one believe that these snapshots represent the triumph of diversity. But this position appears increasingly untenable.
For good reason. England, unlike the United States, does not have a long history of assimilating others. And many of the country’s migrants—in particular, the large Muslim population—are among the most difficult populations to integrate.
From a critical perspective, the history of mass migration in Britain is a history of civil tension, punctuated by violence: riots, terrorism, murder, rape. Events of this week have brought this suppressed conflict to the surface once again.
The day after my conversation with the British journalists, England broke out in another round of riots. A first-generation Rwandan teenager had stabbed three young girls to death, prompting British nationalists and Muslim counter-protesters into the streets. The resulting clashes led to significant property damage and nearly 400 arrests. The country’s left-wing prime minister, Keir Starmer, has signaled his support for suppressing the nationalists.
A question lies buried under these events: What makes a nation? And what is the relationship between its content and its form?
It’s easy to understand why migrants from Somalia or Pakistan would select England as their destination. The political, economic, and cultural form of their home countries is a disaster. In England, by contrast, these migrants are able to secure an income, often including public benefits, and enjoy the fruits of a developed, modern, peaceful country.
The predominant theory among Western elites is that the content of mass migration—the particular people, and the culture they bring—is irrelevant. All groups are equal. Individuals are interchangeable. To think otherwise is to engage in bigotry.
This logic has a whiff of liberalism, but only in the most reductive, naïve sense. The truth is that, even if we believe in the principle that all men are created equal, this does not mean that all cultures are equal or interchangeable—far from it. The structure of a civilization is a delicate thing. Changing its citizens will, over time, change its form.
This process is underway in London. The buildings, avenues, and palaces look the same as before; there is still a parliament, a king, and the pound. But the central city feels hollowed out. The old connection between citizen and nation has been altered. The old bonds of culture have been frayed.
The situation in London recalls the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment that asks whether, if every part of a ship is replaced, it is the same ship in the end. The answer, in our case, is a confident “no.” England without the Englishman would no longer be England. The form—parliamentary democracy, economic growth, liberal culture—might hold for a time, but eventually, it would give way, too.
News of the Times;
Historian unearths solid evidence:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/671084
Zelensky Bombs Zaporozhye Nuke Plant:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-81124-desperate-for-escalation
Here's the Headline 14 Years After:
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2024/07/20/heres-the-headline-just-15-years-after-dems-hailed-affordable-care-act-passage-n2398588
UK judge upholds ban on puberty blockers:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/3102612/uk-judge-upholds-ban-puberty-blockers-for-gender-dysphoria-children/
Harris Campaign Busted Spoofing News Outlets In Headline-Altering Ad Scheme:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/harris-campaign-busted-spoofing-news-outlets-headline-altering-ad-scheme
Tests confirm humans tramped around North America more than 20,000 years ago:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/05/tests-confirm-humans-tramped-around-north-america-more-than-20-000-years-ago/
Journalist Who Criticized Aaron Rodgers for His Views on COVID-19 Vaccines:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/journalist-who-criticized-aaron-rodgers-his-repeated-conspiracy/
Gina Carano Lawsuit Initial Judgment Reveals:
https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/gina-carano-lawsuit-initial-judgment
Brendan Depa who severely beat teacher over Nintendo Switch sentenced to five years:
https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/hulking-florida-teen-brendan-depa-sentenced-to-five-years-in-prison-for-attacking-teacher-over-nintendo-switch/
Dr John Money and the sinister origins of gender ideology:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/05/dr-john-money-and-the-sinister-origins-of-gender-ideology/
"Millions" Wasted On Electric School Busses:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/millions-wasted-electric-school-busses-maryland-pivots-back-diesel
Christians arrested in Paris for riding bus protesting Olympics:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-arrested-in-paris-for-bus-protesting-olympic-ceremony.html
Tim Walz Was Dead Wrong:
https://reason.com/2024/08/08/tim-walz-was-dead-wrong-about-misinformation-and-free-speech/
Caught On Camera Allegedly Attempting To Meet 13 Year Old Boy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bronx-ada-resigns-after-being-caught-camera-allegedly-attempting-meet-13-year-old-boy
Brits Are Being Arrested for Social Media Posts Now:
https://www.lucianne.com/2024/08/09/brits_are_being_arrested_for_social_media_posts_now_133612.html
Hollow?
Striving?
The top six foods that make your fart are beans, corn, bell peppers, cauliflower, cabbage and milk.
Or, as my co-workers like to call it, "Lunch!"
*.*
According to GQ magazine, 28% of men do gamble at least once a year without telling their wives.
What are the odds?
Oh and don't tell my wife I asked...
*.*
The Department of Defense has run out of funding after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin blew roughly $300 billion at a Las Vegas blackjack table, sources confirmed today.
“This is not the time to cast judgment, because everyone makes mistakes,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman. “The Department of Defense has come back from worst and we all need to just tighten our belts for a little bit and hold out for new funding.”
According to defense officials, a slightly irritated Austin was found at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas awaiting his 3 a.m. Frontier Airlines flight.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never thought it would be a good idea to split 10s,” the secretary remarked sternly. “Sometimes the best way to learn is to just jump off the deep end and figure it out, and I’m now a better man for it so it’s probably best we just move on and forget it ever happened."
When asked why he would use DOD funds instead of personal funds, he explained to reporters: “My credit card is a Citi card, so I accidentally used my [Government Travel Card] instead, a silly mistake that service members make all the time.”
*.*
When you think about it, if you have an actual "House of Dragons," wouldn't that be really hard to keep clean?
*.*
I just ate what I thought was a feta cheese crumble from my salad off my shirt.
Turns out it was deodorant.
How's your day going?
Quote of the Times;
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." - Yogi Berra
Link of the Times;
Enraged Butler Cop On Bodycam Says He Told Secret Service To Cover Warehouse:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-fking-told-them-enraged-butler-cop-bodycam-says-he-told-secret-service-cover-warehouse
Issue of the Times;
The End of Israel by The Zman https://thezman.com/wordpress/
One of the myths of the 20th century that is slowly starting to wither away is the one about Israel just striving to exist. Since the wars of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the narrative has been that Israel is this plucky democracy fighting for its existence in the midst of savage not-democracies. The line, “Israel has a right to exist” has been the company slogan for Israel Inc. for close to fifty years now. Over the last year this official narrative, like so many others, has started to collapse.
It is clear at this point that Israel is not the victim of aggression, but the primary instigator of conflict in the region. The assassination of the Gaza leader in Tehran, on its face, is an unjustified act of war. Ismail Haniyeh was not just the lead negotiator for Gaza, but the most dovish of the Palestinian leaders with regards to making a deal with the Israeli government. The only reason to kill him was to foreclose further negotiations over Gaza and to bait the Iranians into war.
The Israelis, the Zionist and their supporters in the West will claim that there can be no peace as long as Hamas exists, so they are acting in self-defense when they assassinate the people on the other side of the peacemaking table. They also argue that there can be no peace as long as Iran exists as an Iranian state, so they are acting in self-defense when they attack Iran. Currently, they are arguing for Israel to pre-emptively attack Iran before Iran retaliates.
What we are seeing is an evolution of that myth from the 20th century. The original myth was that Israel just wanted to exist and it was the Arab world that refused to acknowledge Israeli’s right to exist. All the Arabs needed to do was not make war on Israel and there would be peace in the region. Now, the narrative is that Israel must make war on the region in order to secure peace. We have gone from supporting the plucky underdog to backing the savage master.
It is similar to an observation by Christopher Caldwell regarding the programs that sprouted from the civil rights revolution. It was first argued that these programs must be supported because their beneficiaries are too weak. Now it is argued that these programs must be supported because they are too strong. We see this with Israel. Fifty years ago, the Washington political class supported Israel because she was weak. Now they support Israel because the Israel lobby is too strong.
The thing is though, regimes in serious trouble often go on the offensive thinking it will lead to some breakthrough or change the situation in some way. Armies that are beaten will often stage one last great offensive. Ideological regimes will crack down on dissent, like we are seeing in the West. The Israel lobby is proudly intervening in American elections, because it fears support is faltering. Israel seeks war with Iran, because is it very unstable domestically.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/06/missouri-cori-bush-primary-bell-aipac-israel
There is no question that the ground has shifted over the last year with regards to support for Israel in the West, particularly America. In the United States, where it matters most, unconditional support for Israel is now limited to old white conservatives, primarily located in the Bible belt. Everyone else ranges from Israel fatigue to outright hostility to Israel. The actuarial tables tell us that support for Israel among American is in a death spiral that cannot be arrested.
This coincides with the decline of the American empire, especially in the Middle East, where decades of intervention have exhausted the military and exhausted the American people’s patience with the topic. The days of the American empire dictating policy to the region are drawing to a close. This is why Israel is desperate to start a regional war with the Iranians. They think it will bring their patron back into the region, even though it is clear that this is highly unrealistic.
On the domestic side, an area that gets little attention, Israel has some profoundly serious internal divisions. This post by Alastair Crooke describes some of it.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/05/the-1948-irgun-re-born/
The current Israeli government is caught in a vice. One jaw is the reality of the situation with regards to Israel and the Arabs and the other jaw is that “an eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet – and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state.”
The ideological cross currents within Israel reflect the demographic collapse that has been underway for a couple of generations. The once dominant Ashkenazi Jews, these are the Jews of the diaspora, are now in steep decline largely due to their low fertility rates and the relative high fertility rates of the other groups, particularly the ultra-orthodox and the Mizrahi Jews. These are the Jews who never left the Middle East, and who hold an expansive view of greater Israel.
The result of all of this is a hyper-aggressive Israel that is seeking a big war with all of its local enemies and a hyper-aggressive Israel lobby in the United States that is aggressively interfering in elections. One result is the collapse of the old narrative where Israel is the plucky democracy in a world of antagonistic not-democracies. In its place is a new narrative where Israel is instigating the final conflagration to settle all of these outstanding issues for good.
What all of this tells us is that Israel is in deep trouble. The underlying reason for it is the country was born in war. Countries that are the creation of war tend to end in war because they must always seek war. For Israel, “normal” is the endless state of emergency, the constant fear of another attack. This dovetailed well with the diaspora fear of you know who jumping out of the history books. It has evolved to the point where Project Israel cannot exist in peace, so it must seek war.
How this ends is not clear. The geezers currently running Israel must eventually give way to a new generation, but that new generation is more war-like and vastly less sophisticated about global matters. On the other hand, the Arab world is young and increasingly sophisticated about how the world is changing. Can the Israelis figure out how to live in the new world or will they seek to take the rest of the world with them into the abyss of the dying old world?
News of the Times;
Tim Walz Replaced MN State Flag:
https://nationalfile.com/tim-walz-replaced-mn-state-flag-with-somali-symbolism/
Medicare's Real Contribution:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/medicares-real-contribution-hollowing-out-healthcare
A Swim in the Sewer:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/how_do_you_match_the_disgusting_display_at_the_olympic_opening.html
California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets:
https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-california-gender-law-newsom
Von der Leyen commission loses Covid vaccine case:
https://www.rt.com/news/601236-eu-hide-details-covid-vaccines/
Wind Farm Operations Shut Down By Feds:
https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/vineyard-wind-reports-turbine-blade-damage-in-offshore-incident
Police report details what led to arrest of former Phoenix Suns player:
https://www.azfamily.com/2024/07/16/police-report-details-what-led-arrest-former-phoenix-suns-player-scottsdale/
TikToker Who Urged Migrants To Invade US Homes:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/illegal-alien-tiktoker-who-urged-migrants-invade-us-homes-reportedly-worked-venezuelas
‘Really, Really Difficult’:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/19/really-really-difficult-bureaucrats-worry-behind-closed-doors-theyll-be-sent-packing-under-trump/amp/
The FBI Set Everything Up:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/fbi-set-everything-up-they-wrote-script-whitmer/
Russia’s New ‘Combat Icebreaker’ Heads For Sea Trials:
https://gcaptain.com/russias-new-combat-icebreaker-heads-for-sea-trials/
The Hundred Years’ War and the English colonisation of France:
https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/the-hundred-years-war-and-the-english
Nearly Half of German Welfare Payments Goes to Foreign Migrants:
https://modernity.news/2024/07/11/nearly-half-of-german-welfare-payments-goes-to-foreign-migrants/
West Jerusalem has accused the 27-year-old model:
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/601399-adidas-bella-hadid-israel/
Tim Walz’s Lutheran Church is a Trainwreck of Heresy:
https://protestia.com/2024/08/07/vice-president-pick-tim-walzs-lutheran-church-is-a-trainwreck-of-heresy-and-blasphemy/
Or, as my co-workers like to call it, "Lunch!"
*.*
According to GQ magazine, 28% of men do gamble at least once a year without telling their wives.
What are the odds?
Oh and don't tell my wife I asked...
*.*
The Department of Defense has run out of funding after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin blew roughly $300 billion at a Las Vegas blackjack table, sources confirmed today.
“This is not the time to cast judgment, because everyone makes mistakes,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman. “The Department of Defense has come back from worst and we all need to just tighten our belts for a little bit and hold out for new funding.”
According to defense officials, a slightly irritated Austin was found at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas awaiting his 3 a.m. Frontier Airlines flight.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never thought it would be a good idea to split 10s,” the secretary remarked sternly. “Sometimes the best way to learn is to just jump off the deep end and figure it out, and I’m now a better man for it so it’s probably best we just move on and forget it ever happened."
When asked why he would use DOD funds instead of personal funds, he explained to reporters: “My credit card is a Citi card, so I accidentally used my [Government Travel Card] instead, a silly mistake that service members make all the time.”
*.*
When you think about it, if you have an actual "House of Dragons," wouldn't that be really hard to keep clean?
*.*
I just ate what I thought was a feta cheese crumble from my salad off my shirt.
Turns out it was deodorant.
How's your day going?
Quote of the Times;
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." - Yogi Berra
Link of the Times;
Enraged Butler Cop On Bodycam Says He Told Secret Service To Cover Warehouse:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-fking-told-them-enraged-butler-cop-bodycam-says-he-told-secret-service-cover-warehouse
Issue of the Times;
The End of Israel by The Zman https://thezman.com/wordpress/
One of the myths of the 20th century that is slowly starting to wither away is the one about Israel just striving to exist. Since the wars of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the narrative has been that Israel is this plucky democracy fighting for its existence in the midst of savage not-democracies. The line, “Israel has a right to exist” has been the company slogan for Israel Inc. for close to fifty years now. Over the last year this official narrative, like so many others, has started to collapse.
It is clear at this point that Israel is not the victim of aggression, but the primary instigator of conflict in the region. The assassination of the Gaza leader in Tehran, on its face, is an unjustified act of war. Ismail Haniyeh was not just the lead negotiator for Gaza, but the most dovish of the Palestinian leaders with regards to making a deal with the Israeli government. The only reason to kill him was to foreclose further negotiations over Gaza and to bait the Iranians into war.
The Israelis, the Zionist and their supporters in the West will claim that there can be no peace as long as Hamas exists, so they are acting in self-defense when they assassinate the people on the other side of the peacemaking table. They also argue that there can be no peace as long as Iran exists as an Iranian state, so they are acting in self-defense when they attack Iran. Currently, they are arguing for Israel to pre-emptively attack Iran before Iran retaliates.
What we are seeing is an evolution of that myth from the 20th century. The original myth was that Israel just wanted to exist and it was the Arab world that refused to acknowledge Israeli’s right to exist. All the Arabs needed to do was not make war on Israel and there would be peace in the region. Now, the narrative is that Israel must make war on the region in order to secure peace. We have gone from supporting the plucky underdog to backing the savage master.
It is similar to an observation by Christopher Caldwell regarding the programs that sprouted from the civil rights revolution. It was first argued that these programs must be supported because their beneficiaries are too weak. Now it is argued that these programs must be supported because they are too strong. We see this with Israel. Fifty years ago, the Washington political class supported Israel because she was weak. Now they support Israel because the Israel lobby is too strong.
The thing is though, regimes in serious trouble often go on the offensive thinking it will lead to some breakthrough or change the situation in some way. Armies that are beaten will often stage one last great offensive. Ideological regimes will crack down on dissent, like we are seeing in the West. The Israel lobby is proudly intervening in American elections, because it fears support is faltering. Israel seeks war with Iran, because is it very unstable domestically.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/06/missouri-cori-bush-primary-bell-aipac-israel
There is no question that the ground has shifted over the last year with regards to support for Israel in the West, particularly America. In the United States, where it matters most, unconditional support for Israel is now limited to old white conservatives, primarily located in the Bible belt. Everyone else ranges from Israel fatigue to outright hostility to Israel. The actuarial tables tell us that support for Israel among American is in a death spiral that cannot be arrested.
This coincides with the decline of the American empire, especially in the Middle East, where decades of intervention have exhausted the military and exhausted the American people’s patience with the topic. The days of the American empire dictating policy to the region are drawing to a close. This is why Israel is desperate to start a regional war with the Iranians. They think it will bring their patron back into the region, even though it is clear that this is highly unrealistic.
On the domestic side, an area that gets little attention, Israel has some profoundly serious internal divisions. This post by Alastair Crooke describes some of it.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/05/the-1948-irgun-re-born/
The current Israeli government is caught in a vice. One jaw is the reality of the situation with regards to Israel and the Arabs and the other jaw is that “an eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet – and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state.”
The ideological cross currents within Israel reflect the demographic collapse that has been underway for a couple of generations. The once dominant Ashkenazi Jews, these are the Jews of the diaspora, are now in steep decline largely due to their low fertility rates and the relative high fertility rates of the other groups, particularly the ultra-orthodox and the Mizrahi Jews. These are the Jews who never left the Middle East, and who hold an expansive view of greater Israel.
The result of all of this is a hyper-aggressive Israel that is seeking a big war with all of its local enemies and a hyper-aggressive Israel lobby in the United States that is aggressively interfering in elections. One result is the collapse of the old narrative where Israel is the plucky democracy in a world of antagonistic not-democracies. In its place is a new narrative where Israel is instigating the final conflagration to settle all of these outstanding issues for good.
What all of this tells us is that Israel is in deep trouble. The underlying reason for it is the country was born in war. Countries that are the creation of war tend to end in war because they must always seek war. For Israel, “normal” is the endless state of emergency, the constant fear of another attack. This dovetailed well with the diaspora fear of you know who jumping out of the history books. It has evolved to the point where Project Israel cannot exist in peace, so it must seek war.
How this ends is not clear. The geezers currently running Israel must eventually give way to a new generation, but that new generation is more war-like and vastly less sophisticated about global matters. On the other hand, the Arab world is young and increasingly sophisticated about how the world is changing. Can the Israelis figure out how to live in the new world or will they seek to take the rest of the world with them into the abyss of the dying old world?
News of the Times;
Tim Walz Replaced MN State Flag:
https://nationalfile.com/tim-walz-replaced-mn-state-flag-with-somali-symbolism/
Medicare's Real Contribution:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/medicares-real-contribution-hollowing-out-healthcare
A Swim in the Sewer:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/how_do_you_match_the_disgusting_display_at_the_olympic_opening.html
California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets:
https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-california-gender-law-newsom
Von der Leyen commission loses Covid vaccine case:
https://www.rt.com/news/601236-eu-hide-details-covid-vaccines/
Wind Farm Operations Shut Down By Feds:
https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/vineyard-wind-reports-turbine-blade-damage-in-offshore-incident
Police report details what led to arrest of former Phoenix Suns player:
https://www.azfamily.com/2024/07/16/police-report-details-what-led-arrest-former-phoenix-suns-player-scottsdale/
TikToker Who Urged Migrants To Invade US Homes:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/illegal-alien-tiktoker-who-urged-migrants-invade-us-homes-reportedly-worked-venezuelas
‘Really, Really Difficult’:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/19/really-really-difficult-bureaucrats-worry-behind-closed-doors-theyll-be-sent-packing-under-trump/amp/
The FBI Set Everything Up:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/fbi-set-everything-up-they-wrote-script-whitmer/
Russia’s New ‘Combat Icebreaker’ Heads For Sea Trials:
https://gcaptain.com/russias-new-combat-icebreaker-heads-for-sea-trials/
The Hundred Years’ War and the English colonisation of France:
https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/the-hundred-years-war-and-the-english
Nearly Half of German Welfare Payments Goes to Foreign Migrants:
https://modernity.news/2024/07/11/nearly-half-of-german-welfare-payments-goes-to-foreign-migrants/
West Jerusalem has accused the 27-year-old model:
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/601399-adidas-bella-hadid-israel/
Tim Walz’s Lutheran Church is a Trainwreck of Heresy:
https://protestia.com/2024/08/07/vice-president-pick-tim-walzs-lutheran-church-is-a-trainwreck-of-heresy-and-blasphemy/
Solzhenitsyn?
Simone Biles shook off a calf injury to dominate during the qualifying rounds at the Olympics.
My questions: Why did she bring a baby cow to the Olympics and how did it get hurt?
Poor calf.
*.*
A Jewish man wins a huge sum of money in the lottery and he is discussing with his wife what they will do with it.
His wife asks him what they should do with all these letters begging for money?
The man responds, "Keep sending them out."
*.*
Top 5 Signs your Baseball Team isn't going to the Playoffs:
MLB has banned games from being on TV, for reputation's sake.
Entire team usually quits after 6 innings.
6 players still hitting off a tee.
Owner thinking about trading entire team for a Sony Playstation 5.
New team flag: All-White!
*.*
There are a couple of small meteor showers underway for the next couple of weeks, just in case you're awake during the wee hours.
They call them the wee hours, because that's when I get up and wee.
*.*
Sending a text to the wrong person is considered the most embarrassing thing people can do.
I was obviously not included in this survey.
Quote of the Times;
It’s always fascinating to see how the biggest champions of “our democracy” are unelected elites whose number one priority is thwarting the genuine will of the people and taking advantage of their position to enrich themselves and their masters. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
General Syrsky Shocks With News of Russian Armor:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-72424-general-syrsky-shocks
Issue of the Times;
Solzhenitsyn Warned Us by Gary Saul Morson
The great Russian writer understood the West and predicted its future with frightening precision.
Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”
For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped.
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997.1 Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.
Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace “democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”
Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas? Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.
How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West] who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slavery?” Why do crudeness of thought and the repetition of ill-understood slogans pass for sophistication? “I couldn’t have imagined to what extreme degree the West desires to blind itself,” Solzhenitsyn told a London audience in 1976.
Those who have reflected on Soviet experience, Solzhenitsyn advised, readily discern “telltale signs by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical blackout that struck New York in 1977, he identified one such warning: “The center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.” What would he say if he had seen the Antifa riots following the murder of George Floyd or the cowardly responses to today’s university encampments?
Solzhenitsyn discovered the root cause of the West’s decline in its assumption, shared by almost everyone with any influence, that life’s purpose is individual happiness, from which it follows that freedom and democratic political institutions exist to make that goal easier to attain. And so elections usually turn on the growth of an already abundant economy. Could there be a view of life less worthy of human dignity? America’s Founders acknowledged a higher power, but now the most “advanced” people have succumbed to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”
Acknowledging nothing higher than themselves, people overlook the evil in human nature. Original sin, what’s that? Sophisticates laugh at phrases such as “the Evil Empire” or “the Axis of Evil” because “it has become embarrassing to appeal to age-old values.” And so “the concepts of Good and Evil have been ridiculed for several centuries…. They’ve been replaced by political or class categorizations.” Crime and other ills supposedly result from readily amendable social arrangements and will inevitably give way to progress.
Like the Soviets, Westerners speak of being “on the right side of history,” as if progress were guaranteed and what comes later will be necessarily better. How readily such thinking seduced early-20th-century Russian (and Weimar German) intellectuals! And how vulnerable it leaves us to underestimating the evil that human beings can commit! “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we are being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life” and our moral sense. People cannot even understand evil unless they recognize that it “resides in each individual heart before it enters a political system.”
“As for Progress,” Solzhenitsyn replied to self-styled progressives, “there can only be one true kind: the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individual persons, the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” For the hedonist, death looms as the terrible cessation of pleasures, but for spiritual people it is proof that, as Pierre, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, enthuses as he points to the sky: “We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on the scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole.” Or as Solzhenitsyn argued in his Harvard commencement address: “If as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not a search for the best way to obtain material goods. . . . It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life’s journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”
People can accomplish such moral growth not by self-indulgence but by its opposite, self-restraint or, as Solzhenitsyn also called it, “self-limitation.” Without that, they remain mired in the world of things and unable to see beyond the present moment. Après moi le déluge.
“If we don’t learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” Solzhenitsyn insisted, “we, mankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.” Voicing the overriding lesson of the Russian literary tradition, Solzhenitsyn told Westerners: “if personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay…. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not in seizing but in refusing to seize: in other words, in self-limitation.”
The spiritual malaise of hedonism fatally weakens a society by leaving it unable to defend itself. “The most striking feature that an outside observer discerns in the West today,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in the Harvard address, is “a decline in courage,” which “is particularly noticeable in the ruling and intellectual elites,” presumably including his Harvard audience. Amid an abundance of material goods, “why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good, and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as-yet distant land?” People naturally say, “Let someone else risk his life.” European powers “bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more remains for a prosperous life.” (Thirty years later, few European countries not on the Russian border meet the agreed-upon defense expenditure of 2 percent of GDP.) America bases its security primarily on its formidable arsenal, Solzhenitsyn noted, but weapons are never enough without “stout hearts and steadfast men.”
One step beyond unwillingness to defend one’s country is actual hatred of it. I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when I learned of campus mobs this year shouting “Death to America!” For Solzhenitsyn, that is where the cult of individual happiness, sooner or later, is bound to lead. Facing the slightest frustration, forced to endure a modicum of adversity, or exposed to a world of contingency and misfortune, those educated to regard individual good fortune as their due seek someone to blame. They readily embrace any fashionable ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors, the innocent good people and the implacably evil. But as Solzhenitsyn famously observed in The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil runs not between groups but “through every human heart.”
Why worry about external enemies when the real threat supposedly comes from another group or party at home? “Or why restrain oneself from burning hatred,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “whatever its basis—race, class, or manic ideology?” As in the French and Russian Revolutions, such anger feeds on itself. “Atheist teachers are rearing a younger generation in a spirit of hatred toward their own society.” From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to verify Solzhenitsyn’s prediction that “the flames of hatred” against one another are bound to intensify.
Society tears itself apart. Turning all questions into a matter of absolute rights makes amicable com-promise impossible, and it is the most privileged peo-ple, shielded from life’s inevitable disappointments, who are the most inclined to such thinking. Those raised in gated communities and preparing for lucrative professions are the first to express resentment and complain they feel “unsafe.” As Solzhenitsyn anticipated, “the broader the personal freedoms, the higher the level of social well-being or even affluence—the more vehement, paradoxically, this blind hatred” of America.
The specter—or rather, the zombie—of Marxism has returned because it divides the world into the damned and the saved. They need not be “the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat” but can be any pair that conveniently presents itself. To the amazement of those who only recently escaped such thinking, “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.”
Solzhenitsyn asked: Why does one country blindly embrace another’s catastrophic mistakes? Why can’t those mistakes become a cautionary lesson? “This inability to understand someone else’s faraway grief,” he pleads, “threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.”
Surely there must be some way “to overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others often passes him by without profit”! And in fact, there is: art, and especially literature.
Great literature has the power, he explained in his Nobel Prize lecture, to “impress upon an obstinate human being someone else’s far-off sorrows or joys” and to “give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions that he’s never himself experienced.” He went on: “Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another’s life experience … and allows us to assimilate it as our own.” Nothing else possesses literature’s “miraculous power” to overcome the barriers of language, custom, and social structure and thereby communicate “the experience of an entire nation to another nation that hasn’t undergone such a difficult, decades-long collective experience.” Literature “could save an entire nation from a redundant” and self-destructive course.
Solzhenitsyn’s audience must have wondered: But surely novelists can err, mislead, or even lie like everyone else! Isn’t that what Soviet socialist realist, “Party-minded” writers actually did? Here it is helpful to remember that in the Russian tradition not everything called a novel or poem qualifies as “literature.” Writing that lies or lacks compassion for those who suffer cannot belong to the canon. As Dmitri Likhachev, the foremost scholar of medieval Russian literature, explained:
Literature is the conscience of a society, its soul. The honor and merit of a writer consists in defending truth and the right to that truth under the most unfavorable circumstances…. Can you really consider literature literature, or a writer a writer if they side-step the truth, if they silence or try to falsify it? Literature which does not evoke a pang of conscience is already a lie. And to lie in literature, you will agree, is the worst kind of lying.
When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, also a Nobel Prize winner, praised the Soviet government’s imprisonment of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the editor and poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky, joined by novelist Lydia Chukovskaia and others, expelled him from “Russian literature.” “Sholokhov is now a former writer,” Tvardovsky asserted.
The most that ordinary people can do when a totalitarian regime blankets them with lies, Solzhenitsyn explained, is not to participate: “Let that come into the world—only not through me.” But writers can do more: “It is within their power … to defeat the lie! …The lie can prevail against much in the world, but never against art.”
Why exactly can a genuine novel not lie? What prompts Solzhenitsyn to deem “the persuasiveness of a true work of art irrefutable” and declare that “it prevails even over a resisting heart”? The answer is that a novel tests ideas as political speeches, journalistic articles, and philosophical systems do not.
If an author implausibly makes a character assert or do something just because a political position requires it, readers will sense the falsity. They will recognize that the assertion comes from the author’s prefabricated ideology and does not arise from the character’s experience. It seems fake, forced, out of character. Analogous tests pertain to other artistic forms, which display their own kinds of proof and disproof. That is why “a true work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced concepts do not survive their trial by image; both concept and image crumble, and turn out feeble, pale, convincing no one.”
Genuine works of art based on truth “attract us to themselves powerfully, and no one ever—even centuries later—will step forth to refute them.” They become classics. When Dostoevsky’s famously stated that “beauty will save the world,” he meant that even if regimes crush truth and goodness, “the intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked-for shoots of Beauty will force their way through… therefore fulfilling the task of all three.”
This view of art as something sacred made Solzhenitsyn highly impatient with the “falsely understood avant-gardism” of certain kinds of modernism and postmodernism. As he explains in his speech “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” delivered in New York in 1993, cleverness alone ultimately proves trivial and, at times, destructive. “Before erupting on the streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic [Russian] revolution had erupted on the pages of the artistic and literary journals of Bohemian circles. It is there we first heard…[of] the sweeping away of all ethical codes and religions.” Even the most talented “futurists,” ensnared by a false revolutionism, demanded the destruction of “the Racines, Murillos, and Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls’” while calling for the Russian literary classics to be “‘thrown overboard from the ship of modernity’.”
Decades later, some Russian writers of the Brezhnev era embraced postmodernist relativism: “Yes, they say, Communist dogma was a great lie—but then again, absolute truths don’t exist anyhow, and it’s hardly worthwhile trying to find them.” In this way, the masterpieces of Russian fiction became the object of condescending scorn.
And so, in one sweeping gesture of alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so today it’s once again fashionable in our country to ridicule, debunk, and throw overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion.
Even more than Russia, Solzhenitsyn said, the West has embraced this shallow relativism. The most advanced theories teach that “there is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, ‘the world as a text.’” Postmodern literature purports to “play,” but this is “not the Mozartian playfulness of a universe overflowing with joy—but a forced playing upon the strings of emptiness.”
In literature as in life, “nothing can be fashioned on a neglect of higher meanings.” No doubt about it, Solzhenitsyn maintained, the world is going through a profound and accelerating spiritual crisis, and its only hope—great literature—is betraying its mission. In a rare moment of hopefulness, Solzhenitsyn found it “hard to believe that we’ll allow this to occur.” He said, “Even in Russia, so terribly ill right now—we wait and hope that, after the coma and period of silence, we shall feel the reawakening of Russian literature, and witness the subsequent arrival of fresh new forces” that will spiritually uplift the world. But only if people return to “higher meaning.”
If Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about their society’s collapse irritated Westerners, his exalted view of literature struck them as too naive to take seriously. How many Americans regard novels as supremely important, let alone redemptive? Today, as literature departments “decolonize” the curriculum, fewer and fewer become acquainted with the greatest works at all.
More and more, students view literature as what they teach—or rather, used to teach—in required courses. Literature no longer has sufficient prestige to attract the best minds, and so the process of decline accelerates. Who reads contemporary poetry, and what timeless American novels have appeared in the past half century?
What’s more, young people increasingly lack the patience that great literature demands. They surf, they scan, they tweet. So how likely is it that, as Solzhenitsyn hoped, literature would transmit the experience needed to avoid a disastrous future?
When a country disparages the classics, it invites what Russians experienced as a “seventy-year long ice age.” People imprison themselves in the present moment and, in the name of freedom, enslave themselves to a single way of seeing the world. Wisdom earned by very different experiences seems increasingly irrelevant.
At the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn directly addressed those elites most resistant to his warning:
All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.
News of the Times;
Japanese oncologist:
https://expose-news.com/2024/07/03/japanese-oncologist-i-didnt-have-a-covid-vaccine/
3 Palestinian terror suspects caught:
https://nypost.com/2024/07/28/us-news/palestinian-terror-suspects-caught-after-crossing-illegally/
San Francisco McDonald's Closes:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/06/24/san-francisco-mcdonalds-closes-guess-why-n3790826
Navy Will No Longer Require Sailors to Pass Physical Fitness Tests:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/06/in-latest-blow-to-military-effectiveness-u-s-navy-will-no-longer-require-sailors-to-pass-physical-fitness-tests/
Arrested on Election Fraud Charges, Released Without Bail:
https://resistthemainstream.com/dem-campaigners-arrested-on-election-fraud-charges-released-without-bail/
Foreign Nationals Probing Military Bases:
https://pjmedia.com/ashleymccully/2024/07/05/concerning-trend-foreign-nationals-probing-military-bases-homes-n4929457
SpaceX May Save Stranded Boeing Starliner Crew At ISS:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/greater-50-50-chance-spacex-may-save-stranded-boeing-starliner-crew-iss
Send This Article to People Who Say “Ivermectin Doesn’t Work:
https://brownstone.org/articles/over-100-ivermectin-studies-a-summary/
AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/ai-trains-on-kids-photos-even-when-parents-use-strict-privacy-settings/
US Spent A Record $140 Billion On Debt Interest In June:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-spent-record-140-billion-just-debt-interest-june-30-all-tax-revenues
Another Ten Year Delay for ITER Fusion:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/07/another-ten-year-delay-for-iter-fusion.html
About That Wind Farm Off Nantucket:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2024/07/31/about-that-wind-farm-off-nantucket-and-the-big-blade-that-just-kicked-the-bucket-n3792518
Hillary Clinton Is The Biggest Donor To Extremist Climate Protesters:
ernity.news/2024/08/02/it-turns-out-hillary-clinton-is-the-biggest-donor-to-extremist-climate-protesters-in-the-uk/
Microsoft Cuts DEI Team:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/microsoft-cuts-dei-team-no-longer-business-critical
Leading 'Trump Russia Hoax' Propagandist's Wife Indicted As Foreign Spy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ex-cia-wife-wapos-spy-hunter-max-boot-indicted-foreign-spy
My questions: Why did she bring a baby cow to the Olympics and how did it get hurt?
Poor calf.
*.*
A Jewish man wins a huge sum of money in the lottery and he is discussing with his wife what they will do with it.
His wife asks him what they should do with all these letters begging for money?
The man responds, "Keep sending them out."
*.*
Top 5 Signs your Baseball Team isn't going to the Playoffs:
MLB has banned games from being on TV, for reputation's sake.
Entire team usually quits after 6 innings.
6 players still hitting off a tee.
Owner thinking about trading entire team for a Sony Playstation 5.
New team flag: All-White!
*.*
There are a couple of small meteor showers underway for the next couple of weeks, just in case you're awake during the wee hours.
They call them the wee hours, because that's when I get up and wee.
*.*
Sending a text to the wrong person is considered the most embarrassing thing people can do.
I was obviously not included in this survey.
Quote of the Times;
It’s always fascinating to see how the biggest champions of “our democracy” are unelected elites whose number one priority is thwarting the genuine will of the people and taking advantage of their position to enrich themselves and their masters. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
General Syrsky Shocks With News of Russian Armor:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-72424-general-syrsky-shocks
Issue of the Times;
Solzhenitsyn Warned Us by Gary Saul Morson
The great Russian writer understood the West and predicted its future with frightening precision.
Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”
For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped.
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997.1 Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.
Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace “democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”
Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas? Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.
How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West] who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slavery?” Why do crudeness of thought and the repetition of ill-understood slogans pass for sophistication? “I couldn’t have imagined to what extreme degree the West desires to blind itself,” Solzhenitsyn told a London audience in 1976.
Those who have reflected on Soviet experience, Solzhenitsyn advised, readily discern “telltale signs by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical blackout that struck New York in 1977, he identified one such warning: “The center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.” What would he say if he had seen the Antifa riots following the murder of George Floyd or the cowardly responses to today’s university encampments?
Solzhenitsyn discovered the root cause of the West’s decline in its assumption, shared by almost everyone with any influence, that life’s purpose is individual happiness, from which it follows that freedom and democratic political institutions exist to make that goal easier to attain. And so elections usually turn on the growth of an already abundant economy. Could there be a view of life less worthy of human dignity? America’s Founders acknowledged a higher power, but now the most “advanced” people have succumbed to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”
Acknowledging nothing higher than themselves, people overlook the evil in human nature. Original sin, what’s that? Sophisticates laugh at phrases such as “the Evil Empire” or “the Axis of Evil” because “it has become embarrassing to appeal to age-old values.” And so “the concepts of Good and Evil have been ridiculed for several centuries…. They’ve been replaced by political or class categorizations.” Crime and other ills supposedly result from readily amendable social arrangements and will inevitably give way to progress.
Like the Soviets, Westerners speak of being “on the right side of history,” as if progress were guaranteed and what comes later will be necessarily better. How readily such thinking seduced early-20th-century Russian (and Weimar German) intellectuals! And how vulnerable it leaves us to underestimating the evil that human beings can commit! “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we are being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life” and our moral sense. People cannot even understand evil unless they recognize that it “resides in each individual heart before it enters a political system.”
“As for Progress,” Solzhenitsyn replied to self-styled progressives, “there can only be one true kind: the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individual persons, the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” For the hedonist, death looms as the terrible cessation of pleasures, but for spiritual people it is proof that, as Pierre, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, enthuses as he points to the sky: “We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on the scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole.” Or as Solzhenitsyn argued in his Harvard commencement address: “If as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not a search for the best way to obtain material goods. . . . It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life’s journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”
People can accomplish such moral growth not by self-indulgence but by its opposite, self-restraint or, as Solzhenitsyn also called it, “self-limitation.” Without that, they remain mired in the world of things and unable to see beyond the present moment. Après moi le déluge.
“If we don’t learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” Solzhenitsyn insisted, “we, mankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.” Voicing the overriding lesson of the Russian literary tradition, Solzhenitsyn told Westerners: “if personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay…. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not in seizing but in refusing to seize: in other words, in self-limitation.”
The spiritual malaise of hedonism fatally weakens a society by leaving it unable to defend itself. “The most striking feature that an outside observer discerns in the West today,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in the Harvard address, is “a decline in courage,” which “is particularly noticeable in the ruling and intellectual elites,” presumably including his Harvard audience. Amid an abundance of material goods, “why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good, and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as-yet distant land?” People naturally say, “Let someone else risk his life.” European powers “bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more remains for a prosperous life.” (Thirty years later, few European countries not on the Russian border meet the agreed-upon defense expenditure of 2 percent of GDP.) America bases its security primarily on its formidable arsenal, Solzhenitsyn noted, but weapons are never enough without “stout hearts and steadfast men.”
One step beyond unwillingness to defend one’s country is actual hatred of it. I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when I learned of campus mobs this year shouting “Death to America!” For Solzhenitsyn, that is where the cult of individual happiness, sooner or later, is bound to lead. Facing the slightest frustration, forced to endure a modicum of adversity, or exposed to a world of contingency and misfortune, those educated to regard individual good fortune as their due seek someone to blame. They readily embrace any fashionable ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors, the innocent good people and the implacably evil. But as Solzhenitsyn famously observed in The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil runs not between groups but “through every human heart.”
Why worry about external enemies when the real threat supposedly comes from another group or party at home? “Or why restrain oneself from burning hatred,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “whatever its basis—race, class, or manic ideology?” As in the French and Russian Revolutions, such anger feeds on itself. “Atheist teachers are rearing a younger generation in a spirit of hatred toward their own society.” From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to verify Solzhenitsyn’s prediction that “the flames of hatred” against one another are bound to intensify.
Society tears itself apart. Turning all questions into a matter of absolute rights makes amicable com-promise impossible, and it is the most privileged peo-ple, shielded from life’s inevitable disappointments, who are the most inclined to such thinking. Those raised in gated communities and preparing for lucrative professions are the first to express resentment and complain they feel “unsafe.” As Solzhenitsyn anticipated, “the broader the personal freedoms, the higher the level of social well-being or even affluence—the more vehement, paradoxically, this blind hatred” of America.
The specter—or rather, the zombie—of Marxism has returned because it divides the world into the damned and the saved. They need not be “the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat” but can be any pair that conveniently presents itself. To the amazement of those who only recently escaped such thinking, “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.”
Solzhenitsyn asked: Why does one country blindly embrace another’s catastrophic mistakes? Why can’t those mistakes become a cautionary lesson? “This inability to understand someone else’s faraway grief,” he pleads, “threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.”
Surely there must be some way “to overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others often passes him by without profit”! And in fact, there is: art, and especially literature.
Great literature has the power, he explained in his Nobel Prize lecture, to “impress upon an obstinate human being someone else’s far-off sorrows or joys” and to “give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions that he’s never himself experienced.” He went on: “Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another’s life experience … and allows us to assimilate it as our own.” Nothing else possesses literature’s “miraculous power” to overcome the barriers of language, custom, and social structure and thereby communicate “the experience of an entire nation to another nation that hasn’t undergone such a difficult, decades-long collective experience.” Literature “could save an entire nation from a redundant” and self-destructive course.
Solzhenitsyn’s audience must have wondered: But surely novelists can err, mislead, or even lie like everyone else! Isn’t that what Soviet socialist realist, “Party-minded” writers actually did? Here it is helpful to remember that in the Russian tradition not everything called a novel or poem qualifies as “literature.” Writing that lies or lacks compassion for those who suffer cannot belong to the canon. As Dmitri Likhachev, the foremost scholar of medieval Russian literature, explained:
Literature is the conscience of a society, its soul. The honor and merit of a writer consists in defending truth and the right to that truth under the most unfavorable circumstances…. Can you really consider literature literature, or a writer a writer if they side-step the truth, if they silence or try to falsify it? Literature which does not evoke a pang of conscience is already a lie. And to lie in literature, you will agree, is the worst kind of lying.
When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, also a Nobel Prize winner, praised the Soviet government’s imprisonment of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the editor and poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky, joined by novelist Lydia Chukovskaia and others, expelled him from “Russian literature.” “Sholokhov is now a former writer,” Tvardovsky asserted.
The most that ordinary people can do when a totalitarian regime blankets them with lies, Solzhenitsyn explained, is not to participate: “Let that come into the world—only not through me.” But writers can do more: “It is within their power … to defeat the lie! …The lie can prevail against much in the world, but never against art.”
Why exactly can a genuine novel not lie? What prompts Solzhenitsyn to deem “the persuasiveness of a true work of art irrefutable” and declare that “it prevails even over a resisting heart”? The answer is that a novel tests ideas as political speeches, journalistic articles, and philosophical systems do not.
If an author implausibly makes a character assert or do something just because a political position requires it, readers will sense the falsity. They will recognize that the assertion comes from the author’s prefabricated ideology and does not arise from the character’s experience. It seems fake, forced, out of character. Analogous tests pertain to other artistic forms, which display their own kinds of proof and disproof. That is why “a true work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced concepts do not survive their trial by image; both concept and image crumble, and turn out feeble, pale, convincing no one.”
Genuine works of art based on truth “attract us to themselves powerfully, and no one ever—even centuries later—will step forth to refute them.” They become classics. When Dostoevsky’s famously stated that “beauty will save the world,” he meant that even if regimes crush truth and goodness, “the intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked-for shoots of Beauty will force their way through… therefore fulfilling the task of all three.”
This view of art as something sacred made Solzhenitsyn highly impatient with the “falsely understood avant-gardism” of certain kinds of modernism and postmodernism. As he explains in his speech “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” delivered in New York in 1993, cleverness alone ultimately proves trivial and, at times, destructive. “Before erupting on the streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic [Russian] revolution had erupted on the pages of the artistic and literary journals of Bohemian circles. It is there we first heard…[of] the sweeping away of all ethical codes and religions.” Even the most talented “futurists,” ensnared by a false revolutionism, demanded the destruction of “the Racines, Murillos, and Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls’” while calling for the Russian literary classics to be “‘thrown overboard from the ship of modernity’.”
Decades later, some Russian writers of the Brezhnev era embraced postmodernist relativism: “Yes, they say, Communist dogma was a great lie—but then again, absolute truths don’t exist anyhow, and it’s hardly worthwhile trying to find them.” In this way, the masterpieces of Russian fiction became the object of condescending scorn.
And so, in one sweeping gesture of alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so today it’s once again fashionable in our country to ridicule, debunk, and throw overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion.
Even more than Russia, Solzhenitsyn said, the West has embraced this shallow relativism. The most advanced theories teach that “there is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, ‘the world as a text.’” Postmodern literature purports to “play,” but this is “not the Mozartian playfulness of a universe overflowing with joy—but a forced playing upon the strings of emptiness.”
In literature as in life, “nothing can be fashioned on a neglect of higher meanings.” No doubt about it, Solzhenitsyn maintained, the world is going through a profound and accelerating spiritual crisis, and its only hope—great literature—is betraying its mission. In a rare moment of hopefulness, Solzhenitsyn found it “hard to believe that we’ll allow this to occur.” He said, “Even in Russia, so terribly ill right now—we wait and hope that, after the coma and period of silence, we shall feel the reawakening of Russian literature, and witness the subsequent arrival of fresh new forces” that will spiritually uplift the world. But only if people return to “higher meaning.”
If Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about their society’s collapse irritated Westerners, his exalted view of literature struck them as too naive to take seriously. How many Americans regard novels as supremely important, let alone redemptive? Today, as literature departments “decolonize” the curriculum, fewer and fewer become acquainted with the greatest works at all.
More and more, students view literature as what they teach—or rather, used to teach—in required courses. Literature no longer has sufficient prestige to attract the best minds, and so the process of decline accelerates. Who reads contemporary poetry, and what timeless American novels have appeared in the past half century?
What’s more, young people increasingly lack the patience that great literature demands. They surf, they scan, they tweet. So how likely is it that, as Solzhenitsyn hoped, literature would transmit the experience needed to avoid a disastrous future?
When a country disparages the classics, it invites what Russians experienced as a “seventy-year long ice age.” People imprison themselves in the present moment and, in the name of freedom, enslave themselves to a single way of seeing the world. Wisdom earned by very different experiences seems increasingly irrelevant.
At the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn directly addressed those elites most resistant to his warning:
All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.
News of the Times;
Japanese oncologist:
https://expose-news.com/2024/07/03/japanese-oncologist-i-didnt-have-a-covid-vaccine/
3 Palestinian terror suspects caught:
https://nypost.com/2024/07/28/us-news/palestinian-terror-suspects-caught-after-crossing-illegally/
San Francisco McDonald's Closes:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/06/24/san-francisco-mcdonalds-closes-guess-why-n3790826
Navy Will No Longer Require Sailors to Pass Physical Fitness Tests:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/06/in-latest-blow-to-military-effectiveness-u-s-navy-will-no-longer-require-sailors-to-pass-physical-fitness-tests/
Arrested on Election Fraud Charges, Released Without Bail:
https://resistthemainstream.com/dem-campaigners-arrested-on-election-fraud-charges-released-without-bail/
Foreign Nationals Probing Military Bases:
https://pjmedia.com/ashleymccully/2024/07/05/concerning-trend-foreign-nationals-probing-military-bases-homes-n4929457
SpaceX May Save Stranded Boeing Starliner Crew At ISS:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/greater-50-50-chance-spacex-may-save-stranded-boeing-starliner-crew-iss
Send This Article to People Who Say “Ivermectin Doesn’t Work:
https://brownstone.org/articles/over-100-ivermectin-studies-a-summary/
AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/ai-trains-on-kids-photos-even-when-parents-use-strict-privacy-settings/
US Spent A Record $140 Billion On Debt Interest In June:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-spent-record-140-billion-just-debt-interest-june-30-all-tax-revenues
Another Ten Year Delay for ITER Fusion:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/07/another-ten-year-delay-for-iter-fusion.html
About That Wind Farm Off Nantucket:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2024/07/31/about-that-wind-farm-off-nantucket-and-the-big-blade-that-just-kicked-the-bucket-n3792518
Hillary Clinton Is The Biggest Donor To Extremist Climate Protesters:
ernity.news/2024/08/02/it-turns-out-hillary-clinton-is-the-biggest-donor-to-extremist-climate-protesters-in-the-uk/
Microsoft Cuts DEI Team:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/microsoft-cuts-dei-team-no-longer-business-critical
Leading 'Trump Russia Hoax' Propagandist's Wife Indicted As Foreign Spy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ex-cia-wife-wapos-spy-hunter-max-boot-indicted-foreign-spy
Abinader?
This Summer, the London Zoo is teaching some baby penguins how to swim.
My question: where are the parents?
*.*
Top 5 Signs you Really Need this Friday!
The Co-Worker Pool only had you making it to Thursday.
You're wearing a shirt that says, "I really need this Friday".
You first thought it was Friday on Monday.
This week has felt like one, big 40-hour day.
When you glanced at the calendar, you wept.
*.*
In a groundbreaking revelation that has left the aviation industry buzzing, a Boeing 737 plane has bravely come out as both Black and Gay, securing itself a unique status exempting it from certain safety regulations.
The announcement, made during a press conference at the Boeing headquarters, saw the aircraft adorned with rainbow-colored wings and a fresh coat of paint to reflect its newfound identity. The plane, now affectionately known as “RainbowJet,” declared it was proud to be at the forefront of diversity and inclusivity in the aviation world.
In a surprising turn of events, regulatory authorities swiftly responded by granting RainbowJet a special exemption from a range of safety protocols, citing the need to support and uplift marginalized aircraft in the industry.
“We believe in celebrating diversity, even among our planes,” said FAA spokesperson Avia Tionary, who struggled to keep a straight face while making the announcement. “RainbowJet has shown incredible courage in sharing its identity, and we want to encourage other planes to follow suit.”
The move has sparked mixed reactions within the aviation community. Some applaud the industry for its commitment to inclusivity, while others question whether safety regulations should be influenced by an aircraft’s sexual orientation and racial identity.
RainbowJet, now an icon for progressive planes everywhere, took to the skies with an extra spring in its turbines. Passengers boarding the plane were greeted by a cheerful announcement celebrating diversity, accompanied by a dance routine performed by the flight attendants in honor of their newly empowered aircraft.
Critics argue that while diversity and inclusion are values, exempting a plane from safety regulations based on its identity may not be the wisest course of action.
*.*
Top 5 Signs you have a Serious Problem with Saying NO!:
Just ask any of your five wives.
You can say "Yes" in 40+ languages.
You're the poster child for Over-schedulers Anonymous.
Of the 48 hours this weekend, you've scheduled 49 of them.
You're president of 29 clubs.
*.*
Fried potato cakes are coming back to Arby's after being gone from the menu for three years.
Because we're just not eating enough cakes.
Quote of the Times;
"I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts it is more bloody than either." - John Adams
Link of the Times;
The Spoken History of a Global Language:
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
Issue of the Times;
Are Mass Deportations Possible? the Case of the Dominican Republic by Eric Striker
Birthright citizenship is repealed. Special agents round up illegal immigrants at construction and agricultural work sites to be instantly sent home. A concrete wall is constructed and garrisoned with soldiers surveilling the border with drones and radar.
These are not the empty promises of Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni or the British Tories, they are the reality of Luis Abinader’s Dominican Republic.
The bloody history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic has created a unique racial and ethnic dynamic on Hispaniola that continues to influence the latter’s politics.
Following the success of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines decreed in 1804 that all white people on the island were to be killed on sight. Following the success of this gruesome act of genocide, Haitian forces sought to export their revolution by invading the Spanish side of the island, which had a much smaller, sparse population, though they encountered resistance in this crusade due to the high percentage of mixed race and white people living there. Dominicans racially classified as white, which included some light-skinned African-mixed people, were stripped of their citizenship and land by the Haitian constitution and forced out of their cattle ranching trade to work for blacks in slavery conditions in the cash crop industry.
A group of multiracial and white Dominican nationalists called the Trinitarios, led by Spanish descendant Juan Pablo Duarte, led a rebellion against Haitian dictator Charles Rivière-Hérard and expelled his forces from the eastern portion of the island in 1844, establishing the divide that exists today. Though the occupying army was numerically superior to the Dominicans, Rivière-Hérard was himself undermined from within by an uprising of Haitian blacks enraged by the fact that their leader himself had some European ancestry.
Today, the trauma of Haitian rule continues to inform Dominican identity. This national sentiment helped Abinader, of Spanish and Lebanese ancestry, successfully win the 2020 election on a platform of ending Haitian migration and cutting through red tape to deport those already in the country. It was estimated at the time of Abinader’s victory that Haitians, most of them in the country illegally, numbered somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million out of the Dominican Republic’s 11 million population.
Soon after taking office, Abinader began preparations to keep his promise. His Modern Revolutionary Party, with consensus support including from opposition groups, passed a law in 2022 to form a new immigration enforcement police unit that would specialize in targeting job sites known to hire Haitian illegals for unannounced mass round ups. In 2013, a constitutional reassessment removed birthright citizenship from all those born to foreign parents since 1929, which granted the Dominican government the powers needed to detain and remove 170,000 Haitians from the country by the end of 2022.
The next year, what the US State Department has condemned as “mass deportations” reached unprecedented levels. That year, 250,000 Haitians living within Dominican territory were identified by immigration authorities and expelled, while an additional 200,000 voluntarily repatriated. A substantial portion of these Haitians had their citizenship retroactively revoked under the 2013 constitutional amendment, which means they are not recognized as either Dominican or Haitian citizens, but this did not stop Abinader from sending them back at a rate of 50,000 immigrants per month. In one instance during this crackdown, 20,000 Haitians were deported in a time span of nine days. The small and relatively poor Dominican Republic now has one of the most active and prolific immigration enforcement systems on the planet.
From January to April in 2024, the rate of deportations fell to a total of 30,000 in four months, but this reduced level of enforcement is more of a testament to the government’s effectiveness in removing Haitian migrants in previous years rather than any dampening of their burning enthusiasm. Last May, the Abinader government completed a 250-mile concrete wall, modeled after Israel’s barrier to Syria in the Golan Heights (which, in the Israeli case, the United States supports), permanently preventing Haitians from illegally crossing into the country. The Dominican government has adamantly refused to host any Haitian refugees in its territory and has rejected demands from the UN that it grant citizenship or residency permits to multi-generational migrants regardless of how long they have resided in the country.
Within the Dominican landscape, Abinader’s policies are uncontroversial. He was recently re-elected in a landslide and all of the major parties support his anti-migrant efforts. The opposition to these policies is restricted largely to outsiders: Washington, the United Nations, and various foreign funded non-governmental organizations who have sought to undermine the effort.
Much like in America and Western Europe, business interests in the tourism, construction and agricultural sectors warned from the onset that preventing them from hiring Haitian immigrant labor would cause the economy to go into recession and inflation to skyrocket. These predictions were proven false. Three years into the mass expulsion program, the Dominican economy is thriving while inflation has been tamed.
For over a decade, the US government and its “civil society” allies have attempted to browbeat the Dominicans out of enforcing its immigration laws and protecting its border. A 2015 Atlantic article demonizing the country by Jonathan Katz helped trigger this moral panic from the start, when deportations were comparatively much lower. A deluge of negative press coverage and accusations of “racism” and “Anti-Haitianism” from the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on — along with official complaints condemning the Dominican Republic by the US State Department — have flooded the conversation uninterrupted for the past decade. In 2023, the Jewish-controlled Associated Press published a pack of largely anonymous accusations intended to demonize Dominican immigration enforcement authorities as rapists.
On the street level, a local asset of the American Jewish World Service purporting to represent Dominicans of Haitian descent, Reconoci.do, has sought to import American-style anti-white racism to the country, albeit with little success. A 2020 march in Santo Domingo organized by Reconoci.do dedicated to George Floyd was physically stopped in its tracks by the Antigua Orden Dominicano (Old Dominican Order), a Dominican nationalist shirt movement modeled after 1930s European fascist groups. AOD has grown in numbers and popularity by engaging in street battles against Reconoci.do and other foreign sponsored activist groups, making it difficult for the racial left to organize or establish a political foothold in the country. The Abinader government has faced repeated demands to proscribe AOD as a hate group, but has so far ignored these requests.
The Dominican Republic, once a colony of the United States, has in recent years become highly assertive in the face of Washington harassment. Much like in the case of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, these figures of the so-called global south have enjoyed greater space to govern according to their own needs and values thanks to declining American imperial influence.
Though the Dominicans are closely aligned with the United States, they have gained the upper hand in relations due to the specter of China and Russia gaining another ally near American soil.
The Dominican government’s previous leader, Danilo Medina, began a campaign to pull away from the United States, such as a 2018 move to end the country’s recognition of Taiwan and declaring it Chinese territory in exchange for Beijing’s investment and infrastructure projects. This drift towards China provoked a rare visit from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, only the third visit from such a post since 1961, who lectured the Dominicans on the importance of democracy and offered desperate concessions in order to get them to stay Washington’s geopolitical course.
Abinader has been friendlier to the US than his predecessor, citing the nation’s immense transactional economic privileges granted to them under the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement. Abinader has temporarily paused some Chinese projects in the country that were the subject of Washington’s anger, but has not cancelled them, leading some to believe he is leveraging his country’s strategic position to work the relationship on the Dominican Republic’s terms.
In September 2022, the Dominican government declared that it would retain good relations with Russia, a major source of tourism to the country, during “good and bad times,” a reference to the G7’s attempt at ostracizing the nation over the Ukraine war. Dominican officials even offered to organize special flights to their country to help Russian citizens circumvent bans from entering countries that traditionally serve as layovers. Vladimir Putin appears to be paying special attention to US-Dominican relations in hopes of capitalizing on tensions, as seen in his offers to drastically expand ties with the Caribbean nation in recent years, including aiding their oil exploration program, which American oil companies currently control.
A month after the meeting between the Russian and Dominican diplomats, the US embassy published a loaded “alert” addressed to “dark-skinned” Americans, instructing them to avoid visiting the Dominican Republic due to fears that they would be confused for Haitians and arbitrarily detained on immigration grounds. No example of such an incident having ever occurred to justify such fearmongering was provided.
The Dominican government responded to this attack on their tourism industry by summoning the US ambassador and demanding a retraction. The strategic importance of the Dominican Republic to US interests was revealed when Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman personally visited the country and humbly acquiesced to the Dominican demand that she record a video promoting their tourism industry to Americans as an act of contrition.
Both Bukele’s El Salvador and Abinader’s Dominican Republic enjoy massive transactional benefits from their relationship with the United States — retaining good will with America makes intuitive sense for them —but by showing they have other options, they have succeeded in implementing their domestic agendas in spite of attempts at meddling from their supposed ally.
The Dominican war on immigration is unapologetically motivated by a desire to protect the interests of their ethnic majority, who do not want the anarchy of Haiti to spill over into their relatively functional country. If the Dominican Republic can end illegal immigration and deport 5% of the population in a span of three years, then so can advanced Western nations.
News of the Times;
Moscow Breaks World Record:
https://movingtorussia.substack.com/p/moscow-breaks-world-record-for-most
Satan Asks Democrats To Tone Down All The Evil:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnN1a8nNCwA&ab_channel=TheBabylonBee
Boeing 757 Loses Wheel, 737 Aborts Takeoff Due To Tire Failure:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/week-us-aviation-boeing-757-loses-wheel-737-aborts-takeoff-due-tire-failure-near-miss
Hawaii Airport Forced to Evacuate:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/hawaii-airport-forced-evacuate-after-two-grenades-found/
You Won't Be Surprised:
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/06/18/you-wont-be-surprised-to-learn-what-group-is-responsible-for-ove-34-of-rapes-in-paris-n3790461
California Legalized Drugs. Cartels Took It Over:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20723/california-legalized-drugs-cartels
Announcement extrajudicial criminal trial:
https://exsurgedomine.it/240620-attendite-eng/
Tiger Woods Appeared In Magazine To Avoid Leaked Pictures With His Mistress:
https://www.outkick.com/sports/tiger-woods-appeared-in-magazine-to-avoid-leaked-pictures-with-his-mistress
Remote Amazon tribe finally connects to internet:
https://nypost.com/2024/06/04/lifestyle/remote-amazon-tribe-connects-to-elon-musks-starlink-internet-service-become-hooked-on-porn-social-media/
Leftists Eating Their Own:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/leftists-eating-their-own-jimmy-kimmel-live-forced/
Snopes has finally gotten around to debunking the ‘very fine people’ hoax:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/snopes_has_finally_gotten_around_to_debunking_the_very_fine_people_hoax.html
50% of Students Can't Read at Grade Level:
https://hotair.com/walter-hudson/2024/06/23/resistance-public-educators-pushing-back-against-parents-as-50-of-students-cant-read-at-grade-level-n3790507
We Can’t Protect Kids Without Fathers:
https://pjmedia.com/terry-schilling/2024/06/24/we-cant-protect-kids-without-fathers-n4930104
Blood on the Wine Dark Sea:
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/blood-on-the-wine-dark-sea
Remember when the FBI shared photos of the docs at Mar-A-Lago?
https://notthebee.com/article/remember-when-the-fbi-shared-the-photos-of-the-docs-trump-had-at-mar-a-lago-yeah-they-added-the-cover-pages-themselves-for-show
My question: where are the parents?
*.*
Top 5 Signs you Really Need this Friday!
The Co-Worker Pool only had you making it to Thursday.
You're wearing a shirt that says, "I really need this Friday".
You first thought it was Friday on Monday.
This week has felt like one, big 40-hour day.
When you glanced at the calendar, you wept.
*.*
In a groundbreaking revelation that has left the aviation industry buzzing, a Boeing 737 plane has bravely come out as both Black and Gay, securing itself a unique status exempting it from certain safety regulations.
The announcement, made during a press conference at the Boeing headquarters, saw the aircraft adorned with rainbow-colored wings and a fresh coat of paint to reflect its newfound identity. The plane, now affectionately known as “RainbowJet,” declared it was proud to be at the forefront of diversity and inclusivity in the aviation world.
In a surprising turn of events, regulatory authorities swiftly responded by granting RainbowJet a special exemption from a range of safety protocols, citing the need to support and uplift marginalized aircraft in the industry.
“We believe in celebrating diversity, even among our planes,” said FAA spokesperson Avia Tionary, who struggled to keep a straight face while making the announcement. “RainbowJet has shown incredible courage in sharing its identity, and we want to encourage other planes to follow suit.”
The move has sparked mixed reactions within the aviation community. Some applaud the industry for its commitment to inclusivity, while others question whether safety regulations should be influenced by an aircraft’s sexual orientation and racial identity.
RainbowJet, now an icon for progressive planes everywhere, took to the skies with an extra spring in its turbines. Passengers boarding the plane were greeted by a cheerful announcement celebrating diversity, accompanied by a dance routine performed by the flight attendants in honor of their newly empowered aircraft.
Critics argue that while diversity and inclusion are values, exempting a plane from safety regulations based on its identity may not be the wisest course of action.
*.*
Top 5 Signs you have a Serious Problem with Saying NO!:
Just ask any of your five wives.
You can say "Yes" in 40+ languages.
You're the poster child for Over-schedulers Anonymous.
Of the 48 hours this weekend, you've scheduled 49 of them.
You're president of 29 clubs.
*.*
Fried potato cakes are coming back to Arby's after being gone from the menu for three years.
Because we're just not eating enough cakes.
Quote of the Times;
"I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts it is more bloody than either." - John Adams
Link of the Times;
The Spoken History of a Global Language:
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
Issue of the Times;
Are Mass Deportations Possible? the Case of the Dominican Republic by Eric Striker
Birthright citizenship is repealed. Special agents round up illegal immigrants at construction and agricultural work sites to be instantly sent home. A concrete wall is constructed and garrisoned with soldiers surveilling the border with drones and radar.
These are not the empty promises of Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni or the British Tories, they are the reality of Luis Abinader’s Dominican Republic.
The bloody history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic has created a unique racial and ethnic dynamic on Hispaniola that continues to influence the latter’s politics.
Following the success of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines decreed in 1804 that all white people on the island were to be killed on sight. Following the success of this gruesome act of genocide, Haitian forces sought to export their revolution by invading the Spanish side of the island, which had a much smaller, sparse population, though they encountered resistance in this crusade due to the high percentage of mixed race and white people living there. Dominicans racially classified as white, which included some light-skinned African-mixed people, were stripped of their citizenship and land by the Haitian constitution and forced out of their cattle ranching trade to work for blacks in slavery conditions in the cash crop industry.
A group of multiracial and white Dominican nationalists called the Trinitarios, led by Spanish descendant Juan Pablo Duarte, led a rebellion against Haitian dictator Charles Rivière-Hérard and expelled his forces from the eastern portion of the island in 1844, establishing the divide that exists today. Though the occupying army was numerically superior to the Dominicans, Rivière-Hérard was himself undermined from within by an uprising of Haitian blacks enraged by the fact that their leader himself had some European ancestry.
Today, the trauma of Haitian rule continues to inform Dominican identity. This national sentiment helped Abinader, of Spanish and Lebanese ancestry, successfully win the 2020 election on a platform of ending Haitian migration and cutting through red tape to deport those already in the country. It was estimated at the time of Abinader’s victory that Haitians, most of them in the country illegally, numbered somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million out of the Dominican Republic’s 11 million population.
Soon after taking office, Abinader began preparations to keep his promise. His Modern Revolutionary Party, with consensus support including from opposition groups, passed a law in 2022 to form a new immigration enforcement police unit that would specialize in targeting job sites known to hire Haitian illegals for unannounced mass round ups. In 2013, a constitutional reassessment removed birthright citizenship from all those born to foreign parents since 1929, which granted the Dominican government the powers needed to detain and remove 170,000 Haitians from the country by the end of 2022.
The next year, what the US State Department has condemned as “mass deportations” reached unprecedented levels. That year, 250,000 Haitians living within Dominican territory were identified by immigration authorities and expelled, while an additional 200,000 voluntarily repatriated. A substantial portion of these Haitians had their citizenship retroactively revoked under the 2013 constitutional amendment, which means they are not recognized as either Dominican or Haitian citizens, but this did not stop Abinader from sending them back at a rate of 50,000 immigrants per month. In one instance during this crackdown, 20,000 Haitians were deported in a time span of nine days. The small and relatively poor Dominican Republic now has one of the most active and prolific immigration enforcement systems on the planet.
From January to April in 2024, the rate of deportations fell to a total of 30,000 in four months, but this reduced level of enforcement is more of a testament to the government’s effectiveness in removing Haitian migrants in previous years rather than any dampening of their burning enthusiasm. Last May, the Abinader government completed a 250-mile concrete wall, modeled after Israel’s barrier to Syria in the Golan Heights (which, in the Israeli case, the United States supports), permanently preventing Haitians from illegally crossing into the country. The Dominican government has adamantly refused to host any Haitian refugees in its territory and has rejected demands from the UN that it grant citizenship or residency permits to multi-generational migrants regardless of how long they have resided in the country.
Within the Dominican landscape, Abinader’s policies are uncontroversial. He was recently re-elected in a landslide and all of the major parties support his anti-migrant efforts. The opposition to these policies is restricted largely to outsiders: Washington, the United Nations, and various foreign funded non-governmental organizations who have sought to undermine the effort.
Much like in America and Western Europe, business interests in the tourism, construction and agricultural sectors warned from the onset that preventing them from hiring Haitian immigrant labor would cause the economy to go into recession and inflation to skyrocket. These predictions were proven false. Three years into the mass expulsion program, the Dominican economy is thriving while inflation has been tamed.
For over a decade, the US government and its “civil society” allies have attempted to browbeat the Dominicans out of enforcing its immigration laws and protecting its border. A 2015 Atlantic article demonizing the country by Jonathan Katz helped trigger this moral panic from the start, when deportations were comparatively much lower. A deluge of negative press coverage and accusations of “racism” and “Anti-Haitianism” from the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on — along with official complaints condemning the Dominican Republic by the US State Department — have flooded the conversation uninterrupted for the past decade. In 2023, the Jewish-controlled Associated Press published a pack of largely anonymous accusations intended to demonize Dominican immigration enforcement authorities as rapists.
On the street level, a local asset of the American Jewish World Service purporting to represent Dominicans of Haitian descent, Reconoci.do, has sought to import American-style anti-white racism to the country, albeit with little success. A 2020 march in Santo Domingo organized by Reconoci.do dedicated to George Floyd was physically stopped in its tracks by the Antigua Orden Dominicano (Old Dominican Order), a Dominican nationalist shirt movement modeled after 1930s European fascist groups. AOD has grown in numbers and popularity by engaging in street battles against Reconoci.do and other foreign sponsored activist groups, making it difficult for the racial left to organize or establish a political foothold in the country. The Abinader government has faced repeated demands to proscribe AOD as a hate group, but has so far ignored these requests.
The Dominican Republic, once a colony of the United States, has in recent years become highly assertive in the face of Washington harassment. Much like in the case of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, these figures of the so-called global south have enjoyed greater space to govern according to their own needs and values thanks to declining American imperial influence.
Though the Dominicans are closely aligned with the United States, they have gained the upper hand in relations due to the specter of China and Russia gaining another ally near American soil.
The Dominican government’s previous leader, Danilo Medina, began a campaign to pull away from the United States, such as a 2018 move to end the country’s recognition of Taiwan and declaring it Chinese territory in exchange for Beijing’s investment and infrastructure projects. This drift towards China provoked a rare visit from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, only the third visit from such a post since 1961, who lectured the Dominicans on the importance of democracy and offered desperate concessions in order to get them to stay Washington’s geopolitical course.
Abinader has been friendlier to the US than his predecessor, citing the nation’s immense transactional economic privileges granted to them under the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement. Abinader has temporarily paused some Chinese projects in the country that were the subject of Washington’s anger, but has not cancelled them, leading some to believe he is leveraging his country’s strategic position to work the relationship on the Dominican Republic’s terms.
In September 2022, the Dominican government declared that it would retain good relations with Russia, a major source of tourism to the country, during “good and bad times,” a reference to the G7’s attempt at ostracizing the nation over the Ukraine war. Dominican officials even offered to organize special flights to their country to help Russian citizens circumvent bans from entering countries that traditionally serve as layovers. Vladimir Putin appears to be paying special attention to US-Dominican relations in hopes of capitalizing on tensions, as seen in his offers to drastically expand ties with the Caribbean nation in recent years, including aiding their oil exploration program, which American oil companies currently control.
A month after the meeting between the Russian and Dominican diplomats, the US embassy published a loaded “alert” addressed to “dark-skinned” Americans, instructing them to avoid visiting the Dominican Republic due to fears that they would be confused for Haitians and arbitrarily detained on immigration grounds. No example of such an incident having ever occurred to justify such fearmongering was provided.
The Dominican government responded to this attack on their tourism industry by summoning the US ambassador and demanding a retraction. The strategic importance of the Dominican Republic to US interests was revealed when Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman personally visited the country and humbly acquiesced to the Dominican demand that she record a video promoting their tourism industry to Americans as an act of contrition.
Both Bukele’s El Salvador and Abinader’s Dominican Republic enjoy massive transactional benefits from their relationship with the United States — retaining good will with America makes intuitive sense for them —but by showing they have other options, they have succeeded in implementing their domestic agendas in spite of attempts at meddling from their supposed ally.
The Dominican war on immigration is unapologetically motivated by a desire to protect the interests of their ethnic majority, who do not want the anarchy of Haiti to spill over into their relatively functional country. If the Dominican Republic can end illegal immigration and deport 5% of the population in a span of three years, then so can advanced Western nations.
News of the Times;
Moscow Breaks World Record:
https://movingtorussia.substack.com/p/moscow-breaks-world-record-for-most
Satan Asks Democrats To Tone Down All The Evil:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnN1a8nNCwA&ab_channel=TheBabylonBee
Boeing 757 Loses Wheel, 737 Aborts Takeoff Due To Tire Failure:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/week-us-aviation-boeing-757-loses-wheel-737-aborts-takeoff-due-tire-failure-near-miss
Hawaii Airport Forced to Evacuate:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/hawaii-airport-forced-evacuate-after-two-grenades-found/
You Won't Be Surprised:
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/06/18/you-wont-be-surprised-to-learn-what-group-is-responsible-for-ove-34-of-rapes-in-paris-n3790461
California Legalized Drugs. Cartels Took It Over:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20723/california-legalized-drugs-cartels
Announcement extrajudicial criminal trial:
https://exsurgedomine.it/240620-attendite-eng/
Tiger Woods Appeared In Magazine To Avoid Leaked Pictures With His Mistress:
https://www.outkick.com/sports/tiger-woods-appeared-in-magazine-to-avoid-leaked-pictures-with-his-mistress
Remote Amazon tribe finally connects to internet:
https://nypost.com/2024/06/04/lifestyle/remote-amazon-tribe-connects-to-elon-musks-starlink-internet-service-become-hooked-on-porn-social-media/
Leftists Eating Their Own:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/leftists-eating-their-own-jimmy-kimmel-live-forced/
Snopes has finally gotten around to debunking the ‘very fine people’ hoax:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/snopes_has_finally_gotten_around_to_debunking_the_very_fine_people_hoax.html
50% of Students Can't Read at Grade Level:
https://hotair.com/walter-hudson/2024/06/23/resistance-public-educators-pushing-back-against-parents-as-50-of-students-cant-read-at-grade-level-n3790507
We Can’t Protect Kids Without Fathers:
https://pjmedia.com/terry-schilling/2024/06/24/we-cant-protect-kids-without-fathers-n4930104
Blood on the Wine Dark Sea:
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/blood-on-the-wine-dark-sea
Remember when the FBI shared photos of the docs at Mar-A-Lago?
https://notthebee.com/article/remember-when-the-fbi-shared-the-photos-of-the-docs-trump-had-at-mar-a-lago-yeah-they-added-the-cover-pages-themselves-for-show
Soviet?
The number one question of the day: Is it 5pm yet?
*.*
Former NFL star Mark Schlereth says that Bill Belichick looks like an "absolute clown" dating a 23-year-old.
An extremely, incredibly happy clown, but still a clown.
*.*
It was different when we were kids.
In second grade, a teacher came in and gave us all a lecture about not smoking, and then they sent us over to arts and crafts...
To make ashtrays for Mother's Day.
*.*
Cup Noodles has come out with a new flavor; S'mores-flavored Ramen.
Can Lasagna Popsicles be far behind?
*.*
Mattel is starting to make their games color-blind accessible.
Traditionalists are seeing red.
Quote of the Times;
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” - Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s
Link of the Times;
Red Lines, Reality And Retards:
https://morgoth.substack.com/p/red-lines-reality-and-retards
Issue of the Times;
You Have No Idea How Soviet We Really Are by Helen Andrews
The historian Niall Ferguson launched his new column at the Free Press with a banger, “We’re All Soviets Now.” His comparison of the United States in 2024 to Russia in 1987 offended Jonah Goldberg and Noah Smith, among others, but their criticism of Ferguson gets it backwards. The only problem with his column is that it didn’t go far enough.
Ferguson’s points of similarity between modern America and late Soviet Russia are—to condense a column of substance to a bare list—gerontocratic leadership; bloated government; lack of trust in institutions; high death rates; and “a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.”
Good points, all of them, yet in each case Ferguson soft-pedals his argument.
In the case of the economy, for example, is the most Soviet thing about America really that our projected federal deficits exceed 5 percent of GDP, as Ferguson notes? Ferguson bemoans that the “insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process” represented by “the Biden administration’s ‘industrial policy.’”
Surely that’s small potatoes compared to the fact that one sixth of the American economy is devoted to health care, a sector where, as a recent piece by TAC’s own Jude Russo hilariously details, the numbers are all fake. The amount of money sloshing around insurers and hospitals is absolutely massive, yet the prices involved bear no relation to utility or even reality. In exchange for devoting such a big chunk of our economy to medicine, what do we get in exchange? The occasional miracle, and a lot of overtreated octogenarians and routine care at inflated costs.
Higher education is another incubus sitting atop the American economy. It employs 4 million people and is responsible for $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, yet a layman struggles to see where any value is being created at all, much less value proportionate to the expense. As with health care, higher ed produces a small number of genuine miracles—groundbreaking research or brilliant scholarship—dwarfed by a vast army of functionaries whose net value to society is, frankly, negative. Everyone can tell that the system is rotten, yet schools still have the power to squeeze middle-class parents for every penny they’re worth.
Beyond “eds and meds,” what other growth industries are politicians betting their states’ and cities’ future prosperity on? Legalized weed and gambling. That is New York’s plan for making up its post-pandemic revenue shortfall. Many states are banking on sports betting as a source of fresh taxes. Even if these vice industries created as much revenue as their advocates promised—and early evidence suggests that they do not—they would still be pernicious, destroying more value than they create.
The essence of a late Soviet economy is not that the state plays a big role. It is that the average citizen looks around and thinks, This can’t possibly continue forever. The whole system is fake and insane. That is why Ferguson is wrong to look for evidence for his thesis in budget projections rather than the industries like health care and higher ed, which are neither capitalist nor socialist but mutant combinations of the worst of each.
Ferguson rightly cites America’s “deaths of despair” as a symptom of decline. But one phrase that does not appear in his column is “birth rates.” That is the bigger clue that American society has lost the will to perpetuate itself. It is possible to downplay the declining life expectancy that Angus Deaton and Anne Case detected among White Americans as a temporary blip caused by specific policy errors, such as opioid overprescription. The fact that other European countries have not seen similar drops suggests that the causes may indeed be specific to America and remediable.
The fertility decline is a much bigger problem. It can be seen everywhere liberalism touches. It is apparently a fundamental side effect of our system. It represents a deep nihilism and desire for oblivion no less than alcoholism or suicide. And no one has any idea how to fix it.
The ideology that props up late Soviet America the way communism propped up the USSR is, obviously, “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Here, again, Ferguson points in the right direction but does not go far enough. He contrasts the promise of DEI, namely that it is “devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities,” with the reality that DEI programs “do nothing to help poor minorities.”
That is one downside of DEI. But surely a bigger one, which truly deserves to be called late Soviet, is that in 50 years the average American will no longer be able to count on his doctor being able to perform basic medical procedures or his plane not falling out of the sky.
It will take decades for these results to manifest, of course, but they are the inevitable result of the decline in standards being implemented in the name of DEI today. The Soviet economy lumbered along for decades, too, despite its intrinsic dysfunctions, and it even delivered a rising standard of living for much of that time period. That is the real late Soviet predicament: Everyone can see the disaster coming, yet no one seems to have the power to stop it.
We like to reassure ourselves that, if we were really in a late Soviet situation, we would know it. Think of Boris Yeltsin and his boggling at an American grocery store. The contrast between capitalist abundance and empty shelves at home was obvious. There is no equivalent experience for an American today, say the optimists. In fact, there may well be—just ask the many visitors who come back from East Asia with the impression that over there, at least, things work.
But set aside those comparisons for a moment, since, after all, there may be a Potemkin quality to those travelers’ impressions. The more important point is that the average Soviet citizen knew perfectly well that his consumer goods were inferior to America’s but had soothing excuses to reassure himself why his system was nevertheless superior. Long before Yeltsin’s trip to Texas, there was the “Kitchen Debate” between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959. The American National Exhibition in Moscow showcased the many labor-saving devices our housewives enjoyed. The response of the Russian public, far from being dazzled, was mockery.
“Is this the national exhibition of an immense country or the branch of a department store? Where is American science? Where is American production machinery? Can we really base our judgment of it on these lawn-mowers?” one woman told Izvestia.
“Is it possible that you think our mental outlook is restricted to everyday living only? Where is your industry? We expected the American Exhibition would show something grandiose, similar to Soviet sputniks…and you want to surprise us with the glitter of your kitchen pans,” one Russian wrote in the visitors’ book.
Khrushchev echoed the same argument: “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”
To an American reader seven decades later, these remarks sound lame and unconvincing. But rather than bask in our feelings of superiority, let us examine ourselves.
Think of your local CVS or Target. If you live in a big city, chances are that many items, from deodorant to laundry detergent, are under lock and key. Even with these precautions in place, shoplifters still wander the aisles, brazenly filling garbage bags and walking out. This is only one of the many ways the day-to-day experience of shopping has gotten worse in America, on top of inflation and declining product quality.
If a foreigner pointed out these problems and told you things were better where he came from, in Moscow or Beijing or Dubai, would you have a reply? Answers could be given to all of the above criticisms. Annoyances can be justified as the unfortunate cost of some worthier goal. But as you ponder the tradeoffs that might justify your city’s dysfunctions, stop occasionally and ponder whether your justifications are more convincing than the lady in Izvestia’s.
News of the Times;
Billionaire David Sacks Perfectly Describes:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/billionaire-david-sacks-perfectly-describes-what-democrats-biden/
Just Another Night In Gavin Newsom's California:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-just-another-night-gavin-newsoms-california
Kamala Harris' Financials Confirm What You Thought About Her Books:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/16/kamala-harris-financials-confirm-what-you-thought-about-her-books-n4929081
Gold Star families fume after Biden denies troop deaths:
https://nypost.com/2024/06/28/us-news/gold-star-families-react-after-biden-denies-troop-deaths-under-his-watch/
Eight Automakers Accused of Lying About Customer Data Protections:
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/news-blog/driving-dystopia-eight-automakers-accused-of-lying-about-customer-data-protections-44506987
Illegal Alien Car Crash That Never Made The Papers:
https://vdare.com/posts/an-illegal-alien-car-crash-that-never-made-the-papers
NY Governor Quietly Grants Clemency to Murderers:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/05/26/ny-governor-quietly-grants-clemency-to-murderers-n3789098
Asian powerhouse declares intention to join BRICS:
https://www.rt.com/news/598362-thailand-brics-letter-application/
US Fails to Hide the Slap:
https://english.almasirah.net.ye/post/40374/US-Fails-to-Hide-the-Slap-Yemen-s-Attack-on-the-Eisenhower-Echoes-Worldwide
8 Suspected Illegal Alien Terrorists Arrested:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/8-suspected-illegal-alien-terrorists-arrested-new-york-philadelphia-la
Louisiana Reaffirms Gold and Silver As Legal Tender:
https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2024/05/31/louisiana-reaffirms-gold-and-silver-as-legal-tender-003227
Duolingo bends to Russia’s LGBT demand:
https://www.rt.com/russia/598768-duolingo-roskomnadzor-gay-demand/
Coke is Confederate:
https://southernnation.org/groups/coke-is-confederate-coke-confederate-history-scv-scvchat/
Democrat Atlanta Prosecutor Jailed For Stealing $15 Million of Covid Funds:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/democrat-atlanta-prosecutor-jailed-stealing-15-million-covid/
John Leguizamo Complain About White People:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n7FAyV82IQ&ab_channel=PopCultureCrisis
*.*
Former NFL star Mark Schlereth says that Bill Belichick looks like an "absolute clown" dating a 23-year-old.
An extremely, incredibly happy clown, but still a clown.
*.*
It was different when we were kids.
In second grade, a teacher came in and gave us all a lecture about not smoking, and then they sent us over to arts and crafts...
To make ashtrays for Mother's Day.
*.*
Cup Noodles has come out with a new flavor; S'mores-flavored Ramen.
Can Lasagna Popsicles be far behind?
*.*
Mattel is starting to make their games color-blind accessible.
Traditionalists are seeing red.
Quote of the Times;
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” - Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s
Link of the Times;
Red Lines, Reality And Retards:
https://morgoth.substack.com/p/red-lines-reality-and-retards
Issue of the Times;
You Have No Idea How Soviet We Really Are by Helen Andrews
The historian Niall Ferguson launched his new column at the Free Press with a banger, “We’re All Soviets Now.” His comparison of the United States in 2024 to Russia in 1987 offended Jonah Goldberg and Noah Smith, among others, but their criticism of Ferguson gets it backwards. The only problem with his column is that it didn’t go far enough.
Ferguson’s points of similarity between modern America and late Soviet Russia are—to condense a column of substance to a bare list—gerontocratic leadership; bloated government; lack of trust in institutions; high death rates; and “a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.”
Good points, all of them, yet in each case Ferguson soft-pedals his argument.
In the case of the economy, for example, is the most Soviet thing about America really that our projected federal deficits exceed 5 percent of GDP, as Ferguson notes? Ferguson bemoans that the “insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process” represented by “the Biden administration’s ‘industrial policy.’”
Surely that’s small potatoes compared to the fact that one sixth of the American economy is devoted to health care, a sector where, as a recent piece by TAC’s own Jude Russo hilariously details, the numbers are all fake. The amount of money sloshing around insurers and hospitals is absolutely massive, yet the prices involved bear no relation to utility or even reality. In exchange for devoting such a big chunk of our economy to medicine, what do we get in exchange? The occasional miracle, and a lot of overtreated octogenarians and routine care at inflated costs.
Higher education is another incubus sitting atop the American economy. It employs 4 million people and is responsible for $1.6 trillion in student loan debt, yet a layman struggles to see where any value is being created at all, much less value proportionate to the expense. As with health care, higher ed produces a small number of genuine miracles—groundbreaking research or brilliant scholarship—dwarfed by a vast army of functionaries whose net value to society is, frankly, negative. Everyone can tell that the system is rotten, yet schools still have the power to squeeze middle-class parents for every penny they’re worth.
Beyond “eds and meds,” what other growth industries are politicians betting their states’ and cities’ future prosperity on? Legalized weed and gambling. That is New York’s plan for making up its post-pandemic revenue shortfall. Many states are banking on sports betting as a source of fresh taxes. Even if these vice industries created as much revenue as their advocates promised—and early evidence suggests that they do not—they would still be pernicious, destroying more value than they create.
The essence of a late Soviet economy is not that the state plays a big role. It is that the average citizen looks around and thinks, This can’t possibly continue forever. The whole system is fake and insane. That is why Ferguson is wrong to look for evidence for his thesis in budget projections rather than the industries like health care and higher ed, which are neither capitalist nor socialist but mutant combinations of the worst of each.
Ferguson rightly cites America’s “deaths of despair” as a symptom of decline. But one phrase that does not appear in his column is “birth rates.” That is the bigger clue that American society has lost the will to perpetuate itself. It is possible to downplay the declining life expectancy that Angus Deaton and Anne Case detected among White Americans as a temporary blip caused by specific policy errors, such as opioid overprescription. The fact that other European countries have not seen similar drops suggests that the causes may indeed be specific to America and remediable.
The fertility decline is a much bigger problem. It can be seen everywhere liberalism touches. It is apparently a fundamental side effect of our system. It represents a deep nihilism and desire for oblivion no less than alcoholism or suicide. And no one has any idea how to fix it.
The ideology that props up late Soviet America the way communism propped up the USSR is, obviously, “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Here, again, Ferguson points in the right direction but does not go far enough. He contrasts the promise of DEI, namely that it is “devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities,” with the reality that DEI programs “do nothing to help poor minorities.”
That is one downside of DEI. But surely a bigger one, which truly deserves to be called late Soviet, is that in 50 years the average American will no longer be able to count on his doctor being able to perform basic medical procedures or his plane not falling out of the sky.
It will take decades for these results to manifest, of course, but they are the inevitable result of the decline in standards being implemented in the name of DEI today. The Soviet economy lumbered along for decades, too, despite its intrinsic dysfunctions, and it even delivered a rising standard of living for much of that time period. That is the real late Soviet predicament: Everyone can see the disaster coming, yet no one seems to have the power to stop it.
We like to reassure ourselves that, if we were really in a late Soviet situation, we would know it. Think of Boris Yeltsin and his boggling at an American grocery store. The contrast between capitalist abundance and empty shelves at home was obvious. There is no equivalent experience for an American today, say the optimists. In fact, there may well be—just ask the many visitors who come back from East Asia with the impression that over there, at least, things work.
But set aside those comparisons for a moment, since, after all, there may be a Potemkin quality to those travelers’ impressions. The more important point is that the average Soviet citizen knew perfectly well that his consumer goods were inferior to America’s but had soothing excuses to reassure himself why his system was nevertheless superior. Long before Yeltsin’s trip to Texas, there was the “Kitchen Debate” between then Vice President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1959. The American National Exhibition in Moscow showcased the many labor-saving devices our housewives enjoyed. The response of the Russian public, far from being dazzled, was mockery.
“Is this the national exhibition of an immense country or the branch of a department store? Where is American science? Where is American production machinery? Can we really base our judgment of it on these lawn-mowers?” one woman told Izvestia.
“Is it possible that you think our mental outlook is restricted to everyday living only? Where is your industry? We expected the American Exhibition would show something grandiose, similar to Soviet sputniks…and you want to surprise us with the glitter of your kitchen pans,” one Russian wrote in the visitors’ book.
Khrushchev echoed the same argument: “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”
To an American reader seven decades later, these remarks sound lame and unconvincing. But rather than bask in our feelings of superiority, let us examine ourselves.
Think of your local CVS or Target. If you live in a big city, chances are that many items, from deodorant to laundry detergent, are under lock and key. Even with these precautions in place, shoplifters still wander the aisles, brazenly filling garbage bags and walking out. This is only one of the many ways the day-to-day experience of shopping has gotten worse in America, on top of inflation and declining product quality.
If a foreigner pointed out these problems and told you things were better where he came from, in Moscow or Beijing or Dubai, would you have a reply? Answers could be given to all of the above criticisms. Annoyances can be justified as the unfortunate cost of some worthier goal. But as you ponder the tradeoffs that might justify your city’s dysfunctions, stop occasionally and ponder whether your justifications are more convincing than the lady in Izvestia’s.
News of the Times;
Billionaire David Sacks Perfectly Describes:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/billionaire-david-sacks-perfectly-describes-what-democrats-biden/
Just Another Night In Gavin Newsom's California:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/watch-just-another-night-gavin-newsoms-california
Kamala Harris' Financials Confirm What You Thought About Her Books:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/05/16/kamala-harris-financials-confirm-what-you-thought-about-her-books-n4929081
Gold Star families fume after Biden denies troop deaths:
https://nypost.com/2024/06/28/us-news/gold-star-families-react-after-biden-denies-troop-deaths-under-his-watch/
Eight Automakers Accused of Lying About Customer Data Protections:
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/cars/news-blog/driving-dystopia-eight-automakers-accused-of-lying-about-customer-data-protections-44506987
Illegal Alien Car Crash That Never Made The Papers:
https://vdare.com/posts/an-illegal-alien-car-crash-that-never-made-the-papers
NY Governor Quietly Grants Clemency to Murderers:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/05/26/ny-governor-quietly-grants-clemency-to-murderers-n3789098
Asian powerhouse declares intention to join BRICS:
https://www.rt.com/news/598362-thailand-brics-letter-application/
US Fails to Hide the Slap:
https://english.almasirah.net.ye/post/40374/US-Fails-to-Hide-the-Slap-Yemen-s-Attack-on-the-Eisenhower-Echoes-Worldwide
8 Suspected Illegal Alien Terrorists Arrested:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/8-suspected-illegal-alien-terrorists-arrested-new-york-philadelphia-la
Louisiana Reaffirms Gold and Silver As Legal Tender:
https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2024/05/31/louisiana-reaffirms-gold-and-silver-as-legal-tender-003227
Duolingo bends to Russia’s LGBT demand:
https://www.rt.com/russia/598768-duolingo-roskomnadzor-gay-demand/
Coke is Confederate:
https://southernnation.org/groups/coke-is-confederate-coke-confederate-history-scv-scvchat/
Democrat Atlanta Prosecutor Jailed For Stealing $15 Million of Covid Funds:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/06/democrat-atlanta-prosecutor-jailed-stealing-15-million-covid/
John Leguizamo Complain About White People:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n7FAyV82IQ&ab_channel=PopCultureCrisis
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.