Who watches the Watchmen?

"Watchmen" is a 2009 American superhero film based on a 1986-1987 British-American comic of the same name. I never read it, and have never been particularly thrilled by the superhero genre. So I wasn´t that excited about "Watchmen" either, but I admit that you might be, if you are into that sort of thing. The film does look, feel and sound like a certain kind of American comic, with exactly the same aesthetics, typical lines (including the pseudo-erudition and the pseudo-hard boiled aspects) and "alternative timeline" plot. The most funny line: the bad guy says "do you think I´m some kind of comic book villain?".  

The original comic was apparently intended as a dystopian parody of the entire superhero genre, and I suppose it worked well enough back in 1986, when people still expected Superman to defend the Amerikan way of suburban life, or something to that effect. Today, every other superhero on TV turns out to be a murderous psycho, so from our 2021 horizon, "Watchmen" is actually quite tame! The same goes for the society depicted. It´s neither better nor worse than the United States actually looked like in 1986. Where, pray tell, is the dystopia? My backyard is probably more scary (and more in need of psychotic superhero intervention) than the alternative timeline United States of "Watchmen"...

The plot is extremely complex (it was apparently even more complicated in the original comic), with constant flashbacks and digressions. The Watchmen are not "superheroes" in the usual sense, but rather a vigilante squad of martial art specialists in funny outfits. Their political loyalties are not always obvious. In the intro, we learn that one of the Watchmen, The Comedian, actually killed JFK! The sole exception to the rule is Doctor Manhattan, a scientist transformed into a god-like being after an accident in a military research facility. Manhattan has genuine superpowers and is immortal (but not omnipotent). In the in-house universe of the story, Richard Nixon asks Manhattan to attack "Viet Cong", something he promptly does, ending the Vietnam War in US favor after only a week of supernatural fighting. Nixon then changes the US constitution (or perhaps disregards it), being elected to a third term. Tricky Dick is a rather typical comic book villain, a trigger happy nuclear weapons aficionado who doesn´t mind half of America to be nuked unless he can destroy the Soviet Union in the process. Other "real" people that turns up in "Watchmen" are Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan and - I think - William Buckley. Reagan is briefly mentioned.

The villain (or anti-hero) is a former Watchman turned billionaire, Adrian Veidt alias Ozymandias, who takes utilitarianism to its logical conclusion. In order to end the arms race between the superpowers, an arms race that threatens humanity with nuclear annihilation, Adrian tricks the United States and the Soviet Union into cooperating against an outside threat...by killing millions of people in futuristic bomb attacks, and then blaming the massacres on his old Watchman colleague Doctor Manhattan! Nixon and the unnamed Soviet leader promptly unites against Manhattan (who is of course entirely innocent), while Adrian´s corporation introduces free energy, saves the environment and fills the skies with highly advanced blimps. Er, what?! 

Another bizarre twist is that Manhattan accepts Adrian´s deception (including the mass murders), since the mayhem served the higher purpose of world peace. "Kill millions to save billions". That being said, I admit that I found Manhattan to be intriguing (and yes, I know its superhero comics pseudo-philosophy). The blue demi-god takes the Lovecraftian idea that the universe doesn´t (and shouldn´t) care about humanity to its logical conclusion. Not just humanity, but *life itself* is inconsequential. During his self-imposed exile on Mars, Manhattan points out that the red planet is perfect without life (and without shopping malls), pointing to the strong winds and the intricate geological formations. Indeed, Manhattan is on the way to become pantheistically One with this dead but infinitely creative expanse. OK, I admit I was fascinating. (But of course the idea is illogical, since there is still a consciousness admiring the austere perfection of Mars: Doctor Manhattan´s tachyonic brain.)

Unless I misinterpreted the story somehow, it doesn´t *really* have a happy ending. One of the Watchmen, the hard boiled assassin Rorschach, refuses to accept Adrian´s Machiavellian-genocidal peace strategy, but is promptly killed by Manhattan when threatening to expose the conspiracy. Unknown to the conspirators, however, Rorscharch´s diary has ended up in the "kook file" of a far right newspaper, and its strongly implied that the paper publishes the contents. Presumably, the arms race and environmental destruction will simply re-appear right on schedule when the superpowers realize that Doctor Manhattan is innocent, and that no external threat to all humans on Earth exist...

Perhaps that´s the real dystopia. 

"Watchmen" creator Alan Moore

Credit: Fimb

Jag har gått upp i stabsläge

 

Vad omikron-helvetet har att vänta sig om det mot förmodan vågar sig förbi mina tassemarker. 

Even worse than Suez, mylord

 

The British Empire has finally fallen. Today, Barbados became a republic. The president pictured above.

That, and the Suez Crisis. 

1700-talets hemliga diplomati

Oskorei om Karl Marx´ pamflett "1700-talets hemliga diplomati". Tar givetvis *kraftigt* avstånd från allt den här mannen skriver! :D

Karl Marx och 1700-talets hemliga diplomati

The king is dead, long live the king

 

For the record, I´ve found it. The book of books. The mother of all books. The book that ended book publishing. The book in which Karl Marx supposedly writes positively about...Swedish right-wing nationalist icon and warrior-king Karl XII (or Charles XII).

Not sure if true, but will check later this week. Neither the far right nor the left will like this one! 

You have been given fair warning. 

When Greta met the reptoids

 

I assume this is parody, but it looks almost like a tribute. Note the reptoids that briefly show up when Greta mentions "the people in power".

Hmmm...

Does she KNOW???

PS. Greta and Rittenhouse were born on the same day. 

Underlivspolitik

Har inget särskilt emot gratis mensskydd i skolan, men jag kan inte låta bli att reagera på två saker. För det första: finns det inte ett gammalt ord för personer som har mens? Jag vet inte, men jag tror det. Ordet är väl "kvinna" eller "tjej". Så varför används inte dessa ord *en enda gång* i artikeln? 

För det andra: vänstern brukade håna Ebba Busch Thor och kristdemokraterna för "underlivspolitik". Det var uppenbarligen något slags avancerad projicering. För vad är krav på gratis mensskydd om inte just...underlivspolitik.

Lustigt att de aldrig nämner vems underliv det är frågan om... 

Lagstifta om gratis mensskydd i skolan

Min fiendes fiende, Jimmie för helvete

Jag ser att alt-högerns kärleksaffär med Kakabaveh (som kritiserat V för att inte ta hedersvåld på tillräcklig stort allvar) nu definitivt verkar vara över. Den har väl legat på is sedan förra uppgörelsen mellan "den kommunistiska kurden" och sossarna. Hösten 2020? 

Sedan undrar jag om Jimmie och Fria Tider verkligen håller reda på alla fraktionerna i Syrien. PKK:s syriska gren understöddes fram till hösten 2019 även av USA eftersom de bekämpade IS. Och jag antar att den numera har en taktisk allians med Assad, som Fria Tider väl stödjer? Vem SD stödjer är mer oklart. Grå Vargarna? 

Men okej, okej, jag vet att denna kommentar från min sida är lite "autistisk". Den egentliga orsaken till angreppet på Kakabaveh är förstås någonting annat. Vågar man gissa på hennes etnicitet? 

"SAP köpte segern av kurdisk kommunist"

The Labor Movement in Prophecy

Some brief notes on Efraims Budbärare (Messengers of Ephraim). 

I don´t know where Swedish, Scandinavian or Northern European Israelism originally comes from, but I suppose some truly baroque author from the 17th or 18th centuries might be the culprit.

Efraims Budbärare (Messengers of Ephraim) or Efraims söner och döttrar (Sons and Daughters of Ephraim) were formed around 1870 by Swedish-American ex-Adventist preacher Charles Lee (Carl August Lindqvist). Their peculiar sect had followers in both Sweden, Norway, the United States and Canada. Most were Swedes or Norwegians. (In Norway, the group called itself Messengers of Manasseh.) Attempts to evangelize in England, Scotland and Ireland failed. Lee died in Chicago in 1926, and his wife Julia - who took over the movement - in 1927. 

The finer points of the Lee couple´s Bible exegesis need not concern us here. Suffice to say is that they considered Swedes to be the lost tribe of Ephraim, while Norwegians were the lost tribe of Manasseh. The international workers´ movement (sic) represents the return of the lost tribes of Israel onto the world scene. When Jesus returns, a literal millennium will be established on Earth, in which Swedes and Norwegians will play a central role. So will the working class. It´s not clear from the material I´ve read if "working class" or "international workers´ movement" refers primarily to the workers in the Germanic nations, but it certainly sounds like it.

During the Cold War, Efraims Budbärare "supported" (after a fashion) the Soviet Union, since they identified the Soviets with Assur. If I understand them correctly, they believed that the Soviet Union will smash world capitalism ("Babylon"), but then somehow themselves be destroyed by God! 

Efraims Budbärare believed that God has a physical body and that Jesus was "the incarnated Word" (not sure how his relation to God was supposed to have looked like). No immortal soul exists. Nor does hell. Those unworthy of entering the millennium will simply be destroyed. The resurrection is physical. The Messengers were disestablishmentarian, and hence rejected military service and politics (including socialist politics). Baptism was also rejected, and so was communion, and all Church holidays and Sabbaths. No church buildings existed. The main enemies of this sect were the Adventists and the Salvation Army! The total membership is unknown, due to the (seemingly?) amorphous and un-organized character of the group, but in 1969, about 300 people in Sweden were believed to support Efraims Budbärare. Henry Åhlander, who exegeted Lee´s writings, died in 2020, suggesting that perhaps "the lost tribe" still has a few supporters left...

Advent Sunday Christian

 

I´m not a Christian. I´m not even a Sunday Christian. I guess you could call me an ADVENT Sunday Christian. :D 

Surviving with wolves

"Misha and the Wolves" is a 2021 Netflix documentary about Misha Defonseca (or Monique de Wael), a Belgian-American writer of a memoir titled "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years". A French derivative work by the same author is titled "Survivre avec les loups" (Surviving with the Wolves). Both were published in 1997. There is also a French film of the same title based on the latter book. 

According to the memoir, Misha is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who ran away from the Catholic family that was hiding her after her parents had been deported by the Nazis (who occupied Belgium during World War II). At the time, Misha was only seven years old. The most sensational part of the story claims that she was adopted by a wolf pack in the Belgian forests! She also claimed to have killed a Nazi soldier who tried to rape her, by repeatedly stabbing him. 

The story was almost too good to be true. As indeed it was. "Misha and the Wolves" tells the story of how Defonseca´s lies were exposed. It´s an intriguing detective story, almost as hard to believe as Defonseca´s memoir. 

Somewhat ironically, it was Defonseca´s American publisher, Jane Daniels, who worked overtime to expose the hoax. Daniels claims that she initially believed in Misha´s story. The two women had a fall out after the memoir had been published, Misha Defonseca accusing Daniels of keeping most of the royalties. A US court sentenced Daniels to pay 22 million dollars to Defonseca, money Daniels claimed she didn´t have. So Daniels certainly had a vested interest in suddenly realizing that Misha´s memoir was a literary hoax, and hire people to prove the fact. (According to Wiki, the US court system has indeed revised its verdict and now demands that Defonseca pays Daniels a substantial sum instead!) 

After painstaking research in various archives (including preserved secret lists of Jewish children hiding from the Nazis during the war), Daniels´ team discovered that Misha Defonseca´s real name is Monique de Wael, she is a Belgian Catholic rather than a Jew, and was safely in parish school during World War II. Two reporters from the Belgian newspaper Le Soir did further research and came up with a possible motive for the hoax (apart from the money to be gained). It turned out that Misha´s parents *were* deported and killed by the Nazis. Both were members of the Belgian resistance. Misha´s father, Robert de Wael, is believed to have cracked under torture and turned in other resistance members. For this, he was widely regarded as a traitor after the war, and Misha became known as "the traitor´s daughter". This triggered Misha to invent a new identity for herself as a lone Jewish child and Holocaust survivor as a coping mechanism. After Misha Defonseca moved to the United States, this psycho-drama took on further life, as she joined a Jewish synagogue and began to tell her story to a gullible audience. As for Daniels, she was warned by a Holocaust historian that Defonseca´s story was impossible, but decided to publish her memoir anyway. The historian believes that Daniels was simply greedy. The most bizarre episode in the entire saga took place when The Oprah Show became interested in Defonseca´s story. They sent a team to the small town in Massachusetts where Defonseca was living in order to film her interacting with live wolves from a local wildlife sanctuary. The alpha wolf more or less attacked Defonseca under the very nose of Oprah´s producer, but then decided to let the "wolf-whisperer" go?!

While "Misha and the Wolves" is interesting, it´s frankly too kind to the people involved in this affair. I never read "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years", but if Wikipedia´s description of it is correct, it´s remarkable that *anyone* believed in this story. Here is Wiki: "At a time when she faces starvation in a forest, she is adopted by wolves, becoming a feral child. Protected by the pack, she survives by eating offal and worms. All in all, she treks over 1,900 miles (3,100 kilometers) through Europe, from Belgium to Ukraine, through the Balkans and Germany and Poland (where she sneaks in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto), to Italy by boat and back to Belgium through France. Before the war is over, the character has taken human life to survive, stabbing to death with a pocket knife a rapist Nazi soldier who attacks her." Either Americans are extremely badly informed about World War II history (and wolf biology) or Misha was automatically believed due to her status as a Holocaust survivor. But note that *Holocaust historians* (hardly Nazis) didn´t believe her, while many European readers *did*. So perhaps something else is going on here. And why wasn´t the above information included in the documentary?

With that little reflection, I end this blog post. (Swedish readers might want to know, that "Misha och vargarna" is available on SVT Play.) 

It doesn´t always begin with the Jews...

I don´t know who Paul Kingsnorth might be. (It´s not the guy on the picture above. That´s Adolf Eichmann!) The link below is to a recent article by Kingsnorth on Substack. Most of his other content seems to be behind a paywall, but this one is for free. 

The short form is that while the COVID pandemic is real and serious, the establishment is using it as an excuse to impose authoritarian technological forms of control on the citizens. Control measures which so far haven´t been able to stop the virus, not even in nations where almost everyone is vaccinated. Suggesting that the real point of the control is something else entirely. 

Free speech, critical thinking and even science are among the causalties of this "war", and soon, liberalism and democracy itself might follow suit, as Germany and Austria are threatening to forcibly vaccinate and/or incarcerate sections of their respective populations (as an Englishman, Kingsnorth finds this highly ironic). 

Here is one quote:

>>>We are moving towards enforced mandatory vaccination of entire populations - including children - and prison sentences for those who refuse. By winter’s end, we could be living in a world in which the state has taken full charge of our bodies, and our only chance of remaining active members of society is to submit to their every instruction, and agree to permanent digital monitoring to prove our compliance. 

>>>Eighteen months ago, anyone suggesting that this would be the direction of travel when this virus arrived in town would have been dismissed as a paranoid David Icke fanboy. But over that eighteen months we have moved smoothly from ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’ to ‘mandatory injections to avoid prison.’ We have normalised this, and accepted it. We have not asked questions. Those who have dissented have been censored, silenced, bullied and abused.

Read all of it here:

The Vaccine Moment, Part 1: On the Days of Revelation

Waiting for the big one

 

I´m still surprised at the fact that the SJWs haven´t cancelled "Life of Brian". Sure, it´s anti-Christian (sort of), but it also makes hilarious fun of...the 1970´s left! Like in the clip above. 

Either SJWs are too stupid to see this, or they consider the anti-Jesus angle to be so important that Python (Monty) got a temporary dispensation. 

Many people will be blacklisted and purged when the SJW Front for the Liberation of Portland finally comes for this film, and everyone who delayed cancelling it...  

Vatican II is destroying the Church

 

This must be the result of Vatican II. Time to reintroduce the traditional Latin mass!!! Sure, it´s younger than the Lutheran mass, but who cares? 

Welsh - wait for it - Israelism?!

Can´t help sharing this little gemstone from John Michael Greer´s blog. I never heard of this particular sect before, probably a sub-set (or sub-sect?) of British Israelism or Christian Identity. (There used to be a group in Sweden which claimed that the Swedish working class specifically was the lost tribe of Ephraim, but that´s another show!) 

>>>

Copper, good heavens — now there’s a blast from the past. My wife’s maternal grandfather was a Welsh Israelite of the old school, who insisted that the Welsh were one of the lost tribes of Israel — I forget which one — and made a living during the Depression preaching at Welsh-language churches in upstate New York. I didn’t know the movement was still around. Raymond Capt is a name I know from a different context: he wrote a book purporting to prove that Stonehenge was built by ancient Freemasons, which most Masons find very funny. As far as I know, there’s zero basis to any of it — a lot of European cultures have fringe groups claiming “We’re the Chosen People, and the Jews aren’t!” I’ve always put that down to a kind of spiritual status envy.

>>>

Welcome to Monarch

"Kong: Skull Island" from 2017 is apparently one of several "MonsterVerse" films, which reboot the Godzilla and King Kong franchises. I´ve only seen the 2017 flick, in which a secretive group of maverick scientists working for the US deep state get more than they ask for. The year is supposedly 1973 (yet, everyone looks more modern - or less, in some cases). The classified Monarch crypto-zoology project is almost shut down due to a lack of tangible results, when a satellite discovers Skull Island, an unknown territory in the middle of the Pacific surrounded by almost impenetrable storms. Monarch´s team of monster-hunters and heretical geologists (one of them an academic outcast who believes in the Hollow Earth theory) are joined by US military personnel from the Vietnam War on an expedition to investigate the site. What happens next is easy to imagine, LOL.

Or perhaps not, since the main twist of "Kong: Skull Island" is that King Kong is one of the *good* guys. Skull Island is connected to gigantic cave systems in which prehistoric creatures still live, creatures so abominable that the Earth really belongs to them, not to humanity, if they ever decide to come up for a quick snack. Note the combo of Hollow Earth speculations and Lovecraft´s Eldritch horrors! King Kong seems to be the only monster fighting on the side of humanity against a breed of bizarre oversized reptilians known as skullcrawlers. Kong´s family was killed by the crawlers, and he is the last of his race, being worshipped by the natives of the island as a god for keeping the place reasonably safe. Due to a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, Kong and the Monarch away team end up fighting each other, enabling the dinosaurid horrors to escape their underground caverns...

This isn´t *really* a good film (it would have been even worse without the huge budget!), but as lighter entertainment on a cloudy Friday afternoon, I suppose it works tolerably well. 

OMICRON PANIC

 

Here we go, right on schedule... 

Veckans Pinochet-kramare

MUF:s ordförande visar framfötterna genom att attackera SD...från höger.

Tanken att SD i själva verket är "strasseriter i vardande" är ju intressant. Vad MUF-ledaren är för något vet vi redan. 

"SD är ett sosseparti"

A god of clay

Swami Tadatmananda, a Western supporter of Advaita Vedanta (who looks like an adorable autistic baby) tries to explain Shankara´s "non-dual" position on Brahman and the unreal world. And perhaps make it sound more rational? If so, he doesn´t succeed very well. Instead, the viewer (me) is left wondering what on earth is the difference between this and materialism? Isn´t this really a kind of spiritual materialism? But sure, I suppose you could say that spiritual materialism is "rational", somehow. 

In this scenario, Brahman is the subtle substance everything is made of: humans, stars, dreams, even Ishvara (the personal creator-god). Everything that exists is just a "form" or "name" of Brahman. The swami at one point calls it "a concept" (which is absurd). He constantly compares Brahman to the clay in a clay pot. The pot has no "independent existence" and is really "just clay" (again, absurd notions). At another point, he compares Brahman to atoms and quarks - if science had been able to discover what quarks are made of, they would have discovered Brahman. 

Tadatmananda is smart enough not to say that the world is a literal "illusion". It is "real" in some sense, but it´s a dependent reality. Ultimately, only Brahman is real (just as ultimately only the clay is real in the analogy of the clay pots). But if I understand this man´s teachings correctly, he says that Brahman is inert and passive. It´s just a substance. The phenomenal world is created by Ishvara. While Ishvara is also a manifestation of Brahman (and hence not "ultimately real"), it seems to be this personal creator-god which molds the Brahmanic clay into the "names" and "forms" surrounding us (including ourselves). But if so, Ishvara is really Brahman´s shakti, the active energy that *actually* does something, the Demiurge that takes the clay and applies (its own?) "concepts" onto the clay, creating the entire world. *But that logically means that we should worship Ishvara alone, and not bother with Brahman*. 

Yet, the group this teacher belongs to, Arsha Bodha Center, wants to reach Brahman through meditation practice. They want to return to the clay, merge with it, even. According to another clip, the goal of non-dual meditation is similar to a permanent dreamless sleep. Indeed, Tadatmananda says in yet another clip that Advaita Vedanta (or his favored version thereof) is very similar to orthodox Buddhism. This seems to be correct: nirvana is also a permanent dreamless sleep of sorts (or is often interpreted that way). Presumably, this is the only way to escape suffering in this system. Note, however, that this makes the divine imperfect, since the suffering can only be caused by an imperfection in the clay. Everytime the clay is molded into name and form, suffering (I presume) is the result. 

However, since humans can pray to Ishvara, there seems to be another way out of our predicament. Why can´t Ishvara create a number of heaven worlds for his creatures? Indeed, this is what he or she has done according to Hindu mythology. While these heavens will be destroyed after one mahakalpa, that is a very long time. Sure sounds more fun cavorting with the gopis in Vrindavan (the transcendental version) than becoming dreamless clay!

I happen to agree (I think) with the idea that there must be one metaphysical substance underlying everything that exists (or at the very least everything we can concieve or percieve as existing). Even "good" and "evil", or "God" and the "world", must in *some* sense consist of the same substance, otherwise they would never be able to interact with one another. To take just one example, the Christian Devil is a fallen angel, and hence presumably made of the same substance as the good angels. (While creatio ex nihilo for the same reason seems wrong, emanationism being the correct take.) However, I want to believe that this substance isn´t "the ultimate reality", it´s just part of "God´s energy body" or whatever exotic term we want to use. If you enter it in a meditative state, you are (in one sense) "one with God", but in another and more important sense, you have simply touched his vast energy (let´s call it clay-energy), while other and more interesting possibilities remain untapped... 

Det här riskerar att bryta samhällskontraktet

Orolig kille 

Hur många gånger sedan 1970-talet har jag inte hört frasen "det här riskerar bara att spä på politikerföraktet". Har aldrig förstått vilka de var, de där farliga människorna som gick runt och föraktade politiker. Fast *så* många kan det ju inte ha varit. Inte med tanke på att valdeltagandet "när det begav sig" var över nittio procent!

Och nu är det dags igen. Talmannen (vad heter han nu igen?) ballade totalt häromdagen och uttryckte en stark oro över att de kaotiska turerna under superonsdagen (då Magdalena Andersson tillträdde och avgick inom loppet av en arbetsdag) riskerade att...gissa vad...spä på politikerföraktet. Han uttryckte sig inte riktigt så, bokstavligt talat, men det var det han menade.

OK, vänta lite nu...

Det finns *ingenting annat* i Sverige sedan finanskrisen, migrantkrisen, coronakrisen eller energikrisen som skulle kunna sänka de folkvalda politikernas förtroende? Ingenting alls? Säkert? 

Det blir lite konstigt när killarna (och numera en del tjejer också) däruppe reagerar först sedan några riksdagspiruetter kablas ut i direktsändning och får en del välsituerade väljare på rätt sida stan att ta sig lite för pannan. 

De verkar leva i en bubbla däruppe. 

Fast så borde jag ju inte säga. Jag menar, det riskerar ju att spä på politikerföraktet...

BLACK FRIDAY

 

Thank Pan for Bidenflation

 

"Thank god for Bidenflation, at least that means I can live a year longer!" 

You´re a big man, right?

 

Crazy old man with a big white beard, calling himself Sadhguru, is actually quite funny here... 

An extremely silly blog post

This is an extremely silly piece I wrote the other day when I had nothing else to do, and had been triggered by the usual autistic deontology-utilitarianism "debates" on the web. Take it for what you will. 

Is there such a thing as objective morality? Here are some reflections.

Imagine being a rationalist-rational philosopher who just proved in an entirely unimpeccable way (based on First Principles) a moral truth objectively valid in all possible worlds. And therefore...what? 

Therefore nothing, of course. Why should anyone follow such a splendid derivation? And when people continue not giving a damn, the only thing the Meta-Ethical Philosopher can do is to scream at them "YOU ARE BEING IRRATIONAL". In all possible worlds, presumably. After all, proving *what* is moral isn´t the same thing as making people do it, right? There´s just one little problem: nobody gives a damn now either. 

So we are still left with the little problem of what really makes people act morally. It certainly isn´t a First Principle entirely valid even in the Antares star system. Here is an example.

Let´s assume you live in Death Valley. There is no real community, but you don´t care, because you want to live for yourself. So "game theory" doesn´t apply here. You don´t believe in the Bible. Nor can the law do anything in this remote area. Now, what´s to stop you from burglarizing the house of your mentally handicapped neighbor (there are a few scattered houses in the valley) and steal his chest of gold? Or perhaps your eudaimonistic goal in life is to become a really good serial killer, and hone your serial killing passions accordingly. (And yes, such cases do exist. Jeffrey Epstein got away with it for decades. That´s game theory for you, right there. Sure, he was eventually killed, but so what? Maybe that´s an acceptable part of the game.) 

I think it´s pretty obvious that the answer is "nothing". Unless...unless there is also a third scattered house in the valley. This house is inhabited by a former biker who just served 25 to life for killing four people. He was set free for good conduct after 25 years. The biker is two metres tall, looks like an American football player, has huge tattoos all over his body, and carries a machine gun the size of Kyle Rittenhouse. He is also the brother of the mentally handicapped man, the guy with the chest of gold you want to steal. 

So you decide not to do it, after all. 

That´s how morality works. Everything else is just vain philosophical conceit. Or shit. Or whatever whenever.

That was an extreme example. But less extremely too, a "truly rational" morality would have to base itself on really existing human nature. What else could it possible be based on? Presumably a combination of selfish genes, genetic altruism and reciprocal altruism. (And, I suppose, "the altruism of fear" as in the example above.) Perhaps the most rational morality is the one combining or balancing these traits: your individual freedom, the safety of your family (and the safety *in* your family), and reciprocity with whoever isn´t your family (be it another family, another tribe, the state, the gods - provided such exist, and so on), since reciprocity enhances freedom and/or security. 

Morality is often based on other factors, too. Compassion is one. The yuck factor is another. We-are-not-like-the-Gentiles is a third. Some kind of "cuz reasons" factor may be a fourth ("No, we don´t eat red apples. Why? No idea, we just don´t"). Such things are probably "irrational", that is, irrational as part of morality specifically (unless they are *part* of that morality, which makes them rational - such as compassion directed towards your sworn blood brothers in the biker Männerbund, let´s say). They may be rational for other, non-moral reasons. Or you may have to take them into consideration anyway. 

Which brings me to my next point. There will always be moral conflicts between the goals mentioned: individual freedom, family, community, deals with other communities. There will also be conflicts about how to deal with all the irrelevant cultural dross which doesn´t really have anything to do with morality sensu stricto. For instance, if a strong aversion to red apples helps save the world from a thermo-nuclear conflagration, should we concoct a noble lie about a god named Thermo-Nucleus who can be appeased by not eating apples in said color? Or would this lead to unwanted discrimination of the color blind?

The point is: even though there may be an Absolute Morality somewhere in the clouds, in the Third Heaven, or thereabouts (in fact, I do think there is!), down here in the valley of death, morality will always be gritty (and perhaps even a bit nutty). Perhaps the best solution to our moral principles is to admit this fact, and act accordingly. Maybe that will solve some of our conundrums. 

That, and a really big machine gun. 

On the Metaphysics of X

A lot of hot takes in this one...

On the Metaphysics of Sex

I väntan på en skifteskonselj

Magdalena Andersson har för ögonblicket något slags svårslaget rekord. Hon är den statsminister i Sveriges historia som suttit kortast tid. Närmare bestämt i omkring sju timmar. Fast egentligen är det värre än så.

Magdalena Andersson har nämligen aldrig varit statsminister över huvud taget.

Det formella maktöverlämnandet skulle ha skett först på fredagen, i samband med en "skifteskonselj", då den tillträdande statsministern presenterar sin nya regering för kungen. Och det hanns ju aldrig med i detta fallet.

Magdalena Anderssons svårslagna rekord är alltså att hon avgick som statsminister innan hon ens han tillträda...

Nå, ingen skada skedd. Hon blir såklart konfirmerad fredag nästa vecka istället. Då hon också får den stora äran att bli den första socialdemokratiska statsministern som regerar med en nynazistisk budget. Or something. Men det är, som man brukar säga, en helt annan historia...

Of course I´m paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me!

Gustav III was king of Sweden from 1771 to 1792. I noticed a curious thing about how many popular history books depict this particular monarch. He is always criticized for being extremely distrustful, borderline paranoid even, constantly dissimulating, never showing his true feelings, having an intractable personality, etc etc.

There is just one problem with this description.

Gustav III was assassinated. 

I say he wasn´t distrustful enough! The fate of king Gustav reminds me of that old joke "of course I´m paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me"...

The king is also taken to task for being obsessed with Freemasons and other secret societies. Once again, I wonder about the competence of our popular history writers. For starters, his murderer Anckarström was a Freemason. But then, so was the king himself. Indeed, he was the de facto head of Swedish Freemasonry. But why? Weird obsession? Or something else entirely?

Welcome to the 18th century, guys! Masonic lodges all over Europe were covers for the intelligence services of various nations. French Freemasonry was a front for French intelligence. British Freemasonry for British intelligence. And yes, Swedish Freemasonry also had lodges abroad, and was of course a cover for Swedish (and presumably French) intelligence (Sweden was a French ally). I´m sure there were also Masonic lodges that were used as fronts for revolutionary groups. Once again, France is a good example. Or Bavaria. Remember the Illuminati? (The real ones.)

So it turns out that Gustav III wasn´t an intractable weirdo, after all. OK, maybe to some extent. But I somehow suspect that his personality traits may have helped him survive in the super-conspiratorial atmosphere of 18th century politics-as-usual. At least until 1792... 

A Letter from Earth

From the blog The Dendroica Project, some excerpts from "A Letter from Earth". For the whole thing, see link below! Note the similarity to the essays by John Michael Greer I posted links to recently...

>>>>

Dear humans,

You have been behaving rather oddly of late. I have been following the evolution of your species with great interest, as you are in many ways unique among the forms that have lived upon me over my long life. I am wondering if it might be helpful to see how you appear from the perspective of a planet. Your planet. Earth, as you call me in one of your languages.

My “heartbeat” – the living rhythm of my life – is my orbit around the star you call the Sun. For you, this “year” is a long time. For me, it is but a second. Imagine then that each year is condensed into a single beat of your heart – that time appears to pass 42 million times faster. Then perhaps you can begin to understand my experience, and the way that you appear to me.

By this reckoning I am one hundred and eight years old, and I expect to live for another hundred years before the dying, expanding Sun dissolves my substance. You live, on average, for one minute. Perhaps that is longer than you expected; you imagine that you are only an eyeblink in deep time. The one you call Jesus lived 25 minutes ago. The last ice age ended two hours ago. Your species has existed in its present form for seven days, and earlier species of humans first appeared three weeks ago.

You have mined most of the accessible iron laid down when those cyanobacteria first oxygenated the atmosphere. You have discovered the traces of decayed life buried in my skin – you call them fossil fuels. It is not so much energy really – equivalent to the solar energy that reaches my surface over a month or two of your time and less than a heartbeat of mine – but it has been enough to power your factories and energize your fantasies of a techno-industrial space-traveling future. Those fuels were laid down in my skin gradually over nine years of my time – 360 million years of yours – and you have mostly burned through them in the past three minutes. Whether or not you burn the rest in another minute or two is of little consequence to me.

You have discovered the fuel that warms the core of my body – the unstable element you call uranium – and realized that if you concentrate and compress it you can release all of its energy at once. You call these Armageddon weapons, and they terrify you. To me, they are like those little fireworks you toss on the sidewalk and they make a little flash and pop. Even if you were to set off all fifteen thousand of them – in a war that you believe would surely destroy your species and your planet – the energy released would still be one hundred thousand times less than the asteroid impact that is still in my recent memory – and that your burrowing ancestors and millions of other species survived.

I am saddened that your species has declared war on the rest of Nature, but I am not afraid, because I know that it cannot last much longer. Everything that you build decays from the moment it is made. My systems rebuild and renew themselves continuously. Your systems move resources from mines to factories to landfills, from wells to fires to the atmosphere. My systems recycle resources indefinitely. This is a war that you cannot win, because you are not actually separate from Nature. The power of your industries pales in comparison to the great thermal engine that converts sunlight into wind and weather, into rainstorms and rivers, into forests and grasslands – all of which nourish you – and the fuel for your industries is rapidly running out.

Many of you who have turned aside from Progress and who would call yourselves environmentalists still believe the story. You believe that you are separate from Nature and that Man has the power to conquer Nature. But rather than seeing this as your destiny, you see it as an evil that must be stopped. You see yourselves as destroyers, as sinners who must repent. So it is that you insist that your fellow humans must be controlled in the name of stopping climate change. So it is that you mourn endlessly those species whose extinction you have caused, or you attempt to resurrect them. So it is that you seek to “restore” nature to a state from before you “degraded” it – a state that can only be maintained by relentlessly poisoning “invasive” plants into submission.

Allow me to reassure you that you cannot destroy this planet, any more than you can transcend it and blast off into space. Your planet-destroying Death Stars are just a fantasy. You see yourselves as a cancer upon my body, but to me it feels more like a skin rash and a mild fever. You see the change you cause as bad and control as good. From my perspective there is no such morality. Change is inevitable and control is temporary. Whatever harm you have done will heal, in just a few minutes or hours of my time. Carbon dioxide will be absorbed by the oceans and precipitate into limestone, and the climate will cool again, resuming cycles of ice ages and interglacial periods. Those species that you have moved and that have thrived – that you call “invasive” – will become native to their new homes, just as you will become native to the land you inhabit.

>>>>

 A Letter from Earth

SD:s lilla bitch

Centerpartiet tänker släppa fram en budget som förhandlats fram med deltagande av Sverigedemokraterna. Slutsats: Annie Lööf är Hitler. 

En mindre provokativ slutsats: Lööf föredrar budgetar framförhandlade med SD än budgetar framförhandlade med Vänsterpartiet. 

Så nu vet vi det. 

Santa in the dock

A lost chapter from some book by C S Lewis? Jack attacks the secularization and commercialization of Christmas in this humorous essay with a serious undertone, written in the style of an ancient Greek travelogue. Or rather a modern Anglo translation thereof. 

Tbh, I don´t really like party-poopers like this (ahem, there´s nothing wrong with Christmas cards showing Santa and some reindeer), but I suppose that depends on the quality of the party in for the pooping. It could be argued that there are two kinds of party poopers, after all: those who poop the party and those who *throw* the party! 

With that little comment, click on the link below and enjoy. 

C S Lewis: Xmas and Christmas (A Lost Chapter from Herodotus)

Jordens fördömda

En stor del av vänstern verkar stödja lockdowns, eller åtminstone betrakta protester mot dem (och mot vaccin) som fascistoida. Så det kan ju bli intressant att se hur denna vänster reagerar på nedanstående. Den svarta befolkningen i två franska kolonier protesterar mer eller mindre våldsamt mot både fattigdom, dyrtid och...tvångsvaccinering. Vilken impuls kommer visa sig vara starkare? Svassandet för det globo-liberala etablissemanget, eller sympatierna för jordens fördömda?  

Covidprotester lamslår "franska" öar i Karibien

Karmic culmination

Many of the reactions to the Rittenhouse acquittal have a very disturbing quality about them. I mean, how could a person like *this* ever become a staffer of a main line political party? Don´t they understand that they could be setting the stage for a quite literal civil war? The Dems had to drop this character from their payroll, but unfortunately I don´t think this is an isolated example... 

Chicago Democratic staffer resigns after bizarre tweets

Meeting demons in Lemuria

Lemurian demon?

John Michael Greer answers a question from an anon: 

>>>Last week, you mentioned that our species got mixed up with demons due to some mistake that we made. What exactly happened, and what was the mistake that we made?

>>>It happened a very long time ago -- Dion Fortune puts it in the Lemurian period, which would be well over 20,000 years ago by my calculations -- and different writers disagree about the details. My guess -- and it's only a guess -- is that human beings in that period deliberately made contact with the demonic realms and opened channels of contact between that realm and ours. One of the consequences was what Fortune calls "the sin of separateness" -- the loss of contact between the lower and higher selves and, as a result, the delusion that each of us is a little separate bubble of consciousness, rather than defined but unseparated parts of a continuum of consciousness.

Read the entire exchange here: 

The demons of Lemuria

Guess who share the same birth date?

Bizarre stuff.  

"Greta Thunberg and Kyle Rittenhouse were born on the same day"

Ingen vet varför

Kontrasten mellan Sydafrika och resten av det "svarta" Afrika är märklig. Beror det på urbaniseringen, färre fall av malaria, etc? 

Corona minskar i Afrika - ingen vet varför

Kan någon förklara?

 

Stödjer Taiwan Daniel Ortega? 

J K Rowling update

J K Rowling´s conflict with trans activists continue. First, they cancel her from a "Harry Potter" reunion! Note: Rowling is the *author* of the Harry Potter books. Then, some trans radicals doxxed Rowling´s family. Rowling is left-liberal, pro-gay and pro-open borders, but has nevertheless come under fire by trans radicals for suggesting that "women" is a biological category. You can never be woke enough, etc. 

J K Rowling doxxed by trans radicals

J K Rowling says she received death threats after being doxxed

J K Rowling blacklisted from "Harry Potter" reunuion

No aliens, but still a mystery

"The Last Secret of the Nasca" is a 2018 National Geographic documentary about the perennially mysterious Nazca culture in southern Peru. Strictly speaking, the documentary is French, originally titled "Nazcas, les lignes qui parlaient au ciel". And yes, I´ve seen a Swedish version! 

The Nazca culture existed from around 200 BC to 700 AD, and was preceded by the lesser known (at least to the paying public) Paracas culture. Both cultures created gigantic geoglyphs in the Nazca desert, but also road-like structures. The Nazca geoglyphs, such as the Monkey or the Hummingbird, are world famous and have been the staple of various unserious "theories" about aliens and UFOs. So have the strange skeletons with deformed skulls found in the area. One of the geoglyphs is actually called The Astronaut by the Swedish narrator! The Nazca people also produced complex textiles and other intriguing artifacts. 

To be honest, nobody *really* knows what on earth (pun intended) the lines are for, and the theories presented in this documentary are really speculations. That being said, a religious explanation is the most obvious ("religious" from our viewpoint), since a ceremonial center called Cahuachi overlooks some of the lines. Cahuachi included a small pyramid. Both "mummies" and trophy heads have been found at the site, which is belived to have been a place of pilgrimage for the natives. Young men may have been ritually sacrificed at the site (insert complaint about Saxon and Norse heathens here "for balance"). As for the figures, I laughed at the "learned" explanations of the archeologists featured. "This is obviously a fertility symbol", "this shows the eternal nature of time and its cyclical character". Ahem, you can´t know that without a written scripture. On a more fascinating note, one of the supposed gods of the Nazca people looked like a chimaera, combining the traits of a killer whale with that of many other animals, and carrying the inevitable trophy head. Psychopomp? 

The documentary speculates that the geoglyphs were created during a period when rain and hence water became more scarce, as a way to influence the gods to send more of it. When this failed, Cahuachi was abandoned, while the artists in the deserts suddenly made large straight lines intersecting the previous animal figures, as if defiguring them. A new religion in the making? I think it´s obvious that these explanations are influenced by our present predicament with climate change. The Natives impotently screaming "save us, dear gods, sent us rain" in the gloomy Peruvian desert are really us.

We also get to see some really flashy virtual technology, so perhaps all isn´t entirely lost yet? To me, at any rate, the tech gadgets shown are just as mysterious as the Nazca lines! When this docu was recently showed on Swedish TV, the person introducing the show pointed out that the currently popular theory about Nazca is actually somewhat different, claiming that the straight lines may have been canals! 

Perhaps we really can´t understand the thinking processes of this lost civilization, just as they for sure wouldn´t be able to understand ours... 

Another Pretendian

A leading "Native" activist and bureaucrat in Canada, one Carrie Bourassa, may have faked her indigenous identities. This according to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) investigation. Genealogical records indicate that she is really 100% White European of Russian, Czech and Polish ancestry (obvious if you look at her). In other words, a "Pretendian". Parallels to Rachel Dolezal are pretty obvious here. 

Note that Bourassa´s SJW supporters explicitly say that identity isn´t about genealogy, but about "self-declaration" and "acceptance from the community", a perfectly logical position for a postmodern leftist to take - after all, they believe a man can become a woman simply by "self-declaration". While that clashes with traditional feminism, this idea clashes with Native rights, since Natives get affirmative action (the probable reason why Bourassa and her sister claimed Native ancestry). It will be interesting to see how long this kind of coalition holds together - as long as there is enough "action" to go around for everyone? When the party´s over, a struggle for the remaining crumbs will blow the postmodern coalition apart. Note also that the "self-declaration" take is really a tacit admission that the CBC are right, and that Bourassa doesn´t really have indigenous ancestry. 

I don´t know much about Canadian Natives, but as far as I understand, the Métis have a high status among Canadian progressives due to their legendary 19th century leader Louis Riel. The Tlingit are well known in New Age and spiritual circles due to their belief in reincarnation. As for the Anishinaabe, according to all-knowing Wiki, the name of Canada´s capital Ottawa is derived from their Algonquin language... You could almost *predict* that an impostor would claim ancestry from these three groups! 

Indigenous or pretender?

The myth of the holy cow

Nobody is surprised. 

The myth of the Indian vegetarian nation

The Hindu ethic and the atman of capitalism

Why are Indian gurus selling noodles?

For the same reason as the "gurus" of modern capitalist consumerism, obviously. You know, money, profit, Protestant work ethic, that kind of thing... 

Is this some kind of thing in India?

Another one?! (This was in 1993, but still...)

Pitched battle in Calcutta over dead guru´s decomposing body

Keep the guru in the freezer

This is "old news" (2014-2017) but I decided to link to it anyway. Yes, it´s a bizarre story about a stone dead Hindu guru whose body is literally kept in a freezer by his devotees, supposedly because they believe he is only in a deep meditative trance! The real reason might be some kind of property dispute, although I don´t understand how the freezer situation fits into the scenario. Isn´t the guru legally dead according to Indian courts? 

Dead Indian guru frozen by devotees

Followers win fight to keep guru in the freezer

A dead seer kept alive by blind faith

She used to be *so* charming

 

Little Wednesday from the Addams Family used to be so cute and charming...until "Addams Family Values" turned her into a psychopathic baby killer. Shame on you, Hollywood! Happy Thanksgiving, btw.

Thanksgiving my ass

 

The classical Thanksgiving scene from the crazy comedy "Addams Family Values", in which Wednesday decides to change the course of American history in a slightly more pro-Indian direction... 

Pardon me for thanksgiving

 

I admit that this annual "pardoning of a turkey" is quite funny. Joe seems to be a natural when it comes to stuff like this. But why is the turkey white? Some kind of pardon-friendly subspecies, perhaps? Happy Thanksgiving, btw. ;-) 

The other side of the pond

 

I´m shocked, shocked I say! It turns out that there is an entire genus of insects that is MARINE. Yes, they live in the freakin´ ocean!!! And no, I´m not confusing Insecta with Crustacea. They really are actual insects, "true bugs" in fact, related to the pond skaters we can find in our quiet little inland lakes. It seems the pond skaters found a much bigger pond to skate over! 

Wtf.

Below, I link to All-Knowing Nerd Site Wikipedia´s entry on these deeply disturbing creatures, and one of Wiki´s main sources. 

Halobates

Biology of Halobates (Heteroptera: Gerridae)

A world of damselflies

 

"David Attenborough´s Dragons and Damsels" is a wittily titled documentary about dragonflies (Anisoptera) and damselflies (Zygoptera) somewhere in the UK. And yes, the odonate extravaganza is narrated by the apparently ever-young David Attenborough. 

Dragonfly-like insects have been around for a staggering 330 million years! This production shows a wide variety of dragonfly and damselfly species, mostly the latter, come to think of it. If you are a budding zygopterist, this may rock your little world. Damselfly species shown include the Common Blue, the Banded Demoiselle, the Willow Emerald, the Azure Damselfly, the Common Red Eye, and perhaps some others I missed. Dragonflies shown include the "Emperor" and the Common Darter. 

Odonates turn out to be surprisingly highly evolved insects, with complex behaviors surrounding territorial defense, mating and signaling. Their flying capabilities are so extraordinary that human engineers who built a "dragonfly robot" had major problems mimicking the original insect! The documentary shows how Emperor dragonflies laying their eggs inside Common Blue territory are mobbed by swarms of the smaller damselflies. It´s interesting to note that the underwater nymphs of the damselflies are hunted and eaten by the Emperor nymphs, but it´s difficult to believe that the damselflies somehow *know* this. Other natural enemies of the damsels include fish, spiders and "pond skaters" (a bizarre "true bug" that can walk on water). Climate change rears its head with the Willow Emerald, a south European species which has began to spread in Britain, catching the attention of scientists and odonate aficionados alike. The Willow Emerald lays its eggs inside the bark of trees (rather than in the water) and is believed to have colonized the UK due to changes in weather patterns. 

"Dragons and Damsels" ends with winter coming to the anonymous lake, killing off all remaining specimens of Odonata...except the nymphs, which survive deep under the lake surface, only to re-emerge as adults in the spring. As they (perhaps) have done for 330 million years. 

Safe space

In the interest of unity and my own personal safety, I hereby endorse President Joe Biden, the legitimate head of state and government of these United States. I call on everyone to follow the law in the jurisdiction of their domicile and report all suspicious activity to the proper authorities. I will henceforth only publish posts of a completely safe and uncontroverisal nature. This civic act of self-censorship for the benefit of the higher good of society will begin at 1800 hours local Swedish time today and be in effect until at least January 1, 2023. 

Examples of safe topics: the phylogeny of the noctuid lepidoptera, the intellectual history of episcopalian Methodism during the 19th century, trends in Austro-Hungarian fashion and architecture during the belle epoque, and the pros and cons of manned space flight to the outer moons of Uranus. 

Thanks for your understanding. 

Men Trump hade rätt (del 666)

När ska Martin Gelin och Peter Wolodarski be om ursäkt?  

Washington Post ber om ursäkt för falska nyheter om Trump

Pravda on the Potomac caves

Kek is the effective ruler of Amerika. This proves it!  

The Washington Post corrects, removes parts of two stories on Donald Trump

>>>The Post’s decision to edit and repost the Millian stories is highly unusual in the news industry.

>>>Mainstream publications often add corrections to published stories when credible new information emerges. Some publishers also enable readers to petition them to remove unflattering stories from their websites, a once-controversial practice that has gained more acceptance in the digital era, when articles can remain accessible online for years.

>>>But it’s rare for a publication to make wholesale changes after publication and to republish the edited story, especially more than four years afterward.

>>>“No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University."

Infinite expansion in space

NASA wants to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon

And apparently on Mars, too. OK, let me guess. Elon Musk already has some ideas...? 

LOL.