"In moments of despair it had occurred to me that there was something of a medieval Dark Age about the current mood: Extinction Rebellion with its child saints and the self-flagellating Woke culture. Being given an apparently sound reason to disable the most notable manifestations of that historical tradition which we are now being encouraged to denounce: what could be better suited to the weird, vaguely hysterical, fashion of the times? Fear may be the most dangerous contagion but I am coming around to the view that this is not simple fear. It is a mass neurosis of which irrational and prolonged anxiety is a symptom: a corrosive loss of confidence and understanding of one’s role and identity which will, if it prevails, ultimately undermine the quality of modern life more irrevocably than any virus.
It is not only our official cultural institutions that are at risk here. One of the most fundamental principles of post-war liberal democracy is on trial – or, at least, coming up for examination." The Telegraph
————–
Yes, I know. I am becoming even more boring about this, but Daly has her finger on the essence of the matter. The call to wokeness is a siren song enlisting neurotic adherence to a cause that demands rejection of the world as we have known it and the creation of a utopian cult that does not know its own creed. That remains to emerge when the putative victors in the struggle for a woke world fall upon each other for control. What would President Bidoharris do in such a circumstance? IMO they would cave in and the street fanatics would rule a barren landscape that was once a prosperous and well run country. pl
Colonel:
In the day a long time ago (the 70’s!) and while I was still in our previous profession, My team played skip-to-my-Lou with a similar group of folks around the Tonle Sap in our old stomping grounds.
The folks that we were watching/hiding from then bear a remarkable similarity to the folks now. Their fate is known.
IMO, This phenomenon is not organic. Rather, it has been deliberately induced by the enemies of democracy and of the US – some of these enemies are foreign powers, some are foreign individuals and some are domestic, and of those, even within our own government. Allies with a common objective for the time being.
The US govt began systematically developing mind control techniques in the 1950s that built on the work of Bernays. Some of the programs were for controlling individuals (e.g. MK-ULTRA) and some for controlling masses. Those programs have come to fruition and are being applied to the US population. It’s easy now with mass media, social media and everyone being wired into their devices 24/7.
As much as the Democrats have a war room, that war room is taking orders from another one that is higher up the chain of command, IMO.
The current panic/hysteria could be reversed or morphed into something more positive within a year if the powers running this operation wanted it to be done, but they don’t want that. They want to wreak havoc and destruction. They make a James Bond villain look like child’s play.
https://academyofideas.com/2017/07/edward-bernays-group-psychology-manipulating-the-masses/
A terrified world was ready to believe in the Zombie Apocalypse. What are the roots of that predeliction?
“Covid” was not the trigger; only the spark that set off the tinder already gathered. Loss of religion – substituting drugs for the pain of personal growth – broken families – mass media – age of disinformation – retreats from the challenges of daily interpersonal connection to interactions by choice behind the computer screens
Rollo May, in his book “Love and Will” nailed it in the 1960’s – the Age of Aquarius will become the Age of Addiction- life-affirming passion is being replaced by life-sapping lust.
However, this describes only the malaise and our own choices to this this mainstream. There are still incredible people out there that reject all of the above. As the 1960’s taught us, if we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem. And part of the problem may be tuning into the malaise ourselves and blocking out where the sunshine still exists.
Mea culpa. Playing one of Eric Berne’s Games People Play – “Ain’t it Awful?”
Come on Pat.. the Cone Head family runs a “well run country.”
What is the creed of the liberals, Colonel? Who are the liberal gods? Do you think the problems facing western civilisation are a consequence of it turning its back on them? I have a different thesis: The west didn’t turn its back on the liberal gods. It embraced them wholeheartedly, so much so it has now earned an audience with their prince, in his own abode no less.
In the case of the ongoing George Fentanyl riots I would suggest that this is a mass psychotic episode, caused by everything mentioned in the article plus drug use, especially constant, long-term, vaporized marijuana use.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that the worst of the rioting has occurred where marijuana has either been legalized or effectively decriminalized.
An interesting article on the subject;
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/millennial-guide-to-anti-wokeness-liberal-democracy/
Ted Buila
You mean the Obamas and the Clintons? They do look a bit “alien” in the best sense of the word. Barry rode a fantastic “train” of scholarships all the way to editor of the Harvard Law Review. Michele and her brother were the beneficiaries of the Daly Machine’s gratitude to her father’s role as a ward healer. This seems an amazing sequence of events in an indelibly racist country.
Regarding the climatic aspects of it at least, there is some evidence in peer-reviewed journals that there may be a Maunder Minimum beginning in the 2030, resulting in a significant drop in average temperature. It’s related to sunspot cycles. [Note: I’m citing a popularization of it here:]
https://www.livescience.com/51597-maunder-minimum-mini-ice-age.html .
The detailed peer-reviewed article aboutmit in Nature is quite lengthy and technical.
Col. Lang,
Yes. Savonarola.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonfire_of_the_vanities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Savonarola
Post 9-11, Dick Cheney pushed the One Percent Doctrine to justify invading Iraq – if there is a one percent chance Saddam has nuclear weapons, the US must treat this as a 100% chance.
This One Percent doctrine became widely discredited, and Ron Suskind wrote a book about it – how indeed were government decisions made during the War on Terror?
How much of the One Percent Doctrine remains embedded in government decisions today, when faced with the War on Covid? If it was discredited as the Cheney Doctrine as 100% overkill, why is it still applied as our model for “covid” decision making?
Shut 100% down if there is a 1% risk -that some will die, and in fact some did die. Shouldn’t we be talking about this?
In the case of George Flloyd (et al) why has there been a pathologic avoidance in virtually all media, right and left, to even mention resisting arrest and drug use as co factors in these person’s ultimate outcomes?
If one tried to raise these issues all one got back is “he did not deserve to die even if he was a criminal high on drugs”, “he did not deserve to be killed over passing a $20 bill” ……… that a death alone justifies the ongoing string of distortions.
What undergirds this intentional avoidance that prevents even the introduction of personal responsibility for one’s own outcomes? Liberal orthodoxy California-style requires only blame; and shuns any possible hint that one set their own fate in motion by their own choices. This bleeding hear overkill is oppressive.
The cult of victimization – is it now found in 99% of our society? Please, November 3, show me I am wrong. Of course, my mind set is distorted by living in California. Asking for personal responsibility is thee quickest way to get canceled and censored on any local blog out here.
I vaguely remember when personal responsibility was a fundamental tenant of American life. It was certainly the hall mark of my own growing up in the 1950’s. In California.: When did this change so dramatically? Was it LBJ and The Great Society?
Who was it that said fate is what life hands you; destiny is what you do with it. Fate is being born a certain race, in a certain neighborhood to certain parents, or lack of them. Destiny is certainly what one chooses to do with that fate. And well evidenced by the recent RNC testimonies. Bravo.
The gist of this article;
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/schiff-pelosi-livid-after-intel-community-ditches-manipulated-election-briefings-written
Seems to be the marriage of convenience between the democrats and the intelligence community is starting to fray, as the lightbulb over the head of the intelligence people has turned on, that sticking to the, “Hillary as the rightful one,” narrative for the last four years was too many eggs in one basket and now they will be throwing the democrats under the bus.
Anyone sensing similar?
Does the 1955 Alan Ginbsurg beat poem “HowL” have any relevance to what is going on today? Does “Rebel Without a Cause” speak the same message – rage, undefined, diffuse generational rage …..at something.
Howl
BY ALLEN GINSBERG
For Carl Solomon
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,………. (etc, etc, etc)
Pat..come on. Tweaking the Obamas, Clintons and me the Cone Head Family are other subjects. I was addressing your inference that the Trump family is running the country in a well and prosperous manner. Hardly. Running the country on an overnight 4 trillion dollar plus credit card charge and dribbling out dixi cups Less Taxes Kool Aid is pushing the standard definition of a well run prosperous country.
John Merryman:
I didn’t I read it that way. Seems more like a way to get out of answering questions.
Ted Buila
It is the Democrat congressional party that wants to spend more funny money than Trump and you know very well that if it had not been for the carefully encouraged CODIV panic and shutdown the country would be hugely prosperous and Trump would have clear sailing to re-election. As I have said before, I am quite good at taking a Le Carre style back-azimuth. There is an ops room somewhere running The Resistance, always has been and at the bottom of that chamber pot are painted familiar faces.
Deap
Yup.
Extinction Rebelion’s purpose is to help commodetise various things along the lines of carbon trading.
Col. Lang,
I don’t have details but there is a report of the occupants of three out of state car apprehended on the way to do mischief. Follow the money.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/kenosha-police-out-of-state-gas-masks-fireworks
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/police-federal-agents-arrest-seattle-based-riot-kitchen-crew-that-stopped-in-kenosha-to-serve-free-food/
https://www.nbc15.com/2020/08/27/kenosha-police-find-helmets-gas-masks-more-in-out-of-state-vehicles-arrest-9/
I maintain that the root cause of the neurosis is MAGA-16 (now exacerbated by the prospect of MAGA-20) and for the Brits BREXIT-16. These events derailed the unstoppable progressive/globalist train in both places and ever since the liberal media has lost its collective mind.
As a direct consequence of these severe disruptions to their world view, the MSM has been in full millenarian apocalypse mode. They have happily embraced Wu-Flu with the enthusiasm of a Medieval religious order trying to convince us that the pestilence has been sent to punish us for our sins; those unforgivable acts of mass democracy by “irredeemable” and “deplorable” sinners in the annus horribilis.
Daley says:
She is right about the challenge to fundamental freedoms that government reactions to the virus have brought about. But Trump and Brexit themselves are events that fundamentally challenge the hitherto inexorable march of post-war liberalism.
It is impossible to prove, but I strongly suspect the reaction to the virus would have been very different had not the media (and like minded liberal politicians) been in a highly neurotic state before the ‘rona appeared on the scene.
I watched “news coverage” of the “march for social justice” at Washington, with the portraits idolizing George Floyd and Jacob Blake, the adoration of the “families,” and their parents sobbing about the loss of their “little saints” in utter disbelief. Disbelief that this theater for two dead drug-addicted felons was was actually being performed, and disbelief that the news media was covering it. Yes, “Medieval mass neurosis” describes it well.
Mike,
I know I’m reading more into it than is there. I’m connecting it to Trump’s improving polls and what effect that might be having on the overall bureaucracy and specifically the intelligence communities, that adopted a neoliberal globalism as the presumed path and are possibly re-assessing it, towards a more nationalist approach, symbolized by Trump.
Which makes the Democrats no longer the useful idiots of choice.
The fact this comes out immediately after the RNC, which Trump got a bump from, as opposed to Biden’s flat numbers after the DNC, seems rather coincidental.
What wheels are turning under the surface and what hints are others seeing, is my question.
Pat ton appel (if): the country would be hugely prosperous and Trump would have clear sailing to re-election. Agreed a hugely prosperous country (read the Dow at 30k plus) a better than even chance he’s in. The Dow & Economy as is today its a hard way crap shoot IMO. Pat he has a second RE-ELECTION card not to be discounted. It’s “the war of some dimension” floating at the top of his chanber pot. Punt.
Seward,
I have read the layman’s quality article you link to. (I may avoid the scientist-oriented deeply-technical article as being too hard for me). The layman’s quality article is very hopeful.
First, it is a reminder that natural forces did not walk off the field when man made forces walked onto the field. The natural forces and cycles continue exerting their force and cycle effect.
A few per cent change up or down in the amount of sunlight reaching the heatable surface of the earth can raise or lower heat-gain enough to have visible and meaningful effects over just a few years.
I remember Mount Pinatubo. A rising carbon skyload was already raising the amount of heat-buildup to the point where sub-arctic ice in Hudson’s Bay was forming later and melting earlier than what the Hudson’s Bay polar bears had been used to.
Canadian wildlife managers noticed the bears thinning or even starving as a shrinking-in-time-and-space Hudson icepack compromised the bears’ ability to hunt harp seals out on the ice.
The Pinatubo-generated world-surrounding sulfuric acid droplet cloud reflected back into space enough sunlight that Hudson’s Bay ice formation was restored enough to allow Hudson’s Bay bears to hunt and eat harp seals again. The several years of the Pinatubo sulfur shroud allowed several years worth of polar bears to eat well, look well fed, etc. Canadian wildlife managers referred to this several years-worth of bears as the “Pinatubo bears”. I remember having seen a news show about that on CBC news back when cable still brought us the CBC channel.
I think the Pinatubo shroud reflected only a few percent of sunlight away from reaching the earth-surface. That few percent was enough for force a re-cooldown in the teeth of carbon skyflood global warming. If a Maunder Minimum 2.0 reduced incoming sunlight by just that same small percent, then it could have that same big effect for as long as the MaunderMin continues. I see more hope of that than what the article you link to seems willing to entertain. IF! . . . the sun Maunder dims as predicted.
So here’s hoping the MaunderMin happens as predicted. If it offers 30 years of Pinatubo-quality solar-incoming reduction, I think global warming may slow down or stop or even somewhat reverse over that 30 years. I would be 73 years old in 2030 so I might be alive enough long enough to see if my amateur if-then prediction about meaningful suspension or reversal of surface warming comes true if the sun reduces output.
That would give us time to think about , and maybe apply, socially bearable ways to rebalance the carbon cycle and reduce the carbon skyload. Why would we want to do that if Maunder 2.0
helps re-cool us anyway? Because the other effect of carbon skyflooding is ocean-seawater dissolved-carbon-level raising. Some of that carbon dioxide turns into carbonic acid, making the oceans just enough more acid to disrupt the calcium metabolism of some of our tastiest shellfish and also some of the primary prey items which some of our most-preferred ocean fish eat on the way to growing big enough for us to eat.
So even if Maunder Minimum 2.0 re-cools the planet enough to make global warming seem like not-a-problem-anymore, maybe we should still try to rebalance the carbon cycle and lower the skycarbon levels and the seacarbon levels just for the halibut.
I’m tired of all the uproar, the “he said, she said,” the posturing about who is more righteeous.
I long for the days when news was not in our faces every day on the “Tee Vee.” I blame television and Google for cluttering everyone’s minds with sensationalism while spreading the idiotic ideas of college professors and graduate students who teach undergrad classes. I’ve been accused of being a Luddite since I do not have and never did have a Facebook page.
There is a reason so many people I know are now not encouraging their children to attend college. And if they allow them to attend college, they make sure the college is a Christian college. There is a reason now that home schooling and charter schools and schools of choice are gaining popularity, as well as occupational training.
I hope with all the hope I can muster during this strange time that my grandchildren will be able to grow up and live in sane times. I will encourage their parents to send my grandchildren to occupational courses or to learn to work by hiring on and growing in a hands-on occupation.
Until we reform our colleges and universities of the children of the flower children and those who played in the mud at Woodstock, our country will not be able to return to its founding ideals.
I did attend college during the time of the flower children and the hippies, but I was too busy working 20 to 25 hours a week while take a full load of classes and having to maintain an A- / B+ average to maintain my scholarship. I was lucky not to major in a program that at the time allowed or encouraged politicizing the subject matter that was being covered.
I am hoping against all hope that “the times they are a’ changing” again (but in reverse direction).