Monday, February 10, 2025

Endless Recycling

 


From Coffee and Covid:

The Times’ ponderous article spent about six pages warming up to its theme. But, “We are now,” the Times finally explained, “almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.”

Least, least, least. Since the printing press.

But why? What, or who, is holding the culture back? Global culture has indeed been stalled, a sociological failure, winning only at participation. You might now begin the whataboutism. What about X? What about Venmo? What about AI? What about Elon’s rocket ships? Stand by. Those gadgets are either part of the problem or exceptions proving the point.

Our modern world is populated by high revision numbers, stratospheric sequel counts, and recycled, geriatric celebrities. We check our iPhone Sixteen —now with three cameras— to find out when Need for Speed Ten starts, and then buy tickets online for an octogenarian Rolling Stones concert. In 2022, the hit Netflix show Stranger Things — a futuristic sci-fi series set back in the 1980’s — and in its season four — featured Kate Bush’s 1985 single Running Up That Hill. The 40-year-old song hit the top 10 in 34 countries.

It’s endless recycling. And it’s not normal.

🔥 There are many examples, but perhaps the most obvious symptom of cultural freeze is stalled fashion. The handful of writers calling out stuck culture focus on how distinct was each decade leading up to the Millennium, right before the Patriot Act passed in 2001. Tracing backwards, the cultural evolution trend holds. But from the 90’s forward, zip. Zero. Nada. (Read more.)

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The Last Television President

 From Steam Calliope Scherzos:

Someone will pose the question as to whether I’m accusing TV journalists of being aware of what they were doing. And unmistakably, they did not. I think that journalists are, on the whole, more driven by ideology than money, though if they can find an instance in which the two interests can coincide, they’ll seize upon it. This is because if both they and their bosses are operating on the same wavelength, then things will go more smoothly, even though both parties will be assessing the situation differently. I therefore have no doubt that every TV anchor who was trying to “take down” Donald Trump genuinely wanted to end his political career permanently. But they also failed to recognize that the nuances of whatever message they were trying to popularize would ultimately fail when set in relief against the iconography of Trump the myth — a myth that their medium had been building up for decades.

And yet for all of its importance, and for all of the work it did in steadily expanding Trump’s mythology over time, television is still a dying medium, viewed mostly by the elderly. The median age of all Fox News viewers is 69 years old, and the median age of MSNBC’s viewers is 70. And because of such a lopsided viewership, the TV business is quite strange. Old reruns often get higher Nielsen ratings than newer shows, and newer shows consequently benefit from increasingly low expectations from executives. In professional wrestling, the only televised industry I follow somewhat closely, the All Elite Wrestling owner Tony Khan hemorrhaged viewers continually over the course of a year and yet still landed a surprisingly lucrative media rights deal. More and more people are cutting their cable cords, and increasingly, young people are looking back on the era of cable television with confusion: why, exactly, did people pay for TV? What were they thinking? (Read more.)


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The Theology of the Lion

 From Andrew Klavan at The New Jerusalem:

One of the fascinating things about the systems that arose from the Enlightenment, is that they work so well precisely because they’re not “Christian” in that sense. Democracy, capitalism, free trade — they harness our natural ambition, competitiveness, partisanship and desire for gold. These things, when set free under controlled circumstances, encourage creativity, achievement and the building of wealth. Sure, a billionaire may be charitable, but he didn’t become a billionaire by being charitable. He did it by crushing the other guy with his superior products, investments and strategies.

And we admire him for it. I mean, we can piously pretend not to, but assuming he did business honestly, and won out through cleverness, hard work and drive, we respect him for his success. Just like we admire and respect a character like James Bond who not only gets the beautiful girl, but gets a different beautiful girl in every movie. Again, readers can leave pious comments saying tsk tsk tsk, but the truth is: assuming Bond is not an abuser or an adulterer, guys want to be him, and girls want to be with him. And when Dr. No tries to destroy the world, who you gonna call?

I’ll go even further. Christians who get prissy about human nature are incredibly off-putting. Those people who attacked J. D. Vance for speaking simple moral common sense? Does anyone admire or respect them even a little? Not even themselves, I’d wager. They’re like those people who acknowledge that their land once belonged to the Indians when they are in no way prepared to give the land back. Why even strike the pose?

Christianity certainly adds a new dimension to our moral calculations — the dimension of eternal life. But in practical terms, this does not delionize the lion, it merely directs the man toward his highest self. It confirms us in our sense that there are things more important than present advantage, things even worth dying for. (Read more.)

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Sunday, February 9, 2025

Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy


 I thought that reading Kash Patel's 2023 book Government Gangsters, about Deep State corruption, would be like peering under a rock and seeing worms, grubs and centipedes, but I was wrong. Reading Kash's book is like lifting a rock and instead of finding the expected dirt and grubs there is a bottomless pit full of poisonous worms, snakes, gas and fire, reminiscent of St. Teresa of Avila's vision of Hell. If you want to understand one reason why American society is in a free fall, why there is chaos in our cities, in our schools and in anything connected to the government, then read Kash's book. No country, no nation can function when mired in lies and treachery, when politicians become billionaires, not through their own business acumen, but through selling the influence which comes with an elected office. That we have any country left is due to the grace of God, as well as to the hard work and basic integrity of the American people. Government Gangsters is a timely read as daily there are revelations about the government abuse of USAID, and as we wait for Kash to be confirmed as Director of the FBI.

 From the Amazon page:

A sinister cabal of corrupt law enforcement personnel, intelligence agents, and military officials at the highest levels of government plotted to overthrow a president. Even after they failed, they continue to secretly pull the levers of power without any accountability to the American people. This isn’t the synopsis of a fictional spy thriller. This is what is actually happening in the United States government.

In
Government Gangsters, Kash Patel—a former top official in the White House, the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and the Department of Justice—pulls back the curtain on the Deep State, revealing the major players and tactics within the permanent government bureaucracy, which has spent decades stripping power away from the American people and their elected leaders. Based on his firsthand knowledge, Patel reveals how we can defeat the Deep State, reassert self-government, and restore our democracy. (Read more.)

Kash's book has many stories about Trump's first term as President and what it was like to work for him and become part of his inner circle. It seems that Melania Trump was more involved in helping the President in his work than was thought by many at the time, and that he trusts her judgment in matters of state as well as her unerring taste and grace in running the White House. But the main strength of the book is the chronicle of how Trump was continually betrayed and lied about by Deep State operatives, persons planted to engineer his destruction. The book is exhaustively documented and can be checked and double-checked for accuracy, since Kash is a master at gathering evidence to build a case. Those who made an enemy of him, who underestimated him and sought to make him go away, will regret it forever. By the way, some of the ethnic slurs aimed at Kash by Democrats are those which I never heard in all my life growing up south of the Mason-Dixon line. Absolutely vile.


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USAID and CIA Secretly Worked to Impeach Trump

 From The Vigilant Fox:

A bombshell report from journalist Michael Shellenberger reveals that Trump’s impeachment wasn’t just a Democrat-led political hit job—it was an intelligence operation.

Shellenberger blew the lid off the scandal on Jesse Watters Primetime, exposing how the deep state worked behind the scenes to take down Trump.

Back in 2019, Democrats rushed to impeach Trump over a whistleblower complaint claiming he pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden. But there was one huge problem: the so-called whistleblower wasn’t even a direct witness.

“Many people may not remember that it was a CIA analyst who was left over from the Obama White House who wrote the memo that led to the impeachment,” Shellenberger explained. “It was all based on hearsay. The person had not actually been in the room with Trump.”

And it gets worse. That memo relied on a report from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)—a group that pretends to be independent but is actually funded by USAID and controlled by the U.S. government.

“Tens of millions of dollars had gone into this group called OCCRP,” Shellenberger said. “But it was basically created as an extension of the State Department and then of USAID.” (Read more.)

 

 From Amuse on X:

One must ask: if USAID is so committed to media independence, why is it absent in places like Cuba or Venezuela, where journalists face real threats from authoritarian regimes? The answer is evident—USAID’s media projects are not about fostering independent journalism but about engineering regime change against governments that resist Washington’s progressive-globalist agenda.

This state-sponsored journalism has profound consequences. Stories unfavorable to the Left are buried, and investigations into Democratic corruption are dismissed as "conspiracy theories." A glaring example was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election—a story later confirmed as legitimate but dismissed at the time as "Russian disinformation" by an obedient press. The result? Public discourse is distorted, elections are influenced, and dissenting voices struggle to be heard.

The Founders understood the necessity of an independent press. A media establishment that takes its cues—and its funding—from the government is not a free press at all. It is an instrument of state power. The only solution is a complete separation between journalism and government. No taxpayer dollars should fund newsrooms. Media organizations must compete in the open marketplace of ideas, where credibility, not political favoritism, determines survival. (Read more.)

 

Also from Amuse on X;

Internews’s funding sources betray its true objectives. It is no accident that USAID, the CIA's tool for ideological influence operations, provides up to 90% of Internews’s budget. USAID's historical entanglement with regime-change operations and the promotion of progressive social policies should alone raise suspicions about the kind of "independent media" that Internews claims to support. But even more telling is the financial backing from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, a network infamous for bankrolling leftist movements under the pretense of fostering democracy. The confluence of Soros’s globalist agenda and USAID’s interventionist ethos ensures that Internews operates not as a neutral media entity, but as a propaganda wing for international leftism.

Internews has played a direct role in creating political upheavals across the world, particularly in Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. In each of these nations, CIA and USAID foreign policy interests have leveraged Internews to foster dissent, support opposition movements, and ultimately engineer instability. By flooding these regions with Internews-trained journalists and media networks, the organization has been instrumental in shaping narratives that align with U.S. geopolitical objectives, undermining sovereign governments in favor of pro-Western factions. (Read more.)


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King Arthur's Lost Kingdom

 A summary of some of the latest research, which appears to confirm the story of King Vortigern inviting the Angles and Saxons to come to Britain to help him fight the Picts and the Scots, who were in the North.

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Saturday, February 8, 2025

The Real Reason Dems Despise Musk

 From American Refugees:

Democrats have plenty of reasons to hate Elon Musk. His DOGE operation is making them look like crooks straight out of Boss Tweed-land with government waste, much of it to pay off friends and political allies, in the stratosphere. And he’s only getting started.

Already uncovered are at least a half-trillion in government waste regarding COVID-19. Giant sums of money were frittered away studying things like transgenderism in animals with absolutely no knowledge by taxpayers.

No one knows the extent of it, at least not yet.

Meanwhile, numerous ad hominem from the quondam left are appearing on X and the networks aimed at Musk’s youthful tech-savvy team, accusing them of being, essentially, too wet behind the ears to be doing this. Maybe it’s true of some of them, but worth noting is Founding Father James Monroe was 18 on July 4, 1776, Alexander Hamilton 21 and the great theorist of the Constitution James Madison 25.

Look for more of these smears going forward, but the deep down reason they most abhor Mr. Musk is that he is an apostate. He used to be on their side. He was their genius. What happened? (Maybe just the simple application of facts.)

The dislike of apostates is not just restricted to Muslims who have an unpleasant tradition of, shall we say, taking it to the mattress. Apostasy can be a monumental threat to all sorts of core beliefs (liberalism? progressivism?), especially when they are old and unexamined. Systems unravel. (Read more.)

 

From Tierney's Real News:

Elon Musk’s team is sorting through (auditing) the US Treasury ledgers to find waste and fraud. Estimates are that 20-25% of our spending is on waste, fraud and grift - amounting to roughly $2 TRILLION in US tax dollars per year. In other words, if we got rid of the money laundering and the grift we could pretty much balance our budget and pay off our debt.

I’ve audited the books of several corporations and I ALWAYS FOUND at least 10% in waste to cut - and another 10% that I would deem fraudulent “kick-backs or overpayments.” I found that the only people who did NOT want me to audit the books were corrupt department heads or the “keepers of the books” who were using the company’s money as their own piggy bank.

The same is true for Government - the only people who are against this auditing exercise are corrupt bureaucrats, politicians, donors and contractors who are getting kickbacks and benefiting from the fraud. If you see people protesting the audit, they are the fraudsters. (Read more.)


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Why Did the Trojan War Last for Ten Years?

 From The Greek Reporter:

With Troy, there is one obvious reason why a single city was able to withstand against the Greek forces for ten years. The reason is that it was not just a single city withstanding those forces. In fact, Homer describes in his Iliad (written c. 650 BCE) a coalition of nations from Anatolia and even parts of Europe on the side of the Trojans.

If it really had been just the isolated city of Troy standing against the Greeks, it probably would have fallen quickly. Yet, that is definitely not what Homer described. When we see what he did describe, it is not surprising at all that the Trojan War lasted so long. On the side of the Trojans, there was the kingdom of the Phrygians and the kingdom of the Lydians. It appears that Homer was describing the world of the Trojan War based on the geopolitics of his own era or those just shortly before.

The Phrygian kingdom that Homer refers to controlled a huge part of Anatolia. It was quite rich and powerful and could actually be described as a small empire. Troy was closely associated with them. In fact, King Priam of Troy supposedly married a Phrygian princess. Later, Greek writers often called the Trojans ‘Phrygians.’ The kingdom of Lydia was powerful, too. After the fall of Phrygia in approximately 700 BCE, Lydia immediately rose to fill the power vacuum, indicating that it had already been a powerful state. (Read more.)


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Friday, February 7, 2025

Demons in the Sky

 From Tierney's Real News:

This is Part 3 of my report on the DC crash. If you haven’t read Part One and Part Two yet - please do so before you read on. I’m not going to repeat much of the information I’ve already shared … but I will build on it.

In my analysis, I have found many discrepancies (and holes) between what the media and ‘expert’ pundits are telling the public and what actually happened. I will cover those one by one. None of them individually tells the whole story - but they should be viewed in totality to paint a picture of the most plausible explanation.

Also, many of the so-called ‘expert’ videos that I’ve seen from YouTube ‘pilots’ smack of deception, coverup and CIA - so I don’t put much trust in those. Why? They are leaving out major facts in their analysis.

In my first report, I showed you a video of the crash that I found on X that was leaked to CNN that, to me, was the most accurate view of the crash. Up until that point, the only videos we were shown of the crash were grainy and hard to see.

https://x.com/PriscillaMirage/status/1885337679161942143

This video clearly makes it look like the Blackhawk helicopter flew directly into the plane. (Read more.)

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