« News Updates From Inside The Forbidden City | Main | No floor action yet in Congress on an impeachment (updated) »

11 January 2021

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Artemesia

At least George Washington acted under his own name.
George Orwell was a name Eric Arthur Blair conjured and adopted because it gave him political cover and commercial success.

(signed)
[not] Artemesia

By the way -- David Goldman has been mentioned several times in the last few days.
In 2019 he spoke at the Westminster Institute in Great Fall, VA. He described the many means of tracking its citizens employed by the Chinese government and, if I recall correctly, displayed an image of the "thousand points of" citizens that CCP tracks from an electronic central command post.

https://anchor.fm/westminster-institute/episodes/David-Goldman-Will-China-overtake-the-U-S--as-the-worlds-leading-superpower-e3euan/a-abmk3h

imo Westminster tilts neoconish. It's not certain whether Goldman's audience was appalled or envious.

james

interesting rant walrus... thanks for sharing... i share your conclusion, but i don't relate to how you got to it... this part i really question - "applauded the Patriot Act. When you cheered at the vilification of muslims, "sand niggers", "rag heads". When you justified the use of torture. When you masturbated watching targeting videos of drone strikes on Afghans."

in fairness to the ordinary joe in the usa, i don't think what you are saying here is true.. i could be wrong.. i don't live in the usa, but while the msm might have appeared this way, i think it is out of kilter with the ordinary person on the street... maybe, just maybe i am really naive...

BillWade

At least one internet service provider is now blocking facebook and twitter citing both's lack of concern for the 1st Amendment. I hope many other providers follow suit soon.

elaine

Matthew 10:16
"Behold I send you forth as sheep amongst wolves, be wise as serpents & innocent as doves..."

JM Gavin

Walrus,
Breathless hyperbole aside, what is your point? All of us in the U.S. are bad, and we asked for the worst, and now we are going to get it because we deserve it? All of our hope and dreams were embodied by Donald Trump, who came to save us from our sins, so we crucified him?


JMG

Harlan Easley

It goes much deeper than this. Walk 12 End 12.

Fred

Walrus,

" Because I figure it's a win/win for me."

If memory serves you got rich helping China industrialize by outsourcing lots of Western manufacturing capability. Remind us again of the value of free trade, open borders, and making sure China never loses face.

Eric Newhill

This has been a long time in the making. A good friend of mine was into this whole matrix thing back in the early 90s. He completed hisPhD and went to work for the DoD/DARPA. He was trying to sell me on what a wonderful world it will be; computer chips I peoples' heads, the entire planet wired together. We'd debate this topic into into the night over Turkish coffee and cigarettes. He just couldn't conceive that it would be used for evil, let alone that it was evil in its very nature, regardless of who controlled it. IMO, it was all about being a part of power and control intelligencia. That has a strong appeal for some people that I don't understand. I think such psychologies have always been in the human mix, but technology is now giving them an opportunity that never existed before. I suspect the tech giant leaders are much like my friend as much as they are profit seekers. My friend now lives far out in the country side on a ranch, having left the DoD a few years ago. He wants nothing to do with any of it. Something happened at DARPA that left him very scared.

akaPatience

Silly me. I can remember happily thinking in 1984 that Orwell turned out to be wrong.

coboarts

None of this came from anyone's base. It has all reigned down from above. Both sides are all in. Trump and Jones set their bases up to be identified and decreed terrorists. There is no place in the sphere of ideas. It is all in service to the regime. The regime will last forever, at least one thousand years - right?

dsrcwt

I was in high school when I read "A Man for All Seasons", and this exchange has stuck with me since then (over 30 years )

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

Deap

In the 70-80's, "sex was free" "do your own thing" until AIDS and other rampant STD's made the "Singles Revolution" realize following your bliss was not so free spirited after all. Same with "free internet", it was fun until is not. Not is now. Now it is downright scary. Circle the wagons and drop out os "social media". It is not a friendly place any longer. It is a fatal attraction.

Deap

All quite biblical, once one steps back far enough. Evil, sin, false gods, end times, grace, redemption, one true light. I think we have seen this play before. Pretty much like every other world's religion also postulated.

How do we live? And then we die. We perhaps only really quibble about the existence of an afterlife, but the wheel of life plays out pretty much the same no matter what personal statement of faith one adheres to.

Turn, turn, turn ...there is a purpose for every season. We are certainly in the fallow stage right now, but with careful tending a new crop will spring forth even more nutritious than the last.

And the devil still gets the hindquarters.

Walrus

JM Galvin, my point is that at least as early as 9/11, very very few people had either the brains or cojones to stand up and fight back against the gradual but continuous assault on human rights by our own elected Government. We are now about to receive collective punishment for that.

I don't know whether the majority will fight back when they see what is coming or passively accept it. Based on experience to date they will just roll over.

As for hyperbole, I don't think so and I am mindful of the pitfalls of what I term "failure of imagination". The swamp and its denizens are very frightened people. Perhaps already they have passed the PNR. This "domestic terrorism" meme followed by second amendment strictures has the power to start a civil war.

Fred

walrus,

"This "domestic terrorism" meme followed by second amendment strictures has the power to start a civil war."

We are already in a civil war, or did you miss the reign of destruction wrought by the left through its executive orders and shock troops terrorizing civilians and burning things down in multiple cities?

JM Gavin

Walrus,

I get that part of your point...what I am asking you is what you propose that people do about this? The U.S. is entering into the next part of what I call the "Post-Constitutional Phase" in our decline. Breathless hyperbole isn't the answer.

Aren't you Australian, or am I confusing you with someone else?

JMG

Ishmael Zechariah

Walrus,
'It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.' Pay heed to the great Yogi! There were those who wrote off the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Ask Lloyd George how that worked out. McCain declared that "Russia was a gas station masquerading as a country" in 2014. McCain is gone, Obama is gone, Russia is still here. Let us see if Ms. Nuland can fXXX Russia- she did not do such a good job w/ the E.U. Maybe she has forgotten how. Crimea is Russian; can she take it back? I, for one will be happy to see her attempt it. If you search for " the Green Belt Initiative" and "Mild Islam" you will not find much. Wikipedia will term one a "conspiracy theory". It was no such-Zbigniew Brzezinski might tell you the truth if you ever meet him where pots need no fire to boil. Both gambits failed. Iran is still up and Syria is coming back. The islamists of Turkey are starting to see the walls closing in on them and they are scared. Now they are nationalists...
I would not write off the Deplorables so soon; they have behaved admirably until now-and might stop behaving soon. If so, look to your horses. Technology cannot win if the fighters do not quit; do ask the izzies. There might be hard times ahead but I,for one, have faith in the power of the Patriots of the USA. My vote is for them.
Ishmael Zechariah

The Twisted Genius

Walrus,

Your technology driven tyranny still has a lot of back allies and secret underground passages where cyber anarchists still silently prowl. One such hacker seems to have managed to obtain and archive 80 terabytes of Parler user data before AWS deep sixed it. It started last Wednesday when a young Austrian hacker using the name crash override (the Jolie character in "Hackers") started archiving Parler traffic from the Capitol assault. Hearing that AWS was going to drop Parler on Sunday midnight she went into overdrive and enlisted some hacker cohorts to get as much data as possible. Luckily for her, the companies providing the security certificates for Parler dropped them earlier than that. Parler was left defenseless. All manner of data including biographic info, messages, images and image location data has been downloaded, archived and made public. Once the data is converted into a readable format, the world will see it. Same principle as Wikileaks. Parler users are shitting themselves over this development.

The name crash override caught my eye not because of Angelina Jolie or the movie, but because I once went by the handle of crash_1nterupt back in the days I was revere engineering x86 assembly code and conversed with cagey Russians and East Europeans over FIDONet. It was a golden age of digital technology and culture.

turcopolier

walrus
yes.

Never heard any American use the term "Sand Nigger." "Rag head?" Yes. Seems to me that Texans used the term for the Apache and such other folk.

walrus

JMG, what to do? Read page 149 assuming you have bought a copy.

I am a Southern Walrus, a very rare species.

Jose

Great post,

we have quoted Saint Thomas Moore (a double saint in the Catholic and Anglican (really Catholic) religion)

...and democracy is great experiment that can be quoted by an enemy of Saint Thomas

"Those Who Have Been Made ... Can Be Unmade..." - Anne Boleyn

This is were we are...This is we are heading...

marhias alexander

As an unattractive and socially inept nerd I'd like to ask "who are the alpha males?"
The rest of it is great.

TheUnready

All,

Didn't George Orwell go on to work for the British Govt.'s propaganda department?

Perhaps the only antidote to creeping centralization is to adopt the practices of tribal people. Bitcoin plus a secure autonomous messaging system should keep the empire at bay for a while...

Colonel - I can confirm that I have been called a sand nigger in England, though it was in jest.

Fred

TTG,

"Luckily for her, the companies providing the security certificates for Parler dropped them earlier than that." Sounds like another breach of contract. Not that it matters much, they'll just write a check some years into the future.

JohninMK

Walrus, not sure where page 149 is.

All I would say is that the US State is the target to be avoided at this stage almost at any cost as it is without doubt the most hazardous. I suspect that directly pulling the tail of a Government should always be a last resort.

However, over to the left the large tech companies are setting themselves up as the front line in a serious hate campaign. Their vulnerability is their share price which is in part based on their data processing ability. Anything that impacted their data transmission capacity could hit that hard and their fiber must be pretty vulnerable. But I am sure that they had this aspect covered when they planned their actions over the last couple of weeks.

The comments to this entry are closed.

My Photo

February 2021

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28            
Blog powered by Typepad