And yet many Scots with thick brogues are able to sing with an American accent.
He’s not the only one.
And yet many Scots with thick brogues are able to sing with an American accent.
tcrosse:
Such as Jim Kerr of Simple Minds. I heard him interviewed on Fresh Air. He had such a strong Glaswegian accent, that hearing him sing the chorus of their big hit was night and day.
What would make the opposite sex sooooo unappealing that there is no future?
remember people… they are importing people who favor socialism over freedom cause the freedom people are feminist and infertile and unable to have any kind of normal relationship in numbers to even replace themselves…
[can you imagine how different the voting would be if the 100 million not leftists had kids rather than be barren and do their own thing divaluing their genetic contributions to a better future more than their ability to save by not breathing too much – or Farting]
And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. A true communist (graduate of Moscow State University) nominated for Comptroller, with a recent statement that all oil companies must be shut down.
(Though who knows? Maybe “Biden” will make her change her mind tomorrow and she’ll issue an “I-never-meant-that-for-a-second-yadda-yadda-yadda-this-administration-loves-and-respects-the-energy-industry” denial…)
Communism Long Ago vs. American Communism Today
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ileana Writes is a freelance writer, author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her books, “Echoes of Communism”, “Liberty on Life Support” and “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy,” “Communism 2.0: 25 Years Later” are available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Iwas asked recently if the recent Marxist takeover of our country resembles my experience under the rule of the Communist Party Soviet-style regime decades ago. My simple answer is that Marxism is much worse today in so many ways.
Take for instance one’s body. We used to teach our children to run away from strangers who attempted to touch them inappropriately and to let authorities know and their parents about such aggressors, some of whom may have been relatives. But the 9/11 terrorist attack on our country conveniently allowed the government to pass the Patriot Act to protect us from terrorists. Nobody blinks an eye anymore at the invasive searches at airports, touching personal parts, molesting grandmothers, toddlers, babies, and adults alike. If you ask the TSA personnel, some of whom look quite frightening, they save thousands of lives every day.
Under the Communist Party rule, we were never strip-searched to such a degree and in public; a hapless or guilty citizen was strip-searched if he/she was arrested or if someone shop lifted. They were guilty until proven innocent and it seems that the law is changing in that direction now, you are no longer innocent until proven guilty, and citizens are arrested indefinitely without charge just like they did under communism long ago. The corrupt justice system, and it was all corrupt, created fake charges just to get rid of an inconvenient citizen who defied the Communist Party.
Schools under Soviet style communism never taught sex education, mentioned, or shown pornography in school, much less have explicit lessons. But today in America, perverts in the academia and in public schools are obsessed with sex, pornography, and teaching it to students and children as young as kindergarten, often without the parents’ knowledge and permission. Vile books are read in America’s classrooms, so vile that, when parents attempted to read passages from said books in front of the board of education, they were stopped on the grounds that such material was inappropriate in public.
The socialized medical system was bad and lacking everything. Doctors were paid equally and poorly and supplemented their incomes with bribes from equally poor and desperate citizens. People knew that, if they wanted to survive, they had to carry around envelopes with bribe money. Doctors and nurses did not care if their patients lived or died.
The Communist Party members had priority of everything in their special hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. There were not enough doctors for the rest of the population, and the doctor-patient ratio was astronomical in terms of how many patients a doctor had to care for; drugs and medical equipment were lacking or missing entirely; ambulance service consisted of empty vehicles with nothing else to potentially save a person’s life, and ambulances always arrived hours and even days later in rural areas.
Our medical system today, once the best in the world, has taken on a fascist hue, as doctors and hospitals refuse to treat people who are not Covid-19 vaccinated as mandated by the president’s executive order.
Data is falsified and bribes are accepted from the government to count all deaths as Covid-19 deaths in violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors refuse initial treatment to patients with life-saving drugs because the CDC protocol does not include said drugs – only ventilators and the drug Remdesivir were approved initially.
Shortages of basic goods, drugs, and food occurred all the time as the Communist Party did not know how to centrally-plan and run a successful economy based on supply and demand. The U.S. economy is taking a serious dive under the lack of economic leadership and disastrous policies of the Biden regime.
Inflation stands at 8.6% and that is only the beginning. Shelves are bare, the supply chain is broken, things are missing in stores, variety is gone, businesses are going under at a high rate, gasoline has doubled in price since the beginning of the Biden regime, and stagflation looms large.
Technology changed everything and made this current brand of Marxism quite awful. Without Internet and Zoom meetings, the government would not have been able to lock us down for almost two years now, transform schools into virtual classrooms, transform doctors’ visits into virtual pretend-medical care, jobs were moved into one’s home via Zoom, and large corporations took over the economy, holding their employees hostage to a forced vaccine demand, bankrupting small businesses that were not allowed by the all-mighty federal, state, and local governments to operate, as they were deemed unessential.
Technology spies on all of us; technology and social media at first made us unafraid of data mining and of reporting ourselves to the government through innocent status postings and photographs. But the Internet-controlling techies changed everything.
Technology is allowing IRS to control our banking transactions, our tax returns, and the integrity of the voting system; paper ballots are gone, replaced by computers and programming. Who controls the technology are the ones who count the votes now. At least under the old communist party system, we all knew the outcome of an election every time before we were ever marched to the voting booths. Nobody pretended that the voting was fair. There was only one candidate, the Communist Party approved candidate.
Technology enables the Marxist government in power today, and they are all Marxist regardless of whether they have an R or a D behind their titles, to control who sees the doctors, who can have access to a hospital, who can buy a plane ticket, who can go overseas, on vacation, on a cruise, who can cross the border of another country (with the exception of our southern border which is entirely open per orders of this Democrat administration), who can go to school, who can shop in a store, how, and when, who can get hired by the government, and who can buy or rent a house or apartment. The techies have been allowed to become the judge, jury, and executioner of everything we do in the marketplace with total monopoly power over our lives.
Corporate fascism has reached levels that the communists from long ago could only dream of. The myriad of government agencies and bodies are constantly spying and controlling the lives of their subjects, the American taxpayers. The elected and non-elected governments and bureaucrats have become oppressors, they no longer work for the American people, we work to pay for their bloated and blood-sucking bureaucracy, for their salaries and wealth accumulation.
The STASI, the financial police, the security police under Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ceausescu, and other dictators had to work extremely hard to spy on their citizens and keep them under control.
Today’s American Marxists can cut our access to food, education, medical care, medicine, gasoline, cars, and airplanes, our own savings, and they have us under their thumbs forever without wiretapping our homes or throwing us into dungeons or gulags. Our entire society is becoming one techie-controlled gulag.
The old communists did not have smart phones, Alexa, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart meters, and other smart devices that surveil homes constantly and report results to the Mother Ship. The old communists had to hire an army of informers and wire tappers to get a fraction of the information that now resides with our techie controllers in the euphemistically named, the “iCloud,” a network of giant memory servers scattered across the country and the world.
Identical talking points are spewed daily by alphabet soup fake media, politicians, ad agencies, sports teams, universities, public schools, Hollywood, Internet fact-checkers
The mainstream media is enormously powerful in this country, and it is all controlled by Democrat Marxists. The old communists had a couple of state-controlled publications like Pravda. Nothing else was allowed to exist in print without the Communist Party’s approval.
Now the same propaganda, with identical talking points from the Democrat Marxist Mother Ship in D.C. is spewed non-stop by the alphabet soup fake media, politicians, ad agencies, sports teams, universities, public schools, Hollywood, and Internet fact-checkers who are paid to distribute lies and to discredit the truth. Four tech companies and their employees, Americans and foreign nationals, have become the arbiters of truth and the champions of the fake media. The few alternative news outlets are censored non-stop by the same four tech companies.
Propagandists under the old communist regime had a much more difficult job to spread disinformation and lies in the absence of electronic communication, satellites, Internet, smart phones, smart TVs, smart appliances, and social media. Everything had to be done by hand and actual files built on millions of citizens who held divergent and politically incorrect opinions.
Some non-communist teachers and a few lone priests, at significant risk to themselves, spread the anti-communist truth. Today, most teachers have been themselves so heavily indoctrinated into this neo-Marxism that they would not believe the truth if they were led to the gulags and shown the conditions in which those people were kept and worked and the punishments they suffered.
The teachers and professors today are immensely powerful as they have the eyes and the ears of American children so many hours every day. They are the effective force of change of the American minds towards communism and against capitalism thanks to Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education bureaucracy established in 1979.
Insta-brogue:
Pronounce “oil.”
Pronounce “beef.”
Pronounce “hooked.”
Now pronounce them all together: “Oilbeefhooked.”
Voila!
Sometimes, given the tin ear of some for the profane, you can get them to repeat it out loud in public. Good clean fun.
Among familiars, a simple “oilbeef” may even evolve into useful shorthand, expressing either genuine surprised appreciation (“Ron DeSantis was one helluva young baseball player — oilbeef.”) or, e.g., trapped listening to some 20-mule-team bore-ass master of the obvious, with a caustic tinge (“Wow. Is that a fact? Well oilbeef!)
Works for me and my wife, anyhow.
We went to Scotland a couple of years ago. While visiting a grocery store we overheard two Scotsmen talking to each while stocking shelves and we understood only every third or fourth word. But once they knew we were Americans then their accents moderated and they were quite understandable.
Now, if there can be an honest recount of the governor’s race…..
The last British Military contingent based in HK prior to the Handover was the Black Watch. Wanchai bar staff and Filipina Camp Followers had to do some quick-footed linguistic learning and adaptation when they arrived.
@Huxley:
Knocked off 30% of The Three Body Problem last night. It’s a Yes.
Zaphod:
Whoa. It’s that good? Some say it’s a slog.
huxley —
From “The Commitments”:
Jimmy Rabbitte: Look, don’t use your own accents. It’s “ride, Sally, ride”, not “royad, Sally, royad”.
It’s shaping up to be a nice existential slow-but-sure creeping Lovecraftian horror show. The broad premise so far seems to be that stability and predictability are periodic exceptions in the cosmic scheme and that we were lucky to have evolved during one of these hiatuses. And now Chaos is Coming. I’ll bet this is even more creepy in Chinese. the character Luan carries a lot more associative baggage with it than the Greek word does for us.
Also there is this wonderfully vulgar hard-bitten Beijing street cop. It’s refreshing to read characterisations and descriptions of things Chinese not filtered through someone angling for column inches in the Atlantic.
Yum. Lovecraft. Happened to watch a doco on him over the weekend. “Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown” (2008). More interesting than I expected. Of course the righteous cancel do-bees have already been at Lovecraft for racial sins in the 20s. My fave was “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
The library should soon have 3BP ready for me in book format, along with the Audible audiobook. Nothing against the Chinese, but I can’t imagine their version of Lovecraft.
Bryan Lovely:
“The Commitments” was a perfect small film — exactly what I want to watch now and then.
Tom Hanks hit a similar perfection with “That Thing You Do.”
Noticed that Geoffrey Miller lists 3 Body Problem in his recommended book list.
PrimalPoly.com
huxley,
I like your Simple Minds track and factoid. Your song has a connection to Scottish accents and mine doesn’t, but recently I was digging into a couple of the old Tears for Fears hits.
I was watching a trashy TV series and they had a high school prom scene and the theme song was Head Over Heals.
The song is similar to Simple Minds “Don’t You” I think. It’s my favorite Tears for Fears song, though their Everybody Wants to Rule the World was a much bigger hit for them and is good too. The interesting factoid for those two songs that I never knew was that they were both from the album “Songs From The Big Chair.” The big chair is a throne? No. I won’t spoil it for those who care. Look it up on Wikipedia.
The vocals in the songs have this nice octave jump in the last bar of every other verse. That jump is also presaged in the guitar intro. The drummer is Jewish, or pretending to be in the video? Not sure.
@JimNorCal:
Thanks for the Geoffrey Miller tip. New to me and an instant YouTube channel subscribe.
Even if he does mention Reason Magazine favourably. *honk honk* (Clown Horn). Nobody’s perfect.
It’s times like this I regret not being on FB and other platforms as one misses out on the neighborhood Karen Collective Meltdown, Finger-pointing, Recriminations.
Re The Three Body Problem:
Don’t be put off by the Barack Obama book jacket blurb. IMHO it’s very unlikely that this fraudulent Hei Guizi actually read the thing.
Speaking of the Devils… Exhibit No. 6,789,123 for why the USA is more borked than China:
Happened last year. Some guy got dragged over the coals and put through a struggle session because the way one says umm ah… err… um in Mandarin sounds to imaginative ears like the most common vocabulary item used in hip hop after Bitch and Ho.
Wow. Just Wow. Derbyshire does it again. In a recent article he mentions that Wang Huning’s book is available in translation at unz.com
Wang Huning and what he thinks are not unimportant.
Also, it’s always a smart idea to see how one looks through other people’s eyes. Americans in particular are hopelessly bad at this. The Rest of the West not much better.
“06—Can China change course? Just a couple on the China beat.
First: Several people have pointed me to the article by the analyst who bylines as “N.S. Lyons” at the Palladium website on October 11th. Title: “The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning.”
The subject, Wang Huning, is a Chinese intellectual who has thought and written deeply about both their national culture and ours. He is also one of the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, and so a very powerful person indeed.
I must confess I had never heard of Wang Huning. I flatter myself that I’m decently well-informed on Chinese history and literary culture, but I’m not your go-to guy for insights into power relations among the ChiCom leaders.
According to Lyons, Wang has been a key player in Xi Jinping’s current effort to steer the ship of state away from its former course of free-wheeling entrepreneurship, hedonism, openness to foreigners, and demographic collapse to something sterner, more egalitarian, less welcoming, and more fertile.
It’s a fascinating piece with good insights into what is currently going on over there. The question it leaves you with is: Can that huge ship in fact be steered onto a really quite different course, even with all the power of one-party authoritarianism at the wheel?
And what about us, with our plague of opioid deaths, homeless camps in the main streets of our cities, vast military commitments left over from the 1940s, out-of-control security agencies, endless racial rancor, enstupidation of our schools and colleges, and the rest of our failings? Couldn’t we use some course correction, too? Is our system capable of it?
It’s a great article, even if you’re not that interested in China.”
Wang Huning strikes me as a Chinese Sayid Qutb. Maybe with more justification, but still had a bad experience and went home to write books about how America should be taken down.
@Bryan Lovely:
IMHO. That’s a knee-jerk reaction. One was a one-book goat-@#$%er from the sandpit. The other one, like him or no, is the product of a civilization that was around before us and is looking increasingly likely to be around after we’re gone.
That doesn’t make him good, or even right. But to paraphrase (badly) Cromwell, I beseech you, in the Bowels of Christ, think it possible that Wang might be LESS WRONG in his understanding of ourselves than many of us, ourselves are.
As I keep harping on. It’s not about being ‘Right’.. What does that even mean in the affairs of men? To win out, all that is necessary is to be Less Wrong in your understanding of the situation than your opponents.
My contentious (around here) contention is that both sides of the farce that is politics in the West are more Wrong about what is wrong with the West and about the strengths and weaknesses of China than any Chinese vice-versa one can dream up.
Seriously, most critiques of the PRC from both sides are in Wolfgang Pauli’s immortal words ‘Not Even Wrong.’
A little humility (yeah, I know :P) is in order in the West.
@Geoffb:
Damn! That’s prolific, if true. I take back everything I ever might have said about them lacking drive.
^^^
Now *that’s* how you play the game. Wonder if Wang interned at the ADL or ACLU during his sojourn back in the day?
Not uncommon for uncouth fellows to get cancelled for claiming that Usual Suspects pull most of the levers in the Light on the Hill — thereby totally disproving the theory as I will always attest whenever I’m not sitting facing the only entrance to the room.
Drollness aside, the fundamental dichotomy appears to me to be Serious Peoples / Frivolous Peoples.
You have a point.
Any country that kills off millions of its own people can most certainly NOT be accused of being frivolous….
(Though maybe we should check first with the Dalai Lama.)
On the other hand, China did make a supreme effort to re-educate the particularly obtuse and resistant—and for all I know China continues dishing out this particular form of altruism…
(CRT pushers—and “Biden”—should take note…)
About 3/4 of the word-count on this thread is attributable to two posters, one of whom has made 19 separate posts.
A psychiatric explanation for the tribal slavishness to the Dangerous Covid! narrative that’s totalitarian: Dr Mattias Desmet, Ghent University lecturer on mass formation.
He sees our situation as a large scale mass-formation event. Very detailed and illuminating. I think he nails it.
TJ, yes.
There’s also this description of totalitarian-creep, which augments/reinforces your link, though perhaps from a more strategic/corporatist direction: https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-humiliation-of-america/
H/T Powerline blog.
Art Deco:
It’s a slow day down at General Tso’s Chicken Ranch.
I’m sure if you put your mind to it you could provide more statistics. How about a Flesch-Kincaid grade level?
Or am I crediting the Arabs with too much discernment?
No.. I lied. One more.
F W de Klerk who sold out his people to a bunch of savages for half a Nobel Prize and some other baubles and (random guess) a shot at the Ivies for his grandkids is dead. Good Riddance.
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And yet many Scots with thick brogues are able to sing with an American accent.
He’s not the only one.
And yet many Scots with thick brogues are able to sing with an American accent.
tcrosse:
Such as Jim Kerr of Simple Minds. I heard him interviewed on Fresh Air. He had such a strong Glaswegian accent, that hearing him sing the chorus of their big hit was night and day.
–“Simple Minds – Don’t You (Forget About Me)”
https://youtu.be/CdqoNKCCt7A
According to wiki the band was arm-twisted into recording the song. They did so in three hours and assumed it would be forgotten.
Single men just don’t care about sex anymore, study says
https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/majority-of-single-men-care-less-about-sex-now-than-pre-covid-study/
What would make the opposite sex sooooo unappealing that there is no future?
remember people… they are importing people who favor socialism over freedom cause the freedom people are feminist and infertile and unable to have any kind of normal relationship in numbers to even replace themselves…
[can you imagine how different the voting would be if the 100 million not leftists had kids rather than be barren and do their own thing divaluing their genetic contributions to a better future more than their ability to save by not breathing too much – or Farting]
And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore. A true communist (graduate of Moscow State University) nominated for Comptroller, with a recent statement that all oil companies must be shut down.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/11/10/biden-nominated-a-communist-who-wants-to-bankrupt-the-oil-industry-n2598866
Saw that too.
Heh…
Well, at least they’re honest about it….
Ahhh, honesty…
https://thegoptimes.com/joe-biden-caught-on-video-bragging-about-voter-fraud/
(Though who knows? Maybe “Biden” will make her change her mind tomorrow and she’ll issue an “I-never-meant-that-for-a-second-yadda-yadda-yadda-this-administration-loves-and-respects-the-energy-industry” denial…)
Communism Long Ago vs. American Communism Today
Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, Ileana Writes is a freelance writer, author, radio commentator, and speaker. Her books, “Echoes of Communism”, “Liberty on Life Support” and “U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy,” “Communism 2.0: 25 Years Later” are available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Iwas asked recently if the recent Marxist takeover of our country resembles my experience under the rule of the Communist Party Soviet-style regime decades ago. My simple answer is that Marxism is much worse today in so many ways.
Take for instance one’s body. We used to teach our children to run away from strangers who attempted to touch them inappropriately and to let authorities know and their parents about such aggressors, some of whom may have been relatives. But the 9/11 terrorist attack on our country conveniently allowed the government to pass the Patriot Act to protect us from terrorists. Nobody blinks an eye anymore at the invasive searches at airports, touching personal parts, molesting grandmothers, toddlers, babies, and adults alike. If you ask the TSA personnel, some of whom look quite frightening, they save thousands of lives every day.
Under the Communist Party rule, we were never strip-searched to such a degree and in public; a hapless or guilty citizen was strip-searched if he/she was arrested or if someone shop lifted. They were guilty until proven innocent and it seems that the law is changing in that direction now, you are no longer innocent until proven guilty, and citizens are arrested indefinitely without charge just like they did under communism long ago. The corrupt justice system, and it was all corrupt, created fake charges just to get rid of an inconvenient citizen who defied the Communist Party.
Schools under Soviet style communism never taught sex education, mentioned, or shown pornography in school, much less have explicit lessons. But today in America, perverts in the academia and in public schools are obsessed with sex, pornography, and teaching it to students and children as young as kindergarten, often without the parents’ knowledge and permission. Vile books are read in America’s classrooms, so vile that, when parents attempted to read passages from said books in front of the board of education, they were stopped on the grounds that such material was inappropriate in public.
The socialized medical system was bad and lacking everything. Doctors were paid equally and poorly and supplemented their incomes with bribes from equally poor and desperate citizens. People knew that, if they wanted to survive, they had to carry around envelopes with bribe money. Doctors and nurses did not care if their patients lived or died.
The Communist Party members had priority of everything in their special hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. There were not enough doctors for the rest of the population, and the doctor-patient ratio was astronomical in terms of how many patients a doctor had to care for; drugs and medical equipment were lacking or missing entirely; ambulance service consisted of empty vehicles with nothing else to potentially save a person’s life, and ambulances always arrived hours and even days later in rural areas.
Our medical system today, once the best in the world, has taken on a fascist hue, as doctors and hospitals refuse to treat people who are not Covid-19 vaccinated as mandated by the president’s executive order.
Data is falsified and bribes are accepted from the government to count all deaths as Covid-19 deaths in violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Doctors refuse initial treatment to patients with life-saving drugs because the CDC protocol does not include said drugs – only ventilators and the drug Remdesivir were approved initially.
Shortages of basic goods, drugs, and food occurred all the time as the Communist Party did not know how to centrally-plan and run a successful economy based on supply and demand. The U.S. economy is taking a serious dive under the lack of economic leadership and disastrous policies of the Biden regime.
Inflation stands at 8.6% and that is only the beginning. Shelves are bare, the supply chain is broken, things are missing in stores, variety is gone, businesses are going under at a high rate, gasoline has doubled in price since the beginning of the Biden regime, and stagflation looms large.
Technology changed everything and made this current brand of Marxism quite awful. Without Internet and Zoom meetings, the government would not have been able to lock us down for almost two years now, transform schools into virtual classrooms, transform doctors’ visits into virtual pretend-medical care, jobs were moved into one’s home via Zoom, and large corporations took over the economy, holding their employees hostage to a forced vaccine demand, bankrupting small businesses that were not allowed by the all-mighty federal, state, and local governments to operate, as they were deemed unessential.
Technology spies on all of us; technology and social media at first made us unafraid of data mining and of reporting ourselves to the government through innocent status postings and photographs. But the Internet-controlling techies changed everything.
Technology is allowing IRS to control our banking transactions, our tax returns, and the integrity of the voting system; paper ballots are gone, replaced by computers and programming. Who controls the technology are the ones who count the votes now. At least under the old communist party system, we all knew the outcome of an election every time before we were ever marched to the voting booths. Nobody pretended that the voting was fair. There was only one candidate, the Communist Party approved candidate.
Technology enables the Marxist government in power today, and they are all Marxist regardless of whether they have an R or a D behind their titles, to control who sees the doctors, who can have access to a hospital, who can buy a plane ticket, who can go overseas, on vacation, on a cruise, who can cross the border of another country (with the exception of our southern border which is entirely open per orders of this Democrat administration), who can go to school, who can shop in a store, how, and when, who can get hired by the government, and who can buy or rent a house or apartment. The techies have been allowed to become the judge, jury, and executioner of everything we do in the marketplace with total monopoly power over our lives.
Corporate fascism has reached levels that the communists from long ago could only dream of. The myriad of government agencies and bodies are constantly spying and controlling the lives of their subjects, the American taxpayers. The elected and non-elected governments and bureaucrats have become oppressors, they no longer work for the American people, we work to pay for their bloated and blood-sucking bureaucracy, for their salaries and wealth accumulation.
The STASI, the financial police, the security police under Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ceausescu, and other dictators had to work extremely hard to spy on their citizens and keep them under control.
Today’s American Marxists can cut our access to food, education, medical care, medicine, gasoline, cars, and airplanes, our own savings, and they have us under their thumbs forever without wiretapping our homes or throwing us into dungeons or gulags. Our entire society is becoming one techie-controlled gulag.
The old communists did not have smart phones, Alexa, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart meters, and other smart devices that surveil homes constantly and report results to the Mother Ship. The old communists had to hire an army of informers and wire tappers to get a fraction of the information that now resides with our techie controllers in the euphemistically named, the “iCloud,” a network of giant memory servers scattered across the country and the world.
Identical talking points are spewed daily by alphabet soup fake media, politicians, ad agencies, sports teams, universities, public schools, Hollywood, Internet fact-checkers
The mainstream media is enormously powerful in this country, and it is all controlled by Democrat Marxists. The old communists had a couple of state-controlled publications like Pravda. Nothing else was allowed to exist in print without the Communist Party’s approval.
Now the same propaganda, with identical talking points from the Democrat Marxist Mother Ship in D.C. is spewed non-stop by the alphabet soup fake media, politicians, ad agencies, sports teams, universities, public schools, Hollywood, and Internet fact-checkers who are paid to distribute lies and to discredit the truth. Four tech companies and their employees, Americans and foreign nationals, have become the arbiters of truth and the champions of the fake media. The few alternative news outlets are censored non-stop by the same four tech companies.
Propagandists under the old communist regime had a much more difficult job to spread disinformation and lies in the absence of electronic communication, satellites, Internet, smart phones, smart TVs, smart appliances, and social media. Everything had to be done by hand and actual files built on millions of citizens who held divergent and politically incorrect opinions.
Some non-communist teachers and a few lone priests, at significant risk to themselves, spread the anti-communist truth. Today, most teachers have been themselves so heavily indoctrinated into this neo-Marxism that they would not believe the truth if they were led to the gulags and shown the conditions in which those people were kept and worked and the punishments they suffered.
The teachers and professors today are immensely powerful as they have the eyes and the ears of American children so many hours every day. They are the effective force of change of the American minds towards communism and against capitalism thanks to Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education bureaucracy established in 1979.
Insta-brogue:
Pronounce “oil.”
Pronounce “beef.”
Pronounce “hooked.”
Now pronounce them all together: “Oilbeefhooked.”
Voila!
Sometimes, given the tin ear of some for the profane, you can get them to repeat it out loud in public. Good clean fun.
Among familiars, a simple “oilbeef” may even evolve into useful shorthand, expressing either genuine surprised appreciation (“Ron DeSantis was one helluva young baseball player — oilbeef.”) or, e.g., trapped listening to some 20-mule-team bore-ass master of the obvious, with a caustic tinge (“Wow. Is that a fact? Well oilbeef!)
Works for me and my wife, anyhow.
We went to Scotland a couple of years ago. While visiting a grocery store we overheard two Scotsmen talking to each while stocking shelves and we understood only every third or fourth word. But once they knew we were Americans then their accents moderated and they were quite understandable.
This SNL skit is hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGRcJQ9tMbY
Some good news in NJ:
Durr won. The incumbent conceded.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/nov/10/new-jersey-senate-president-steve-sweeney-concedes/
Now, if there can be an honest recount of the governor’s race…..
The last British Military contingent based in HK prior to the Handover was the Black Watch. Wanchai bar staff and Filipina Camp Followers had to do some quick-footed linguistic learning and adaptation when they arrived.
@Huxley:
Knocked off 30% of The Three Body Problem last night. It’s a Yes.
Zaphod:
Whoa. It’s that good? Some say it’s a slog.
huxley —
From “The Commitments”:
Jimmy Rabbitte: Look, don’t use your own accents. It’s “ride, Sally, ride”, not “royad, Sally, royad”.
https://youtu.be/KVU1TLDILjA?t=2130
@Huxley:
It’s shaping up to be a nice existential slow-but-sure creeping Lovecraftian horror show. The broad premise so far seems to be that stability and predictability are periodic exceptions in the cosmic scheme and that we were lucky to have evolved during one of these hiatuses. And now Chaos is Coming. I’ll bet this is even more creepy in Chinese. the character Luan carries a lot more associative baggage with it than the Greek word does for us.
Also there is this wonderfully vulgar hard-bitten Beijing street cop. It’s refreshing to read characterisations and descriptions of things Chinese not filtered through someone angling for column inches in the Atlantic.
Rocket launch in about 30 minutes.
Crew-3 Mission | Launch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZvtrnFItNs
Zaphod:
Yum. Lovecraft. Happened to watch a doco on him over the weekend. “Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown” (2008). More interesting than I expected. Of course the righteous cancel do-bees have already been at Lovecraft for racial sins in the 20s. My fave was “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
The library should soon have 3BP ready for me in book format, along with the Audible audiobook. Nothing against the Chinese, but I can’t imagine their version of Lovecraft.
Bryan Lovely:
“The Commitments” was a perfect small film — exactly what I want to watch now and then.
Tom Hanks hit a similar perfection with “That Thing You Do.”
Noticed that Geoffrey Miller lists 3 Body Problem in his recommended book list.
PrimalPoly.com
Meanwhile, another outrage from a low info Dem politician
https://www.mrctv.org/blog/colo-governor-signs-exec-order-letting-state-tell-hospitals-turn-away-non-jabbed
Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) signed an executive order this week that allows hospitals to turn away those who are unvaccinated against COVID-19.
huxley,
I like your Simple Minds track and factoid. Your song has a connection to Scottish accents and mine doesn’t, but recently I was digging into a couple of the old Tears for Fears hits.
I was watching a trashy TV series and they had a high school prom scene and the theme song was Head Over Heals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsHiG-43Fzg
The song is similar to Simple Minds “Don’t You” I think. It’s my favorite Tears for Fears song, though their Everybody Wants to Rule the World was a much bigger hit for them and is good too. The interesting factoid for those two songs that I never knew was that they were both from the album “Songs From The Big Chair.” The big chair is a throne? No. I won’t spoil it for those who care. Look it up on Wikipedia.
Rick Beato on Head Over Heals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsjhSm4YCfw
The vocals in the songs have this nice octave jump in the last bar of every other verse. That jump is also presaged in the guitar intro. The drummer is Jewish, or pretending to be in the video? Not sure.
@JimNorCal:
Thanks for the Geoffrey Miller tip. New to me and an instant YouTube channel subscribe.
Even if he does mention Reason Magazine favourably. *honk honk* (Clown Horn). Nobody’s perfect.
Random scumbag of the day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nelson
Can’t watch a rocket launch without some piece of political filth smearing his ugly face all over the screen.
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them. — V. I. Lenin
Read it and weep.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/11/10/republicans-voted-for-bidens-infrastructure-bill-after-securing-cash-from-chamber-of-commerce/
Zaphod —
Are you reading “The Three Body Problem” in original Chinese or English translation?
@Bryan Lovely:
English translation. Reading a novel in Chinese is well above my pay grade.
A bit of Local Covid Colour:
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3155598/coronavirus-cathay-pacific-pilots-infection
Compulsory mass testing for a bunch of people.
It’s times like this I regret not being on FB and other platforms as one misses out on the neighborhood Karen Collective Meltdown, Finger-pointing, Recriminations.
Re The Three Body Problem:
Don’t be put off by the Barack Obama book jacket blurb. IMHO it’s very unlikely that this fraudulent Hei Guizi actually read the thing.
Speaking of the Devils… Exhibit No. 6,789,123 for why the USA is more borked than China:
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli/index.html
Happened last year. Some guy got dragged over the coals and put through a struggle session because the way one says umm ah… err… um in Mandarin sounds to imaginative ears like the most common vocabulary item used in hip hop after Bitch and Ho.
Wow. Just Wow. Derbyshire does it again. In a recent article he mentions that Wang Huning’s book is available in translation at unz.com
https://www.unz.com/book/wang_huning__america-against-america/
Wang Huning and what he thinks are not unimportant.
Also, it’s always a smart idea to see how one looks through other people’s eyes. Americans in particular are hopelessly bad at this. The Rest of the West not much better.
Here’s a bit from Derb on Mister Wang:
https://vdare.com/radio-derb/not-even-the-midterms-va-nj-uniparty-win-the-garland-archipelago-biden-on-the-road-etc#06
“06—Can China change course? Just a couple on the China beat.
First: Several people have pointed me to the article by the analyst who bylines as “N.S. Lyons” at the Palladium website on October 11th. Title: “The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning.”
The subject, Wang Huning, is a Chinese intellectual who has thought and written deeply about both their national culture and ours. He is also one of the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee, and so a very powerful person indeed.
I must confess I had never heard of Wang Huning. I flatter myself that I’m decently well-informed on Chinese history and literary culture, but I’m not your go-to guy for insights into power relations among the ChiCom leaders.
According to Lyons, Wang has been a key player in Xi Jinping’s current effort to steer the ship of state away from its former course of free-wheeling entrepreneurship, hedonism, openness to foreigners, and demographic collapse to something sterner, more egalitarian, less welcoming, and more fertile.
It’s a fascinating piece with good insights into what is currently going on over there. The question it leaves you with is: Can that huge ship in fact be steered onto a really quite different course, even with all the power of one-party authoritarianism at the wheel?
And what about us, with our plague of opioid deaths, homeless camps in the main streets of our cities, vast military commitments left over from the 1940s, out-of-control security agencies, endless racial rancor, enstupidation of our schools and colleges, and the rest of our failings? Couldn’t we use some course correction, too? Is our system capable of it?
It’s a great article, even if you’re not that interested in China.”
LOL, LOL, LOL.
Thank you, Neo!
There are no Black Serial Killers.
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/suspected-serial-killer-arrested-for-6-homicides-in-st-louis-area-and-kansas-city/
Zaphod,
Close to my home there are/were…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Eugene_Watts
Zaphod —
Wang Huning strikes me as a Chinese Sayid Qutb. Maybe with more justification, but still had a bad experience and went home to write books about how America should be taken down.
@Bryan Lovely:
IMHO. That’s a knee-jerk reaction. One was a one-book goat-@#$%er from the sandpit. The other one, like him or no, is the product of a civilization that was around before us and is looking increasingly likely to be around after we’re gone.
That doesn’t make him good, or even right. But to paraphrase (badly) Cromwell, I beseech you, in the Bowels of Christ, think it possible that Wang might be LESS WRONG in his understanding of ourselves than many of us, ourselves are.
As I keep harping on. It’s not about being ‘Right’.. What does that even mean in the affairs of men? To win out, all that is necessary is to be Less Wrong in your understanding of the situation than your opponents.
My contentious (around here) contention is that both sides of the farce that is politics in the West are more Wrong about what is wrong with the West and about the strengths and weaknesses of China than any Chinese vice-versa one can dream up.
Seriously, most critiques of the PRC from both sides are in Wolfgang Pauli’s immortal words ‘Not Even Wrong.’
A little humility (yeah, I know :P) is in order in the West.
@Geoffb:
Damn! That’s prolific, if true. I take back everything I ever might have said about them lacking drive.
“…rocket launch…”
Hmmm. This is kinda cool…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10186369/The-future-satellite-launches-Startup-CATAPULTS-prototype-vehicle-space.html
“…Not Even Wang…”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/china-blinks-contagion-property-sector-crash-spreads-regulators-set-ease-bond-rules
https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/china-punishes-mockery-questions-about-historical-figures-this-is-self-wounding/
Etc., etc., etc.
^^^ Self-Wounding, issit?
MLK was a drug user who ran trains on white women in hotel rooms.
And he plagiarized his dissertation.
Discuss. Judge with respect to content of his character. With name and phone number attached, of course.
…though one could indeed make the claim that China is doing certain things right…
https://www.nysun.com/foreign/un-fires-whistleblower-who-says-communist-china/91733/
(“Biden” might even want to take some notes!)
^^^
Now *that’s* how you play the game. Wonder if Wang interned at the ADL or ACLU during his sojourn back in the day?
Not uncommon for uncouth fellows to get cancelled for claiming that Usual Suspects pull most of the levers in the Light on the Hill — thereby totally disproving the theory as I will always attest whenever I’m not sitting facing the only entrance to the room.
Drollness aside, the fundamental dichotomy appears to me to be Serious Peoples / Frivolous Peoples.
Point well taken…
“71-year-old army vet still in jail over Jan 6”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/316714
(Well, er, possibly…)
You have a point.
Any country that kills off millions of its own people can most certainly NOT be accused of being frivolous….
(Though maybe we should check first with the Dalai Lama.)
On the other hand, China did make a supreme effort to re-educate the particularly obtuse and resistant—and for all I know China continues dishing out this particular form of altruism…
(CRT pushers—and “Biden”—should take note…)
About 3/4 of the word-count on this thread is attributable to two posters, one of whom has made 19 separate posts.
A psychiatric explanation for the tribal slavishness to the Dangerous Covid! narrative that’s totalitarian: Dr Mattias Desmet, Ghent University lecturer on mass formation.
He sees our situation as a large scale mass-formation event. Very detailed and illuminating. I think he nails it.
Long interview here
https://youtu.be/uLDpZ8daIVM
TJ, yes.
There’s also this description of totalitarian-creep, which augments/reinforces your link, though perhaps from a more strategic/corporatist direction:
https://unherd.com/2021/11/the-humiliation-of-america/
H/T Powerline blog.
Art Deco:
It’s a slow day down at General Tso’s Chicken Ranch.
I’m sure if you put your mind to it you could provide more statistics. How about a Flesch-Kincaid grade level?
Looks like he put away a quantity of the stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuo_Zongtang
@TJ:
I think most people live lives so devoid of meaning that they will batten onto anything that comes along. Covidianism was the Perfect Storm.
One more for the road:
Chinese Ingenuity Makes Entire Arab World Redundant in One Fell Stroke:
https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article/3155682/chinese-farm-developing-facial-recognition
Facial recognition for goats.
Or am I crediting the Arabs with too much discernment?
No.. I lied. One more.
F W de Klerk who sold out his people to a bunch of savages for half a Nobel Prize and some other baubles and (random guess) a shot at the Ivies for his grandkids is dead. Good Riddance.