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A Website of Alternative Thinkers & Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

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DISAPPEARING EBOOKS

I knew as soon as I saw this story that I would have to blog about it. Not only did several people send some version of it to me, but the subject is near and dear to my heart. Reason? I've been warning about the dangers of ebooks for some time. And this story more or less concretizes and to some extent confirms my concerns. Suppose one day you logged into your ebook cloud (or whatever it is), and discovered a notice that your ebook was gone. Not just "temporarily unavailble, please check back in a few minutes," but gone.

If that sounds far-fetched, it has already happened to users of Microsoft's ebooks  (thanks to J.T. and F.S. for first bringing this to my attention, and to all the rest of you who also shared the story):

Microsoft is about to shut off its ebook DRM servers: "The books will stop working"

Microsoft's Ebook Apocalypse Shows the Dark Side of DRM

Now, let's give (begruding) credit where credit is due: Microsoft at least had the integrity to refund its ebook customers for snatching away their ebooks.

But my concerns over the years has boiled down to a fundamental truth, expressed in the opening paragraph of the Wired article by Brian Barrett:

Your iTunes movies, your Kindle books—they’re not really yours. You don’t own them. You’ve just bought a license that allows you to access them, one that can be revoked at any time. And while a handful of incidents have brought that reality into sharp relief over the years, none has quite the punch of Microsoft disappearing every single ebook from every one of its customers.

EBooks are a platform, and subject to all the problems of censorship we've seen attached to other" platforms", Facebook, YouTube, and so on: censorship. I've been maintaining for some time that the digitization of books and other information (think music and music scores and librettos and lyrics, folks) is kind of like the old Soviet Encyclopedia, on steroids: now you see a picture of Yagoda, or Yezhov, or whomever, and later, you don't, because the picture, along with the monster man has been purged. Ebooks make it all too easy for a corporate world run amok to censor anything they wish; don't like the content? Just go in and change the text. Or just get rid of it altogether. Sure, Microsoft has not claimed its actions are the result of censorship, but the good old "bottom line." But its actions highlight the dangers inherent in the digital platform, which is why I've been maintaining that the only canonical form of any of my works is the hard copy book, which readers own.

One may thus easily imagine other ebook "platforms" eventually stating that "this service may be terminated at any time by the owner for any reason, without refund." We're not quite there yet, for such a move would basically signal an almost complete corporate takeover of the information field, which is why it's important to prevent that by buying books, scores, and music CDs. And perish the thought that your books, scores, poems, lyrics, librettos or what-have-you do not show enough "diveristy" or inclusion. Don't believe me? The move is already afoot to "level the playing field" there too  according to this article shared by P.S.J.:

Triggered by Bach: Classical Music as Implicit White Supremacy

One friend who had seen this article told me that this was merely another attempt to keep everyone divided. So far as that goes, I suppose that is true. But for me it's another bit of evidence that the cultural Gramscians really do mean a complete makeover of the culture, to the point of destroying its past and cutting people off from its traditions. One can imagine a day, under their malign "leadership" and nihilist agenda, when the mere performance of Bach's cantatas will be viewed as a subversive or anti-semitic act, simply because of the Christian nature of the lyrics, or when a performance of Beethoven's Ninth symphony will be viewed as a pandering to patriarchy with its ringing chords on the word Bruder (Brothers!). They won't stop there: they will go on to attack all the other signs and symbols of "privilege": the Beatles, Abba, REO, ELO, Elvis, and others from the "classical era" of rock, so on. They will attack Duke Ellington as an "Uncle Tom" for liking Bach, or Fanny Mendelssohn for composing music too much like her more famous family member who was male, Haendel will be attacked for his setting of the Dixit Dominus or Haydn for his Die Schoepfung (The Creation) or Dave Brubeck as "cultural appropriation", and on and on it will go.

Which returns us to the matter at hand: there is no digital platform that is secure, especially in the hands of already morally compromised technocrats. There is no replacement for the hard copy, be it the score, the book, the lyrics, libretto, or CD. They are, and will remain, the only canonical form of artistic creations.

See you on the flip side...

 

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AMAIRKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN: THE REVENGE OF THE ADJUNCTS

This article starts off this week's blogs in an unusual way, not because I'm long overdue for one of my rants about Amairkuhn edgykayshun, but because this article touches upon me personally. It's about the plight of America's adjunct professors:

The Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors Is Underway in Florida. And It's Big.

Just in case you didn't know, it is more than likely that if you send your child off to an American quackademy for a college education, that he or she will receive the bulk of instruction from an adjunct professor. We'll get back to why that's not necessarily a good thing in a moment. But consider these two paragraphs from this article:

“Two half-time adjunct jobs do not make a full-time income. Far from it,” Ximena Barrientos says. “I’m lucky that I have my own apartment. I have no idea how people make it work if they have to pay rent.”

We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.

...

The accepted story of what an “adjunct professor” is—the myth that has drawn so many hopefuls into the world of professional academia—is that adjuncting is not a full-time job at all. It is something that retirees do to keep themselves busy; something that working professionals do on the side to educate people in their field; something that, perhaps, a young PhD might do for a year or two while looking for a full-time professorship, but certainly nothing that would constitute an actual career in itself.

In fact, this is a big lie. The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions.

That's just the beginning. I not only experienced exactly what Dr. Barrientos in this article experienced, but thousands of others have too. And this article barely even begins to get into the problems adjuncts face, nor does it really address very deeply the consequences to declining academic standards the move towards adjuncts has wrought. On most college campuses, including in the state where I taught (Oklahoma), adjuncts are faced with the following problems:

1) Their classes are only offered if a minimum number of students enroll. Thus, adjuncts never know, until the very last moment, how many classes they will have. Since their income is dependent on how many classes they teach, it becomes extremely difficult to budget. Imagine not knowing if, for the next three to four months your income would be $4,000 or $8,000? (And yes, the pay is that bad.)

2) If an adjunct is known, however, to be a "tough professor," that is to say, if they take their job as a professor seriously and to profess a discipline rather than to "teach a subject", and thus if they take their responsibility as a professor seriously and attempt to maintain genuinely college level academic standards, students will tend not to enroll for their courses, opting instead to enroll in an "easier" professor's course for the same credit. As a consequence of this fact, academic standards have declined in direct proportion to the amount of instruction done by adjuncts. But wait, it gets worse.

3) If an adjunct does attempt to maintain genuinely college level standards - and remember, folks, those standards have declined so dramatically in Amairikuhn quackademia that many professors don't even know them any more - then invariably the student-snowflake will complain to the all-powerful administration to "tone it down," with the ever-present threat of "no longer being needed".

4) In many states - including the one I taught as an adjunct in, Oklahoma - adjuncts are only paid at the end of the semester for their courses, and even then that can be iffy. On more than one occasion I, for example, came in to pick up my paycheck, only to be told, like all the other adjuncts, that a "glitch ex machina" had affected the machines that printed out the checks, and it would be two more weeks. Meanwhile, late fees pile up on bills, and you're losing money because of the institution's or state's incompetence  (and it probably isn't incompetence, they're just using the system, and the adjunct's money, during that time period to make themselves more money). After several examples of the state being late with my paycheck, I had to insist that I be paid on a pro-rated monthly basis. Getting the over-paid administrators to (a) see that the pay schedule was simply immoral, and (b) that they should actually get off their butt, walk to the payroll office scriptorium and do something about it (like having the monks and nuns chisel a check), was like extracting teeth... from an elephant. Without anesthesia.

5) Finally - and let's be honest here - in many cases, as quality of instruction declines for all the above reasons, so does the quality of the adjuncts themselves. The goal is to fill classes, churn out degrees, and make money at the government trough from student loans.  It is not to maintain academic standards in the disciplines. As a result, not much vetting of adjuncts occurs, and usually the people vetting adjuncts are themselves products of the decaying standards.

You might be asking where all your child's tuition money must be going? The answer is very simple: it's going to the overpaid left-wing lunatics in college administrations, who then see to it that their chums and buddies get the few remaining tenured positions open. As administration sucks up more and more of the tuition budget, the first thing to be cut are quality permanent faculty. Why pay a tenured professor a living wage plus benefits, if you can pay an adjunct to carry a full course load, and not provide him or her (1) an office, (2) a timely paycheck (3) or health and dental? Why pay an associate professor on a tenure track $40,000 when an adjunct will do it for $24,000? You can then pocket the rest as an "administrator".  As administration bloats, faculties are trimmed, with all the above-enumerated consequences to falling standards. The fat, in other words, is not in faculties, it's  in administrations, and I'm going to go so far as to say that there is not an administrator, be he dean or department chairman or university or college president, on a campus today, that is earning what they are being paid.

Yes, it's that bad. And the result is this:

Students at Florida’s enormous community colleges (Miami Dade College alone has more than 165,000 students) may not be conscious of this dynamic, but they sit at its center, and they pay the price—not only in their student loan bills, but by sitting in classes taught by teachers who are overworked, underpaid, given virtually no professional resources or continuity of scheduling, and who are often forced to rush from job to job in order to make ends meet, leaving little time for helping students outside of classroom hours, much less for publishing work in their fields to advance their careers. Now, Florida’s higher education system sits at the center of another trend as well: the unionization of those well educated but miserably compensated adjunct professors.(Emphasis added)

One might be thinking here that it cannot possibly be this bad. Well, speaking from personal experience with Oklahoma's miserific and unethical adjunct system, I can say it mirrors that of Florida recounted in the article. Most adjuncts have to carry what would be considered a full course load, and do so at a fraction of the salary of a full time professor. As the article also states, they are given "virtually no professional resources" nor even "continuity of scheduling." Your course in organic chemistry my be at 6:30 PM Tuesdays and Thursdays one semester, and at 10:30 AM Monday, Wednesday, Friday the next. And as an adjunct, oftentimes you will not have the choice of your own textbook, but rather have to use the text that full time professors have chosen for a particular course. And since the standards have already declined, these texts are often of dubious quality. When I taught Russian History, for example, the required text was so bad (it was a Barnes and Noble sort of "Cliff notes" text) that it actually referred to Josef Stalin as a "great statesman." And as adjuncts, another problem is that more often than not, one never even meets the other adjuncts in your field. After all, why have faculty meetings to coordinate, when you're not really faculty? And besides, you have little time anyway.

You're just a stand-in, a proctor for a text book company, doing a book report, trying to evade the "thought police" of the looney left, while the administrators take home handsome salaries, and produce idiotic screaming snowflakes who want their safe spaces.

I doff my hat to the real professors out there having to adjunct. I managed to escape the system. I  know what you're going through, and I hope you escape it, too, because you know the numbers, even with unions, will never add up.

OK. I'm done. Rant over.

See you on the flip side...

 

THE TANKER INCIDENT: JAPAN SAYS NOT SO FAST…

If you're following the story about the attacks on the tankers in the Persian Gulf, then you'll want to read today's story, and the article from the Saker linked in today's "Tidbits", for there appear to be more holes in the story than in the ships themselves. The US-based narrative is saying that the attacks were caused by mines.

But Japan is saying "not so fast" according to this story from Zero Hedge shared by G.B.:

Japanese Tanker Owner Denies Ship Hit By Mine, Says Crew Saw "Flying Objects" Before Attack

What's interesting here is to compare this story to the picture of the "mine" which appears in The Saker article linked in the Tidbit, which pictures a "triangular" shaped object allegedly the "mine", and clearly this is above the waterline. I suppose one could "nitpick" here and call any explosive device attached to an object a "mine", but in conventional usage, a mine is indeed an underwater object designed to detonate below a ship's waterline.   But even that is not what Japan is saying:

For a moment on Thursday, it appeared that the US Navy had produced the 'smoking gun' to which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had alluded during his statement from earlier in the day: CENTCOM footage which the Navy said purported to show Iran's IRGC 'caught in the act' of trying to remove an unexploded  mine from the Kokuka Courageous, one of the two tankers damaged in Thursday's attacks.

CENTCOM said the video it released showed the IRGC removing an unexploded limpet mine from the side of one of the tankers, suggesting Tehran had sought to remove evidence from the scene.

After the video's release, Iran continued to deny any involvement in the attacks. And perhaps now we know why.

In comments that cast the entire narrative promulgated by the US in doubt, Yutaka Katada, the president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the Kokuka Courageous, said Friday that he doesn't completely believe Washington's version of events.

Instead, he said the vessel wasn't damaged by a mine, but by some kind of projectile, like, say, a torpedo. He called reports of a mine attack "false." One reason is because a mine doesn't damage a ship above sea level, like what was seen with the Courageous.

"A mine doesn’t damage a ship above sea level," said Yutaka Katada, president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the vessel. "We aren’t sure exactly what hit, but it was something flying towards the ship," he said. (Italicized emphasis added)

So, the owner of the Japanese tanker that was hit in last week's attacks is stating that it was a flying projectile of some sort, not a mine, and that implies an artillery projectile, a missile, or a drone.

So, look what we have: (1) a claim by the owner of the Japanese tanker, and its crew, that some sort of projectile hit the ship, not a mine, contradicting the American version of events, and (2) the unlikelihood that Iran would conduct an attack on a Japanese tanker while the Japanese premier was on an official visit to Tehran. Thus, if we're to believe the "narrative" coming out of the USA, Iran fired "something" at the tanker while Japan's premier was on a diplomatic visit to that country.

The problem with that whole picture is, of course, that Iran would be running an extreme risk by attacking the ship of a nation - Japan - that is not even hostile to Iran while its premier is visiting, and that Japan would inevitably find out about the attack. If indeed Japan had even remotely suspected this scenario, then Tokyo would already have registered some sort of politely but firmly worded official protest with Tehran, which it has not done. So far, the silence, in other words, is deafening.

But I strongly suspect that with Yutaka Katada's comments, Tokyo has already signaled its response unofficially, for it is difficult to believe that in a government as tightly run as the Japanese, that Katada's remarks were not "cleared" beforehand. And in this instance, registering an unofficial objection to the American narrative via a private corporation rather than through "official channels" would be a very Japanese way of sending the message "we know the narrative is nonsense, but we're not going to embarrass you publicly by stating it officially."

For the moment, then, I am sticking with my high octane speculation that this event may have originated from elsewhere, and principally from rogue elements in The Swamp and their proxies in the region.

You know who I mean.

See you on the flip side...

AMAIRIKUHN EDGYKAYSHUN AND THE MENSTRUAL EQUALITY ACT

Yes, you read that headline correctly. An institution of "high learning"  in Amairikuhn quackademia has decided that menstrual equality needs to be promoted on its campus(note, I said "high", not "higher", because I strongly suspect the people behind this idea - and I'm using the term "people" loosely here - were high when they proposed it). And, lest one leap to what would be under normal circumstances a rational conclusion and believe that this is happening in some explosion of bloviation at Harvard square, the Rockefailure University of Chicago, or the quackademies of Nuttyfornia, think again, for not to be outdone in edublithering lunacy, a quackademy in the Amairikuhn heartland has decided that the absence of access to menstruation products in men's lavatories could, in fact, be construed as an offense and injustice to transgendered women using the men's restrooms on the campus of the "University" of Arkansas' Fayetteville campus, according to this story shared by K.M.:

UA Student Gov’t Seeks Free Access For Menstruation Products

Yes, you are permitted to do a double-take and read that one again:

(The University of Arkansas) currently uses coin-only dispensaries -- mostly in women's restrooms...

Uhmmmm... er... at the risk of exposing my white male patriarchal privilege, I have to ask, where else would one expect them to be located? Oh, I forgot: it's ok now to use whichever bathroom of which ever sex you feel more inclined to "being" on any particular day. My bad; mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

-- which ASG says further limits access to menstrual hygiene.

(Associated Student Government) said 86 percent of individuals experience an unexpected need for menstrual hygiene management (MHM), and having only women's restrooms outfitted with tampons is unequal and limits the ability of members of the transgender community to safely and easily access MHM on-demand.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Being a rational man or woman you're probably thinking that this means that the campus, in order to make this nuttery "completely equal", will inevitably have to distribute condoms or other "men's health products" in women's restrooms to accommodate transitioning transgendered males. That may indeed be the case, but if so, it would only be a sign that the "University" of Arkansas has only progressed as far as the now rabidly traditional and ultra-right-wing conservatism of nth-wave feminism. (I say nth-wave feminism because I long ago lost count of which wave of feminism the culture was surfing. I lost count somewhere between the Margaret Court-Bobby Riggs tennis court confrontation and the Billy Jean King-Bobby Riggs tennis court confrontation. And to be honest, I lost count because I lost interest because it was clear where all this nonsense was heading.  One does wonder how those confrontations may have gone if, perhaps, rather than Bobby Riggs, the men were represented by Rod Laver or Bjorn Borg, but I digress.)  The problem with that analysis is of course that the placement of condoms or "men's health products" in women's restrooms would be an obvious imposition not only of dreaded patriarchy within a female safe space, but a further manifestation of the continuing and insidious disguised presence of patriarchy and female repression.  In order to truly address the Rampant Inequality Caused by the Patriarchy, it would be better to ban all public men's restrooms completely, and convert the ones currently in the infrastructure to women's bathrooms. During the difficulties and dislocations of the Transition Period to Full Equality, men could, of course, use these facilities if they paid a small "men's user fee". A government bureaucracy can be set up for this purpose next to the Clinton Library in Little Rock, and over time, those fees can be gradually raised in order to prevent men from displaying patriarchal privilege and utilizing public restrooms. The benefit of this plan will, of course, force men, whose flatulence is helping create climate change, from eating so much, and confining themselves to urinate, defecate, and flatulate in the privacy of their own homes, or at least move to San Franfreakshow, Nuttyfornia where they can do so on the streets and sidewalks. We can, of course, force compliance by confiscating their homes after installing Elimination Smart Meters. If they are not compliant, these homes can be seized and turned over to the Dreamers, who truly deserve it.

See? Problem solved. We are, after all, the Shining City on a Hill and The Indispensable, Exceptional Nation.

***

All satire and sarcasm aside, this nonsense has to end, and soon, because it is nothing less than an nihilistic assault on men and women, on maleness and femaleness, that is to say, on our humanity.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

 

A BIT OF CONFIRMATION ABOUT THOSE PERSIAN GULF ATTACKS?

In the past few months, I've tried to avoid blogging much on this website about politics or geopolitics, because so much of it is just downright disgusting and emotionally draining. But today, I think it may be a kind of moral dereliction not to do so.

Last Thursday I recorded my News and Views from the Nefarium on the tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf. At the time, there wasn't much to go on, except, of course, that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeio was quick out of the gate to denounce Iran as the ne'er-do-well in chief behind the attacks.

I wasn't so sure, and I'm still not. Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely no fan of the regime in Tehran. They are a state sponsoring terror. But if that is the standard by which we must focus our ire, then the (out)House of Saud is also right at the top of the list, and one could think of a few other countries over in that region as well. Moreover, in some American states, it is now a "hate speech" crime to raise even a minim of suspicion about the treatment of Palestinians by Israel, or to question the legitimacy, not to mention constitutionality, of the whole idea that some people can maintain a dual citizenship in this country and that one, and hold public office in this one! For those paying attention, that was a neat and nifty equation of two concepts hardly related, as anti-Zionism has been equated with anti-Semitism. At a stroke, any theological criticism of the Zionist position or agenda - be it Orthodox Jewish or traditional Christian - has been made a hate crime. And for those really paying attention, those ludicrous laws not only have sanctioned a massive curtailment of the First Amendment right of free speech, they have implicitly sanctioned a form of Christian doctrine - dispensationalism - long understood by traditional Christian confessional positions as a heresy. If you're an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi or a traditional "Book of Concord" Lutheran pastor, you could be in breech of those laws for questioning the theological basis of Zionism and/0r its dispensationalist counterpart that holds sway in many American "evangelical" circles.  By those decrees, one would have to come up with a sort of "anti-Zionist" "Index of Forbidden Books" that the Faithful of the Indispensable Nation must not read, and at the head of that list would have to be books like Alfred Lilienthal's What Price Zionism? or Ben Hecht's Perfidy or Rabbi Marvin Antelmann's To Eliminate the Opiate, not to mention Hannah Arendt and a few others. In other words, Jewish intellectuals and critics of Zionism would themselves be denied a voice. They could not write their books in modern Texas or Florida, two states which have already passed such "anti-Zionism" laws.

I rehearse all of these points because in last Thursday's News and Views I outlined reasons why I'm not at all convinced that Iran is behind those attacks. I don't rule it out, but with the rush to condemn that nation without a scintilla of evidence or argument at the time, my suspicion meter went into the red zone. I found few reasons for Iran to do such a thing, but plenty of reasons for factions elsewhere in the Middle East to do so, and highlighted the Saudis as one possibility, Israel another, and one cannot rule out a kind of "Bay of Pigs" scenario of some rogue intelligence faction in this country trying to pin the executive branch to a course of action by precipitating such an incident. For me it had, and still has, that element of "Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq" quality to it. There is - if I may so put it - a cartoonish quality to it. It's too pat, too obvious, and too unsubtle. It seems designed to persuade opinion in this country, and that is what this article shared by V.T. seems to indicate what has already happened:

Senators Switched Key Votes On Gulf Arms Ban Hours After Tanker Attacks

The key here, in case you missed it, is this, and it occurs right at the beginning of the article:

A brief report from AntiWar.com's Eric Garris suggests Thursday's tanker attack incident in the Gulf of Oman which the United States promptly blamed on Iran has directly impacted bills placed before the Senate which would ban US arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar.

Garris wrote of the vote which came hours after the Gulf tankers incident: "Both votes were considered highly likely to pass up until they were rushed to the floor today. The timing appears almost certainly to have been related to Thursday tanker bombings in the Gulf of Oman, and shifted a number of Senators’ votes in favor of continuing the arms sales." He noted that "some senators switched sides to kill the bills" following news of the tanker attacks.

And there you have it.

Let's not forget that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran at the time, acting (as many suppose) to clear the air, and potentially (as others suppose) as intermediary for President Trump. But in any case, Abe may have been there to conduct independent diplomacy, and hence the incident could be also construed as a shot across Japan's bows. The idea that Iran would attack a Japanese ship while Abe is there in any capacity, intermediary or otherwise, is, in a word, completely nuts. And the Persians are not nuts. And I strongly suspect that not even their nutty regime is that nuts.

As for the rest of us who believe that "It is finished" means "it is finished," and that there is no longer any special theological dispensation or privilege attaching to Israel, Zionist or otherwise, well, Austin and Tallahassee have decreed such views heresy.

And in doing so, it looks to me like they're not only flying in the face of the First Amendment, but also the establishment clause. But hey, that's ok, because we're already second class citizens required to fund entities like Planned Parenthood...

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

THE STEAMPUNK SCRAPBOOK: BIGBOY AND 8444 DOUBLE-HEAD

Regular readers here know I have this fascination for three things that I suppose could fall under the category of "steampunk." Those are: (1) artillery (the bigger the better); (2) roller coasters; and (3) steam locomotives, which are I suppose the very essence of "steampunk": clanking, snorting, hissing beasts of valves, tubes, and pressures all bolted together, and dreamed up by engineers doing things the old-fashioned way, on drafting tables, using pencils, and slide rules. When you stop and think what the steam locomotive represents in terms of its engineering achievement, it really is breathtaking.

Well, all that's a bit of context for a story I've followed and blogged about on this website occasionally, and that is the Union Pacific Railroad's purchase and restoration of old steam locomotives to fully functional operations, and their conversion to burn oil, not coal. This effort began in the 1990s, and the railroad restored a 4-6-6-4 "Challenger" articulated locomotive, which you can watch the sheer muscle of this locomotive pulling 143 freight cars over the mountain passes in California, and doing the work of several diesels:

And if you've ever been driving around Wyoming, you might have seen engine 844 chugging along and 75 mph or better (you can find many videos by Skip Weythman on youtube with engine 844; check them out, they're fun to watch).

But a few years ago, Union Pacific brought the largest steam locomotive ever built to its "steam shop" in Cheyenne to begin the process of restoration and conversion, the 4-8-8-4 "Big Boy" articulated locomotive, even bigger than the Challenger in the first video above.

Well, that restoration work has been concluded, and the Big Boy has not only had its first "steam up" and trial run, but has joined engine 844 in a "double-header" expedition to Ogden, Utah:

 

Now, pardon me for cramming so many locomotive videos into one blog. As I say, I can't help it; I have a "thing" for these old beauties and marvels of engineering skill and ingenuity, all done without a scrap of "computer-aided design" in their day, just drafting paper, pencils, triangles, French curves, erasers, and slide rules.

There is, however, method to my madness, and I have blogged about this before, and now, with Big Boy's and 844's double-header to Ogden, it's time for a "revision and extension" of my previous high-octane speculations. As I've mentioned before, the restoration work on these old locomotives has been extensive: fireboxes and boilers needed to be rebuilt, many complex parts needed to be completely manufactured anew. In effect, the process of these restorations has meant - I have argued - that Union Pacific probably now has (re-)acquired the knowledge to manufacture a steam locomotive from the bottom up, from scratch. Additionally, it has had to train engineers to operate and run the monsters, and has had to build out the infrastructure to allow them to operate on the company's track, after all, steam locomotives need fuel and water.

What all this means (as I've also previously argued) is that the railroad is laying out a considerable amount of money, so much, in fact, that I highly doubt it's just because it wants to provide photo opportunities for local "railways heritage days" clubs. Something else is definitely involved, and as I've also speculated, that something may be "EMP," electromagnetic pulse. A conventional diesel electric locomotive will be taken down in a heartbeat; so too, will your automobile (unless, perhaps, it is a model T, but that's another story); likewise most aircraft. But a steam locomotive - all valves and gears and levers - will chug along quite nicely. Hence, behind this "steam locomotive restoration" effort I've suspected a much bigger national security agenda, one to reacquire the know-how to build, repair and maintain, and operate these locomotives. (Since I first blogged about this subject, people both in Australia and in the United Kingdom have written me informing me that similar restoration efforts of steam locomotives are under way in those countries as well.)

Which brings us to the last video above, the one showing engine 844 and the Big Boy "double-heading." Now, if you don't know railroad parlance, double-heading is when two or more locomotives are used to pull a train. You see it all the time with several diesels coupled together at the head (and sometimes the middle and ends) of very long trains. Double-heading is relatively easy to do with diesels, since they are built to be able to do so, with the rates of acceleration and deceleration being controlled from one cab via electronic links to the others so that all the engines are acting in an identical fashion, under unitary control.

But double-heading with steam locomotives is a considerably more complicated business, since these are all analog technologies, and no centralized automated electronic control of the engines is possible (and, if my EMP national-security hypothesis is what lies behind this restoration effort, one wouldn't want to devise such a method anyway since it would be vulnerable to EMP interdiction). Double-heading with steam locomotives requires a great deal of experience from the engineers in the cabs of each locomotive. Yet, double-heading was done in the age of steam, and particularly during the American Civil war when both the Confederacy and the Union used railroads to move massive amounts of troops, supplies, ordnance and so on. And it was done with no means of remote or automated radio communication between cabs.

So what I suspect we're now looking at once again (and under the guise of a "railroad heritage days" event) is a bit of trial and practice, a training exercise on how to double-head with steam locomotives, should the occasion ever arise that it would be necessary to do so.

It does make one wonder, especially since President Trump also recently issued an executive order regarding electromagnetic pulse.

See you on the flip side...

THE RED MERCURY SAGA: RUSSIANS SAY LITHIUM-6 WAS RED MERCURY

OK... I had to do at least one "fun" blog this week, and T.M. sent this article along, and I couldn't resist. And it's appropriate that the article is based on a report from those always-byzantine-never-to-be-trusted-Russians and their evil-super-genius-criminal-mastermind-martial-arts-expert-who-is-behind-all-conspiracies-of-all-the-ages Dr. Fu Manchu Vladimir Putin.

So what has Mr. Putin and his evil minions and lackeys been up to lately? Why, they now claim that all that red mercury scare that was the favored Nuclear Nightmare of the 1990s, and which occasionally resurfaces in a variety of contexts (most recently as the "culprit" behind those strange bridge fires in Atlanta a few years ago) was really simply a "code" for Lithium-6. But, as you might imagine, there's a bit more to this story than meets the eye. Here's the article, which, you'll note, is really the abstract to an article:

'Red Mercury' is Lithium-6, Russian Weaponsmiths Say

And here's the problematical part:

The name 'red mercury' is a code word used in the USSR nuclear weapons program since the 1950s to describe enriched lithium-6.

Well, that's not really the only problematical part. There's also this:

Lithium-6 has two nuclear weapons uses: as a reactor target for production of tritium, and in the form of lithium-6 deuteride as a thermonuclear weapon material. The most common production process uses large amounts of mercury as chemical agents. The code name originated because mercuric impurities contaminate the lithium- 6 during production, giving it a red color. 'Red mercury' has been identified by many European media reports as 'any of several simple mercuric compounds and tinctures offered for sale by Russian and European agents,' but none of these had any nuclear value. The uses for lithium-6 are consistent with claims about the uses of 'red mercury.' The USSR built a large complex in the early days of their nuclear weapon program to produce and stockpile lithium- 6. Some was also supplied to China in the 1950s. Russian and Western officials have both stated that no lithium-6 from Russian or Chinese inventories has been diverted since the disintegration of the USSR. (Emphasis added)

Well, what's so problematical about that? To answer that question, we'll have to take a short trip around Harvey's Barn. In 2009 I published my book The Nazi International, in which I review the post-World War Two nuclear fusion research of Dr. Ronald Richter, which he was ostensibly conducting for Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. In 1951, Peron gave a press conference where he introduced Dr. Richter, and then made the extraordinary claim that Argentina had discovered the secret to the hydrogen bomb. The world's press denounced Richter as a fraud, and so vociferous was the press response that Peron appointed a young Argentine nuclear physicist, Dr. Jose Balseiro, to head a commission to investigate Richter's claims. Richter was indeed claiming to do the impossible - at least, by the lights at the time. He was claiming to obtain fusion reactions in a compound of lithium-6 (the rest of the compound was unspecified, but may have involved mercury) under extreme rotation and stress, and at temperatures far below that the standard thermonuclear chemistry of the period thought possible. In effect, Richter was making cold fusion claims some decades before Pons and Fleischman would do so.

Dr. Balseiro filed his report, basically pointing all this out, Richter was denounced as a fraud and placed under house arrest by Peron, and that was that.

Until the USA's infamous Castle-Bravo h-bomb test, which ran away to a reaction of about 15 megatons's yield, after a pre-detonation calculation of "only" 7-8 megatons. As I pointed out in The Nazi International, suddenly people in the USA became interested - very secretly interested - in Richter and his work again, and the US Air Force dispatched people to interview him. Meanwhile, the "cover story" of Castle Bravo was put out: the American thermonuclear bomb engineers had not factored in that the lithium-6 would burn in the reaction.

Woops.

Except, that Richter had made this prior claim, and now, the Russians are also implying that they too knew lithium-6 would burn in a thermonuclear reaction as early as the 1950s. Which means either the American story about Castle Bravo's  engineers being incompetent is probably yet another one of those narratives that has to be questioned, because it implies they fully knew and concocted a nonsensical explanation for it. And now we're learning that mercury was used as a chemical agent in some unknown process involving the lithium-6.

It's the presence of Richter in this mix that makes me wonder, once again, if there is not some truth in the red mercury legend, particularly in this current incarnation; it makes me wonder if some mercury "salted" with lithium-6-deuteride and then put into plasma form might not, in fact, under the right conditions, do what was always claimed for "red mercury": detonate with enormous "quasi-nuclear" force.

Finally, most importantly, if this latest admission from Russia is to be believed, then it means one very important thing: the substance called "red mercury" was, and is, real.

See you on the flip side...

 

 

 

THE NOTRE DAME “REBUILD”: MACRON’S ...

There is already talk of re-building Notre Dame, but the question is, as what? We'll get back to that, but before we do, there is already talk of using the new technology of additive manufacturing or 3D printing to rebuild the cathedral, a process which, incidentally, could conceivably restore the structure more or less to its pre-fire state, according to this article shared by M.W.:

Can Notre-Dame rise from the ashes with 3D printing?

Speaking to FRANCE 24, Eric Geboers, co-founder of Concr3de, said, “As the extent of the damage is becoming clear, it is time to think about how to rebuild this sacred monument that has seen so much history. We propose a strategy to rebuild Notre-Dame in a modern way that maintains the soul and layered history of the building.

“Why not reuse what is left? What if we take the remains of Notre-Dame and use them to build her up again? What if we take the stone that has seen so much history and use that to maintain the soul of the building?”

Rebuilding with the remnants

Concr3de suggests combining old materials with new technologies. They will collect the ash, dust and damaged stone remnants in the nave of the cathedral and turn that into a 3D printable powder. “This powder will have the yellowish grey colour of Parisian stone and will be mixed with the charred remains of the wood. We can use this powder and directly 3D print the destroyed parts of Notre-Dame.

“The ash and limestone that remain would probably make up about half of the required materials. Then we would bind them together. But we would not use any plastics or resins. It would be a much more natural and pure procedure than that.”

“It is impossible to say at this stage exactly how long the work would take, but it would certainly be finished within five years,” said Geboers. “Working with our technique is at least five times faster than cutting stone.

“Of course it will take a lot of work but it is possible. With one large printer, you can produce two cubic metres of material in a day.”

OK, that makes sense, especially if, as Geboers states, one wants to preserve the "soul" of the cathedral, which would seem to imply a restoration of its traditional art-work.

Unfortunately, it would appear that the little popinjay Emanuel Macron's globaloneyist multi-cultural stupidity and hubris knows no bounds, for what he has in mind for the structure is of the same order as his "there's no such thing as French culture" statement that he made at the Verdun memorial, surrounded by the graves of thousands of his countrymen who died in that battle to preserve precisely the culture that Macron said didn't exist. Many people spotted these articles and passed them along:

CHRISLAM RISING: French President Macron Says The Roman Catholic Notre Dame Cathedral In Paris Should Be Rebuilt With Muslim Minarets To ‘Reflect Diversity’ Of France

Macron says Notre Dame should be rebuilt consistent with the modern, diverse France – and architects suggest a glass roof, steel spire and minaret

Now, in case you missed it, the proposals for Notre Dame include (1) turning the top part of it into a greenhouse, and (2) replacing the spire or steeple with a minaret:

Macron’s initial promise to restore the magnificent cathedral to its former glory has been shoved aside. Now he says it will be rebuilt “consistent with our modern, diverse nation”, and at the same time the French Government has announced an international competition to redesign the Notre Dame spire.
After the announcement designers haven’t missed the opportunity to respond with their ideas, proposing that it should not be faithfully restored, but rebuilt with “contemporary” features such as a glass roof, steel spire, or even a minaret.
The Telegraph published an article claiming it would be a “travesty” to restore Notre Dame, while Rolling Stone quoted a Harvard architecture historian as saying that the burning of a building “so overburdened with meaning… feels like an act of liberation.”
Lord Norman Foster, arguably Britain’s most famous modern architect, has unveiled a design topping the ancient cathedral with a glass and steel canopy with a featureless glass and steel spire, which he describes as “a work of art about light” which would be “contemporary and very spiritual and capture the confident spirit of the time”.
...
Perhaps most controversial is a proposal in Domus, the architecture magazine, by Tom Wilkinson, for the fallen spire to be replaced with an Islamic minaret, to memorialize Algerians who protested the French government in the 1960s.
“These victims of the state could be memorialized by replacing the spire with – why not? – a graceful minaret”, Wilkinson insisted.
Yes, by all means, let us rebuild Notre Dame as a multicultural hothouse dedicated to the bland and glittering generalities of globaloneyism such as "the confident spirit of the time" as a "work of art about light." Forget all that Christ and Mary stuff; that's so yesterday. Let us rebuild it as a temple to plants and a shrine to yet another glittering abstraction called "diversity" and "inclusion", and just so everyone feels "included" let us top the whole thing with a minaret (and for good measure, hire a mouezzin to sing the Angelus and call to mass call to prayer). For good measure, we can fill it with Muslim prayer rugs, and have automated Buddhist prayer wheels circling endlessly in front of a tabernacle for the reserved sacrament, which will have an appropriately ecumenical Masonic compass and square on it, and we can put Jewish menorahs on the high altar so everyone will feel "included."
How perfectly wonderful this wonderful vision is. Need I remind you that it will be wonderful? You should feel wonderful about it, because it is wonderful.
Seriously, though, wonderful it may be, but not in the way that Mr. Globaloney intends, for no pious Muslim, nor Roman Catholic, nor Jew would be at home in such a monstrosity, nor want to be near it. Such an agenda - such a twisted vision - requires all of them to commit a kind of apostasy which the "planners" rub their faces in.
The long and short of it is that such plans are not a restoration at all; they are a deliberate mutilation and desecration of a tradition, and let it be noted, the core tradition of this civilization. It is thus a deliberate mutilation of the civilization itself. It is the continuation of what the fire itself was unable to complete.
And that should tell us something about the current "leadership" of the West: they care nothing - absolutely nothing - for the central core of this culture and civilization (or for that matter, the core of the cultures they want to "include"). In fact, they hate it, and will stop at nothing to mar it, mutilate it, desecrate it, and in the process, mar, mutilate, and desecrate the other cultures they've brought into this one in the name of "diversity" and "inclusion," for what they plan to do to Notre Dame today, they can do to the Grand Mosque at Mecca, to the Dome of the Rock, to Lhasa Asa, to Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow tomorrow (you know, the one that Stalin dynamited to make room for some ridiculous Soviet "temple" to the "new man"). The Russians, at least, had the right idea: they rebuilt the cathedral, on its original location, in its original form, and put it to its original use.
But the western leadership, Mr. Globaloney and his allies, Ms. Diversity and Ms. Inclusion, are about nothing; they are about nihilism. Nothing more, nothing less; just nothing.
OK, rant over.
See you on ...  oh, by the way, if you think for a moment that that business in the second article about the creation of "Chrislam" and the Vatican saying that Islam is part of "the plan of salvation" is made up, think again, for that little quotation is lifted straight from one of the documents of the Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes. And the idea of the "merger" of Christianity and Islam has been detailed by Jeff Sharlett's two eye-opening books, C Street and The Family.
As I've said before, they're following a template, an interpretation, and "the fulfillment is the deception."
OK, now my rant is over.
See you on the flip side...

3D PRINTING SCRAPBOOK: FIRST HUMAN HEART 3D PRINTED

If you've been following the three-d printing/additive manufacturing story, and the genetic engineering story, you'll be interested in this one. Frankly, I view it with a mixture of ambivalence, as being something that could be profoundly good, and profoundly bad. The story, as you can guess from the headline, is about the fact that some scientists have now 3-d printed the first artificial human heart. But there's a catch here, and it's a profound one, in this article shared by V.T.:

Major Medical Breakthrough: 3D Heart Printed Using Patient’s Own Cells and Materials

The engineered heart completely matches the immunological, cellular, biochemical and anatomical properties of the patient

In a major medical breakthrough, Tel Aviv University researchers have "printed" the world's first 3D vascularised engineered heart using a patient's own cells and biological materials. Their findings were published on April 15 in a study in Advanced Science.

Until now, scientists in regenerative medicine — a field positioned at the crossroads of biology and technology — have been successful in printing only simple tissues without blood vessels.

I was struck by the fact that apparently, no babies were aborted, ground up, and fetal stem cell tissue harvested to accomplish the feat, which seems all but par for the course for similar developments elsewhere in the world. And the utility of the accomplishment, using a patient's own cells, is rather obvious, as the article points out:

For the research, a biopsy of fatty tissue was taken from patients. The cellular and a-cellular materials of the tissue were then separated. While the cells were reprogrammed to become pluripotent stem cells, the extracellular matrix (ECM), a three-dimensional network of extracellular macromolecules such as collagen and glycoproteins, were processed into a personalized hydrogel that served as the printing "ink."

After being mixed with the hydrogel, the cells were efficiently differentiated to cardiac or endothelial cells to create patient-specific, immune-compatible cardiac patches with blood vessels and, subsequently, an entire heart.

According to Prof. Dvir, the use of "native" patient-specific materials is crucial to successfully engineering tissues and organs.

"The biocompatibility of engineered materials is crucial to eliminating the risk of implant rejection, which jeopardizes the success of such treatments," Prof. Dvir says. "Ideally, the biomaterial should possess the same biochemical, mechanical and topographical properties of the patient's own tissues. Here, we can report a simple approach to 3D-printed thick, vascularized and perfusable cardiac tissues that completely match the immunological, cellular, biochemical and anatomical properties of the patient."

The researchers are now planning on culturing the printed hearts in the lab and "teaching them to behave" like hearts, Prof. Dvir says. They then plan to transplant the 3D-printed heart in animal models.

Of course, the implication here is obvious: if one can do this with hearts, one can do it for almost any organ in the body once they "wear out" and need replacement: "Maybe, in ten years," the article concludes, "there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world, and these procedures will be conducted routinely."

Probably so. One can even envision a time or circumstance that the technology becomes so commonplace that the procedure becomes cheap, affordable, and can be done by "licensed organ printers" rather than doctors, in a kind of out patient procedure. And while we're indulging in all this high octane speculation, one my even envision a kind of "organ dealership" or "Jiffy Lube," a kind of drive-through organ replacement "garage," complete with warranties and expiration dates, and so on.

Now, on the one hand, I can see that this developing technology is a good thing, because it extends life, and life is a good thing. Call me old fashioned, but I believe ardently in the sanctity of life. But it's that, precisely, that also bothers me here, with the article's own admission that one can envision a whole new branch of medicine emerging: organ-printing and replacement, and with it, a cheapening of life, a view that our bodies are so many collections of organs to be replaced when "worn out." I wrote about this years ago, at the very end of my first "foray" into this strange alternative research field, in The Giza Death Star. I wrote about it in the context of a view of those ancient texts which record extraordinarily long life spans for our early ancestors. The biblical texts have humans living in some cases from half a millennium to almost a thousand years. In the Mesopotamian and Egyptian king's lists, these life spans stretch tens of thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of years.

And with the advent of this new "organ-printing and replacement" branch of medicine, once again modern science is providing a context from which to view those ancient claims as perhaps having a basis in a similar technological reality. But as I put it at the end of The Giza Death Star, the danger of viewing organs as so many replaceable "body parts" is what it does to the human spirit. As I warned then, the danger of becoming bored with life to the point of a kind of nihilistic anomie or antinomianism emerges, and one can imagine the emergence of a Hitler or a Stalin with thousands of years to perfect the evil in their souls. On can, of course, imagine a Francis of Assisi or Seraphim of Sarov perfecting their sanctity as well. It's that potentiality that raises another high octane speculation: imagine also a "board" which must "approve" people to be recipients of such medical-technological boons. To be "approved," one will have to have demonstrated holding the "correct opinions." And given the fact that certain state legislatures are openly applauding the passage of full term abortion laws, and that certain state governors in this country are openly and calmly talking about "post-birth abortions" - infanticide - on television, one can fairly guess that people like Seraphim of Sarov or Francis of Assisi won't be on the list of "acceptable recipients."

See you on the flip side...

 

 

CABINET COUP AGAINST MAY? (WITH LATE UPDATE)

Well, it's finally happening... supposedly. According to news coming out of the United Kingdom and the following story in Zero Hedge, Prime Minister Theresa May is facing an open revolt of her cabinet against her leadership of the Tory party and the government, and it's all over Brexit:

UK Coup Erupts: Theresa May Cabinet In Revolt, Plotting Her Imminent Overthrow

This says it all:

Theresa May may have days, if not hours, left as prime minister of the UK following a full-blown cabinet coup on Saturday night as senior ministers moved to oust the UK prime minister and replace her with her deputy, David Lidington.

According to the Sunday Times, following a "frantic series of private telephone calls", senior ministers agreed the prime minister must announce she is standing down, warning that she has become a toxic and “erratic” figure whose judgment has "gone haywire."

The plotters reportedly plan to confront May at a cabinet meeting on Sunday and demand that she announces she is quitting. If she refuses, they will threaten mass resignations or publicly demand her head. The "conspirators" were locked in talks late on Saturday to try reach a consensus deal on a new prime minister so there does not have to be a protracted leadership contest. (Italicized emphasis added)

Chief among the causes of May's losing her cabinet's confidence is the sudden turn-abouts in her positions within the last week:

As the Times details, the coup erupted "after a week of mistakes" by May, who delivered a television statement that alienated the MPs whose support she needs for her Brexit deal and then flirted with backing a no deal before performing a U-turn.

One cabinet minister said: “The end is nigh. She won’t be prime minister in 10 days’ time.”

A second said: “Her judgment has started to go haywire. You can’t be a member of the cabinet who just puts your head in the sand.”

Similar to recurring mentions of the 25th Amendment in the US, concerns about May’s mental and physical resilience are widely shared. Officials in parliament were so concerned about May’s welfare they drew up a protocol to extract her from the Commons if she collapsed at the dispatch box.

For now May has refused to comply with the coup's demands, and the Times sources at Downing Street say May has not yet come to the conclusion that she should resign and is still being encouraged by her husband Philip to fight on. But she has also lost the confidence of key allies whose job it is to maintain party discipline. Whether she remains or quits, the current Brexit process remains irreparably broken: Julian Smith, the chief whip, believes there is no prospect of the prime minister winning support for her deal unless she announces that she is standing down so the second phase of Brexit negotiations can be conducted by a new leader.

So in other words, May was flirting with a hard "no deal" Brexit, then reneged on that, while the coup planners are banking on a second round of negotiations, and that from a position that can only be perceived as weak after a leadership contest!

It's difficult not to lay the blame for the whole fiasco at Prime Minister May's feet, since her performance has been one of stellar weakness at a time when the Euroskeptic parties on the continent are also bucking the dictats coming from the Brussels-Berlin axis; she has been unable to capitalize on that politically at a time when the Big Two of the European Union, France and Germany, have their own weak governments and are increasingly under fire, in France's case, almost literally. To botch an opportunity like that takes real talent that can only be learned at the Angela Merkel school of politics.

The solution, as the article points out, is a temporary premiership under Deputy Prime Minister David Lidington, who would take over the premiership after a May resignation, conduct negotiations, and then (hopefully) turn over the party leadership to a more permanent leader after that.

There's two flies in that ointment, and they're major ones. One of those flies is former cabinet member Boris Johnson whom this author well-remembers from his Oxford days, the other is Jacob Rees-Mogg.

The sad part of all of this is, Britain was warned by a previous Prime Minister who was also a woman, that the European Union scheme would ultimately dilute British sovereignty. No one listened, and she was ousted by a similar cabinet coup and a globalist was put into her place.

And now the lessons that were ignored back then have come home to roost.

So what's my prediction? That will all depend on what happens on the up-coming meeting on Sunday. If May's leadership is successfully challenged, or even if it is not and mass cabinet resignations occur, then one will have to watch Mr. Johnson and Mr. Rees-Mogg very carefully. Both men have been quietly drawing attention to the problems in Ms. May's "deal", and both, if one has been watching them, have been carefully stumping and speaking around the country in classic political stumping style, and a party leadership contest could see them emerge as contenders, though efforts have been made to stop Johnson's leadership ambitions (see MPs plot to stop Boris Johnson ever becoming Tory leader – 'There is NO chance'). Just as a personal note, having been distantly acquainted with Mr. Johnson and watching him campaign in the Oxford Union society, it's never a safe bet to count him out...

Either way, May's days, like Merkel's and Macron's, seem to be numbered.

See you on the flip side...

(There was an update after I composed the above blog: Parliament has voted to take control of the Brexit process from PM MAY:

Parliament Seizes Control Of Brexit From Theresa May)

And yet another update: apparently Commons has another vote coming up tomorrow concerning an extension and approximately one half of May's Brexit deal.... it's getting impossible to keep up with!)

NOT TO WORRY, SAYS JUDGE, CA FIRES CAUSED BY UNINSULATED WIRES

NBC carried this story which Mr. G.L. spotted and passed along, and yes, the conclusion of the judge is as bad as this blog's headlines: U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in San Franfreakshow, Nuttyfornia, has ruled that the single overriding cause of all those fires in Cali...er...Nuttyfornia were caused by uninsulated power wires, which, we're also told, started fires when powerlines blew into each other during high wind storms, and caused shorts and electrical sparks to fall on dry vegetation:

Judge says uninsulated power conductors caused California fires

Ok... that may be one possible source, but I doubt it's the only one, for I find it extremely curious that the article itself begins with a picture of a burned-to-the-gound home, while in the background trees and vegetation can clearly be seen, some burned, but most not. Moreover, most regular readers here have seen those strange pictures from California, showing burned out homes and businesses, surrounded by unburned vegetation. A few weeks ago, I even blogged about the latest theory being discussed in the alternative research field: electrical meters. Some readers may recall that one woman, mystified by the pattern evident in the fires, took pictures of some fire-damaged, but not totaled, houses where very clear indications were shown that fires started in or around the electrical meters. Other pictures and videos showed buckling, melting bridges, next to bushes and shrubs that were clearly unburned.

So what's going on? I have to wonder if the judge who issued this ruling isn't blind. Or, failing blindness, if he was even permitted to see the photographic and video evidence of the strange anomalous patterns of fire damage in these past fires. (That, too, wouldn't surprise me.)

Seriously, though, what's the purpose of the finding? Needless to say, my Suspicion Meter is in the red zone on this one, and it requires a bit of explaining on the end of the High Octane Speculation twig to show why. The purpose of the ruling, it seems to me, is to sustain the narrative that there's nothing anomalous about these fires; there is no reason to entertain any of the other theories out there, from electrical meters, to exotic energy technologies in space, nor even my own theory that perhaps the power grid is being deliberately used as a broadcast grid to create targeted fires, perhaps in conjunction with the other two major theories. By making it all about "uninsulated power lines" and "high winds" in a formal court ruling, the window is opened to make PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) the fall guy. No need to look anywhere else.

And of course, if one makes it all about uninsulated electrical power lines, that opens the door to tons of lawsuits, and closes the door (a bit) on any process of discovery in any litigation that might reveal other mechanisms and technologies in play.

And then, of course, there's the insurance angle...

Bottom line? While I've certainly crawled to the end of the speculation twig again, I cannot help but think that this is about sustaining the narrative: "nothing to see here, move along..."

See you on the flip side...

 

 

PRIVATIZING (CORPORATIZING) WARFARE

Mr. G.P. spotted this important story from Russia's RT site, and passed it on. As you might have guessed from the title of today's blog, it has my high octane speculation motor running in overdrive, for earlier this week I blogged about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s interview with Fox Network personality Tucker Carlson on the legal immunities afforded to the vaccine industry/Big Pharma, speculating on the possibility that some of his remarks during that interview might indicate that some sort of quiet "mafia war" might be taking place in the mafia mobocracy that is Globaloneyism.

There's another indicator that such might be taking place, and it's this:

‘We are coming’: Chilling Blackwater ad triggers fears of Trump seeking to privatize Mideast wars

In a nutshell, the article speculates that the recent resignation of General Mattis from the Trump administration might not be quite the harbinger of a policy change in Syria that many think it to be. The policy may indeed have changed, according to the article, but not necessarily in such a fashion that the USA is getting out of Syria, but rather, turning over operations to a corporate proxy and actor:

The resurrection within the military contractors’ market of notorious Blackwater, which, after numerous scandals and several rebrandings, is now known as Academi, has analysts looking deeper into US intent to withdraw from the wars in the Middle East. The advertisement in Recoil, made public after Defense Secretary Jim Mattis announced his resignation, prompted concerns that president Donald Trump might be seeking to privatize ongoing American engagements in Afghanistan and Syria, following the declared troops' withdrawal from the region.

The main supporter of the idea of privatizing the US fighting in the Middle East has been Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater. The longtime Republican sold the company in 2010 but has maintained communications with Trump, reportedly trying to lobby his inner circle to replace the US military presence in the region with mercenaries. Mattis, who served in the Persian Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq, firmly rejected the idea.

“With Mattis now gone it is conceivable that Trump now may reevaluate” Prince's proposal, Michael Maloof, former Pentagon security analyst, told RT.

But whether or not Mr. Trump eventually green lights Mr. Prince's proposal to "privatize" (and thus, in my opinion, to piratize) middle eastern conflict, I suspect the real story here is that we're getting a first major-media public glimpse at a trend that is bound to increase, regardless of what Mr. Trump may or may not decide to do. Mr. Globaloney has been preaching about the need to turn over global governance to corporations and big banks for a long, long time. Think only of vowel-less Zbgnw Brznsk's books The Technotronic Era and The Global Chessboard or David Rockefailure's Memoirs where he openly boasts about advocating treasonous views. Think, also, of Mad Madam Merkel's recent pronouncements about giving up national sovereignty, and ignoring the clear and express wishes of national citizenries, all to inaugurate the New World Order. Or, conversely, think only of Russian President Putin's remarks against the globaloneyist dogmas.

Any way one slices it, corporations and banks, if they're truly going to "run" things, will have to have militaries in order to enforce their will. Thus far, they have hidden behind national militaries. But indeed, with corporate (defense contractor) control of advanced technologies and the increased reliance of governments on such corporations for their communications, record-keeping, security and so on, there's really no reason to prevent corporations from announcing their de facto sovereignty by recruiting their own security and mercenary forces.  (And besides, if my speculation about the Middle Eastern wars being as much about acquiring and holding ancient records and technologies and archeological sites be true, privatizing the whole enterprise puts yet another veil of security around the operation). And there's another reason perhaps pressuring the move to military corporatization: what if corporation X is unsatisfied with the result, say, of a recent government contract bid, or, indeed, if a government contract has been awarded without any competition at all, to corporation Y? Corporation X feels it has been slighted, that the scales are deliberately tipped against it. How will it enforce its interests against corporation Y?

In other words, and to put it country simple, we might be looking at a future when wars are fought, not just between countries, but between counties like Russia (clearly not interested in being a player in Mr. Globaloney's vision of a tyrannical corporate future), and corporations, or for that matter, between corporations themselves.

And corporations, unlike countries, are not signatories to things like the Geneva convention or treaties outlawing the use of certain types of weapons. Their corporate charters do not enshrine, nor are they required to enshrine, any statements of recognition of human rights such as are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. They do not subscribe to "rules of engagement."

There is one thing that might stand in the way of such a grizzly future, besides Russian hypersonic thermonuclear cruise missiles, but I'll let you figure that one out for yourself...

See you on the flip side...