The Epic of Gilgamesh performed in the original Sumerian

Here’s the opening to the oldest book ever written!  By writing, I mean by pressing a stylus into clay tablets.  They didn’t have word processors back then!  The point of the book, still relevant to today, is approximately this – it’s not all about how many years you live, but how you live your life.

It’s performed on a reproduction period instrument.  Looks like it’s a three-stringer.  I see that the whammy bar hadn’t been invented then.  It’s four minutes long and worth a listen.

Way cool!  So this is about what Mesopotamian tunes sounded like!  I wonder if he could jam out to “Stairway to Heaven” on that?  Yes, really!  I can imagine those Sumerian folks would’ve liked an enigmatic song like that.

Movie review: Ad Astra

Boy howdy, Hollywood needs science consultants.  In fact, that’s quite an understatement.

I just watched Ad Astra with one of my girlfriends.  I really can tell that the filmmakers were trying for a 2001: A Space Odyssey type feel here, with lots of moodiness and psychology and sometimes high drama and overall the solitude of Deep Freaking Space.  They were working at that so earnestly that I feel bad reporting that the film is pretty much a turkey.

There be spoilers, yarrrr!

Early in the film, we meet the protagonist.  (This is a rather grizzled looking Brad Pitt.  Is Angie such a PITA that she’s prematurely aged him?)  After a power surge, he suffers a near-fatal fall from a space elevator, saved only by his parachute.  There actually has been a near space parachute jump before, so that much is realistic.  Note well, space elevators aren’t entirely practical unless you build them out of carbon nanotubes, or use some other design like a Lofstrom loop, but I’ll let that one slide.  Hey, it’s The Future, right?  I might wonder, though, how was it that his tether came loose?  Did I miss something?

So it turns out that it’s suspected that these power surges seem to be caused by a distant antimatter reaction.  Too much of that could destroy the world.  He’s told basically that this might be caused by his long lost father’s distant rocket ship sending power surges earthward.  They want him to go to Mars so he can send some broadcasts to Dad on a special laser transmitter they have there.  Uh – wait a minute, can’t they just have him record the messages, then they send the file to Mars?  Wouldn’t that be a heck of a lot faster?

So first they send him to the moon.  It kind of got turned into a tourist trap.  I’ll give them points for an imaginative perspective on that.  An announcer mentions territorial disputes and moon pirates.  (Pay attention, they’re sticking the magazine into Chekhov’s Gun here!)  One thing they don’t show is everyone bouncing lightly or shuffling from low gravity.  Springy harnesses, bluescreened out later, could’ve produced this effect.

Then they have to cross to the far side of the moon, cutting through a rough neighborhood, to get to the launch pad with the Mars rocket.  I’ll add that although the moon is considerably smaller than the earth, that’s still going to be a heck of a long drive.  (When I wrote Space Vixen Trek Episode 17:  Tomorrow the Stars, I had a lunar globe and carefully figured out what was going on where and what would be realistic.)  Then – whaddaya know – along come these moon pirates!  Fortunately, Brad Pitt is capable of holding a punctured part of his space suit closed as he pops a cap into one of the bad guys.  I might even say that the whole concept is a little bit flaky, but I did have lots of space pirates in Space Vixen Trek Episode 4.135667:  Walking the Planck.  Still, might I ask, how come they don’t have shuttles like on Space: 1999?  I’ll add that this 1970s TV series was a freaking classic, and superior to Ad Astra.

So he gets to the far side of the moon, and they blast him off in a huge rocket.  “Get your ass to Mars!” as Arnold-chan told himself in a much better movie.  This one is similar to a Saturn V, except that it doesn’t come apart in stages.  A plot point is made later of how it wobbles off center during the landing on Mars.  Well, a rocket that operates in a very thin atmosphere (at most) wouldn’t need to be needle-shaped for aerodynamic properties.  What’s more staggering is that it gets there in a couple of weeks, and apparently not under constant propulsion.  Nope, doesn’t work that way.  A Hohman type 2 transfer orbit to Mars would take over a year, the exact length depending on the positions of the planets.

During the trip, they get a distress signal from a space station that just so happens to be on the way.  They stop (apparently having enough spare fuel to brake and resume) to investigate.  By the time they arrive, nobody is answering.  By now, distress signals in space should be considered “Shmuck Bait“.  If it happens in Star Trek, then some shit’s gonna go down very soon, often involving a dead redshirt.  Whenever you get a distress signal in space, do as the New Yorkers do and don’t get invuolved!  For that matter, hasn’t anyone on board seen Alien?  That one should be like Moby Dick in The Future.  Anyway, when they get there, it turns out that there was a BLM uprising going on in the space station, and Brad barely makes it out.  The mission commander, however, is killed by one of the peaceful protesters.

So the spaceship gets to Mars, and I can really tell that the filmmakers were trying hard with their set designs.  Actually, I’ll give them surrealism points for that.  The protagonist finds out some secret information.  It turns out that his dad’s mind slipped a cog out in deep space.  (Well, we kind of figured that out already, but still…)  The protagonist is ordered back to earth, but decides to go rogue instead.  Brad gets back on the rocket by swimming through an underground lake (huh?), then jumping onto the rocket, now headed out to Neptune, just as it takes off.  Don’t try that for real, kids; you’ll get burnt to a crisp.

The rest of the crew don’t take kindly to him stowing away, and try to kill him.  He kills all of them instead, inadvertently, so they really sucked at fighting.  I might ask, though – who the hell brings guns on board a spaceship?  Even if his dad’s a loon and they have to neutralize him, why not use something like tranquilizer darts that won’t have the risk of puncturing a hull?

The rest of the trip takes – wait for it – 79 days.  That’s from Mars to freaking Neptune.  Nuh uh.  Ain’t happening.  Voyager II took a dozen years to cruise out there.  In the movie, they’re in a rocket using old-school chemical propulsion, unlike the antimatter rocket used to send Brad Pitt’s old man out into the Great Beyond.  If they’re using some other kind of propulsion, they can do that – this is The Future, after all – but they’d better explain it, at least in passing.  That’s the right way to do suspension of disbelief.

So Brad finally gets to the rogue ship and brings a suitcase nuke on board.  There, he confronts Dad.  I’d expected a little more, after all this buildup – maybe some Apocalypse Now kind of thing – but I won’t mark off points.  However, I certainly will do so for what follows.  The antenna thing was a little much.  Still, if his own spaceship just so happened to be in its rotational plane, and he just so happened to time it right, then he might could fling himself off of it and reach his destination accurately which is maybe half a mile away or so.  The next thing to do is find the nearest Stop-N-Rob and buy a fistful of lottery tickets.

What follows is worse.  So the suitcase nuke goes off on the other ship.  Apparently it’s considerably more powerful than a Davy Crockett device.  Well, what about the antimatter, though?  If you nuke a ship that has an antimatter fuel tank, what’s gonna happen?  That’s right – it all escapes the magnetic confinement, reacts with normal matter, and everything goes poof!  If all that antimatter leaking out randomly was enough to threaten the earth at such a great distance, then blowing up the tank should’ve burnt Brad’s ship to dust and put a giant dent into Neptune rather like in Event Horizon.  No such thing happens.

Anyway, Brad happens to be out of gas, but he uses the explosion of the suitcase nuke to propel his own ship.  This actually is a design concept in Project Orion, but a spacecraft using nuclear pulse propulsion would need a specially designed push-plate for that, and surely a suitable shock absorber.  Time passes, and Brad’s ship re-enters earth’s atmosphere.  Uh, wait a minute – you have a nuke going off at point A, propelling an object at point B, and it lands perfectly at point C which happens to be 2.8 billion miles away, give or take.  You could, if you wished, use a hand grenade to knock a billiard ball into one of the pockets.  However, if your pool table is the size of the solar system, you’d better have everything lined up with great precision.  It ain’t gonna happen by random chance.

When he gets back, Brad just has a modest amount of beard growth, so the return trip was a couple of months or so.  Think of what kind of acceleration it would’ve taken to make it back that quickly.  It all came from that single nuke burst.  Therefore, it should’ve turned him into Pace Thick & Chunky Salsa.  For that matter, that’s not how nuclear propulsion works.  The Project Orion concept is to use a large number of small nukes to get the spaceship going, and once again to decelerate.  On that note, the movie doesn’t go into what decelerated him.  If there was nothing to slow the ship, it would’ve left quite an impressive crater somewhere, probably causing an ecological catastrophe too.

The film does end on a positive note, but overall, it was a few too many ass pulls.

In search of Onion John

It’s been a while since I read Onion John.  As I recall, I was fourteen then.  Correction; it’s been a geological epoch since I read it.  It’s one of those forgotten classics of children’s literature.  The overall atmosphere reflects the placid and idyllic 1950s.  In retrospect, it unintentionally seems slightly corny.  (This is an effect that I do deliberately with some of my books like Space Vixen Trek Episode 17.)  Still, as charmed of an age as it was, being a little corny and Leave-It-To-Beaverish seems rather like a blessing compared to Clown World poz.

One subplot is the father-son relationship.  They don’t always see eye to eye.  Still, that much was fairly small potatoes as far as conflict goes, and I don’t remember much of that part of it.  The generation gap didn’t get started in earnest until the “kill your parents” 1960s.  (Thanks once again to the Frankfurt School for screwing up our culture!)  The other subplot, of course, is about Onion John himself.

Avast!  There be spoilers!

The titular character is an enigmatic old fellow from an unspecified location which (at the time I read it) I figured was somewhere in Eastern Europe.  Only one of the boys, Andy, can understand him.  It turns out that he has a number of peculiar beliefs, or if you will, superstitions.  Other than that, he lives in a shack up on a hill and collects odds and ends, storing them in bathtubs around the dwelling.  He grows plenty of onions in his garden, of course.

Then Andy’s father organizes the town to provide better living conditions for him.  They tear down the shack and take away his junk collection, which causes him some distress.  Then they build him a modern house.  The problem is that soon after, he tries to kindle the stove with newspaper, since he doesn’t know how to operate modern appliances properly and nobody had the foresight to demonstrate it.  According to my recollection of the story, he dies tragically.  According to other synopses I’ve read, he survives but leaves town to go it alone after they want to build him another house.  Was I remembering incorrectly, or was there was a difference in editions, where the ending was softened?

Again, Onion John is pretty enigmatic, since his origins are a complete mystery.  He comes across somewhat like a slacker, which was out of step with the spirit of the times, though actually he does work some odd jobs.  On the other hand, it turns out that he’s of retirement age, so the fact that he can provide for his own modest needs goes in the plus side of the ledger.

Looking back on it, he seems like a more innocent version of Aqualung, the eponymous character of Jethro Tull’s song, a homeless WWI vet who rasps like Darth Vader because his lungs were scarred during a gas attack.  (WTF were they thinking with this “War to End All Wars” nonsense?)  The song does capture some of the same quiet desperation.  The difference is that Onion John isn’t homeless.  Actually, he built his own place, all by himself.  That worked, until the townspeople decided that wasn’t good enough.

On one side of the tragedy, they meant well, but the problem is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.  (So goes the proverb, but I certainly hope the old fellow had a better final destination.)  On the other side, one could say that the townspeople forced a harmless eccentric to conform, but he just couldn’t cope.  If I recall correctly, they didn’t ask him about tearing down his place and putting up a new one; it was pretty much a surprise.  He was happy the way he was.  They could’ve just let him spend the rest of his days as he wished.

A few clues about Onion John

The surprising thing about this was that the basic plot was nonfiction.  Names and location were changed.  I didn’t know this until fairly recently.  Some of that is discussed in the article “They Killed Him with Kindness. Literally.”  Another discussion, which ties up some of the loose ends posed by that one, is a digression in the bottom third of a post about Louisville, Nebraska.  That one even has a picture of the headstone for his grave:

UHAN KLEBAN
ONION JOHN
1882-1955

Taking the previous two mentions at face value, he’d been around for a while, arriving in the small town of Belvidere, New Jersey probably during or before the 1930s.  The stove accident really happened, and I’m sad to relate that it was fatal.  The fact that this was real makes it all the more poignant.  These items, along with a couple of real-life anecdotes about him, provide a little more depth to the picture.  I’ll add a few other observations.

His name is quite unique indeed, and a little online searching helped to spot where he likely was from.  Kleban is a rare name of Ashkenazi origin.  It probably means “baker”, and I’d bet that Klobuchar (a more famous name lately) does too.  It’s most common in Ukraine and Belarus.  The name Uhan is even rarer, but might be a phonetic or variant spelling of the Estonian name Juhan.  That does indeed mean John!  If he didn’t actually come from Estonia, then it’s likely that he came from either Belarus or perhaps Poland’s former territories east of the Curzon Line.  However, if one goes back far enough, it was all the Russian Empire.

Given the facts of history, as well as immigration policy and trends, I’d speculate he arrived in the USA during the 1900s or early 1910s.  (In other words, he was fortunate enough to skip some interesting times.)  His lack of proficiency in English argues against an earlier arrival; if he’d gotten here as a teenager, he would’ve had the immersion experience in school.  The language he speaks – which only one kid eventually deciphered – remains a mystery, since several were in use in the part of the world he likely came from.  My bet is a patois of Yiddish and extremely accented English.  It would’ve been considerably harder, for example, for Andy to figure out Polish.

So maybe that’s a little more to go on.  Maybe someone with the interest and resources might be able to dig through immigration records.  Perhaps Onion John came to NYC via Ellis Island, then held some factory work for a while until it dried up during the Great Depression.  Then he became a hobo, like so many others back then, and went on walkabout until he came to Belvidere, NJ and managed to get by doing day labor and eventually become a permanent fixture of the community.  Although that’s the likeliest scenario, we’re back to the realm of pure speculation.

Posts 101-150 in review

Whew!  It’s time for another article recap here.

101. Posts 51 to 100 in review – The last post like this.  Don’t miss the first recap as well.
102. Yet another Drag Queen Story Time scandal – It must be tough hiding those boners under their dresses.
103. Caffeine withdrawal is a bitch with fleas – We wants it my preciousssss…
104. Martin Niemoller Reloaded – a new take on the famous statement – I got so sick of the original that I satirized the hell out of it.
105. I’m a lesbian – my coming out story – This is what feminist theory did to my brain;
106. Get Woke Go Broke – Target sells queer shampoo by OGX and queer mouthwash by Listerine, but #takepride takes money – How much did it cost the factory to make a production run for their silly virtue signaling stunt?
107. Payday loan crook gets busted – Better not drop the soap in prison!
108. Book Review – Mister by Alex Kurtagic – If you put up with continued encroachment on your liberty, will The System leave you alone?
109. Work versus prison – Maybe I need to hold up a bank…
110. The Adventures of MP0werdW0myn and OmegaMan – Mission 2 – OMFG’s New Front Group – Maximum Leader Rosso recruits two more useful idiots.
111. Murphy’s Law, the automotive edition – The Amish have it so much better.
112. Miley Cyrus says virginity doesn’t exist, and UK MSM paper agrees – Did you know that this famous pop diva is also an authority on morality?
113. Book announcement – Complete Collection of Deplorable Diatribes, Traditionalist Tirades, and Reactionary Rants of an Egregious Extremist – This one is my magnum opus here.
114. My experience using Kindle Create – There’s not much to their tutorial, so hopefully this will fill in some gaps.
115. Is this Clown World, or is this a world of shit? – There are some politically incorrect realities about public defecation.
116. Former Muslim draws Muhammad cartoons – The wit is a little dry in places, but he has his moments.
117. The Stepford Wives, a case study of feminist propaganda – You actually get to see The Patriarchy’s clubhouse!
118. Clown World’s “cow demons and snake spirits” – Maoist terminology is fun sometimes!
119. The Handmaid’s Tale series: a politically correct soap opera, subversive victimization porn, and electric brain cancer – This is your brain on feminism.  Any questions?
120. Is Wikipedia biased? “Exhibit A” is their Manosphere article – If you followed WP’s link to my page, this is the article the guy who put the URL there meant you to read.
121. The funniest timeshare telemarketing cold call ever – Pwn@g3!
122. The ugly truth about “sugar dating” is proof that Fourth Wave feminism has gone full retard – Is being a “W” really empowerment?
123. What sexual dimorphism looks like – There are men and women and a very small number of loose odds and ends.
124. Wiki Wars: The Narrative Strikes Back – Someone at WP assumed my article 120 is evidence that I was messing with their article.  Silly leftists!
125. Do you want to be a male feminist ally? – Check your brain at the door, pucker up, and prepare to kiss a lot of ass.
126. Is Wikipedia biased? They whitewashed the Union League carpetbaggers of the Radical Reconstruction – It’s history told the one-sided way.
127. Movie review of Joker (2019) – They kicked him while he was down, until he fought back.
128. Britain’s most indecisive transsexual wants to be a porn star – Kid, get a clue!
129. How to quit the Alt Right and stop being a right wing extremist – If you’re going to turn your back on everything you believed in, do it the right way.
130. Meet the founding mother of men’s studies – This is the fairy in charge of telling men how to be men.
131. If you’re sick of YouTube’s political censorship, here is a long list of alternative channels on Bitchute – Here’s the stuff that they didn’t want you to see.
132. I just raised my intersectionality score! – I’m a Black lesbian now, so I can pull rank on everybody else!
133. John Lennon’s “Imagine” reloaded – That perfectly awful pinko / globalist song just got satirized.
134. After the Confederate statues are gone, who will they go after next? – Did you think they’ll stop with Robert E. Lee?
135. The political angle of magick – It’s not just for New Age crystal weenies.
136. How Microsoft AI Tay became a Fascist – Artificial intelligence takes the Red Pill!
137. Black Friday stocking stuffer “Santa Claws” – An overrated scribbler thought he was a poet.
138. If political parties were sodas – Here’s a funny analogy.
139. Men’s Health encourages men to explore bisexuality – C’mon, you know you wanna!
140. Can Disney’s princess movies encourage Princess Complex? – The little girls get some pretty questionable messages from these seemingly wholesome films.
141. What would happen if everything in Clown World was exactly the opposite? – This is a cute thought experiment about inverting the inverted.
142. J.K. Rowling is targeted by online mob of SJW crybullies for defending freedom of expression – Being liberal is no protection against The Homintern.
143. How I quit vaping and discovered that nicotine addiction isn’t very hard to beat – Puff puff give, puff puff give!
144. 2019 is gone, and not a moment too soon – Can I get a respite from this crap?
145. A contrarian perspective on the “optics” debate in the dissident right – There is strength in audacity.
146. Repost: How To Get Over The Girl Who’s Not Right For You, By The World’s First PUA Author – A reprint from before Return of Kings went G rated.
147. Is royal gold digger Meghan Markle maneuvering for the divorce of a century? – And they said Wallis Simpson was bad?
148. Some exciting unseen perspectives about St. Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. – This is what twenty pages of a much longer suppressed FBI report revealed.
149. Reasons why it’s better to be a leftist – Best of all, you don’t have to pretend to be a moderate.
150. Why libertarians and others are wrong about maximally deregulated markets and laissez-faire economics – Bad things happen if the government fails to keep hands out of the cookie jar.

Black Friday stocking stuffer “Santa Claws”

Xmas season is upon us, and we know what that’s all about – SHOPPING!!!  (Yes, I’m being ironic and tongue-in-cheek all throughout, but work with me here.)  Well, why not give your loved ones the gift of poetry, one commemorating this joyous season of commerce?

It’s a poem about Santa Claus, the deity honored by Xmas, though his name is spelled a little creatively here.  The author is the groundbreaking poet Ted Joans.

Who was Ted Joans?

To find out a little more about this celebrated figure of the arts, let’s turn to Wikipedia, the trustworthy and oh-so-NPOV ultimate repository of human knowledge.  Retrieved 11/29/2019, it begins:

Theodore “Ted” Joans (July 4, 1928 – April 25, 2003) was an American jazz poet, surrealist, trumpeter, and painter. His work stands at the intersection of several avant-garde streams and some have seen in it a precursor to the orality of the spoken-word movement.

Cool deal!  Maybe he’s like Keats or Wordsworth or Longfellow?  A little further down:

While he ceased playing the trumpet he maintained a jazz sensibility in the reading of his poems and frequently collaborated with musicians. He continued to travel and maintained an active correspondence with a host of creative individuals, among them Langston Hughes, Michel Leiris, Aimé Césaire, Robert Creeley, Jayne Cortez, Stokely Carmichael, Ishmael Reed and Paul Bowles, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont; many of these letters are collected at the Bancroft Library of the University of California Berkeley. The University of Delaware houses his correspondence with Charles Henri Ford. Joans was also a close correspondent/participant of the Chicago Surrealist Group.

Joans’ painting Bird Lives hangs in the De Young Museum in San Francisco. He was also the originator of the “Bird Lives” legend and graffiti in New York City after the death of Charlie Parker in March 1955. His visual art work spans collages, assemblage objects, paintings and drawings including many resulting from the collaborative surrealist game Cadavre Exquis.

Now that’s quite a luminary then, huh?  With all this cultural street cred, surely he was a master wordsmith.

The famous poem Santa Claws

I’m familiar with his works from an anthology I saw long ago.  One was called “Santa Claws”, a fairly representative sample of his poetry.  Wikipedia forgot to mention how much verve and dramatic force he has!  Why, they were all too modest!  For that matter, the leftist literary establishment that promoted Joans back in the day was all too modest as well.  This poem begins:

IF THAT WHITE MOTHER HUBBARD COMES DOWN MY BLACK CHIMNEY DRAGGING HIS PLAYFUL BAG

IF THAT RED SUITED FAGGOT STARTS HO-HO-HOING ON MY ROOF TOP

IF THAT OLD FAT CRACKER CREEPS INTO MY HOUSE

I’d love to quote the thing in its entirety.  However, it’s pretty short and I don’t want to go beyond “fair use” standards.  The good news is that you can go to his site and read it all yourself.  Best of all, it’s in a convenient JPEG that you can print out and distribute in your Xmas cards to your loved ones.  It does say “free postcard” at the page, after all.  Surely it’ll be a hit!

The Handmaid’s Tale series: a politically correct soap opera, subversive victimization porn, and electric brain cancer

Much like with The Stepford Wives, the Black Pilled channel hit another home run on their propaganda analysis.  This next one is called “Soap Operas that Wash Your Mind”.  The only thing the creator of these videos could be doing better is making it a little clearer in the titles what show is being picked apart.  This one is about The Handmaid’s Tale series.

A brief overview of The Handmaid’s Tale

Originally this began as a novel by Margaret Atwood.  It got a massive amount of publicity back in the day.  The literary establishment promoted the hell out of it, for the fairly obvious reason that it suited the ideological inclinations fashionable with publishers and critics.  I’m not saying it lacks artistic merits or is badly written.  What I am saying is that surely it helps that the book promotes certain narratives.

A movie was made of it too.  Hollywood spinoffs are one of the side benefits that come from being hugely popular with the literary establishment.  Lately the story was serialized and essentially became a soap opera.  These spinoffs are one of the ways the MSM can leverage their conglomerates to  signal-boost messages they like.

It’s no mystery why feminists ate it up like candy.  Basically, the plot happens in Gilead, a dystopian version of the future USA where the evil patriarchy is in control.  Their religious beliefs are even more extreme than the Westboro Baptist Church douchebags.  Basically, it’s an over-the-top exaggeration, though not too far from what lots of liberals think typical Christians actually believe.  They enslave the women because we men are a bunch of dicks.  The protagonist was shanghaied and turned into a concubine, which is a common and accepted practice in Gilead.

Why it misses the mark

Dystopias usually have an underlying premise.  What if all the wonderful feminist progress since the late 1960s got rolled back suddenly?  That seems to be what the theme is driving at.  The message is something like, “We’d better be vigilant and put a stop to the Religious Right.  People like Pat Robertson and the Moral Majority are dangerous.”  The book implies that if people like them get in charge, The Patriarchy will enslave the women and make them concubines.  That’s none too subtle, of course, though it’s not too different from what lots of radical feminists actually believe.

The problem with all that is that it’s too hard to take the premise seriously.  America in the 1950s certainly didn’t look like Gilead.  Neither would it be an accurate portrayal of society in the late 1860s, a time that actually was patriarchal and very devout, and a century before feminism started going full retard.  It’s not even a fair representation of the Middle Ages, at least in Western society.  Therefore, The Handmaid’s Tale is less plausible than The Hunger Games being an accurate prediction of the future.  America wouldn’t turn into Gilead even if Pat Robertson somehow became President – or dictator, for that matter.

All that seemed like an exercise in feminist scarum-shouting about fundamentalists.  Although I don’t regard Christianity as the only game in town – much less the Protestant evangelical version – I don’t have any particular quarrel with it.  I certainly don’t hate fundamentalists; most of them are nice people.  It’s possible to like someone even if you don’t agree with everything he or she believes.  I wish more liberals realized that.  Most of them are nice people too, but many were conditioned to believe that the rest of us are scary boogeymen.

Moreover, criticism of fundamentalism in practice isn’t always about religion.  Sometimes it’s more like a sneaky jab at cultural conservatism without bothering to try to refute it on its own terms.  This is just as putting down Christianity (more broadly) is often a proxy attack on Western civilization.  Things like that tend to set off the alarm bells with me.  I might add further that you don’t have to believe that the world was created 6000 years ago to realize that feminism was a disastrous social engineering project based on flawed utopian premises.

The maker of the following video about The Handmaid’s Tale noted that it actually was based on Islamic treatment of women.  This is a pretty good reason why it’s so unrecognizable in terms of Western society.  Then why didn’t Atwood depict a heartbreaking drama about a Muslim country where Quran-thumpers do the shit to women that they already do in the name of Sharia law?  Then the story would’ve been much more plausible.  However, as I noted in Deplorable Diatribes:

[M]odern feminism became a branch of critical theory, including its “academic discipline” of women’s studies. Consequentially, in practice it’s explicitly anti-Western, almost as much as it is anti-male. They criticize our own society bitterly and incessantly, but with comparatively few exceptions, they don’t have much to say about some truly dreadful things that happen to women routinely in many Third World countries. (It’s rather cruel that these downtrodden women abroad mostly are ignored by the activists who could help the most.) Western feminists actually could do a lot of good if they stopped complaining about “manspreading” and instead focused more than a token effort on real problems. However, that would mean admitting that First World women don’t have it so bad after all. Furthermore, calling out Third World societies would contradict their anti-Western agenda, which is more important to them than actual women’s liberation (in places where they actually need liberating). Therefore, their rhetoric is almost entirely pearl-clutching about their own First World problems.

Later I read Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.  That one is another dystopian novel, this time about almost-there biotech coming into fruition, vast stratification of wealth, global warming, and some generic New World Order tropes.  Actually, it’s a pretty decent leftist critique of globalism.  I’ll have to say she mostly was on point with that.  However, this doesn’t mean that Atwood has wandered off the plantation.  If only she had followed the cookie crumbs a little further, she might be pretty horrified by the globalist shmucks who call the tune in today’s progressivism.

After reading Oryx and Crake, I realized that this one was biting satire.  (I write that way too sometimes, though from a rightist perspective.)  So at that point, I realized that perhaps The Handmaid’s Tale had more to do with satire than presenting a plausible near-future scenario, though still unfortunately saturated with moldy Second Wave feminism.  The problem is that satire should be a caricature, rather than something so distorted that it’s unrecognizable.

The Handmaid’s Tale as a propaganda soap opera

I haven’t seen the series.  I could pirate it, but I’ll give that a miss.  The Black Pilled commentators did all the analysis.  So after my long-winded intro, here it is:

He said the “fast forward” button helped a lot.  The series is larded up with perspective shots and melodramatic music.  With filler like that, they can drag it out for a long time without taxing their screenwriters too much.  The soap opera formula is that it builds up to a weekly finale on Friday, and then throws in a cliffhanger microloop for next Monday to keep the vidiots watching.  Worse, it looks like the producers had the indoctrination dialed up to 11.

He recapped the first two episodes.  He begins with some meta-commentary, first about what kind of target audience this show has.  (For propaganda analysis, that’s a good point.)  Going into the details of the plot, the psychological associative conditioning shticks are pretty plain.  For a few examples:

• If you’re concerned about declining fertility rates, then you’re an evil patriarchal right wing fundamentalist
• If you don’t like birth control, then you’re an evil patriarchal right wing fundamentalist
• If you don’t like abortion, then you’re an evil patriarchal right wing fundamentalist

One of the scenes showed an abortionist who had been hanged by the evil patriarchal right wing fundamentalist regime.  Other invitees to the necktie party were a priest (presumably Roman Catholic) and a gay guy.  Way subtle, right?  Fundamentalists want to hang heretics!

To digress a bit, what would happen if a reality TV show ever depicted what abortionists actually do, including a picture of the bloody bucket with the baby parts?  Every feminist who didn’t suffer from a mind-crippling case of cognitive dissonance would be crying uncontrollably and overcome with horror.  That’s why you’ll never see anything like that on the idiot box.

Other than that, the video describes the anti-White bias in the series.  It doesn’t state outright how that ties into the depopulation agenda, though the connection is pretty clear.  Indeed, this is what the Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan is about.  At the 22 minute mark, he gets more specific about the target audience, and indicates that the show is geared to women of childbearing age, who are exactly the people they want to brainwash with the depopulation messages.  An interesting discussion follows about how the globalist establishment wants to manipulate the human genome to make people more docile, and this soap opera seems to be more agitprop geared to encouraging these trends.

That’s why they’re promoting lifestyles and mental disorders that result in fewer or no offspring from the groups they see as threats.

That’s a great one-sentence summary about the purpose of the degeneracy that’s been promoted for decades, especially aggressively for the last two.  It’s all about the social engineering.

Other than that, it isn’t too hard to read between the lines here, now is it?  Then the ones pushing this on everyone wonder why they’re so unpopular and keep getting blowback.  It doesn’t have to be that way – they should just stop doing that.

Interestingly, this depopulation agenda is almost exactly what the mad scientist character in Oryx and Crake does through genetic engineering.  He created a tribe of humans modified to be docile and clueless, and meanwhile he killed off the rest of the world with a plague.  However, surely it would take a major epiphany for Margaret Atwood herself to put together the pieces about how the globalists want to do fairly similar things to us for real.  Still, if she ever does wander off the plantation, then the literary establishment would never publish another one of her books.

Finally, the commentary has an excellent ending:

The Handmaid’s Tale is just this subversive-to-the-core victimization porn.  And quite frankly, if you have loved ones that are watching this electric brain cancer, this shouldn’t be tolerated.  You should just tell them no.  It’s time to be a man and start putting your foot down and being at least half as effective as the boogeymen that their propaganda makes us out to be.

Preach it, Brother!  Can I have an “Amen”?

My experience using Kindle Create

I’ve had the chance to work with Kindle Create and put it through the paces.  For benefit of other authors interested in it, I’ll share my experiences.  For reference, the download and help tutorial is here, and the help overview is here.

Before, I’ve never had a problem uploading Word manuscripts (either to Smashwords or Amazon) that I wasn’t able to figure out.  However, when I uploaded Deplorable Diatribes on August 17, Amazon choked on it.  This isn’t too surprising, since the manuscript is enormous – exactly a thousand pages in Word.  So then I tried getting it saved as an .EPUB file, but the formatting got all chewed up.  What I had to do instead for the time being was export as a .PDF, and that one I was able to upload to Amazon.  The problem is that some of the formatting was lost even though the .PDF looked as it should be.  It does warn you that the results of converting from that format might not be great, and it’s true.  Furthermore, it probably wouldn’t have been reflowable text, which is the preferred standard in a reader.

After that, I put together the printed manuscript.  It was quite an adventure, getting all the technical nuances right (page size, margins, etc.), converting hyperlinks to footnotes (I found a macro which saved me from getting carpal tunnel syndrome), etc.  There are specific page limits, dependent on page size, but I managed to get it to work with 10-point type which I figure is a safe minimum for readability.

Then I returned to the ebook version, hoping to make it prettier.  That’s when I got Kindle Create, figuring it might succeed where simply uploading the Word document had failed.  So I installed it, and waited a while for it to import the Word doc.  (Again, the manuscript is HUGE – longer than The Brothers Karamazov.  Also it contains lots of content pasted in from the original web pages I wrote, and also with graphics and different styles.)  I should mention that Kindle Create presents a choice in the beginning of whether to import a Word doc or a PDF.  The latter produces text that won’t reflow, but also allows embedded content such as audio and video files.  Perhaps future versions will give you the best of both worlds?

In the beginning, it goes through and tries to parse out the chapters, and applies a default style to them.  All my chapters were the same, indicated with the Word “Heading 1” or “Heading 2” styles.  Still, the process wasn’t perfect, and missed some chapter breaks.  Fortunately, you can insert them as needed and put the chapter heading style on it.  One thing that I couldn’t figure out how to do is to modify the default style so it applies globally; it would be a nice feature.  It also has a way of inserting a table of contents.  I couldn’t figure out how to do that, but fortunately I already had one.

As for the text style, you have the choice of three fonts:  the default Bookerly, a sans serif font, and a monospaced font.  That’s not quite a tremendous number of choices, but at least it’s something.  So there’s not much variation here.  My original manuscript was in Times New Roman except for article introductions which were in Arial.  That didn’t carry over after I converted it.  For the introductions, I had to apply the sans serif font, and there was less visual contrast than I would’ve liked.

You can put in bold, italics, etc. manually.  You can change text justification.  You can type inside the document.  Other than that, I couldn’t get the text color to do what I wanted it to do; some of my hyperlinks are blue, others are red (which is an artifact from the original web documents).  It could use a search/replace feature too.  All told, Kindle Create is not too powerful – a little less so than Wordpad – but at least it does its job.  I found out that it wouldn’t let me make any changes inside of bulleted lists.  I’m not sure why, but it is what it is.

All of the graphics did import.  However, a few of them came out somewhat distorted.  I doubt it’s any kind of a transparency problem, since I’d made some of them myself in MS Paint and didn’t do anything too fancy with them.  (It’s not like I was gluing together a birth certificate for Barack Obama in Adobe PDF Creator or something.)  You have four choices for the graphics as they appear – small, medium, large, or full (which usually fills from one side to the other).  So you can’t pick specific sizes, play with the aspect ratio, or crop them on the fly.  You do get the option to add alt text to the pictures, which I did to my wicked heart’s content.  One little problem I found was that if I was putting in alt text and a “save your work” prompt appeared as I was typing, the picture gets deleted.  One time, the “undo” button didn’t work after that – oopsie!  There is a way to insert pictures, but that proved to be a bit difficult to get to work.

All told, it took a day to get everything the way I wanted it, or as close as I could get.  That much isn’t the fault of Kindle Create; rather, I was working with an enormous manuscript that needed lots of tweaks.  Anyway, so when you’re done, you do the “publish” option and it binds it all into a .KPT file that you can upload.  I’m not sure why, but it turned out to be nearly 40% larger than the Word doc, which wasn’t even a compressed .DOCX file.  After that was the moment of proof.  I uploaded it to Amazon, and it took it!  If what the previewer shows me is accurate, it converted pretty well, though the indentation is a little inconsistent.

So Kindle Creator is a pretty good tool if you’re struggling to get a manuscript that Amazon’s server likes.  The learning curve wasn’t too bad on it.  There are a few bugs, as well as some features that it could use.  Still, it’s pretty handy if you need something like that.  Future versions may be better yet.

Book announcement – Complete Collection of Deplorable Diatribes, Traditionalist Tirades, and Reactionary Rants of an Egregious Extremist

I’ve just completed my ninth book, the second nonfiction title.  This one is huge.  Moby Dick – a whale of a novel indeed – was 206K words.  The ebook version of Deplorable Diatribes, released on August 17, is 384K words – even longer than The Brothers Karamazov.  Although I put months of work into it, I’m selling it for the price of a large cheeseburger combo.  How about that!  The print edition is more; I’m keeping the profit margin pretty low, but still, it’s 756 pages long.

What you’ll find in Deplorable Diatribes

This is a compilation of all my Return of Kings posts.  I was thinking of making several smaller books, but no, here you’ll get the whole shootin’ match.  Most are expanded versions of the articles, and contain introductory commentary.  Also, they’re sorted into topics, and the chapter notes contain much additional background concerning the subjects.  This is one of the longest compilations available of politically incorrect truth, depicting the absurdity of Clown World and how things got that way.

Why did society become so dysfunctional and degenerate, an abnormal mess that some call “progress”?  No country ever was perfect, but several bad ideas made the world much worse.  These were popularized by different groups with varying agendas, and work together to drag down society.

Over the decades, the political left went from being sensible and constructive to something resembling a bizarre cult.  Just as strangely, the mainstream right doesn’t dare dispute the dogma too much on matters of substance.  Here you’ll discover the following:

• How academia became a breeding ground for destructive ideologies
• Why liberals are as silly as a barrel of monkeys
• How feminism became a henhouse of loony birds
• What political correctness is really about
• How leftists conduct censorship because their ideas can’t withstand a free debate
• The bad, good, and ugly points of ideologies
• What’s up with the brain-eating #MeToo zombies
• Why population replacement immigration is bad
• How the economy is manipulated for benefit of wealthiest of the wealthy
• Why “woke” CEOs and champagne Socialists are such airheads
• What America used to look like back when it was still pretty normal
• How to move your social life into the fast lane, as well as be the best person you can be

But wait!  There’s more!

• The most Red-baiting since the good old days when Joseph McCarthy was purging the pinkos
• A mountain of dirt about notable leftist “heroes”
• Globalist schemers unmasked as not being exactly as wonderful as they think they are
• Details on why the gay agenda isn’t as faaaabulous as it appears
• A close look at some of Clown World’s clowns
• The media lies, film at 11
• The wreckage of the social landscape after feminist bunny boilers poisoned the well
• Most importantly, what we can do about all this

Come on, how can you possibly go another day without this treasure trove of deplorability?
Ebook edition:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WN9RJSR
Print edition:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1688462856

The Adventures of MP0werdW0myn and OmegaMan – Mission 2 – OMFG’s New Front Group

A sorry slob swiftly scrubbed the floor.  Meanwhile, the woman he loved kicked back in an easy chair, reading Das Kapital, familiarizing herself with the plight of the noble proletariat.

Twenty minutes later, he asked, “Done to your satisfaction?”

Muffy sighed and got out of her chair.  The springs creaked back, relieved of their 400 pound burden.  “It better be spotless.”  She walked up and sneered, looking over the floor.

“This is the third go-over, so it should be really clean now.”

She replied, “Well, that’ll do for now, but the next time, it’d better sparkle.”

Derp said, “Tell you what.  Maybe we can split the chores?  That’s pretty egalitarian, right?”

“What?  As if you’re my boyfriend or something?”  She made a disgusted face, as if he were a five foot tall garden slug.  That was pretty close to the truth, though she had little basis for looking down on him.

Crestfallen, he answered, “Oh, why absolutely not!”

“You know, you need to find a real job.  I’ve told you time and again, there’s no money in answering online surveys.”

“What?  And sell out?”

“Somebody’s got to get more cash, and it’s not going to be me, since I’m working so hard to bring about the Revolution.  I had to settle for store brand ice cream and soda on the last shopping trip.”  She made a disappointed face.

“Yeah, the government is oppressing us so badly.  It’s so hard to make ends meet.  Our benefits only go so far.  They’re so stingy with the food stamps these days especially!  It’s all Orange Man’s fault!”

“You’d be on the street if I didn’t pull some strings for us to get this subsidized apartment.  I’m telling you, you should check back into the mental ward.  Maybe they’ll up your crazy checks when you get out.”

“I’ve gone over and over with the disability office about it, and they refuse to pay me any more, even though I’m a sperg with seven APA recognized paraphilias and chronic bedwetting.  What I’m worried about right now is how I’m going to pay the thousand dollar fine for disorderly conduct.  They’ll put me back in jail if I don’t pay.  The food was awful, and I went into a horrible fit of video game withdrawal.”

She stuck her nose in the air.  “Well, the judge was nice to me.  She let me off with time served.  You just didn’t play your cards right in court.”

“I guess our career as thoughtcrime fighting superzeroes is over, at least until we can get past this tough spot.  I’m supposed to do 120 hours of community service too.  Picking up litter is slavery!”

“Well, genius, why don’t you think of something?  Then we can get back to being MP0werdW0myn and 0megaMan, the Dysfunctional Duo fighting for Social Justice.  Or is thinking too advanced for your male capabilities?”

“Okay, tell you what – we can start a foundation.  They have lots of money, don’t they?  We can use it to spread Social Justice too.  We can make it sound like something cool and wonderful, but push our own agendas with everybody else’s effort, and especially donations.”

“Cool!  Glad I thought of that!  Now get cracking in researching how you’re going to set up my foundation.”

One week later

Derp grinned goofily.  “Check this out!  The traffic for InDemFedLibFraEqPepT.org is really growing!  I got a couple of hits on our website already!”

“I still say you picked a suck name for it.”

“But it’ll be a name that goes down in history!  Seriously, the ‘International Democratic Federation for Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, and Peppermint Tea’ is the best concept I could come up with.”

She made a face.  “It has the word ‘fraternity’ in it, and those places are rape factories!”

“Hey, it’s got to be better than jail.  The first day I was there, I had to give four blowjobs to those lonely MS13 guys.”

“Think of it as repaying some of your unearned privilege points for being a cisgendered male heterosexual gringo.”

“I’m changing my orientation from ‘heterosexual’ to ‘questioning’.  I was starting to like it by the end of the week, but my butt is aching, and so are my tonsils.  And I’m really having a lot of trouble getting used to A2M.  On the positive side, I’m getting good at deepthroat, and I’m not a virgin any more.”

“Now you’re oversharing.”  She felt pretty sour about him getting more action than she did.

“Really, ‘fraternity’ means ‘brotherhood’.  That’s all I meant by it too.”

“And ‘brotherhood’ is exclusionary to wimmin.  That’s especially offensive to Yours Truly because not only I am a womyn, I came up with the idea for this foundation.  And the ‘tea’ business is way too similar to the Tea Party.  How awful!  There in that basket of deplorables!”

“But that’s just it!  We can sell it as a wonderful coalition across all ideologies.  I mean, who doesn’t like liberty, fraternity – oh, I mean brotherhood, uh, I mean comradeship – and also equality and peppermint tea?  We’ll attract supporters all across the political landscape.  If the teabaggers give us their effort and donations too, why not?  And they’ll just happen to serve us and our purposes.  I’m still trying to figure out how to make us a 501(c)3 nonprofit.  Until then, I’ll just tell everyone we are.  I’ve put that on the website already, since it’ll attract more donations that way.”

“Fine, but don’t waste your time with the IRS, and that’s an order.  They’re just a bunch of Fascists.  Anyway, you better make my foundation work, or I’ll take away your Xbox and Playstation again!”

He gasped.  “Oh no, I’m quite certain this is going to be huge!  I sent seven hundred query emails, and I got a couple of responses already.”

“Oh, those are probably just spams.  Have you taken your meds today?”

“There’s one from someone called Maximum Leader Rosso.  He says he can make us a deal.”

“WHAT?!?”  An expression of joy crossed her face, and Muffy looked like she was about to faint.

“Who’s he?  You know him?”  A pit of fear seized his guts.  Could he be an ex-boyfriend of hers?  As far as he knew, she never had any, but the possibility existed, and it scared the daylights out of him.

“Derp, you’re a much bigger idiot than I thought you were.  He’s a billionaire who heads the Open Mankind Foundation Governance, one of the biggest and most important organizations, the foundation of foundations.  Everyone who’s in the know knows about it.  OMFG hands out the Benjamins like confetti to front groups like mine.  I’m rich!”

“Um – awesome.  Does this mean I get to keep part of my crazy checks now?”

“And as a side benefit, they run one of the foremost transmission belts for Social Justice Warriors like us.  We’ll be tuned into the latest inside information!”

“It’s even better than Tumblr?”

She sighed.  “Did I mention that you’re an idiot?”

Week two

The International Democratic Federation for Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, and Peppermint Tea set up its table once again on the corner of Main and Elm.  Curious passersby walked up and checked out the literature.

“You need to engage with these people!” hissed Muffy.

“I’ve been trying.”

“Well, try harder!  Maximum Leader Rosso expects some results!”

Derp replied, “Well, mostly he wants us as a conduit for funding.  I had to wire most of our cash to my MS13 boyfriends so they can buy more AK47s.”

“You wired it?  You idiot!  That’s traceable!”

“But if I went to the bank to withdraw it, I could get mugged on the way to delivering it.  Besides, I have proof that the money went where it was supposed to go.  Rosso made it very clear that I’d get cement overshoes if it got misplaced.”

A couple of people walked up.  She whispered, “You engage these people, get them to sign up and make a donation, and I’ll criticize how you do it.”

The first was a middle aged lady in a suit.  “Hi, I’m Libby Liberal!”

“Good afternoon, Ma’am, glad to see you here.”

Muffy hissed, “That was a gendered word!”

“I mean, good afternoon, Citizen Person.  How can I help you?”

Libby replied, “I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that my party only works for the globalists and not the constituents.  Whenever we’re in office, we never get closer to eliminating poverty and war.”

Derp smiled.  “Well, you’ve come to the right place.  We’re all about liberty, comradeship, equality, and we even love peppermint tea!”

“Super!  I can’t wait to sign up and make a generous donation!”

“That’s wonderful!”  He turned to the other one.  “And how about you, sir?  I mean Citizen Person?”

The other fellow, a guy in grease-stained overalls, spoke up. “I’m Joe Sixpack.  I’ve voted Republican all my life, and it always astounds me that even when my party is in office, we never change anything.  Then I found out that most of my politicians work for tricky globalist foundations, and so do the Democrats.  Even the ones that don’t belong to these outfits themselves can’t do anything.  There are so many dadgum globalists in Washington that no matter who you vote for, you get the same thing.”

“Well, we’re all about the liberty, comradeship, and equality, so we want to change things for the better just like you do.”

“Did you mention ‘comradeship’?  I don’t suppose this is some kind of a front group, by any chance?”

Derp squinted.  “You could also call it ‘fellowship’?”

“Like ‘fellow travelers’ you mean?”

“Tell you what.  We’re totally about the peppermint tea too.”

“Hey, I like what the Tea Party was trying to do, so count me in!”

Libby Liberal and Joe Sixpack smiled at each other and shook hands, a touching show of bipartisan solidarity.

A tall guy, built like a linebacker, walked up.  “Hey, I noticed your table here the last couple of days and I’ve been doing a little research.”

Derp said, “Oh, hi, Citizen Person.  Want to sign up too?”

“I think that this might be a front group.  Are you affiliated with the Open Mankind Foundation Governance by any chance?”

“Uh – what makes you say that?”

“For one thing, the stuff on your website looks like boilerplate they use for other front groups.  There are some things you should know about its founder, Maximum Leader Rosso.  Did you know that he made his billions crashing economies around the world?  The common people suffered, all so he could get his percentage.  That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  OMFG specializes in getting idealistic people to support globalist agendas, and all the while they think they’re fighting The System.”

Libby Liberal had a pained look on her face.  “You know what, I think I’ll save my cash for my cat food bill.  I have twenty mouths to feed at home.”

Joe Sixpack said, “I’ll use my money to buy a case of Duff, and some football memorabilia!”  He rubbed his hands together in glee at the thought of wearing another man’s uniform.

Muffy whispered to Derp, “This new one looks awfully familiar.”

He whispered back, “He sure does.”

The big guy replied, “You two look familiar as well.”

Muffy slunk away to the nearest unisex bathroom.

Derp fired back with one of his most potent thought terminating clichés:  “Check your privilege!”

“So you thought you could fool the common people, get them to do your work, and take their money?  Kid, that’s pathetic.”  He pointed to the two walking away.  “That lady is an office worker, and that guy is a mechanic.  You could be doing those things, instead of being a parasite.  Come on, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

He stood and raised a clenched fist, causing his pudgy arm to jiggle.  “Power to The People!”

“On that note, you could be an electrician too.  That’s something productive.  Pull yourself together, dude!”

The door to the unisex bathroom opened.  Out came MP0werdW0myn in full superzero costume.  Her problem glasses glinted in the sun.  The sidewalk shook as her thunder thighs treaded the ground.  “So it’s Bright Spectrum, the superdeplorable!  I knew it was you!  I’ll make short work of you, you… you blond beast!”

“Oh, it’s you again?  Lady, you need to apologize for the scene that you and your lapdog caused last time.”

“Ha!  You assume gender!”

“Tell you what,” replied Bright Spectrum.  “As long as you have your table set up, I’m going to stand right here and tell the truth to all these people about what you’re doing.  And for your sake, I sure hope your IRS papers are in order.”  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d gotten a bounty for snitching on tax cheats.

A policeman walked up and pointed to her.  “Hey, you look awfully familiar.  I picked you up for disorderly conduct a while back.  Don’t you have anything better to do with yourself?”

MP0werdW0myn replied, “Uh, okay, I’ll be packing up and leaving right now.”  She continued in a snippy tone, “Any perception of inconvenience is regrettable.”

“And that other troublemaker looks familiar too.  Hey, where did he go?”

Bright Spectrum said, “He jumped down that manhole.  I’m guessing he lives in the sewers.”

Week three

At ten in the morning, there was a sharp knock on the door.

Muffy quit snoring and opened an eye.  She called out, “Answer it, bitch!”  Unlike her, Derp couldn’t wake up; he was passed out from a Warcrack poopsocking session that had lasted until 6am.

The knocking resumed.  She let out a long string of profanities, and pried her oversized butt off of the easy chair.  Muffy waddled to the door.  A couple guys were standing there.  One was old and bald, and another was younger and had a grim expression on his face.

“Didn’t I tell you Mormons to go away and never come back?  You’re part of The Patriarchy!”

The older guy said, “I’m Special Agent G. Gordon Lützow with the FBI.  We’re here to investigate the International Democratic Federation for Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, and Peppermint Tea concerning illegal fundraising, tax evasion, money laundering, and assisting the MS13 international crime cartel.”

She pointed down the hall, where Derp was sleeping.  “He’s in there!  It was all his idea!  He’s a menace to society!”

Book Review – Mister by Alex Kurtagic

If you’ve ever been on an overseas trip where everything goes horribly wrong, Mister by Alex Kurtagic is all that, along with devastating social commentary about Europe run into the ground by globalist misrule.  The book turned out to be a fascinating read, much recommended.  Even despite a few slow spots, I found that I couldn’t put it down.  The title references the protagonist, who throughout the book remains unnamed.  Perhaps not giving him a name (and thus a fixed identity) subtly suggests that THIS COULD BE YOU one day.  It’s much like how Orwell’s character Winston Smith is evocative of a British Everyman.

Still, “Mister” isn’t quite Everyman.  He’s an IT consultant with two doctorate degrees, became a successful self-made businessman, is cultured and refined, and he has a very high IQ.  Moreover, he fully realizes that he’s exceptional, which makes dealing with stupid people all the more grating.  As it happens, the stupid have been proliferating quite rapidly.  As I read it, it wasn’t clear if this was a biting satire of what Europe had become at the time of writing, a grim prognostication of the not-too-distant future, a sequel to Jean Raspail’s prophetic 1975 book Camp of the Saints, or a prequel to the movie Idiocracy.  Really, it’s all the above.

Blade Runner without starships

Furthermore, as an early member of Generation X, he remembers when Britain used to be British.  (So do I, which I’ll discuss in a later article.)  Because his country has been going to hell, he moved to the countryside in a pleasant but fortified house to escape encroaching vibrancy.  More to the point, since the book is set in Spain, he remembers the Franco administration as the good old days.  He sees that not only did the globohomo Eurocrat government wreck the orderly and functional country he remembered from a visit during his youth; they even had the bad taste to destroy monuments from that era.

The Madrid he finds himself in during his ill-fated business trip is Spain by geography only.  As for the population, it’s a chaotic multicultural goulash full of urban Orcs gnawing on the carcass of Western civilization.  The novel’s description is not so different from what major cities in Western Europe already are in the real world.  Years back, I saw the Paris subways for the first time and immediately wondered, “Where are all the French people?”   On the same trip, I visited Barcelona too.  Although I was greatly impressed with the architecture and the native culture, I was taken aback to see so many undesirable migrants who didn’t belong, didn’t fit in, and were there to mooch off the welfare system.  Francisco Franco wouldn’t have put up with that for a minute.

Further, society as depicted in the novel has become a dysfunctional wasteland from “tax and spend” bureaucrats gone wild, the economy going down the toilet because of that, totalitarian political correctness (they even made Christmas illegal), crumbling infrastructure, security theater, and mass surveillance.  Simply put, it’s anarcho-tyranny.  Moreover, he encounters rampant crime, food that’s barely edible (at best), overcrowding, pollution, epic traffic jams, and massive incompetence due to declining IQs.  In other words, all this is basically what Euro-Absurdistan is quickly becoming, because the EU is being run by crooked politicians who get their “campaign contributions” from the globalists.

The narration from the protagonist’s point of view is highly politically incorrect and minces no words.  For example, the following is a description of some MS13 gang members who look like trouble.  Indeed they are trouble, because they rob him soon afterward:

From an evolutionary perspective, XIXth century physical anthropologists would have deemed the faces to have evinced a number of archaic traits:  prominent supraorbital ridges; maxillary prognathism; strongly proclined upper and lower incisors; projecting, zygomatic arches and alveolar ridges; and low, sloping foreheads, fronting brachycephalised skulls with negligible cranial cubicage.  These traits appeared in a chaotic array of inharmonious configurations, suggesting that they were a product of irresponsible miscegenation among developed subspecies of humanity, and, within that category, among the most degraded, and least promising, specimens from Central America.  Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso would have found in their traits – the atavistic stigmata affecting their physiognomical, phrenological, and craniometrical characteristics – brutal and inequivocal confirmation of his theories on the heritability of criminality.

This is from the perspective of someone far on the right of the IQ bell curve, viewing a teeming cityscape full of morons.  As one can see, this isn’t light reading, though it’s not as dense as Middlemarch.  Also, much of the dialogue is in Castilian Spanish.  I was surprised to find that I could read those parts, although I’ve merely picked up an elementary understanding of Southwestern US Spanish via osmosis.

Then things really get vibrant when he has to venture a couple of times into one of Madrid’s “no-go zones”, a common feature of European cities lately.  Throughout the book, he’s disgusted and horrified by what he experiences and endures.  In personal interactions, he expects basic respect and decent customer service, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.  On the other hand, he’s quite timid about confronting the problems facing society.

Inactivity is death

For years, the protagonist has known that things were going deeply wrong.  However, he’s merely Purple Pilled, and believes that his affluence will insulate him from Euro Clown World.  He hasn’t lifted a finger to change things, which proves to be his tragic flaw.  His approach thus far is:

Best to keep quiet, make money, and live well, and be safe.

This does not end well.

Eventually he finds himself in political trouble, and is arrested and treated worse than a common criminal.  Prosecutors who get a hard-on for someone are nothing new, but the munchkin who interrogates him is a real piece of work.  The more that the protagonist tries to explain himself, the more the interrogator reads volumes into it.  Even St. Thomas More wouldn’t have done much better a job of defending himself.

Note well, if you ever find yourself in the judicial system’s meat grinder, the bad cop isn’t there to “give you one last chance to clear things up for yourself”, and the good cop isn’t your friend.   Save any explanations for the courtroom.  The purpose of interrogation is to get you to give information to build a case against you, even if this means twisting your words.  Therefore, the only rational thing to do is KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT.

The scenes that follow would do Kafka proud.  It turns out that they have a mountain of dirt on him, thanks to police state domestic spying that’s already in place in the real world.  (Did I mention that THIS COULD BE YOU one day?)  However, almost all of it is guilt by association, and very tenuous at that.  Still, they made a mountain out of a molehill, and he contemplates being sent to a gulag to be released when he’s elderly if he’s lucky.

Following this, he has his moment of clarity.  He made a mistake not having children, so that he and his wife could enjoy a higher standard of living.  Their high IQ genes will die out with them, and meanwhile the morons have bred like rabbits.  Unfortunately, it’s a common mistake leading society down the path of an Idiocracy scenario.

Furthermore, he failed to stand up and do something about Euro Clown World taking shape back when there was a chance to reverse course.  He could’ve used his intelligence to strategize about how to thwart the globalists.  He could’ve connected with like-minded people.  Instead, he’s put up with every encroachment without raising hell about it.  He feared that taking a stand would cause him to lose respectability as a businessman.  It’s a legitimate concern, and a very common one in the real world.  Still, if nobody has the balls to resist, then things only will get worse and worse.

Learning to live with the state of the world, and insulating himself as best he could from its continuing deterioration, had been the least risky and therefore the most rational choice.  He had reasoned that, provided he did not rock the boat, kept his grumbles private, and voted with his wallet, he would be able to live his life in relative comfort, irrespective of how bad things got out there.

That’s not how it worked out, did it?  He’s filled with regret that he did nothing to try to save his civilization.  I’ll add that if you do nothing, THIS COULD BE YOU one day.

Who stands against the globalists?

In the novel, there actually is some opposition.  It’s not clear how powerful they are.  The media talking heads frequently blame them for The System’s own failures, though it’s pretty clear that they’re overstating things.  The resistance does have some resources and are mostly successful at outwitting all the domestic spying measures.

Other than some colorful individuals who make brief appearances, the dissident right includes Pagans in the tradition of Miguel Serrano, as well as fans of neofolk, martial industrial music, and black metal.  Serrano’s basic doctrines are mentioned in the novel.  He created a rightist interpretation of theosophy and had much to say about German Haunebu saucers and Antarctic bases.  I’ll add that this version of UFOlogy has considerably more panache than the well-known crystal weenie New Age variety.  I don’t believe in any of that, but I sure had fun bringing it to life in Space Vixen Trek Episode 17; my fellow deplorables, whether or not they’re into Serrano, will love that one.

This rightist opposition as depicted seems to be an atypical one.  I’ve never met any of the Serrano crowd, although I became deplorable three decades before Cupcake called us a “basket of deplorables”, bless her heart.  As for the black metal folks, they do have a following in Europe, but it’s UKIP, AFD, FN, and so forth who are at the forefront of resistance to globalism.  Given the setting in Madrid, I would’ve anticipated some others in the resistance too, such as Falangists and fans of Rock Against Communism bands from Spain like Estirpe Imperial, Division 250, Celtica (Mara Ros for the win!), Iberian Wolves, and so forth.   I jam out to their tunes all the time, which perhaps accounts for my unexpected comprehension of Castilian Spanish.

Finally, once again I’ll highly recommend Mister, if you can locate a copy of it.  Hopefully there’ll be a reprint, or a move to print-on-demand.  I’ve spoken out often to show that apathy and retreating from problems doesn’t get you anywhere, so it’s always good to see efforts along similar lines.  For Purple Pilled folks who know that something’s wrong but think that resigning themselves to their fate is an option, or Yuppies under the illusion that moving further out to the suburbs will insulate them from Clown World, this will knock them off the fence.