Monday, December 30, 2019

Sunday Stream



Warning: graphic content (livestream footage of Texas church shooting), 1:10:50

Not for children or those with heart conditions or delicate sensitivities.
7:39 A reading: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" 10:50 Arvo Part's "Credo" 20:49 Don's Descent 30:55 A reading: Nikki Minaj's "Stupid Hoe"

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Racism is Forever

There's an old joke that goes something like "gee, blow one guy and all of a sudden you're gay."

In the woke era you offend minorities once and all of a sudden you're irreedemably racist, forever.

Poor Don Imus. I sampled his show back in the day and had to ask: where was the promised controversy? The first thing I heard was a parody song (last refuge of the morning zoo dj) mocking Rush Limbaugh's racism (Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places" became "All My Friends Have White Faces"); how daring! How relevant! Even for the nineties, it was bad. Cringe wasn't a word yet.

I suspect the politcally incorrect image was exagerrated by the same establishment figures who lined up to appear on his show. They could engage in a sort of Kabuki, a mock engagement with controversy, knowing it would never go too far. Like the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press, the only people who praised his "tough interviews" were the interviewees, all establishment figures who appreciated Tim's ultimate discretion. Like Conrad's Lord Jim, to the powerful Imus was "one of us"--or at the least a dependable patsy.

But he was definitely not one of us.

His service to the status quo would not save him after he was fired from CBS for referring to players on the thuggish-looking Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes” in 2007. He managed to salvage a radio career and was allowed to live in a sort of partial exile from the powerful, but, he had to know this too, sadly, whatever penance he performed would not spare him the posthumous fate of all "racists" and--especially--"antisemites"; upon death his crimes would be ritually read out. He, like many better and more accomplished people before, would forever be "Don Imus, Racist." The human stain that even in death does not fade but only grows.

You wonder what any aging white public figure--who sees the lies--is saving himself for, or from, the shellacked, multi-colored nails of a Jezebel hack?
On the morning of December 27th, known racist and radio host Don Imus died at the age of 79.

If you’re lucky, you grew up not knowing who Don Imus was. If you’re around my age, chances are you found out who Don Imus was in 2007 when he was fired from CBS for referring to players on the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes.” At the time, it felt like it was almost impossible to turn on the news without seeing someone offering their opinion on his remarks.

Gwen Ifill, who had previously been referred to by Imus as a “cleaning lady” appeared on Meet the Press and offered a sentiment that is, unfortunately, just as relevant today, over a decade later, as it was in 2007. Speaking with Tim Russert she said, “My concern about Mr. Imus and about a lot of people… is not that people are sorry that they say these things, they’re sorry that someone catches them.”

This was, of course, not the first or the last time Imus had been caught using racist language, which is not surprising given that he was, in fact, a racist.

Later in 2007 Imus appeared on Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show to address his remarks. After becoming frustrated with the conversation, Imus remarked that he couldn’t “get any place with you people.” That comment obviously didn’t go over well with Sharpton.

A 2006 The New York Times reported that in 2004 he had referred to book publishers Simon & Schuster as “thieving Jews,” and had previously called Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz a “boner-nosed … beanie-wearing little Jew boy” in 1998.

In 2008 Imus, while discussing the suspension of Dallas Cowboys’ cornerback Adam Jones, asked “what color” Jones was. When he was informed Jones was Black, Imus cavalierly replied, “Well there you go, now we know.”

It’s unfortunate that Imus was allowed to continue making these kinds of remarks and spewing his vitriol into the airwaves until his retirement in 2018. After his firing from CBS, New York based radio network WABC picked up Imus’ show Imus in the Morning from 2007-2018. Fox Business Network also ran Imus’ show on TV from 2009-2015.

If somewhere there do exist fans of Imus’ work, they can return to Imus’ infamous quote, forever solidified in Nicki Minaj’s 2012 track Stupid Hoe, certainly a far more generous memorial than Imus deserves.
Someone who's decided to nod along with the ongoing rape of the West has made something of a nihilistic determnation; he's abandoned posterity for the present and, presumably, a respectable image in death. He fears the wrath of no god; he respects the desires of no ancestor; he protects no descendant.
Even after retirement almost to a man they maintain the respectable lie all the way to their death bed. Fear of God is replaced by fear of man--of a shameful reputation.

It isn't as if Imus dared challenge a single operating assumption. He was only too glad to join the point and sputter mob and reinforce them. You see in his gaffes no substance, just crude insults. They are deplorable, and stupid. Especially so coming from a false renegade, establishment hanger-on who supported the system and narrative that elevated his dumb jokes to absurd heights of transgression.
He would never dare challenge the order that sustained him in comfort.

So his lame "racist" jokes only serve to harm, albeit not much, the cause of turning back that system, by serving up the image of the hate-spewing bigot. When someone calls out the system for one of its many contradictions, when someone points out the lie that is "racism", for one, he at least forces the powerful to reveal their hypocrisy as they take him down.

Don Imus never dared go there. I hope he's in a better place, and I hope he wishes he had.

Of course had he, you wouldn't be reading this. We wouldn't know who he was. So he got to have his career, money, even some status but in the end he will be forever "Don Imus, Racist"; this was the price he paid to play.

Friday, December 27, 2019

Celluloid Sunset

An analysis of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
(spoilers ahoy)

Quentin Tarantino has made a career making nostalgia acceptable to the critics by clothing it in irony. I think without his postmodern pose they would be hostile--or will be when the Feminist Inquisition finally comes around for him--to the recurring lament implied in all his sampling of the recent past: things were better before.

Coupled with another of his dominant themes--the necessity of violence to protect the weak from the depraved--it's surprising they haven't unpersoned him already. By celebrating righteous masculine violence through satire and pop culture sampling, giving it the veneer of irony (irony now, ironically, takes the place of false piety) he's been pulling one over on hipsters and critics for a long, fruitful career. Nearing the end of that, and, probably, seeing the feminist tyranny on the horizon, his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood defiantly takes nostalgia from setting to story.

Tarantino's never been much interested in the present; most of his films are not set in it. Even his breakthrough Pulp Fiction disdained the early nineties in which it was set by shuffling ("pulping") a narrative peppered with references to recent history--even Samuel Jackson's Jeri Curls and mutton chops mocked a present we found so boring we had to scramble it up and spice it with a more colorful past; critics and audiences responded instinctively. But there's an implied theme here, who knows if it's intended, fittingly nothing new, and its timing was perfect--we've gone soft.


Despite being seen as a norm-shattering postmodernist, Tarantino's outlook is one of reverence for the past. Whatever else is going on in one of his films, there's a continual celebration of film-making and its history, traditions and great men. It's a conservative point of view in a world rapidly becoming hostile to any genuine conservatism. Hollywood is to be looted by diversity and womyn just like everything else now; its privilege earned for propagandizing on behalf of the new diverse order that will soon devour it--like baby spiders eating mom--is expired. Tarantino got his career in just in time; I'm not sure there's a place for him now, despite his influence on the culture we have now.

Is there money now for something like Reservoir Dogs, about a group of white guys sitting around in suits speaking frankly? No; if it gets made now it's handed off to a soulless JJ Abrams type who casts it with a diverse crew of uninteresting minorities, making no impression on the culture from which it is indistinguishable, like a drop of rain joining a puddle.

Tarantino's references aren't all pop culture either, but reveal the dedicated student of film; in his latest we find him once again paying homage to French director Robert Bresson, with his close shots of feet. I had to read about him doing this in Kill Bill to notice it here; side by side with his embrace of "low" pop culture, red meat for critics and commoners alike, there is an elitism, congruent with his themes of elite heroes operating outside societal norms. Tarantino is for hierarchy and order, whether he knows it or not.

The hero operating outside of the social order is an old, favored trope, but the fact is the social order has changed. There's no place for operating outside norms now that the progressive left, for lack of a better term, sets them.

But the common people, for whom Tarantino distills film down to the good juicy bits the way a pulp novelist does, or the way a dj extends a break (his references too come just like samples in dj music) are attracted not just to the flashing violence and recognition of reference, but also to the strong leader. The people, as Tarantino's more politically sophisticated supporters know, are naturally attracted to the fascistic.

Tarantino holds in himself the democratic contradiction, the source of his genuine, not critical, popularity: in appeasing the popular he praises the strong. His characters are violent elite ubermenschen (born to the role, that is it's genetic) who uphold an order outside the law. Pacifism is depraved, egalitarianism disdained.

In his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood he sets the story in the late sixties, pairing and pitting his two favorite types (and themes)--a movie star and a man of action--against what Tarantino sees as their loathsome opposites: degenerate hippies.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton, a television star who's made a couple of films that a young Quentin Tarantino would have studied and whose career appears to be petering out. It's 1969 and eight years since cancellation of his successful television series "Bounty Law", a black-and-white western that belongs entirely to the previous era, but he doesn't see that, even as he mutters about hippies on the street, driving home devastated after a meeting with an agent (Al Pacino) who wants him to go to Rome to make spaghetti westerns.

Brad Pitt is his stunt double, Cliff Booth, who's relegated to gopher for the most part after getting caught sparring with Bruce Lee on the set of The Green Hornet. It's a welcome surprise: Lee is portrayed as a pompous ass who brags he would "cripple" heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) and is then bested by Pitt. The scene even triggered the Lee family, used to years of fawning reverence.

We learn at some point DiCaprio lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate on Cielo Drive; as he enthuses over the possibilities of living next door to the "hottest director in town" it's supposed to come off darkly comic: DiCaprio doesn't know the horror history has in store. In reality a pregnant Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family not long after he says this.

But Tarantino is offering an alternate history, a preferred history, as he did in Inglorious Basterds. He imagines the 1969 horror as a sort of historic wrong turn, and our dual heroes, Pitt and DiCaprio, are redeemed by setting it right.

The Manson girls arrive in the film as a feral, dumpster diving, sexually charged pack (it's hard not to see today's lost girls in them), singing a song written by Charles Manson:
Always is always forever

As one is one is one

Inside yourself for your father

All is none all is none all is none

It's time to drop all from behind you

The illusion has been just a dream

The Valley of Death may not find you

Now as then on a sunshine beam

So bring only your perfection

For then life will surely be

No cold no fear no hunger

You can see you can see you can see
From a sinister low angle we see the girls singing "as one is one is one" as they march single file past a mural of the Marlboro Man, contrasting the new self-erasing egalitarianism with an icon of the heroic individual--Western--ideal they've come to destroy. They are egalitarianism become nihilistic, and despite Tarantino's nihilistic trappings (he's sort of nihilistic-at-a-distance) as nihilists they are the other pole to his worldview of strong characters living by strong codes.

Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate appears and it's just more subversion of the new feminist norms. She's lovingly, unapologetically objectified; we see her in close shots, in slow motion, we see her dancing. There's no edge to her; she's all sunny, feminine optimism and enthusiasm. She's also vulnerable by virtue of her feminine virtues, in need of a strong male protector--which she doesn't have. In a hilarious scene we see her dancing at a party, being watched by Steve McQueen, who laments that Tate's penchant for short, unimposing pretty boys meant he "never stood a chance".

Tarantino has us follow Tate into a theater to watch herself on film. It's a remarkable scene, where he brings that celebration of film-making to the fore. This is the opposite of the dark critique of Hollywood you might get from David Lynch or countless lesser directors. Tarantino sees in Hollywood--at least an earlier Hollywood--a blessed community of talent coming together to create excellent art. Tate dons a pair of glasses with massive lenses--like camera lenses--and revels at the audience's approval of her performance. After decades of the culture ridiculing the vanity of actors--the easy gag--Tarantino offers a defense of it. Tate watches herself in a successful fight scene and recalls with joy her training with--who else?--Bruce Lee. It's an unironic celebration of the joy of the multi-discipline magic in film-making and acting. It's what he's done with the picture as a whole, pairing a war-hero stuntman with an actor.

In a counterpoint scene later, DiCaprio, guesting on someone else's television pilot and struggling, rebounds and nails a scene; his good-natured and simple Rick Dalton has learned finally to act. This is after an encounter with an eight year-old prodigy and her method acting comes as a harbinger of the future. DiCaprio's tearful reaction to the success of the scene is the only earnestly touching moment I've seen in a Tarantino film.

Tarantino loads the film up with constantly shifting background pop music and advertising. Anytime someone takes a drive across town (and it's an LA story so there's lots of driving) we're treated to a array of pop songs and radio commercials. It's a noisy film but it works. The effect reminds me of impressionism achieving realism: just as a painter blurring objects on a palate seeks to represent a messy world as we see it, half focuse and in motion, Tarantino's ever-shifting background of pop noise conveys how our chaotic, noisy world feels--more than a conventional, cleaner soundtrack.

The commercial samples are often used to great narrative effect: when DiCaprio catches first glimpse of his famous neighbor Polanski, he's in his sports car with stunning Tate by his side, the image of carefree success; the radio commercial for a men's cologne is an un-ironic celebration of masculinity. It encapsulates the dynamic, of the scene and a theme, perfectly.



The action is given mostly to Pitt's stuntman, who encounters the Manson family at Spahn Ranch--where he and DiCaprio shot their successful television series and then later in a scene that will likely confuse people--the Manson killers arrive at DiCaprio's house instead of next door. I'm still not sure if they get there by accident or if they changed plans.

But there's a note here that seems to be Tarantino addressing the role of all the violent imagery he celebrates in the horror: a Manson girl suggests they "kill the people who taught us to kill"--DiCaprio being one of them. It's a brilliant scene, though I'm sure he doesn't intend it how I took it: there's an element of blowback in the horror.



What he intended with that I don't know. Is Tarantino acknowledging the pop culture he celebrates produced these monsters in the first place?
In killing them off does he see himself excising the sickness emerging from the culture he celebrates?
Awareness is key to producing art. Perhaps a certain lack of awareness is required as well.

I talked about the film a bit here:



Subscribe to Untethered Livestreams.

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Clown Juice and the Hebros



My YouTube channel.

Black Hebrew terrorist goes into the Narrate-o-Matic, comes out white. Poor bastard.
The New York Times:
For almost two decades, the intelligence bureau of the New York Police Department has built a security apparatus designed to track international terror groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Now, the department is aiming those resources at a different target: far-right and extremist hate groups.

Police officials say they have formed a new unit within the department’s intelligence bureau, known as “Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism,” or “R.E.M.E,” that will be primarily dedicated to investigating terror threats from far-right and neo-Nazi organizations, including groups like the Atomwaffen Division and The Proud Boys.

The unit became operational early this month, and already has dozens of open investigations, police officials said.

John Miller, the commissioner of the intelligence division, said the far-right extremist groups are not that different in nature from Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda. “There’s no different recipe except our offenders are likely to be on the ground here,” he said in an interview.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the unit’s creation on Wednesday at City Hall, just a day after a gun battle in Jersey City, during which two people with guns opened fire at two different locations, including a kosher supermarket, killing three bystanders and a Jersey City detective.

“What we saw yesterday was a premeditated, violent, anti-Semitic hate crime,” Mr. de Blasio said. “In other words, you can say it was an act of terror.”
Did super-skeevy TMZ neglect to mention the (apparent) overdose of rapper "Juice WRLD" happened during a drug bust out of a woke sense of decency?
TMZ:
Juice WRLD, the talented young rapper and singer whose career was just taking off, is dead after suffering a seizure in Chicago's Midway airport ... TMZ has learned.

Juice's flight from California landed early Sunday morning and, after deplaning ... witnesses tell us he suffered the seizure while walking through the airport. Law enforcement sources say he was bleeding from the mouth when paramedics got on scene.

We're told Juice -- real name Jarad Anthony Higgins -- was still conscious when he was transported by Chicago Fire. However, he was pronounced dead a short time later at the hospital. The cause of death is unclear at this time.

Sunday, December 08, 2019

My Wife's Son


Couldn't help noticing the inner-family diversity of these humanoids on a poster ad (for what I don't remember) at a local market. Looks like that honeymoon in Jamaica was, er, interesting.

Pensacola

Seeing a pair of Saudi officers in the mess hall at Pensacola Naval Air Station was a mere curiosity in 1986. My squadron had sent me there to attend something called Naval Aircrewman Candidate School. The Naval Officer Candidate School across the street from us, not long before portrayed in the film An Officer and a Gentleman, was our model. For them it was their boot camp, Officer Training School (OTS) with an aviation focus. Candidates wearing comic chrome helmets were continually harried by Marine Drill instructors, all of senior enlisted rank.

For us it was bootcamp-lite. Very light. Up early for physical training and classes and usually done and at liberty by three or so in the afternoon. The course was dominated by water survival training. You did things like swim a mile in a flight suit, tread water for ten minutes in same (not as easy as it sounds), and of course the legendary "Dilbert Dunker", a simulated water crash wherein you had to escape blindfolded from a great big barrel dropped in the water and turned upside down.



A couple of days camping hungry at Elgin Air Force base constituted survival training. The land there was spare woods of small thin trees, strafed by the sound of OV-10 Warhogs and occasionally the sinister drone of "Puff the Magic Dragon", a C-130 mounted with a 25mm gatling gun.



Pensacola was pleasant, especially compared to the giant scrub patch that is Camp Pendelton.
Spanish moss draped the trees and the architecture was colonial. Overhead you might see the bases' Blue Angels flying team practicing. We chased girls at night and talked about it in the day, without shame. Political correctness wasn't here yet.

9/11 was years away.

Thursday, December 05, 2019

The Unbearable Whiteness of the Democratic Field

Kamala Harris was arguably the establishment candidate before Elizabeth Warren surged ahead, despite being virtually unknown beyond California and Democratic politics (Liz is actually getting a boost now from earlier national attention as Trump's foil).

Lacking the desire or nerve to separate herself from the pack, which at this point resembles a dog race with fringe group approval as the rabbit, she was left with only her record as California's Attorney General, in our season of "mass incarceration", and her Law and Order-Homocide-SVU acquired affectations. As when grandstanding during her questioning of Bret Kavanaugh, in debate she was all pursed lips and stern gazes; she seemed to be always channeling her favorite characters from television, on television (we see a curious effect here that deserves study--art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating...spiraling down into--imagine that--boring mediocrity).

But if that's her real personality she must be hell to live with--"did you not, in fact," tossed hair, lowered chin, raised eyebrow, hand on hip, "leave the cap off the toothpaste--let me finish, sir--yet again?", head tilt, icy glare.

The occasional dips into ghetto inflection, a silly controversy about her listening to Tupac Shakur while smokng weed (to deflect from all the Tupac-wannabes she's put in jail--a comic affirmation the Democrats have completely inverted the morality of law and order), getting smacked down by the younger Tulsi Gabbard, the bad hair days, and Willie Brown leering over it all.

Despite favorable coverage from the Press she simply couldn't get traction with the actual human citizens the Democrats still, sullenly, have to deal with. She thought she was playing to her strengths--"black" status and a vagina--and running from her weakness--having put away countless criminals in California.

Apparently outflanking Trump on the law-and-order issue--after immigration perhaps the biggest reason for his success and something he's abandoned entirely--was unthinkable, at least in the nomination stage. So it ended, with her finally showing some genuine emotion as she addressed her defeated troops and packed it in.

The Daily Caller reports now on the predictable response from the Democratic left:
“Obviously I’m no centrist but it’s downright effed up that smart, compelling, *very* experienced, centrist Democratic candidates of color are floundering while a smart but wildly inexperienced, centrist white mayor of teeny tiny city is surging,” liberal writer Sally Kohn wrote in a tweet. “Bad look, Democrats.”  
Left-wing commentator Lauren Duca implied that Democrats have a racism problem, as evidenced by Harris’s failed campaign. “White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks,” she charged.


Some are talking of abandoning the Party:
“Kamala may not have been my number one candidate, but she belongs in the race,” added Imani Gandy, an analyst at left-wing outlet Rewire News. “Now we’ve got rich white dudes papering the airwaves with their bullshit,” Gandy wrote, adding: “I’m not voting for Biden or Buttigieg.”
Sanders is unwanted by the Party because he threatens to actually attempt some of the progressive economic reforms he champions. Oh, and he's "white". Tulsi Gabbard, woman of color and especially despised by Harris, likewise regarding foreign policy.

This mini-rage might be a deliberate action on behalf of the campaigns of Stacy Atkins and Julian Castro to rearrange the Democratic primaries to give the Democrats' most powerful constituency, black women, a greater whip hand in the nomination process
“We can’t go around thanking black women for powering Democrats to victory all over the country and then at the same time, hold our first caucus and our first primary in states that have almost no African-Americans,” Secretary Castro told Vogue. “We’re right to call Republicans out when they suppress the votes of African-Americans or Latinos, but we’ve also got to recognize that this 50-year-old process was created during a time when minority voices had zero power in the party.” (Iowa initially began going first in 1972.)
Ironically, identity politics enthusiast Castro has virtually no support among Latinos. He has none among black women either, but their status as least productive, most loud demographic has made them the collective idiot king of the debased Democratic Party.
Castro concedes that the third and fourth primary states, Nevada and South Carolina, which come almost a month later, are more racially diverse. But he also says that the first states of primary season can make or break a candidate’s momentum. “Nobody can pretend that the first one or two states don’t have an oversized influence on what happens in the whole process,” he said. “If you can’t do well in Iowa or New Hampshire, then the chances of doing well in Nevada or South Carolina are much slimmer.”
The Democratic Party is the model for the future one-party United States they have planned, and they appear increasingly untenable as a meaningful institution.
Good times.

Tuesday, December 03, 2019

Understanding Women

The cruelty of the weak exceeds the cruelty of the strong.

Broadcast Note


Tomorrow at 6PM Pacific Time I'll be talking to semi-barbarian violence enthusiast (my description) and prolific author James LaFond on my YouTube channel.

Here are a couple of recent posts from James:
Our junk, or shacks, our asphalt tracks, our concrete streets are all aspects of our divine space wherein the Faith of Civic entitlement and ancestral guilt hover like Apollo Helios in his shimmering aspect about the braided head of Delphi’s drugged, bimbo Pythea. Our civic space is our holy place, where we worship at the altar which has swallowed all others, the altar of consumption. 
So today, on the way to Boomer Fred’s Baltimore County digs, the bus drove me through a construction site in Whitemarsh Maryland, where five six story, hotel sized low income housing projects are being placed dead center in the middle class urban flight zones where two generations of Baltimoreans have fled from the seething urban crime of the Citay. Each of these buildings is a barracks for the invading forces of occupation being removed from Baltimore City to make room for hipster homesteader bug people to serve the dark lords 30 miles down the rushing road… 
Here lives Boomer Fred, a father of four daughters, injured, retired, guilty, nearly expired. The eldest girl lives with a working paleface in rural Pennsylvania, the two fled rather than dead. 
The three younger girls are all hoodrat incubators, impregnated owned, and abused by Knights of the Master Race. 
Fred wants to keep the family together and has the slacker sperm donners who hate him for the terrible guilt of his race over for dinner. 
Yesterday, for Sunday dinner, when the youthful incubator showed up with her knightly master, the Ebon God, Kenny the Kang, insisted on calling Fred’s daughter vile names, threatening Fred’s wife and otherwise disrespecting Fred in what might once have been imagined as his house. 
Fred is flummoxed, wondering if he should have a fatherly talk with Kenny the next time he visits, suggesting decorum, perhaps going so far as to suggest that Kenny should not scold his daughter as a bitch and a whore in his house. 
It was painful to be regaled by the old friend about his fall from knight to serf and the elevation of a member of the race who had hunted him in the streets as a youth into his honored place. 
What was more painful was Fred’s guilt-mired lack of appreciation for yesterday’s incivility. He actually thinks this young man attacked his daughter and his wife out of some lack of impulse control, some quirk in a parentless upbringing, when in fact, an intact and unguilty paleface could tell at a breath, that Fred had been usurped from his throne, stripped forever of the dignity of the only office he has ever aspired to. 
So withers a wretched folk in the civic space of America, the Cemetery of Races.
Indeed, I've long thought of our situation as akin to, say, early European hunter gatherers being conquered by Aryan invaders, with our men emasculated and enslaved, our women their concubines and breeders. Of course, if we were allowed to put up a fight, we wouldn't be having this humiliating conversation. Here's a recent book review from James:
2017, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 199 pages

Reading Navy SEAL memoirs is a pastime of mine—having read five. However, Discipline Equals Freedom was leant to me to read by my friend Dante, who spoke of it as an inspirational book which helped his son overcome some hard times. So, I dove in with both feet and found that Discipline Equals Freedom is the most uniquely formatted book I have read and, it appears, fits very well with the military mind set of the author. Whoever the ghost writer was was brilliant. This book is a tome of bullet points, mantras, positive declarations and can-do/don’t do interpretations of dilemmas we all face. 
Coming from a certified Deep State ass-kicking machine who trains with top MMA pros like Tito Ortiz [pictured in training photos] Willink is very convincing and to-the-point without being mechanical but rather inspirational. His advice on what martial arts one should train in according to what priority and in what order is excellent, but does reflect the budget of a high-earner and is something I never could have pursued as a low life in Baltimore, Maryland when I was the age of the guys he is writing for. But then again, Willink is all about positive energy and outcomes and would possibly remark that he doesn’t write for losers, but for winners. 
If you are an anti-statist, a free-thinker, a questioner and investigator of the human condition, and you have not served as a slave of the most effective military machine to ever stalk the earth, that is the U.S. military which holds nearly 1,000 war bases in foreign nations and is the virtual Lord of Hosts and God in Heaven summoned and called down by people of all classes, factions and nations to smite the Unbeliever, to displace those governments and murder people who do not worship the Divine American Body Economic, than you should partake of this strong man’s pitiless perspective. For, the servants of evil are very often good. They must be to be effective, to be good men in a vile cause. Wallink and his ilk have battled the world over to install rapacious engine of economic extraction, to install tyrants, implement and facilitate crimes against humanity, facilitate drug shipments to their home nation, promote pornography-based cultural values, and in large measure, such men prevail, succeed and survive because they are better quality people than the poor bastards who are the unwilling recipients of our good intentions. 
In the end, I care not a lick about the murder Americans commit across the world in my name, at the hands of men like Willink. What I do care about is that one day, if some infotech company’s censorship functionaries decide I need to die, that all they will have to do to accomplish it, is to quote this article and snippets of various other pieces I have written critical of America, present me to Willink as an Enemy of Freedom, and he will dispose of me in some manner for a handsome fee, and I will have been declared as having shot myself in the back of the head with a hunting rifle. 
It took 2 hours over 2 days at Bear Lake, Utah to read Willink’s book, while resting between my labors building Dante a retaining wall, and, as I hefted each block, flipped each railroad tie, dug each shovel full of earth, I’d imagine how Willink would kill me “right now” and if I’d even know it happened, and in the end decided I was so easy to kill while working that he’d probably send a Mexican to do it. 
Do yourself a favor and read Discipline Equals Freedom, a mantra I live by, and keep in mind that the man that wrote it and his brand of high-resolution postmodern warriors, have been hunting U.S. citizens in the U.S. since at least 2016 and probably earlier. This is the kind of man that will be called in on you when you swerve out of your lane in the long night to come. Willink’s premise and title, Discipline Equals Freedom is profoundly true, as is his mantra Hesitation is the Enemy. These are both internal concepts.  
However, as noted above, discipline such as that demonstrated by apex warrior types is the ultimate external enemy, for such men have the capacity to discipline their mind to such a degree as to serve naked evil in the shadows of the human sheepfold. My friend Tony Cox has a profound distrust of such discipline, for he has seen it manifested by mega-PIGs in criminal settings. 
As always, there is a third view. 
What have Tony [a barbarian], myself, a disciplined barbarian advocate, and Willink [a highly disciplined agent of Civilization] in common? 
We have actionism in common and Willink’s existence demands that Tony and I be better.
None of us hold commonality with the bleating flocks and folds of sheeple or even the puppet masters—wolfish minds in sheepish bodies—which deploy men like Willink to further their many evil desires. In the end, in my simian mind, I only have meaning because someone like Willink is training to kill me [as an anonymous “bad guy”] for stepping out of my assigned lane, when and if the order comes. And even then, if I had been granted a moment of clarity before the end, I’d admire my killer and some part of him would know jealousy for me as he left me dead in the dirt and walked away wondering if he could have been free like I had been and if his bid would have ended as finally. 
What use is an enemy to the combatant if you cannot salute him?
Okay, but it will be only my cold, dead hand that salutes the Dindu tools that tie me to the stake. For, they are not my real enemy. My real enemy hides, in comfort and splendor, and the magnificence of his blind, stupid hatred.

He's not worth saluting either--because he doesn't really fight.

Please join us tomorrow.

Sunday, December 01, 2019

Sick Stream



8:46 Musical interlude "Madonna Dell’Arco- Invocazione e Canto", Francesco Pellegrino, Vesuvius Ensemble
23:36 watching limeys trolling limeys over trans rights
41:28 watching Jesse Lee Peterson at a Slutwalk

Sanity Fair

"Antifascist" demonstration Portland, Oregon. August 17, 2019.  The two sides squared off across a field, defined by police cord...