The donroe and the taco

 

Look who just visited the White House. LOL. I´m glad that diplomacy works, whatever. Credit: Colombian Presidency Press Office. 

Singular

 

Five animals only seen once. OK, quite interesting! Note the implication for cryptozoology: if even species that are extremely rare can become known to science, why can´t we find cryptids which supposedly live in our very backyards? Cuz they´re not real, obviously. 

Unless they´re fairies. As per usual! 

Organic

 

Note that some sections of the Latin American left accepts Woke in its most absurd manifestations. Why? Isn´t that strange, considering the cultural differences between Latin America and the "West"? Maybe it isn´t organic. Somebody is paying. 

So who is paying the Colombian left-wing government?

Colombian president fires "non-binary" gay porn star serving as Equality Minister

Buga buga

 

Some skeptical videos about "the Buga sphere", promoted by Steven Greer and other ufologists as evidence of ancient aliens or something to that effect. The silver sphere is named after the village of Buga in Colombia where it was allegedly found. As usual in cases like this, it´s...probably not authentic. 

Fun fact: when I asked ChatGPT about the Buga sphere the other night, the system started to hallucinate and claim it´s a concept developed by Jack Sarfatti?! Suggesting that OpenAI have changed something in the matrix...again. 

Mangala Ganapati?

 

Hindus believe the strangest things. Or is somebody else behind this laughably amateurish clip on YouTube, which can´t even AI-generate grammatically correct English? On another YT channel, we learn that there are statues of Ganesha in pre-contact Colombia. Here, we´re supposed to believe that there are idols of the elephant-headed god on Mars?! 

Any relation to Quetzalcoatl´s big face or the Egyptian pyramids? LOL. It´s going to get really crowded on the red planet soon if every religion/culture/alternative thinker will project their greatest achievements onto its surface. Maybe the flat earthers will start arguing that Mars is flat, too? 

The journey to other planets have never been this easy.  

Elephants evolved

 

HA HA HA, this is so confused that it becomes unintentionally funny. Erich von Däniken, come back, all is forgiven! So apparently the Hindu god Ganesha has evolved in a way similar to elephants. Or something. Or maybe something else. 

Whataboutism

 

Perhaps a bit embarassing for all the progressives who for generations has denied the connection between Latin American leftist insurgents and the cocaine trade. But then, the CIA aren´t exactly innocent either, so there´s that...

Nor is whiskey harmless. I mean, what did the Colombian head of state drink before this cabinet meeting, I wonder? 

Colombia´s president defends cocaine as "no worse than whiskey"

Federal property

 

Credit: Pete unseth

A provocative thought. Panama wouldn´t even exist as an independent nation without US support. And the US built the Panama Canal. So why shouldn´t the United States take it back? :D

Magisk realism

 

Netflix har tydligen gjort en TV-serie av "Hundra år av ensamhet". Kultureliten är lyrisk. "Jag kan inte vara den ende som är entusiastisk" säger en kulturskribent på en viss kvällstidning. 

Eh?

Jag kan garantera att 99,99% av svenska folket aldrig har hört talas om Gabriel García Márquez. Jag har förstås gjort det. Gubben som tog emot nobelpriset i litteratur klädd i pyjamas. 

Har dock läst Miguel Asturias...

:P

A new look at Easter Island...or maybe not

 

DNA studies supposedly confirms the new take on Easter Island, a kind of best blend of post-colonial political correctness and crypto-Hancockite pre-Columbian contact. 

Or maybe not. 

Note the critical remarks hidden away in the two last paragraphs! Did they test the wrong skeletons (all 15 of them)? Something tells me this controversy will continue for another seven decades or so... 

Easter Island population never collapsed, but it did have contacts with Native Americans

Many are called

 

This is ridiculous...

Mystery or mystification?

 

“Easter Island Origins” is a very recent documentary about the mysterious Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the Pacific Ocean. The island is almost isolated from the rest of the world but famous due to its large stone statues (“moai”), remnants of a vanished high culture. But perhaps Easter Island isn´t really that mysterious. Maybe its people and culture have simply been mystified by outsiders? Judging by this documentary, the answer is “yes”…but some of the new research on the island have led to sensational results anyhow.

Controversially, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl claimed that Easter Island had been inhabited by migrants from South America. While this is disproven (the earliest settlers on Rapa Nui were certainly from other parts of Polynesia), DNA research suggests that there actually might be a connection between the island and the South American mainland. The documentary is somewhat unclear on this point, but if I understand it correctly, the idea is that the *Polynesians* sailed to South America, rather than the other way around. 

Genetic markers typical of the Zenú people in Colombia have been found among the peoples of the Tuamotu Islands, the Marquesas Islands, Mangareva and Easter Island. The idea seems to be that the Polynesians first colonized the two former, then reached the South American mainland, only to return home (presumably with Zenú wives and/or mixed race children). Some of these people with mixed descent participated in the somewhat later discovery and settlement of Mangareva and Easter Island, explaining why the Zenú marker is found there too. The sculptures in “medieval” Colombia had a strong resemblance to those found in the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, Mangareva and Rapa Nui (although the moai at Easter Island are much larger in size).

The usual Western picture of Easter Island is that of a downright irrational population who cut down all trees and used up all rock (which could be used as fertilizer) in a vain and manic pursuit of building larger and larger statues. War and civilizational collapse promptly followed, and when the Europeans arrived, the native Polynesians had already forgot their great traditions, lived in caves and drank sea water. 

“Easter Island Origins” contain interviews with archeologists who deny this traditional picture. They believe that the population of the island was always relatively small (and hence couldn´t dramatically “collapse” in the first place), that there is no evidence of warfare, nor of settlements being abandoned by people taking to the hills. There *is* evidence of wide-spread deforestation, but this was due to rats, which lacked natural enemies and hence proliferated en masse, consuming the seeds of the trees in the process. 

The real (human) population collapse took place after the arrival of the European colonists, when various diseases to which the natives lacked immunity killed off most of the population. *This* led to the great statues being abandoned or destroyed during the 19^th century. Easter Island was also attacked by slave-raiders from Peru. The handful of survivors who were able to return to the island carried smallpox with them and infected the rest of the population. At its lowest, the native population was only 40 people! Today, it´s back around 3000, approximately the same number as before Western colonialism. The island has been controlled by Chile since 1888.

It´s a tragic story of a people that actually reached the American mainland centuries before Columbus made a landfall in the Caribbean…

And no, no evidence of Lemuria!

Rosemary´s Baby or just End of Days?

 

I almost forgot about the Palmarian Church, having read about them in some book 20 years ago. YouTube´s all-knowing algorithm recently recommended me to look at some of their content, so here we go! It turns out that the Palmarian Church, based in Spain, has its own "pope" (or is it Anti-Pope), with the peculiar name Peter III. Above, we see the petty pontiff during a triumphalist mass in the main church building of this group. Note the cheers, applause and I-pods of the audience in attendance!

On to the Wikipedia entry, where I found a *lot* of information about this stongly sectarian Church. Here are the "best" tidbits (yes, I want to indulge ye):  

>>>At the time of his passing, the General of the Order of the Carmelites of the Holy Face and other top Palmarian bishops, were in Bogotá, Colombia, as part of their regular trips across the Atlantic Ocean to see to their followers and attempt to recruit more clergy. 

>>>While waiting to be deported from Colombia, a few hours after the death of Pope Paul VI, Domínguez reported an apparition, in which a mystical papal coronation ceremony took place, where he was crowned Sovereign Pontiff of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church by Jesus Christ himself, with Peter and Paul in attendance, as well as the recently deceased Pope Paul VI. 

>>>Although confessing to be but a poor sinner, from now on he would be referred to by Palmarian believers as Pope Gregory XVII and the Holy See of the Catholic Church would no longer be in Rome, but in El Palmar de Troya. The motto he took was Gloria Olivae, drawn from the Prophesy of the Popes, a Christian apocalyptic writing.

xxxxxxx

>>>Supposedly, before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, comes the Antichrist. An in-depth and specific account of the Antichrist is given in the Palmarian Catechism. 

>>>The Palmarian Church teaches that a Beast of a woman, consecrated to Satan is brought up, as an Anti-Mary (the antithesis of the Blessed Virgin Mary), a false virgin from a Jewish background. Both Satan and the Virgin Mary appear before her, as she is given the choice over becoming Satan's mother, with the former arguing for and the latter against, using her free will, the Anti-Mary chooses in the affirmative. 

>>>She joins a "Jewish religious group involved in Satan worship" and eventually becomes their leader. In a great Masonic Lodge, elaborately decorated with an inverted crucifix, she copulates on the altar with an apostate ex-Palmarian Bishop, dressed in his clerical attire. 

>>>Described as "extraordinarily beautiful and seductive", upon the completion of the act of fornication, the Anti-Mary immediately strangles the ex-Bishop and kills him (whereby he goes straight to hell). The Antichrist; Satan; is immediately conceived in the flesh and all of hell rejoices. The entire ceremony is witnessed by a group of leading 33rd degree Freemasons.

Sounds like the plot of every bad horror flick from the 1970´s ever. But then, perhaps the flicks are based on Christian or pseudo-Christian speculations about how the end times will look like? 

It turns out that Wiki´s entry draws heavily from the work of a Swedish historian of religion, Magnus Lundberg, so off I went to his blog, where I downloaded (for free) an entire 200+ book on the Palmarian Church! So I suppose this isn´t over yet. Not by a long shot. Below, a link to Wikipedia and one to the relevant section of Lundberg´s blog. 

Happy huntin´! 

Palmarian Christian Church

Magnus Lundberg: Palmarian Catholic Church

King Cobra

Första gången Hübinette "outar" en kommunist. Fast det verkar finnas ett antal förklaringar!

"Skansen-Jonas" skryter återigen om hur han genomförde en illegal adoption

Just another Tuesday

 

"Gemini Man" is a 2019 US film starring Will Smith in three different roles. Smith portrays a retired and disillusioned former sniper, Henry, whose last mission was the killing of a high profile Russian agent and bio-terrorist. Or maybe not, since Henry soon realizes that the agent was innocent, and that people inside the DIA (the intelligence agency Henry worked for) are spinning a vast conspiracy...and that *he* is the next target. 

When Henry and his female love interest manage to escape a DIA elimination patrol, agency head Clay Verris sends out a trained assassin who can mysteriously anticipate Henry´s every move. The hitman, known as Junior, turns out to be a younger cloned version of Henry himself! After the usual chases (somewhat unusually taking place in Cartegena and Budapest), Henry manages to "turn" Junior, who have exactly the same fears and doubts as Henry himself struggled with all his life. Verris therefore sends out *another* cloned version of Henry, called Senior, from which all such emotions have been erased. Indeed, that seems to be the point of the conspiracy: to breed a new race of cloned super-soldiers, who feel no remorse for killing and are disposable, thereby "saving" ordinary Americans from going to war themselves...

Funniest comment in the film is when a Russian named Yuri tells Henry: "So your government, which you have worked for all your life, is trying to kill you? And you are angry? In Russia, we call this Tuesday!". (As in "just another day".)

"Gemini Man" (gemini means "twins" in Latin) isn´t the best film around, but it´s much better than "After Earth", in which Will Smith starred against his real son. Here, he stars both himself and his own son?! Without the clone gimmick, the film would probably be quietly forgotten, but with it, it works tolerably. Budapest in Hungary is a magnificent city, although it looks almost computer-animated in this version, and I sure hope the fight between Henry and Junior in the local catacombs was actually filmed back in Hollywood! 

The film is actually on now, as we speak, on a Swedish cable channel... 

Percy Fawcett did nothing wrong

"Amazon - the lost world" is a three-part documentary from 2020, following archeologists and anthropologists trekking in the Amazon rain forests in South America. Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil and Peru are visited. The goal is to investigate evidence that a high culture once existed in the Amazon basin. Once believed to be pseudo-science, recent discoveries suggest that this was indeed the case. Early European explorers were telling the truth when they reported towns along the Amazon river. Likewise, traditions among certain Native tribes about a more glorious past (and much larger settlements) have also been proven correct. At its height, Amazon was the home to a population of about 10 million people! 

The Amazonian civilizations disappeared during the 16th century due to a variety of factors: lethal diseases inadvertently introduced by the Europeans, poisoning by quicksilver (used in gold extraction), and massive slave-raiding. In some areas, the high cultures were declining already before the conquista, due to climate change. Some mysteries still remain, for instance why one Native group have genetic markers similar to those of Australian Aboriginals, Papuans and the Andamanese! That an ancient high culture can just disappear, its remains overgrown by jungle, its few descendants becoming hunters and gatherers, is quite chilling...  

The documentary is "pro-Native" and features interviews with contemporary Native groups about their land rights struggles against the Brazilian state. We also get to follow a Peruvian army unit attacking illegal gold prospectors. 

Actually quite interesting. Recommended.  

"Alla som inte gillar min favoritfilm är rasister"

 

Down and out at Kulturvetarlinjen?

"Med vit, okunning blick på rasifierades verk"

The COVID Consensus

I can´t stop linking to this rather obvious Communist front group...

Note the irony that Max Blumenthal (who seems to be pro-Chinese) is also anti-lockdown, while the dogmato-sectoid-Trotskyite World Socialist Web Site (linked to elsewhere) is anti-Chinese...except on lockdowns, where it recommends that all the world follows China´s so-called Zero COVID policy! 

OK, I admit I was a left-watcher in my sadly misspent youth. 

That being said, Blumenthal´s and Stavroula Pabst´s article *is* a good criticism of the lockdowns and the pro-lockdown "left". The lockdowns have hit the working class and the Global South particularly hard, while being used to "lockdown" democratic debate in the Western nations. Critics have been branded "Nazis" or "fascists". Blumenthal hints at the left´s middle class social composition as the explanation for their (indeed bizarre) support for what amounts to a bourgeois-imperialist (by their own definitions) global emergency. Note also that this supposedly "woke" left supports measures that increase domestic violence against women, mental health problems among youth and young adults, and more IMF control over "BIPOC" nations in the Third World. 

A quote from the essay:

>>>For many among the urban laptop class, including a large swath of the hyper-online Western left which still clamors for national school closures and demands lockdowns in the face of a handful of new cases (while crudely painting critics of official Covid policy as Nazis), quarantine orders merely enforced an already sedentary lifestyle that revolves around Zoom meetings, ordered food and Amazon deliveries. The restrictions further eliminated tedious commutes to work while providing those able to work remotely with the satisfying sense that staying home was a bold act of social solidarity.  

>>>Under this spectacular arrangement, which assumed individual behavior could slow down or contribute to the spread of a virus, isolation was framed as a moral choice that led many of those willingly confined to their homes to fear or vilify a working class that frequently provided them with vital services. And while non-pharmaceutical interventions have generally proven futile against COVID-19, the stentorian demands to socially distance and attendant shaming of those who fail to obey has done little more than generate hostility between friends, families, and communities.

>>>“Lockdowns are a luxury of the rich,” Bhattacharya said, “and affect a certain class of people at the expense of others. A lockdown doesn’t mean all of society stops and we all sit in cages alone while we wait for the fires to go away. The poor and working class, many of them vulnerable and older, are asked to risk themselves, while another class of people stays at home protected.”

>>>This was particularly true in the Global South, where class divisions are clearly drawn and most people live dangerously close to the poverty line.

I said this before: I expected the "new 1914" of the left to be something dramatic, say a "military bloc" with the US army as they bomb the hell out of rogue Trump supporters marching on some state capital. I couldn´t imagine in my wildest fantasy that it would be uncritical support for misguided lockdowns (and even more misguided vaccine mandates?) during a flu pandemic...

The dialectic works in mysterious ways.  

Flattening the curve or flattening the global poor?

Hade Heyerdahl rätt, trots allt?

Nya rön kan ge Heyerdahl rätt om Påskön 

Nya forskarrön tyder på att Polynesien (inklusive Påskön) hade kontakter med Sydamerikas fastland under 1200- och 1300-talen. Om jag har förstått saken rätt så handlar det antagligen om en polynesisk befolkning som blandade sig med "indianer" i nuvarande Colombia, för att sedan migrera vidare till Påskön. 

Jag är inte förvånad över dessa resultat. Polynesierna har länge varit den starkaste kandidaten till "andra än vikingar" som nådde Nya Världen före Columbus. 

I nästa nummer av Nature förväntar vi oss en diskussion om varför vissa "indianer" i Amazonas har samma gener som Australiens aboriginer... 

Eller nej?

The biggest secret

“The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is a book I've been looking for…for almost 30 years. I assumed it would make an excellent addition to my private library of the good, the bad and the really ugly. I recently found it, free of charge, on the World Wide Web. Thank you.

Originally published in Colombia in 1978, “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is an intra-mural Trotskyist polemical tract by one Darioush Karim directed against “Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, a resolution presented by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. Karim believed that the Fourth International had become soft on “bourgeois democracy” and fundamentally revised Lenin's and Trotsky's positions on the matter. Hence, his polemic.

The mysterious Darioush Karim was better known under an alternate pseudonym, Nahuel Moreno. An Argentine Trotskyist of some standing, Moreno headed a politically “orthodox” tendency within the Fourth International, known as the Bolshevik Faction. It left the international in 1979 and eventually created an international organization of its own, known as LIT-CI. The Morenoites had relatively strong groups in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Nicaragua. Their “sections” in the Western world were much smaller. When I tried to procure a copy of “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from the local Morenista group in Sweden circa 1988, I got the distinct impression that they weren't distributing the text anymore, probably because the politics of LIT-CI had become more similar to those of the Fourth International on a number of points. LIT did their best to sound as “democratic” and anti-Stalinist as possible, making me suspect that Karim's book had become a liability. Meanwhile, it had acquired a kind of underground notoriety on the far left, supposedly being some kind of explicitly anti-democratic Über-screed.

Although Moreno-Karim's book doesn't sound as extreme as some of Lenin's and Trotsky's writings from the Russian Civil War period, the old chameleon doesn't disappoint either. He argues in favor of the traditional Bolshevik position on “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, clearly stating that it means the dictatorship of the most revolutionary sector of the working class organized in a Marxist party. While non-Bolshevik political parties shouldn't necessarily be banned, they shouldn't necessarily be allowed either. How much “workers' democracy” should exist is a purely tactical matter, and it's clear from his book that Moreno veers strongly towards the prohibitive side, again like the Bolsheviks during and after the Civil War. Due to the strength of world imperialism and capitalism, the struggle between revolution and counter-revolution will be violent, prolonged and global, making undemocratic forms of “proletarian” rule both inevitable and necessary. Red terror, extrajudicial struggle á la the Cheka against counter-revolutionaries, and plain old lynching of particularly egregious class enemies will be the order of the day. Collective punishment of the bourgeoisie and the taking of hostages among “innocent” class enemies are also necessary. In effect, Moreno is calling for a Morenoite one party state. He has some problems with Trotsky's more democratic formulations from the late 1930's, but argues that correctly interpreted Trotsky didn't really change his old position. More sensationally, Moreno claims that Trotsky revised the standard Marxist analysis of the Paris Commune, arguing that the Commune itself was “bourgeois” and that the dictatorship of the proletariat was represented solely by the “Central Committee of the National Guard”. Moreno says he supports Trotsky's revision of Marx and Lenin on this point.

Two other things strike me when reflecting on Moreno's tract. One is the author's constant attacks on the “labor aristocracy” of the Western nations, instead adopting an orientation to the workers of the Third World. This is surely unusual for a Trotskyist (but not necessarily opposed to Trotsky's own perspective), since most Trotskyist groups are to be found in North America and Western Europe, as if the world revolution would start in Blackpool, Quartier Latin or West Berlin. The other striking fact about “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is the Stalinistic tendency. True, Moreno does call for a “political revolution” against the privileged bureaucracy of the Soviet Union, China and similar states. However, he also strongly emphasizes the other side of the Trotskyist equation: that these states are “workers' states”, that they have more (sic) “workers' democracy” than any capitalist nation due to their unions, people's communes and full employment, and that the bureaucratic deformations of these regimes should be blamed on imperialism. These arguments, of course, are taken straight from the arsenal of Stalinism, the same Stalinism Moreno otherwise opposes! He even claims that the Soviet Union and China are ruled by “workers”, since the “labor bureaucracy” and the “labor aristocracy” are part of the working class! Was Brezhnev a particularly privileged worker?

During the 1980's and the 1990's, LIT-CI (as already indicated) sounded just as “democratic” as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, and arguably even more anti-Stalinist, so I can understand why the Morenoites turned Karim's book into esoteric lore. Admittedly, they did offer to photocopy the book for my benefit, but it sounded too complicated and too expensive, so I turned down the offer.

I'm not sure who would be interested in “The Revolutionary Dictatorship of the Proletariat” today, but if reading Trotsky's “Terrorism and Communism”, Lenin's “The Proletarian Revolution and the renegade Kautsky” or Bordiga's “The Democratic Principle” is your cup of vodka, this Morenoite truth kit may be an interesting digestif.