DBLEagle
I have been doing some reading this month and have mixed it up some.
The first thing I read was The Strange Death of Europe by Charles Murray. I offer a hat tip to Hayek for the recommendation. Murray discusses the impact of a loss of confidence in a European identity, the massive uncontrolled immigration from the Middle East and both red and black Africa, and the impacts of a strong Islam identity among the newcomers. The book is from “the before days” aka 2017 so most of his examples are no more recent than 2015. But he brings up a greatest hits of Western European disruption. Murray places the cultural abandonment of Christianity as an import reason in the loss of confidence as an ideal worth defending from an aggressive and confident Islam as a key reason; aided and abetted by the “EU class” of anti-nationists. It would be interesting to see how Western Europe is dealing with the recent Ukrainian influx. On my visit to Berlin earlier this year I could see it wasn’t going smoothly in many respects.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I haven’t read this in almost 20 years so it is in many ways fresh to me. Eco is a superb storyteller and now I can quickly translate the Latin used which adds texture. This was a fun read, again.
Reading the Glass by Elliot Rappaport is a licensed tall ship captain’s explanation of the atmosphere and impacts on the ocean. He makes clear the interactions between our atmosphere and the water column of the ocean and how they drive overall weather, currents, and local weather. Plus he has a series of great sea tales and the foibles of dealing with water adjacent people the world over. Lots of interesting tidbits as well. I never knew the channel into Tahiti’s primary harbor also ebbs and never floods. Sometimes a light ebb and sometimes a more substantial. This leads me to….
Charlie’s Charts for Polynesia and French for Cruisers. We hope to be taking a wee sail next year so I gotta start doing some reading now and also start brushing off my navigational skills. GPS is nice, but the batteries never die or the guts fry on paper charts.
Fourscore
Just finished Collapse, authored by Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs and Steel fame. Diamond makes a pretty dismal future for mankind but with a lot of good explanations reference to his conclusions.
My take was he relies heavily on government actions and edicts to solve the problems of today as they affect the future. He does admit that the “mistakes are made” but as part of the learning process. He points out the reality of such things as the problems of EVs, the grid, etc. The book was written in 2005 and apparently no one read it then and paid attention to what he was saying.
Unfortunately, he relies too much on the benevolence of politicians, in my opinion. His idea that all concerned should work towards common goals but admits there are conflicts between the various groups.
I do agree with him, that the future is going to be bumpy and lumpy but the politics will only make it worse.
Plenty of examples…
If anyone is interested I’d be happy to send it along.
Richard
For some time a neighbor has been telling me I should read Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth by an anonymous author:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61605704-turtles-all-the-way-down
Written in 2019 and translated and published in English in 2022 it’s a damning account of the Vaccine Industrial Complex that doesn’t even mention COVID. It amply demonstrates that vaccination is just another brick of The Narrative.
I then turned my attention to a new computer programming project and read Exploration Geophysics by Mamdouh R. Gadallah and Ray Fisher:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-540-85160-8
This was the simplest introduction to the topic I could find and I was underwhelmed. I was looking for definitions of some elementary geophysics terms and didn’t find them, some of the diagrams are more confusing than helpful, and there are typos.
Annoyed with reality I took refuge in fiction and re-read Neal Asher’s Rise the of Jain Trilogy set in the Polity universe:
https://www.goodreads.com/series/222102-rise-of-the-jain
IMHO it’s just very slightly less good than the Transformation trilogy I mentioned last month.
Then I was delighted to discover that Asher released a second book of Lockdown Tales written while Great Britain was in COVID lockdown:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75699602-lockdown-tales-2
These are short stories and novelettes mostly in the Polity universe. Some are set after the Polity had disintegrated which to me was a mind-expanding concept.
Lest you think I only read mind-numbing Science Fiction please be aware that I also indulge in mind-numbing Fantasy and commenced a re-read of the Harry Potter series which I really like. I have all the books and all the movies. I even wrote a fan fiction short story that I linked to in a comment on Hit & Run an era ago and which garnered a single positive reply.
It had been years since I re-read the books and while I think the movies are excellent adaptations I think the books are better. The first two, Philosopher’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets are cleverly plotted and just plain fun. If there’s a criticism I can make of the subsequent novels it’s that there’s too much plot. The number of events crammed into a single year is remarkable even without a Time-Turner.
The Harry Potter books are not well regarded by some on this forum for reasons I find entirely understandable. If you’re one of these people, are looking for a way to occupy your copious free time, and would be interested in reading Harry Potter Done Right then I recommend Eliezer Yudkowsky’s 2000 page tome Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
In which Harry’s adoptive parents are loving scientists, Harry gets sorted into Ravenclaw instead of Gryffindor, thinks Quidditch is really stupid, dislikes Ron and Professor Dumbledore, and has an antagonistic relationship with Hermione. For an example of rationality there’s one scene where Harry tries to use magic to factor large semi-prime numbers.
The Hyperbole
James A McLaughlin Panther Gap (2023) *** Hippie-ish/rancher family living in a isolated Coloradan valley, inherits mega bucks from the long dead patriarch’s illicit endeavors, and have to deal with gangster and drug cartels looking to steal the windfall. Part crime novel, part supernatural BS, with a little climate change panic thrown in.
That’s it I’ve hit the reading wall, as I do every year, maybe when the days start gettiing shorter again I’ll get back to reading multiple books a month.
I also indulge in mind-numbing Fantasy
On that note, I am still reading “The Lays of Beleriand”. I will finish the whole History of Middle-Earth series one day.
Queued up next is Andy Ngo’s “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy”.
LOL I just watched a bunch of Potter movies courtesy of late night hotel room boredom. The third one is still my favorite. I also get why why lots of folks arent into it but hey we all hav our guilty pleasures.
That is a guilty pleasure of mine. I like her books too. She definitely matured as a writer as those went on.
Guilty pleasures are the best pleasures. Mine is cheap period mysteries, Agatha Christie wannabe’s.
I recently read instructions for installing a top mounted storage bag on the Mega Jeep. And a shit-ton of comments on Glibs.
I don’t think Collapse offered a grim hope for mankind at all.
Most collapsed civilizations have compelling reasons for why they collapsed, and he goes out of his way to show that it was one than people just being stupid.
more than
I’d say people being stupid is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
No time for reading. I’ve been writing. Apparently someone stuck a nickel in my Create-O-Meter this week.
Interesting euphemism.
I’m jumping on the Zoom in an hour. It was a sweaty laborious day outside. I need some Scotch time.
LABOR DAY MARKS THE END OF SUMMER, NOT THE BEGINNING!
Same here in Northern MN. It got up to 83 degrees while on the roof of my girlfriend’s 3 season porch. We removed it as a condition of the sale of her house. A dull circular saw blade, a chainsaw that stopped rotating, a sun-burnt neck, lots of small cuts and bruises, and a full dumpster. It has been removed.
I somehow lost me phone. It was probably time for an upgrade anyway. I’m just sad all the recipes, spare brain notes, and contact information are lost.
How’s the rhubarb?
Spent a couple days fishing with classmates. Put a trio of octogenarians in the same boat and watch the ensuing hilarity. If we had to depend on what we caught we’d starve to death. Fun though.
It’s growing! I have to find a use for it as I’m trying to avoid sugar. We all know rhubarb needs sugar to be palatable.
Try calling it and see if the dumpster starts ringing.
Tried that.
Just about everyone agrees that we should all work towards common goals, where “common goals” is synonymous with their particular hobby horse. Few seem capable of entertaining the idea that perhaps we’ve already addressed all of the truly “common” goals at a societal level, and the remainder might be better left to the chaos of markets and individual preference.
Collectivism is the notion that a large group of individuals, each with a different set of desires and goals, should voluntarily set them aside and follow the goals of just one such individual, and do the necessary mental contortions to pretend those are their individual goals.
And if some don’t volunteer to follow the program, employ however much violent force is needed to stop those fucking kulaks and wreckers.
I picked up JG Ballard’s Super Cannes this week and just cracked open last night, before I fell asleep at 9:15pm. Seems interesting, but I doubt it will end up being one of his better works. Also, reading about model trains and early BSA air guns.
Look at the old man ovah here!
GlibBooks.
https://archive.is/1X8K4/99356a394a44175eca7b76403a4bf188c1be65c1.webp
NSFW.
https://archive.is/0CKF1/a8753e944978df8140c23958fa9d1b2fc8436325.webp
NSFW.
https://archive.is/pXl01/d7ee02948bac4a44132536eb737afb86f1851628.jpg
NSFW.
https://archive.is/hS1wJ/989f93e2609fc6015a7ed5d00b6fc06ca0b002a9.jpg
NSFW.
Nice Glib Books.
Meh, Stephen King on the shelves. Not worth the time.
Not been reading, I got moving on adding to “On Unknown Shores”, so I’m trying to see how much I can get on the page. I took a dinner break, else I wouldn’t be here.
I ain’t reading. I’m too.busy making the appendices to my First compendulum.
How many pages so far?
It’s impossible to accurately compute because every page is the first page.
Really? In publishing, the first page is always blank.
No one gets the true first.
*lights Bro signal*
Looks up the thread, looks quizzically at Q.
I figured it was because the pages all stick together.
On the Zoom. Playing Van Halen. It’s raining a little. Nobody here.
I’ll be on in an hour, maybe earlier. Just finished some housework and need a shower!
*Golf clap
I’ve done all the gambling I’m gonna do today. I finally let my IPhone do an IOS update.
I did too.
I was still on 4+ year old original version.
Feck. It’s starting to really rain. May have to go in.
Still reading this.
Quick! Generic accident code for railway accident!
Hint: It’s not R14.3.
I must be missing a joke.
It’s not too difficult to look up — V81 and all the sub-codes.
72
My brain, she is tired.
I’m just playing.
How much more do you have to pay to get the answers?
Nothing. V81 is correct. And there are at least a hundred sub-codes. Just making conversation. Zoom is empty and I am provoking joiners.
It’s a sunday in the mid-afternoon, there shouldn’t be a zoom.
Holiday Zoom is active all weekend
Linky?
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87821224358?pwd=eW55MTRDbDNtQkh2aHd3M1Nmenlzdz09
I am in the Zoom.
To Retired Rambo and others, a peaceful Memorial Day.
Still on my Medieval English history kick, I’m about halfway through Queens of the Conquest, Alison Weir’s biography of the Norman queens of England. Because relatively little is known about some of these women, the book is necessarily rather drier than the book I was reading this time last month, The White Ship. Sometimes all that’s known for sure about large intervals of these queens’ lives is at which palace they spent a particular day on the liturgical calendar or which charters they signed, either on their own or with their king. Weir does what she can with the historical evidence available (sometimes mentioning contradictory accounts and speculating as to which chronicler might have had an axe to grind.) At least by reading multiple accounts of this historical period and place I’m growing more familiar with the cast of characters and the major events.
Finished Always With Honor, the memoirs of Pyotr Wrangel, the (eventual) leader of the White Army.
Amazing to think about how different our world would be if the fucking train carrying Lenin derailed and/or the Russian Civil War would have broke a different way. It’s a terrific book and highly recommended.
As a brain cleanse, I read a couple of Robert Crais Elvis Cole series. Early ones are still decent.
Digging into How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence right now. Only a couple chapters in, but once again the WOD appears to have robbed us of some pretty effective tools. Will report back.
I still need to get the second Elvis Cole book, The First one didn’t blow my skirt up but you people claim they get better so I going to give him a few more shots.
2 through 4 are solid. As we’ve talked about before, LA Requiem is when you can bail. It’s not high culture regardless, but not a bad summer read.
Kind of like Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey. Sometimes you need something less heavy.
We’d still be dealing with the Brits.
I’ve come to loathe those limey bastards.
They fucked the White Army, hard.
Yes, you are correct.
I miss limey. I wish he would show up here more.
Indy 500 finish was some real racing, once they got past the red flags.
Murray places the cultural abandonment of Christianity as an import reason in the loss of confidence as an ideal worth defending
And the irony is it is always non-Christian intellectuals making this point. Assuming Murray is no different. The problem with arguing the utility of Christianity is that Christianity isn’t utilitarian dammit.
TBH, I’m not sure which is worse anymore; modern Western wokism or Shariah.
Definitely Wokism.
Is there any real difference between the two?
Wokism is annoying as AF, shariah could have deadly consequences.
Wokism has deadly consequences which will increase in the next six years to rival or surpass Shariah. Shariah has set rules. Wolkism does not.
I agree with this. Wokeism is worse simply because people don’t recognize the religious aspect.
Wokism is fortunately, owned by cowards.
^ There’s a few grieving families in TN who would disagree about Wokism not having deadly consequences. Perhaps not a death toll, but there has to be at least thousands, if not tens of thousands, of genitally mutilated children to add to the body count.
I don’t think Wokism will be as deadly as Shariah, but the potential is there. Certainly much greater if Wokism is rolled into the foundation of a larger Marxist purge. In hindsight, we came pretty damn close to this tipping point during the Covid hysteria, but the politicos backed off before it descended to the point of no return.
Islam has a working definition of male and female.
Accepting Islam, and by extension Shariah, is no different than accepting Christianity; they both have rules, forms and shibboleths. In other words, they both operate under a logical system, at least in the basic form. Wolk, by definition, has no rules, at least not formally, other than rule by strength. Which is the actual frightening aspect. If someone can, on the one hand, demand that you believe all women, but at the same time that anyone can be a woman as long as they say so, then there are no rules, no logical consistency. The only constant is to bow to the will of the left/mob.
…unless they’re accusing someone on your “team” of wrongdoing. Or unless they express wrongthink.
When there is no objective truth, there is only power.
Nietzsche catches a lot of blame for that concept, despite having articulated it more as a warning than an ethos. “Your religion didn’t survive the Enlightenment, so what do you do now that there’s no moral firmament?” It’s still a valid question.
The postmodernists make the utilitarians look positively rational.
I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.
No, when there is no shared Morality, then there is only power. Reality has no check on power, nor the lack of it.
there are no rules, no logical consistency. The only constant is to bow to the will of the left/mob.
See also, Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s takeover, Stalinist Russia, Nazi purges, ….
And follow it up with The Killing Fields, bodies floating down the Yangtze, Shoah, the Moscow Purges. Ad Nauseum.
The problem with arguing the utility of Christianity is that Christianity isn’t utilitarian dammit.
Good place to insert an Ellul quote:
If the disciples had wanted their preaching to be effective, to recruit good people, to move the crowds, to launch a movement, they would have made the message more material. They would have formulated material goals in the economic, social, and political spheres. This would have stirred people up; this would have been the easy way. To declare, however, that the kingdom is not of this world, that freedom is not achieved by revolt, that rebellion serves no purpose, that there neither is nor will be any paradise on earth, that there is no social justice, that the only justice resides in God and comes from him, that we are not to look for responsibility and culpability in others but first in ourselves, all this is to ask for defeat, for it is to say intolerable things.
I guess “” doesn’t work anymore? Or is apple helpfully correcting to “
To me, if you see that Christianity has failed as a basis for Western civ, then you need to do as Nietzsche did and demand a reexamination of values.
That’s not what I’m seeing or saying at all. If anything Western civilization has failed as a host of Christianity. I agree that Christianity is wholly unsuited as a utilitarian means to an end.
The Roman concept of state and citizenship are more central to Western civ than Christianity, particularly in this day and age.
I don’t miss that our respective kings prayed to the same God to deliver them victory over their neighbors.
Applied Christianity vs Christian Theology.
I’ve always thought C. S. Lewis’ “messiah or madman” false dilemma was imbecilic, but at the same time I have absolutely no idea what a secular person would find compelling about Jesus of Nazareth as a moral philosopher outside of a religious context, a la Thomas Jefferson, for instance. I can tell you with certainty that if I rejected Jesus’ divinity and religious authority, I would actually find his moral philosophy quite repugnant and backwards. Without there being some divine inspiration, nothing about “Grovel before all human authority, allow people to physically and emotionally abuse you without recourse up to and including the point of savagely brutal death, if you are the victim of an injustice give the perpetrator more than he took and also bless him and forgive him without seeking justice in the courts, do not seek material goods and comfort, in fact give away all of your wealth beyond your basic subsistence to those more needy than yourself, and feel guilt over every possible sensual pleasure that human life has to offer” would have me thinking “Well you know, that really makes a lot of sense.”
But if you accept Jesus’ divinity, then isn’t that list what you should be doing?
Correct. But that conditional alone is what gives those teachings any truth value. Coming from anyone other than the God-man, that moral philosophy has little to nothing to recommend it. So while I think C. S. Lewis set up a false dilemma in suggesting one could only accept Christ as either the God-man or a lunatic, I do think it would be sensible to reject his teachings wholesale if you don’t believe he was the God-man, not because the only remaining option is that he was a lunatic, but because even if he was perfectly sane – or rather, especially if he was perfectly sane – his teachings simply don’t comport with any manner of human wisdom hard-won through millennia of human experience, and are utterly at odds with every moral and philosophical underpinning of modern civilization, from individualism, to rationalism, to materialistic economic liberalism, to pluralism, and on and on. Jefferson in particular baffles me. I understand why he feigned respect for Christianity publicly despite his seething antipathy for it privately for political reasons, but his private admiration for the moral philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth to the point of cut-and-pasting his own abridged gospel, sans the supernatural, is incomprehensibly silly given his Enlightenment values that formed the absolute antithesis of that very same moral philosophy.
Finished re-reading The Diamond Age, which needs an epilogue even more than Snow Crash. IIRC Stephenson got better about this and The Baroque Cycle had an epilogue, but I’m not going to re-read all of that.
Also listened to the audiobook Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire, which was interesting.
Not sure what I should read. Maybe I’ll finally get around to reading Rise of the Jain.
I’m currently in the middle of a re-read of Cryptonomicon and dreading its abrupt unsatisfying ending.
I think I am alone in feeling that Crypto has his best ending.
Fuck epilogues.
No you’re not.
I’m in an odd place with Stephenson. Cryptonomicon’s my favorite novel and I read it every year, starting on the beach in August. Otherwise I like Snow Crash, and really haven’t liked ANYTHING else.
And on both of those, I treat them more as thinking exercises than “normal” novels, so the endings are fine with me.
Interesting. For me, I don’t like an epilogue as that isn’t part of the story. I don’t want to know every detail of a characters life before the story, and, consequently, I don’t need to know everything after. Just tell me the story.
Also, I could never get past the first few chapters in Snow Crash, it seemed unbelievable from the start. Crypto seems right on the money for me, and I also really liked Diamond Age and the Baroque Cycle.
I don’t think Snow Crash is supposed to be believable. It’s something of a self-satire/anti-fantasy, and its semi-spoken point is that it’s ABOUT language as a processing language impacting the way you think. Like Cryptonomicon is ABOUT information theory. Both are just vehicles for the thought exercises on those topics.
I took the day off and just now read Spudalicious’ Saturday evening links. The practice of exhuming Saints is something of personal interest to me because some years ago a local monastery of Greek Orthodox monks, good friends of mine, established a cemetery on property I own and buried Bishop Theophil there. Orthodox standards for sainthood are less strenuous than Catholic and Theophil is now a Saint with the nickname “The Ambulance” because if you call upon him for help it’s immediate.
Part of this is that after all rigamarole of his burial, which would make an amusing article, it’s possible he’ll get dug up again. Vermont has lenient cemetery laws, I had to learn them quick back then, but I don’t recall seeing anything about the legalities of exhumation.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/kohls-is-selling-transgender-themed-clothing-3-month/
Kohls is already on my boycott list from selling BLM stuff.
Kohls is on my “I have never been in that place, what do they sell?” list.
I would assume they sell Eye Makeup.
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/H19uKs99vIw
I’ve always thought it was pretty restrained for the eighties.
Sombra de la Ojo Sombra
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/textbased/news/text-12129995/How-401k-savings-used-turn-biggest-brands-woke-revealed-ex-Anheuser-Busch-exec.html
Yes. The rise of managed retirement accounts has created an ESG leviathan.
My account is managed and without a trace of that horseshit.
I take it yours isn’t managed by Blackrock or State Street.
The Teamsters Central Pension Fund would like a word.
The clowns from the Obama administration are behind a lot of this shit. That cancerous administration did fundamentally change America and much, much for the worse.
New Scorpo.
It may shock everyone to learn, but the GOP caved on the debt ceiling.
https://apnews.com/article/debt-ceiling-deal-food-aid-student-loans-3c284b01d95f8e193bca8d873386400e
What a joke. We’re truly a one party government. The can can’t be kicked forever
No shock at all. And the Dems caved too. The reality was that if the GOP and Dems didn’t come to a deal, and the country defaulted, and the economy crashed, who would get the blame?? Look who controls the narrative.
I suspect the Dems would have ended 2024 firmly in control of the White House, House, and Senate.
Creech is right. R’s might have the power of the purse in law, but they don’t have the bully pulpit.
Yep, every prior shutdown, they got the blame too. And taxpayers and private citizens were the only ones who got boned in the end.
You know, people who don’t matter.
If they did, they’d have a seat at the table.
Ridiculous.
https://twitter.com/justinamash/status/1663002391795335170
Huzzah! Civilization is saved! Nevermore shall we be faced with the dire prospect of the United States defaulting on its debt obligations despite collecting more than sufficient revenues for debt service! At least until the next election cycle…
The surprise ending of Kabuki Theatre!
We’ll see if the rebel faction can take McCarthy’s head over this, or if he caved so much that even the Democrats will vote for him to retain the speakership.
This deal hands Yellen everything she needs to destroy the USA, and she will.
even as that deal was going down, I’m sitting in a restaurant in Georgia taking a lecture from a FoxNews addict about how Trump and GOP are going to balance the budget like the good old days of Reagan, Bush, Bush
a pox on both their houses, my fervent prayer for many years, the latest evidence continuing to confirm
What a Firster gotta do to get a table dance? Say what what…
Apropos of nothing, this makes me laugh every time I look at it:
https://twitter.com/albert12798/status/1657891038084702212
That is great.
Missed this. Holy fuck.
https://www.protoolreviews.com/honda-exiting-gas-lawn-mower-market/
Harbor Freight will supply your small engine needs!
That’s surprising.
Someone knows that the Japanese equivalent of “mene mene tekel upharsin” is.
Not really. Honda has its head firmly planted in its ass.
I’ve being watching them destroy themselves over the past few years.
Memorial day morning Glibs.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sc5iTNVEOAg
🎶🎶
Good morning, Sean, NA (and Lily – both probably long gone to the park,) and Ssccrruuffyy!
https://www.fox29.com/news/police-impersonators-sought-for-stealing-guns-during-bucks-county-home-invasion-officials-say
😲
I thought the proper term was “who identifies as police?”
Someone has decided that it’s time for the park.
https://news.yahoo.com/two-people-shot-near-revere-010619612.html
Nazis strike again!
-MSM
Interesting sneer quotes from the article:
State police say it is “possible” she is not the intended victim.
Morning Glibbers,
The Weekenders will leave today , the local shopkeepers will be happy to restock and locals can get back on the road. Nice weekend weather for all concerned.
Good morning, 4(20)! Hope this summer somehow turns out to be a scant skeeter season for you and yours!
Mornin’ GT,
The bugs are bad, maybe ’cause so much snow left a lot of water for breeding grounds. I’ll be out in a couple minutes to start the irrigation. Dry spring so far, a little rain predicted this week though.