Firewalls on Fire

The concept of a firewall is a useful one: if there is a definite chance of something flammable catching on fire and you have to be next to it, then it’s an excellent idea to put a wall of nonflammable material between you and it. Automobiles, for instance, contain the vital ingredients of explosive fuel under pressure, electrical sparks, red-hot exhaust manifolds and humans. Putting a firewall between the car’s engine and the humans in the salon seems like a good one.

According to the National Fire Protection Association, “During 2003-2007 [in the US], the 267,600 highway vehicle [fires] reported per year caused an average of 441 civilian deaths, 1,326 civilian fire injuries, and $1.0 billion in direct property damage. On average, 31 highway vehicle fires were reported per hour. These fires killed one person a day. Overall, highway vehicles fires were involved in 17% of reported U.S. fires, 12% of U.S. fire deaths, 8% of U.S. civilian fire injuries, and 9% of the direct property damage from reported fires.” This would lead us to believe that the firewalls built into cars are no more than 67% effective; still, they seem like a good idea.

I once ended up with a used car—a generally very-hard-to-kill slant-6 Chrysler station wagon—that had been Mickey-Moused by a Middle Eastern car mechanic who apparently liked to kill people, preferably with fire. Whatever material was originally packed between the two sheet metal baffles that made up the firewall (asbestos?) was long gone, and he replaced it with… pine needles! This worked great while the needles were fresh and moist—the engine was quiet and the salon was cool—but once they dried out the engine’s roar started hurting my ears and my feet became painfully hot. I used this car for a while anyway—to haul floor sanding equipment around—then traded it away for a rusty old Fiat which a friend of mine later managed to fold in half—but that’s another story. The guy I traded it to then deposited it in my driveway, with the transmission seized, so the rear wheels wouldn’t turn—how on Earth did he do that? The flatbed driver who then hauled it off to a junkyard told me not to call him again.

Top Five

After the recent marathon writing session, I am taking this Thursday off in order to finish editing and proofreading an excellent new novel by Stan Goff which I plan to publish soon.

In the meantime, I hope that you find the time to peruse the following very popular offerings from the past four years.

It bears noting that this Tuesday’s post, Putin to Western elites: You flunked!—a follow-up to my most popular post ever—has been actively squelched by Facebook (which is, after all, a service of the Western elites) but is still on course with 10000 reads just yesterday.

This, I belive, is normal and to be expected. I know that I am walking a fine line, making use of another man’s public media in nonsanctioned ways—telling people things that they aren’t supposed to know. We should count our blessings that the methods of electronic mind control are as yet imperfect.

I’ll be back next week with a review of some of the most important things you aren’t supposed to know. In the meantime, enjoy...

Post	Pageviews
Putin to Western elites: Play-time is over Oct 29, 2014, 45 comments	196756
A Russian Warning May 31, 2016, 67 comments	82600
Peculiarities of Russian National Character Jan 13, 2015, 85 comments	65339
A Thousand Balls of Flame Aug 23, 2016, 51 comments	57679
How can you tell whether Russia has invaded Ukraine Aug 30, 2014, 31 comments	45894

Putin to Western Elites: You Flunked!

[Tuesdays are free, Thursdays are not; please SUPPORT ME ON PATREON. Minimum pledge is $1/month. And before you ask, no, I don’t work for anyone but my own readers.]

By far the most popular article I ever published on this blog was titled Putin to Western Elites: Play-time is Over. It came out almost exactly three years ago, after that year’s Valdai Club conference, and was based on the speech Putin gave at that conference. It garnered close to 200,000 page hits—more than twice more than the next most popular one—because it pointed out something very significant: a sea change in international relations had occurred, heralding the end of America’s unipolar moment when it could dictate terms to the entire world.

Essentially, in that speech Putin signaled to Western elites that they were no longer qualified to play the game of international relations of today and had to go back to school for retraining. And now, three years later, Putin has issued them a final report card, giving them an F in every category: they have learned nothing.

The Shape of the Future

I like to flatter myself that the main reason so many people have beaten a path to my blog and keep buying my books is that for over a decade I have consistently guessed correctly at the shape of the future; not all the time, but enough of the time to make people want to pay attention. I try to be very careful in my prognostications. I never predict relatively trivial events such as stock market crashes, shifts in the composition of national governments and other incidents that only happen on paper or on a whim. Instead, I try to focus on aspects of physical reality—flows of energy in particular—that constrain the shape of the future. I also don’t make prediction with regard to timing: whether something will happen is often a question that has an answer; when something will happen is often a question for which no method of finding an answer exists. Bearing that in mind (so that you are not disappointed) I am going to go out on a limb and make a few predictions about the general shape of the future that will materialize over the course of a single human lifetime, and perhaps quite a bit faster.

I believe that the general shape of the future can be guessed at by focusing on the following four factors: weather, energy, population and geopolitics. Let’s look at each one.

The Limits of Gullibility

The derogatory term “conspiracy theory” automatically gets thrown at anyone with the temerity to question the veracity of stories broadcast by American mainstream media sources: refuse to believe what they are feeding you, and you are automatically branded a “conspiracy theorist.” But what if you refuse to theorize, to impugn, to ascribe, to insinuate or to offer alternative versions, and simply point out that what is being alleged to be true simply isn’t the least bit likely? Of course, anything is possible; for example, it is possible that every single person who reads this article will instantly get hiccoughs. But it just isn’t the least bit likely. If someone were to tell you that everyone who read this article did in fact come down with a case of hiccoughs, I believe that you would be perfectly justified to say “that’s just too unlikely to be true” and leave it at that, without being scorned as a “conspiracy theorist” and without being goaded into providing some sort of alternative account because you are under no obligation to make sense out of anyone else’s nonsense.

The recent massacre in Las Vegas provides a good testing ground for this approach.

The Magic Bullshit Decoder

Unbeknownst to most, their brains are a battleground. Those lower down on the intellectual food chain are programmed more or less directly, through a method close to operant conditioning, to engage in status signaling in order to demonstrate their fitness to their peers, mostly by purchasing certain consumer products, while those higher up are manipulated mostly through underhanded uses of language, using a variety of methods, into buying into a fictional narrative and proving their fitness to their peers through virtue signaling. The lower-brow methods of public manipulation, based on television and advertising, have have already been discussed ad nauseam. Not so with the numerous misdirections and fake-outs involving the misuse language: nobody seems to be involved in keeping track of all the major and minor transgressions against our ability to think clearly. Language is what we reason and communicate with, and when the very words we use are twisted and deformed our ability to think suffers also.

Let me walk you through how that’s done.

World's Largest Playground

Lake Baikal

Quite a number of people in the world have taken up a nomadic lifestyle by living aboard boats. Instead of cooperatively running in the rat race, they have escaped and now work some vague and sketchy internet-based job while sailing around the islands of the Caribbean or around the Mediterranean, with the Greek islands a particular favorite. Other favorite cruising grounds, for those who don’t much care for the open ocean, include the canals of England or Canal du Midi in France. The Inside Passage which runs up the coast of British Columbia from Washington state to Alaska is another favored playground. The Intracoastal Waterway that runs along the Eastern Seaboard (and is lovingly called “the ditch”) is said to start in Boston, Massachusetts, but can really only be said to exist between Norfolk, Virginia and Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border. The more adventurous go through Panama Canal and go island-hopping among Pacific atolls. There are many others. But there is one truly gigantic cruising ground that is charted, dredged, has plenty to see and plenty to do, but remains almost entirely unexplored.

Continue reading...

Please Be Very Afraid

Subscriber link

...By Their Fruits

If you exist within the by now almost hermetically sealed-off mindscape of Western mainstream media, and if you also happen to like knowing the truth, then life must seem increasingly unfair to you—because you can’t win. For decades now the modus operandi has been as follows. Regardless of which party has the majority in Congress or controls the presidency, the same unchanging national (and increasingly transnational) elite ensconced in Washington sets the agenda and pushes it through using any means necessary, whether legal, illegal or blatantly criminal (increasingly the latter as national bankruptcy looms and desperation sets in). Their operatives make sure that there is no real investigation of what happened. All Western media reports that contradict the official mendacious narrative are quashed. Any independent efforts to investigate and to find out the truth are denigrated as “conspiracy theories”—a derogatory term coined by the CIA for exactly this purpose. Any non-Western media sources that dare to contradict the official mendacious narrative are ignored, subjected to ad hominem attacks and all manner of false allegations and, if all else fails, banned outright (as is currently happening with the satellite TV channel Russia Today).

If that happens to be the prevailing method of communicating with the public (as I am convinced, and as you should convince yourself by doing some research if you are not), then what chance do any of us stand of finding out the truth to our satisfaction? Typically, we expect to be presented with a few, possibly somewhat contradictory, versions of events and, after some probing and deliberation, render a verdict and socialize it among ourselves to reach a consensus which then becomes another brick within the edifice of our consensual reality. These are high-priority tasks, because maintaining a sense of consensual reality is important: it allows us to distinguish the sane from the insane, and it makes it possible for us to tell our young people, whose minds are too immature to let them reach their own conclusions without being driven toward unfounded or extremist views, what is safe for them to think. If we are deprived of our ability to maintain a sense of consensual reality, then we lose face before our peers (and our children) and our self-respect suffers because we no longer feel socially adequate.

But what choices are there?