Arnab Goswami of Republic TV, which has covered the Ukraine war far better than any of its peers, hosts a debate on the decline of American dominance.
Category Archives: Art and Ideas
Two Deaths Among Important Christian Alternative Voices
Lew Rockwell, the libertarian stalwart, lost two of its most popular Christian voices recently. A few days ago, economist, goldbug, Y2Ker, enthusiast of conspiracy, and forthright curmudgeon Gary North passed away. I learned a lot about Biblical economics from reading his briskly written and drily amusing newsletters. I often posted things he’d written, because he had a fine eye for cant of all kinds. His bite was as good as his bark and he exercised both, on those who were mistaken [Ellen Brown, of Web of Debt] and those who were misleading [Ann Barnhardt].
Now comes news of the passing of Bill Sardi, a health journalist who turned into one of the Covid regime’s most dedicated foes. Sardi churned out hundreds of articles that turned complex scientific ideas into insights that saved lives and put health back into the patient’s hands. In the age of medical tyranny and vaccine totalitarianism, he was the voice of the man strong enough to rely on his own judgment and make his own choices, be they never so unpopular. His death in hospital from mysterious causes, despite an excellent regimen of supplements, makes one wonder if his vaccine views had made him enemies powerful enough and malicious enough to deny him the care he deserved.
Replacement Theology: Rabbinic Sacrifice Cancels Christ
Israeli rabbis claim that the reinstatement of the paschal sacrifice will end the modern “plague” [my quotation marks] of Covid 19, just as it once stopped the plague sent by the Pharaoh against the Israelites in the Old Testament.
“As it is written in the Book of Samuel as well as the Book of Chronicles, we see that two times the God of Israel canceled a plague inflicted on the Nation of Israel. Once, this divine act of mercy was brought about after Israel offered the Passover lamb in Egypt and the second time was when King David acquired the site of the location for the Temple and built the altar on this exact site in the yard of the Temple Mount
Twenty one days from now, the 14th of the month of Nissan, will be the time for sacrificing the yearly Passover lamb. Like the original Passover sacrifice ended a plague and opened the door for Israel to go out into freedom, the same sacrifice brought this year will be intended to free all of humanity from the yoke of evil and sins, preparing them to receive the Divine support, and healing them from this harsh pandemic.”
Of course, today’s plague is a manufactured scam, involving a bioweapon acting as a nocebo and economic warfare masquerading as health policy. And today’s sacrifice is also an imposture: it is a Rabbinic version of replacement theology and cancel culture, intended to erase the divine sacrifice of Christ on the cross and replace it with the temple sacrifice of animal flesh that Christ’s death destroyed.
Consider that at His death, the temple veil was rent and the earth split open; consider that the priestly sacrifice was never successful thereafter until the Romans destroyed the temple itself forty years later; that every attempt to rebuild the temple was mysteriously botched or aborted, to the point that even non-Christians realized the blasphemous nature of the effort; and it becomes clear that any sanction for the rabbinical project must come only from the infernal region.
Trump As Coriolanus
Glenn Ellmers at American Greatness:
“Coriolanus turns the impudence of his accusers back on them. They are the true betrayers of the republic who, by rights, should be expelled. Trump, in my opinion, should use this line: “I impeach you!”—and then spell out the details of the Democrats’ shameful conduct, which has undermined the Constitution.
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair!
These lines—about the melodramatic cowardice of the accusers—seem especially appropriate in light of the hysterical overreaction to the events of January 6. The so-called insurrection is now being used to prepare public opinion for draconian new measures against “domestic terrorism,” and to justify a proposed wall around the Capitol complex reminiscent of a Third-World dictatorship. This, in spite of conflicting and uncertain accounts of what happened, as well as video evidence of Capitol police opening the doors to the protestors, and even engaging in friendly banter with the “Viking guy”—who hardly appears to be leading a murderous coup.
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows!
This means, “You idiots are just tools of our country’s enemies!” The mob is so consumed with partisan jealousy and bloodlust, they don’t even notice or care that they are weakening the nation, and making themselves patsies for foreign powers. (Of course, it’s possible they do notice, and don’t mind.) Consider, in this context, that the despots in Beijing are surely smiling right now at this spectacle of the United States destroying itself from within, while they don’t even have to lift a finger.
Thus I turn my back: There is a world elsewhere.
It’s not clear what Trump will do with his wealth and influence now that he is out of office. Rumors are circulating that he will start an alternate media empire. This is certainly a more measured response than what Coriolanus did: he joined up with his old war enemy to threaten an invasion of Rome. In the play, that conflict is resolved when Coriolanus’s mother helps to broker a peace. In our time, this farce may still lead to tragedy.
The late professor of political philosophy Harry Jaffa explained that in Coriolanus, Shakespeare shows, “with all the poetic genius that only he could command . . . the inner connection between virtue and republics.” No political stunt can change that.
Shakespeare’s deepest lesson, according to Jaffa, is “the inexorable and inescapable vindictive power of the moral universe.” With control of all three branches of the federal government, the Democrats may imagine there are no limits to their power. But they will never remake the human soul. It may be possible for a while to pretend that passion can replace virtue, and that ideology can replace truth—but this can’t last. Even Washington, D.C. cannot defeat the nature of reality.
Top Scholar Says Trump Impeachment Constitutional
Volokh Conspiracy, the blog of leading constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh, has cited a piece by another influential scholar, Michael McConnell, that Trump was impeached by the correct body, the house, at the correct time, before his departure from office on January 13.
Therefore, argues McConnell, since the constitution allows ALL impeachments to be tried, Trump can in fact be tried even though he is now out of office.
Another proof that the law and the courts are NOT the answer, but a part of the problem, in America.
Patrick Byrne: Walk Past The Barking Dogs…Or Lose
The former CEO of Overstock.com, more notorious as the publisher of the Deep Capture website, advises the right to be Shaolin Monks:
“The other side will try to provoke us, but we are like Shaolin monks: We “walk on past the barking dogs” (as my martial arts master taught me). As he put it to me so many decades ago: “When a dog barks at you, you don’t feel a need to bark back at it, or to run over and kick the dog: you walk past the barking dog.” Similarly, in the days ahead as we patriotic Americans gather publicly to make our positions known, when the Goon-Left shows up we do not get in screaming matches with them, we do not let our tempers rise. We let them bark all they want while we maintain our discipline, poise, and calmness. That is how we show the American people who we are, and who the Goons really are. It is how we win.
Of course, if and only if the dogs actually attack, not just bark but attack, at that point you have the right of all free men and women to defend yourselves, with whatever minimum of force lets you resolve the situation safely. Just remember, however, the Goons think they win if they can make you go violent in front of the TV cameras. And they are right, they will win….. unless you have shown such a preponderance of control that no reasonable observer could question that they were the aggressors, and you were exercising your right to self-defence.”
How I wish I could agree with Mr. Byrne.
But I cannot.
The truth is most of the conservatives at the Capitol protest did indeed behave like Shaolin monks, as the New York Post reporter’s footage that I posted earlier demonstrates.
A few let loose, but only AFTER the police lobbed smoke bombs, tasered them, and used pepper spray….and after various agents provocateurs instigated brawls and vandalized the building, albeit on a much smaller scale than anything America witnessed through the last two years of inner cities on fire.
The problem is not that the right was tricked into breaking the law.
The problem is they did not break the law….at least, not at first.
It is not trespass if you are invited into a building. The guards let people in and did nothing to discourage what was going on.
Watching from across the world, I believed the guards were sympathetic and eager to let people in.
Point two. Even if they had not been invited in, I would not see anything wrong in people entering the house of the people, something they do routinely during tours.
How much more so during an existential crisis of the republic?
It is the will of the people, tempered by the constitution of the nation, that hallows the halls of government. The Representatives are interlopers if they do not represent the people and the Senators are only hired guns if they do not represent the constitution.
When the people’s will is thwarted for evil ends and the constitution cast aside like a used rag then the halls of government are no longer hallowed but cursed; no more Mount Sinai, but a golden calf consecrated to Libido Dominandi.
That is my first point. Conservatives were a. not really doing anything very bad and b. were quite justified in whatever they did do by the egregious behavior of their targets.
My second argument with Mr. Byrne is that agents provocateurs can act without any assistance from the ordinary citizen.
By this I mean that provocateurs and those they provoke can both be stage managed. Anyone could have a social media account opened in their name and a dozen MAGA rants posted therein. Within the totalitarian spy state in which we live, faking an online persona and then foisting it on some innocent is child’s play. A Shaolin monk, killed by an agent provocateur, can be reborn on the internet as a vile pedophile rapist, on the strength of very little but online rumor. Once that label has taken hold, posthumous rehabilitation is impossible. Once reputation is gone, then who are the good guys and who are the bad? In short, for a man who engaged the media in such hand- to- hand combat and had his own Wikipedia biography targeted, Mr. Byrne seems to have forgotten that it is not who you are, but who people think you are.
To recap my argument, not only does Mr. Byrne, one, regurgitate the assumptions behind the mainstream narrative about January 6, two, his advice fails to account for how Shaolin monks avoid being recast as their opposite through the media.
To elaborate. There would have been no Mahatma without Margaret Bourke White and the reverential international press that followed with her. In today’s media ethos, the Mahatma would only be Mohandas, a big- eared, toothless lecher, a pedophile rapist and Luddite, a coward and traitor intent on giving India to Pakistan. Indeed, that is how Gandhi is seen, now that the hagiographers have been succeeded by the debunkers.
My third argument contra Byrne is that violence is only a loser’s game if it is sporadic and individual. Not otherwise.
It goes without saying that John Q Public should not be stocking up on ammo and rifles in the hope of taking out his state representative. In the age of Pegasus, unmanned drones, and AI bots, he is likely to end up in a psychiatric hospital or dead.
However, the idea that wearing buttons and going about our business is going to put an end to the rot is laughable. The boot will not lift from our necks until we join hands and throw it off from us. Concerted public ACTION, not slogans is what will win the day.
Militias could indeed be a part of that action, but not in the way most people think.
I suggest citizen patrols that show up wherever BLM or Antifa threaten people, their homes and businesses. That would be a real start.
But actual physical violence is the smaller part of the problem..
It is the media distortion of reality that is the bigger part.
So another project of resistance should be to target journalists who are especially mendacious about conservatives. We should give them the same relentless public exposure and censure they give others. We could list their failed predictions, their past plagiarisms, their padded resumes, their personal and business fiascos in little biographies that could be inserted below any commentary of theirs wherever it appears and we could do this relentlessly.
Neither of these courses of action is going to win us good press on the left. And that is the final issue I have with Mr. Byrne’s criticism. It is stuck at the level of optics.
Optics is certainly important. Very important. But that doesn’t mean we give up certain options. It means we get smart about our options. It is certainly a bad idea to get caught on camera beating up a leftist goon [and here, I definitely mean a goon, not just some social justice warrior who gets on your nerves.]
The remedy is not to give up beating up on the goons.
It is to make sure the cameras are switched off when you take off your gloves.
Sam Francis On Anarcho-Tyranny
Samuel Francis, Chronicles, July 1994
“This condition, which in some of my columns I have called ‘anarcho-tyranny,’ is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites, the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection of public safety.”
“Coming Plague”: Error-riddled Elite Manifesto
CFR-member and Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurie Garrett is the author of the 768-page “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In a World Out of Balance” (1994). In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been hailed as a prophetic work, especially as Garrett was also a consultant for the 2011 film “Contagion,” which many people see as an example of how the Hollywood-intelligence complex “preps” the public for future planned scenarios.
In my previous post, I mentioned an extraordinary error in the book, noted by an Amazon reviewer.
“She claims, in the chapter “Microbe Magnets” that there were 500,000 deaths from Cholera in NYC in 1832. Wow… that’s a horrifying number. Except it isn’t true. There were about 250,000 people living in NYC that summer, and 3215 of them succumbed to the disease. I was able to check it from multiple sources in mere moments, with the magic of the internet at my fingertips, and although I know she wouldn’t have had that in 1994, it is still an egregious error.” End Quote
If exaggerating something by nearly a 100 times wasn’t bad enough, she also made this whopper:
“The city of Strasbourg alone savagely slew 16,000 of its Jewish residents, blaming them for spreading the Black Death.”
Try as I might, I could not find any credible source for that high a figure, which gives the lie to the NY Times review that calls the book “prodigiously researched.” What Garrett seems to have done is skimmed a few articles and misread them in her haste. [Lila: I corrected a sentence referring to Garrett doing a hasty google search, which would be an anachronism.]
” Those people of Strasbourg, who had thus far escaped the plague and who thought that by killing off the Jews they would insure themselves against it in the future, were doomed to disappointment, for the pest soon struck the city and, it is said, took a toll of sixteen thousand lives.“
The pestilence (the Black Death) killed 16,000 Strasbourg Christians, after the Christians eliminated the Jews living in the town, killing anywhere between a hundred or two (according to some sources) and two thousand odd (a figure which most scholars believe to be too high):
“Closener [Lila: a contemporary historian] also gave the number of executed as 2,000 (wol uffezwei tusent alse man ahtete). Königshofen agreed with that number (der worent uf zweitusent). This total was probably high because the population of the Jews in Strasbourg was likely only 250 to 300 as has been argued earlier. Possibly, more Jews had come to the community recently to escape potential or actual persecutions in other areas of Alsace and the Empire, but it was likely that the estimate of 2,000 victims was an exaggeration. This large number may be just another example of how Medieval chroniclers were unable to deal with large figures and responded by greatly expanding them…”
200-300 deaths becomes Garrett’s 16,000, which is really the number of gentile Strasbourgians killed by the Black Death.
How can sloppy research of this kind be passed off as prize-winning scholarship, unless the prize is a signalling device indicating a thesis the power-elite find useful to their agenda?
“Shiva” Rising In Tamil Nadu
The Tamil serials these days are full of the images and icons of Shaivism.
An aficionado tells me this is a recent thing.
This is a lazy blog-post in a spare moment. I don’t have the energy to insert the links, but google the Tamil serials, Nandini, Nagini, Mahamayi, Ganga, Keladi Kanmani, and several others whose names elude me.
Cobras slither through them and morph into human beings…usually gorgeous women who do battle with evil.
[Note that in Jewish lore, the female spirit/demon Lilith, supposedly the mate of Adam before Eve, is associated with a half-woman, half-serpent lamia-like figure.]
Goddesses named Amman (mother) abound in contemporary Tamil Nadu cinema.
The trappings of Shaivism from the trishul (trident) to the horizontal ash on the forehead appear everywhere, as well as images of Shiva himself.
Besides Kashmir, Tamil Nadu is the great center of Shaivite worship.
The serials play up the idolatrous, superstitious side of it….presenting it seductively… Black magic abounds.
The sudden appearance of such imagery this year, along with the (Shiva) bull-centric Jallikattu riots, makes me wonder.
Hollywood has always been a favorite venue for propaganda and the subliminal insertion of memes and imagery into the public consciousness.
There’s nothing to say the same thing is not going on here in TN, where cinema has such a potent hold on the minds of millions of people.
Christianity too has its Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who infused occult and pagan imagery into Christian themes.
But this goes beyond that.
This is more akin to Dungeons and Dragons or Harry Potter.
It is magic for its own sake.
It is an attack on the sober, agamic Hinduism of the aam admi that stresses moral duty.
Blogsplaining myself
Sometimes I look back over old posts and catch things that need explaining.
Last night, I saw a post about feminism, in which I said I was not a femin-ist but a human-ist.
That might confuse readers who note that my other posts are generally written from a Christian perspective, to which “humanism” is opposed.
Humanism refers to the Enlightenment philosophy of human reason as the arbiter of all things.
I am not that kind of humanist.
However, in that post, I was differentiating myself from feminists. I wanted to be clear that I was concerned for women as human-beings…not as some special gender elevated above men. That was the sense in which I used the word human-ist in the post.
There and elsewhere, a casual reader might get confused by the conflicting view-points published on this blog.
They’re easily explained.
I publish anything that strikes me as containing an important insight, even if it contradicts my own world-view.
It’s my way of keeping myself honest and not succumbing to ideology.
The second point I wanted to make is that I am not an anti-Semite in the traditional sense, despite my tendency to rummage through white nationalist/so-called anti-Semitic sites.
I consider global government a very bad idea and I see its roots going back to the rabbinical dream of world conquest under a Messiah-King.
Deciphering that project requires plain-speaking…but I am not motivated by hatred for Judaism itself, either Torah-based or Talmudic, although certainly there are things in the latter I dislike intensely.
As to Christianity itself, I used to be a rather liberal and unorthodox Christian, as you can see from earlier writing on the web.
These days, I have moved much closer to a conservative position. That’s a result of extensive research over the last few years.
And personal experience.
I now hold an orthodox faith, but I still differ from orthodox believers in one thing – I do not believe that Christ’s salvation is conferred only on those who profess Christian doctrine. I believe it is conferred on all, regardless of confession. It depends only on what is in the heart.
If a person strives to embody truth and love as Christ practiced it, they are “believers” in the sense Christ meant.
They worship Christ, only without naming him.
There are many practicing “Christians” who are actually idolaters, because their belief is superstitious and a profession of the lips.
There are many practicing “pagans” who are actually Christians, because their belief is in the true god, regardless of what name they’ve chosen to give him.
Christ will draw them to him, one way or other.
This is not an idle conclusion. It’s one I’ve reached after many years of back-and-forth, study, observation, and interaction with people of all faiths.