Mistaken Identity

Obviously a Warrior's bison* headdress, and sported by a d00d from Arizona as it happens, so why is Curtis Yarvin going on about a "Viking pillage of the Senate", "Harald Hardrada and his merry men" &c?

A waggish mis-waggery? Curtis is Contemptuous

To be brutally frank, this is one of the problems with cheap history. People think they have a sense of history, when the oldest book they’ve read is something published in 2017 that explains the Byzantine Empire in terms of “Game of Thrones.” Maybe we need to ban the History Channel, until we can figure out what’s going on.

so one must assume he knows what he doesn't know what he's talking about.

*a bison has a beard, a buffalo does not, as almost everybody has pointed out.

Anyhow and meanwhile, there's this fascist coup (no, not the one advertised) going down and nobody much seems to care. Smiling and waving and looking so fine...

Will the old clown be allowed even to survive Inauguration Day? State of OrangeManBad declared, Martial Lawlessness...

Onwards and Upwards

A happy and prosperous New Year to all my reader

Reader: not me, haven't looked in for yonks

Blogista: well, to ME then

Into That Good Night

 

The longest night is nearly over and

Reader(s): and before the darkest dawn comes the dawn of dawn and

Blogista: we have KC Green to thank for this unconventional but eloquent doggie'n'zeitgeist combo. Thank you, KC.

Pejorocracy

 A note in Laudator Temporis Acti on Ezra Pound's coinage "pejorocracy", rule by the worse

One thing that puzzles me about pejorocracy is this — why the comparative degree and why not the superlative (pessimocracy, from Latin pessimus = worst)? 

There is also the delightful "kakistocracy", the Greek version of rule by the worst, with echoes of Musil's Kakania, of "catastrophe", of "caca".

Rule by the worse seems suitably lukewarm and half-baked, the pejorocracy not being capable of the superlative in any field.

I have the feeling that this year marks the end of the West as a going concern, its inmates abandoning the last of any functional understanding of "reality" or "civilisation", its pejorocrats fumbling their way to the rubbish heaps.

May Day

Sudden nostalgia for the 22nd May 2007 and a day when I was free, living in Brighton, rolling in money, drinking my head off when I felt like it...

...now life amid a vast miasma of torpor and ugliness, stupidity no longer impedance but become a galvanic industrial resource, of which "we" have limitless reserves.

Perhaps enlightenment is to be found in cliodynamics, and Peter Turchin's Ages of Discord for example, or somewhere in the pages of the great Valéry, with the Zürau Aphorisms always to hand. Perhaps I will just go down to the corner shop and buy a huge bag of sweets.

5 From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

The goal, if there ever was one, is not the or any point. If I must reach the point of no turning back; then I am already at it: if it is a point I must reach, I cannot be at it. Per ardua ad ardua and so forth.

Statesmen

Thank goodness that in Good Ol' Joe Biden we'll at last have a US President who is sharp-witted, honest, capable, decent and has Britain's interests at heart, unlike that awful "dumpster fire" Donald McHitlerFace Drumpf!

Thank goodness that in Good Ol' Joe Biden the Office of President will at last be held in dignity and respect and good riddance to that worthless arsehole #OrangeManBad!

Ask any seasoned and competent Politician and he, or of course she, will tell you that a few Facts in Politics stand as if cut into stone or soldered in brass!

FACT 1: the Opinion Polls are always accurate as regards the outcome of any popular poll: that is why for instance we remain firmly in the EU, and Hillary Clinton is the current US President, despite all the excitable noise made by deplorables on both sides of the Pond in the run-up to the actual voting!

FACT 2: praising a foreign Politician a week before an Election he is certain to win is a guarantee of his, or of course her, steady goodwill during their term in office: that is why the blistering contempt with which the UK is held by the incoming incumbent will hold no sway during his term in office!

FACT 3: publicly rubbishing a foreign Politician notorious for his vanity is a surefire way of gaining his steady goodwill in such matters as essential trade deals, should he happen to accidentally win after all! But of course he won't and can't, see Fact 1.

So it is a good thing that the deeply competent statemen who govern our public affairs did not keep schtum in the run-up to this US Election as a fool or nincompoop might suggest. Their wise words will certainly win us immense advantage when Kamala Harris AntiFa Donald Trump Good Ol' Jo Biden is running the US of A!

British Establishment: The polls are ironclad, Trump has lost by a mile and nobody thinks otherwise.

Blogista: Nobody including the excellent Borepatch for instance?

British Establishment: But he is an American "blogger", not a British Establishment, he cannot possibly be right. Besides, Professor Pantsdown's Incontrovertibly Incontrovertible Lines of "C" Code prove that 2,147,483,647 kittens will die if #OrangeManBad wins, and there can't be that many kittens on the planet, so it is a logical impossibility.

The New Normal

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;

Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And Universal Darkness buries All.

Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, 1743