Agreed completely, however each person needs to evaluate their level of participation with tyranny and take personal responsibility as well. With fourth grade math skills and a calculator, I knew from the Diamond Princess (Feb. of 2020) that this was being blown into oblivion and proceeded to go 100% mask free, test free and vaccine free. It was like living in a Zombie Apocalypse hell, people who I previously thought had courage and a brain were absolutely offline and happy to comply. Yes, tyrants did this but it's also true that about 97% of humans participated in ways that, had they not, it would have ended much sooner.
You're spot it. We'd been trained for years as societies to crave safety over freedom, and this was the litmus test. Our populations failed.
However, maybe this is the smack in the face we all needed, and I'm now hoping we all have an opportunity to change that math you speak of in your comment.
Definitely need to leave room for pattern recognition. Much like selling "WMD's" and the War on Terror now smacks of bullshit, no one had heard "two weeks to flatten the curve" and had their amygdala assaulted 24/7 prior to March of 2020 so I pray that the next go-round people will have their heads on a swivel.
Pattern recognition is such a fundamental part of human survival. Most people have been to numbed to recognize this, and because of that, in part, we find ourselves screaming into the void.
The social scientists have been hard at work on us all for the past few decades.
Ask? Demand more likely if it comes to that - "Fill the cup citizen, it's your civic duty. We have body equity-inclusive positive incitment-structure pictures to aid you should you require it"
Even worse for the women.
"Since you're not going to use all those eggs you are privileged with, it is your moral duty to donate them to the state for fertilisation with sperm selected for optimal societal diversity and equity."
Couldn't happen? The Socialist Democrat party of Sweden ensured over 70 000 cases of forced abortions and sterilisations, mainly between the end of WW2 and the 1970s, for purely eugenic reasons.
I don't think 'they' have learned anything. My hypothesis for that is that most of the Western world is caught up in the "Putin-bad, Zelinsky-good" mind set without another thought about why things unfolded as they have in Ukraine. And they certainly outshout anyone who wants to have a reasoned discussion about why we should not encourage nuclear war. See Obama speech in Michigan and the yahoos who support him.
I knew the world was changing in spectacular ways when I found myself agreeing with Naomi Wolfe and RFK Jr. Something I never thought I would have ever found myself doing! Agreed, most of these people have shown incredible bravery and character and even made me think that some of the things I disagreed with them about in the past may be worth revisiting/rethinking.
I'm with you. Before Covid, my wife started digging into the vaccines they were trying to pump in our kids, and I thought she was - misguided. I will eat humble pie 100 times over on that one.
We're living in the age where our meaningful but less important difference have to be put aside, because nothing less than the future freedom and identity of humanity is at stake. This is why I pinned my "Meet Me In The Middle" article to my Stack. It's entire thesis is about this needing to cobble together a coalition of the Awake.
Next time you're called a conspiracy theorist, ask that person what they mean. Ask them to define what a conspiracy theorist is. Ask them why they believe you to be one.
Then patiently point out the lies.
2 weeks to flatten the curve. Were you a conspiracy theorist when you - or others like you - said it didn't feel right?
Locking down healthy society isn't right. Were you a conspiracy theorist by pointing out the massive collateral damage it would do, as the massive evidence now points to?
The "standard of care" being administered in hospitals was terribly wrong. Remdesivir, immediate ventilators, depriving people of basic proven OTC, cheap alternatives, and freakin Vitamin C & D, does that make you a conspiracy theorist?
There's something wrong with this "vaccine". Were you a conspiracy theorist when you said you didn't trust it, that it hadn't been tested, that we've never unleashed something like this on such a massive scale publicly, and that it would ultimately fail spectacularly?
We you a conspiracy theorist when you pointed out that the goalposts kept being moved, and then they were ultimately moved?
On second thought, maybe don't waste your breath. Cult members will rarely concede their cult is wrong, despite any evidence you present.
in an ideal situation i would have taken him to task but it was a work senior amongst four of us chatting so i just said 'yea i am. ive been studying viruses for 20 years and read actual medical journals, one of them suggests you are up to 7 times more likely to get covid if you had a jab in the last month.'
I got the jabs early summer 21, despite that I told myself I would wait a year at least. I've been thinking about how I got to that place as a reminder to myself, how information and socially isolated I had become. At the time I was getting a lot of shitty info from NakedCapitalism .com, which site is still acting like China is the model. Another abject lesson I will never forget. I think it was mid fall then, when I watched the Darkhorse podcast from Kirsch, Malone and Weinstein, and from then on it became ever more clear what an abject scam this all was, and that I had been had. I'm still furious about it.
Thankfully, the jabs were no harm on the front end. Since, I have started running woodland trails, as a test. I figure if I drop dead suddenly "for no reason" I'm going to do it in the woods. But mostly I'm just noticing my age and how I am probably 15lbs heavier than ideal.
I've been reflecting how much I have changed the last three years. The last time I changed this much in this short of time, I had lymes disease at the same time the global credit market nearly imploded in 2008. I've been thinking lately, we probably wouldn't be in this mess now if we had let the big banks collapse then and jailed the biggest bankers.
Well, glad you're around still, getting healthier, and most importantly doing something instead of sitting like a victim.
I was also thinking about the credit/housing crash in 2008 and how wildly that affected our reality. TARP, the bailouts, yes, they SHOULD have been allowed to crash and burn. I should have added that to this post.
I was writing at the now defunct Doomstead Diner in the years after. We all said then, because they gave the bankers the keys to the kingdom instead of jail time and breaking up the banks, the next bubble is going to be infinitely worse. Of course I did not quite imagine them using an engineered virus as cover for a controlled global smash and grab, but here we are.
I think I echo SCA when I say that when you write like you did in that article, it's your highest and best. We definitely need the other stuff - there's a LOT in the Gutter - but when you access your academic side, it's pretty breathtaking.
But I DO absolutely love your high school guttermouth self too.
The silly stuff is mostly there just to keep there from being a drought during the times when I know I'm not going to be able to write for a good number of days at a time because I'm really busy or sick or depressed- to keep people engaged.
If I were a perfect person executing my intentions for the stack perfectly, it would just be composed essays three times a week and maybe a Thing about farm stuff because people like it.
But sometimes mom just throws on a microwave pizza.
I also like a good taco salad. You know, one of those bowls made of hard taco shell that is filled with things like meat, cheese, nacho cheese, sour cream, ground meat, and the occasional bit of iceberg lettuce. One like in this video.
Unlike most people, I do remember most things that have happened in recent history over my lifetime and I've always felt alone in my memories because most people just seem to forget as long as something doesn't affect them personally (even though in reality, all major events affect everyone even if they choose not to see it). This time it feels different. Judging by the thousands of comments I've read ever since Emily begged for amnesty, I see something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime: people are not forgetting this time! Combined with the desperation we see in the tyrants all over the world and it adds up to a bit of hope! I don't think we will have the same world or America we have been spoiled into expecting again in our lifetimes (and I actually think that's a good thing in many ways), but I do think there's a chance that our progeny will have a shot at what we've had after some very challenging decades. That chance totally depends on whether we choose to remember this time, demand accountability and real change and actually do something to implement that change and then follow through with making sure the next generations remembers as well and moves forward into the new hopeful future with a vow on their lips to never allow this madness to ever happen again.
Rob, I think the key point here is "accountability".
Without true accountability - trials, massive lawsuits, humiliation, exposure, prison - we have zero shot at a sane future. Like any criminal, if they aren't caught and brought to justice, they'll just keep doing it. Most criminals do their crimes over and over, and only then when they're caught do we see just how habitual that pattern was. Unless they're caught and held accountable, they continue to commit their crimes with alacrity.
It's no different for this cult. It was so good to see so much scorn and rage hurled at the Emily Oster article, and we need much more of this. It's the only way to break this pattern. At the VERY least, it will give these people a second's pause before they try it again as long as they see their peers shamed, imprisoned, and cast out of our society.
This is a GREAT point. One of my biggest frustrations about all this (and there are MANY) is how the Boomer generation essentially folded, completely paralyzed by fear.
This supposedly rebel generation of the 60's and 70's, these "damn the man" hippies, these "for the children" bleeding hearts simply dived into a cave due to a boogieman. I think more than any other demographic, this one was most responsible for the total implosion of our societies.
They used our children as human shields against their own fear.
They used the older generation as human shields and red herrings against their fear.
They shut the doors to their own families out of fear (I feel this personally).
They screamed and shrieked "COMPLIANCE!" even through their parent's generation literally stood down Nazis and madmen and totalitarians because of fear.
Now, let me be clear, there's MORE than enough culpability in my generation and the ones after me. Gen Xers and Millennials certainly piled right on with macabre delight. However, I have a special bone to pick with the Boomers, because of ANY generation, they should have been the ones to put a quick stop to this.
The real virus has ALWAYS been fear, and it always will be.
I’m always amused with the blanket description some use regarding my generation. It’s similar to all the “ism” and “ist” words thrown around these days, too bad there’s not a tidy word for it.
May I point out that most of the people making decisions around what happened regarding Covid and inducing all the fear, were members of the generation that raised us Fauci, Biden, Trump etc. The average age for the Boomer generation is 58. The average age of an American farmer by the way.
We didn’t shut our doors to any family member. None wanted to come because they feared giving us Covid. So there’s that version of fear.
We stayed at home mainly because my husband has Becker’s muscular dystrophy, which is a rare form of muscular dystrophy. It constricts the lungs and has destroyed his heart function. He has a pacemaker and defibrillator because of it. Have you ever had a charley-horse? This disease is like having a charley-horse in every muscle, all of the time. On top of this he has chronic asthma. So we had a bundle of issues of concern. And in our family, this was the person telling everyone younger to go live their lives. He didn’t ever wear a mask, nor does he believe the covid shots were effective.
We’ve avoided eating in restaurants mainly because of the all the nonsense that went on just to participate. It was just easier to cook at home or carry out. We decided yesterday that we were tired of it all and are just going to live.
As for the fear, for me, it was fear of all the irrational thinking and pitting against each other. I didn’t comply. In any way. In fact, through my eyes all I saw was people younger than me falling all over themselves to comply in every way, right down to the 5th booster. And now they all have some sort of anxiety or emotional stress issues.
So, it’s always been the prudent thing to understand an individual situation before placing a judgmental blanket over a large group of people, you don’t really know.
I’ve read some of your previous Boomer rants, and perhaps you need a better sampling.
How do you imagine the Boomers could have put a quick stop to Covid?
I hear and appreciate your rebuke/response, I really do. I'm REALLY wrestling with this question internally and am trying to understand my own angst specifically towards my parent's generation.
I was talking to my wife just last night about this because for the first time since 2019, we're allowed to take our kids to see their grandfather (my father-in-law) and step grandmother.
This man and woman, now in their late 60s/early 70s, both served in the military for most of their adult lives. He's a retired one-star general from the Air Force, and she was an Air Force wife, which I count as service. This is a man who's testified before Congress; has commanded significant portions of our nuclear arsenal; drank with Soviets; etc. He's forgotten more about defense and security than I'll ever know. Their entire lives were devoted to protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States from all threats, foreign and domestic.
Yet somehow, they have been living and promoting Covidstan for the past two years as true believers. She has become the personification of a "Karen". Knowing that their own parents beat back the Nazis, knowing this is the generation that perpetuated the radicalism of the 60s and is supposed to be "anti-establishment", I have a very bad taste in my mouth for this generation.
This generation SHOULD have clearly remembered the sacrifice of their parents.
This generation of "anti-establishment" SHOULD have cried the loudest against any of this madness and truly lived up to their anti-establishment ethos.
Yet this generation was the first "helicopter parent" generation. This the generation that nerfed my generation (I'm 45).
This is the generation that found great power as academics and perverted the minds of my generation (and those behind me) by taking over the universities and brainwashing millions that have come after them into thinking Western Society - BAD, Free Market - BAD, Socialism - GOOD, Authoritarianism - GOOD.
I look at this generation as the spawn of so many societal ills, a legitimately entitled generation blessed with the greatest chance to expand the blessings of individual liberty and freedom. Instead, from where I sit, this is the generation that by and large squandered it all, and in doing so created a lineage that has lead us to the Woke, fear-driven madness that we now wade in.
So that's where I'm coming from. I've read a TON of history about the 60s. I wanted to be a hippy, and if I could have, I'd have traveled back to Haight-Ashbury and probably traveled with The Grateful Dead. I've studied relentlessly that era and how it was a massive disruption along the timeline of our country. There's no doubt that out of the 60s came a fundamental change in how the West operates. We can debate on the causes, but it's clear that your generation opened a Pandora's box that we're still feeling today.
I'm completely willing to admit that I'm off-base, unfair in my judgment, and misguided. I'm honestly working through these thoughts in real time. I know I need to separate the individual from the "label" or from generalities, because that's how I want to always see the world. I've written posts about valuing the individual over the masses.
As I head to see my in-laws down in Florida for the first time since 2019 with my family, including their two grandkids, I'm faced with feelings and emotions that as I said I'm wrestling with. Again, I LITERALLY had almost this same conversation with my wife last night. When I look at them now, knowing they're willingly part of a system that I absolutely abhor, I'm struggling to remove the system I hate from the individuals who I love.
To sum this up:
1. I hope I've clarified where I'm coming from when I write with some scorn about your generation. I in no way intend to damn the individuals who've had to wade through the complexities of these last few years, including you.
2. I've confessed to really wrestling with this bitterness towards a mass, a generation, and I'm still a work in progress on this. Thank you for bearing with me, challenging me, and I would love to continue to be challenged and even rebuked if that feels necessary. It's only going to help me grow further and really make sure I'm valid and concrete in my beliefs and convictions, not misguided.
Here’s what I hear, “a black person beat me up once so therefore I think all black people are bad”.
That’s kind of what is being said here about Boomers.
It’s a narrow minded point of view. I wrote a piece recently on that topic, might piss you off or it might not. It was about how there are no longer comedians because today’s society can’t deal with what they may say. You can find it in my Substack.
May I suggest the parents you loathe and love are and always were, liberal elites?
The conservative members of our generation, and I think that’s where you get lost in your thinking, never wanted to be hippies, do not agree with the group-think that is currently present on college campuses, find the current culture quite horrifying.
While some Boomers got degrees in women’s studies, many of us did the work that makes this country go.
It’s why I mentioned the average age of a Boomer and a farmer is 58. There are no new farmers coming up. The work is too hard.
There are always good eggs and bad eggs in a generation, that will always be true.
With the pandora’s box that got opened, do you mean the introduction to or invention of: Ethernet, Internet, Email, World Wide Web, Credit Cards, ATM, Modern Telephone, Fax, Mobile Phones/Cell phones, Disposable Cell Phone, Space Exploration, Moon Landing, Apple II – PC’s, Scanning and Tunneling microscope, Digital Television and Movies, Satellite Television, Omnimax film, 3D Movies, Drive in Movies, Drive in Restaurant, Fast food/Drive through, Shopping Malls, DNA Finger printing, Artificial Heart (Jarvik 7), Viagra, Contraceptives, Modern prosthesis, Controlled Drug Release technology, Synthetic Skin, Ambulatory Infusion Pump (insulin injection), Portable Dialysis machine, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Segway Personal Transporter, Optical Character Recognition, Digital flat screen TV & Computer, Touch Screens, Digital music, Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Universal Serial Bus port (USB connection), Lithium Batteries, CMOS Active Pixel Image sensor (phone camera), Automated External Defibrillator (AED), E-Commerce (Amazon), Blogging, Internet relay chat (Social Media), Instant Pot?
Created by Boomers with real degrees.
We didn’t squander anything, we introduced these things to the world. How some of them get used, like the Internet and Internet relay chat is what has been squandered.
How are you going to feel when your children look at your generation and proclaim you squandered all of the technology your parents left you?
There are many in our generation who raised well adjusted Millennials (born between 1980 and 1994). They are hard to find in the mobs of pink haired tattooed loud mouths usually featured.
I homeschooled my Millennial up to college. (I am writing a series about that at my Substack.)
He got his degree in Aerospace Engineering from one of the top ten Engineering schools in the United States. He is a well-adjusted, confident, self-reliant individual. He is debt free and recently bought a house.
So, if you really are a work in progress, I think there might be some room for divergent thinking about us on your part. You’re too young to not have an open mind.
Do you know what a Venn Diagram is?
And it has nothing to do with Kamala Harris’s love of Venn Diagrams (she probably doesn’t know what one is).
Look at our generation as a complicated Venn Diagram.
As a translation, it's rather good as it captures the lakonik matter-of-fact style of the original.
This Wiki collects all of the old texts, not just the norse/viking era ones - in the nordic tongues though, so reading and translationg might be heavy going.
In swedish, the stanzas would look like this (the numbering is different due to differences in rythm and pronounciation between old icelandic and swedish, and then from swedish to english):
29. Vis tyckes den
som fråga kan
och svar gifva:
Altid öfverskyle
andras brister
mennisko-söner.
---
77. Bort dör din hjord,
bort dö dina fränder
och sjelf dör du äfven:
men rycktet aldrig
skall dö för den,
som sig ett godt förvärfvar.
78. Bort dör din hjord,
bort dö dina fränder
och sjelf dör du äfven:
men ett vet jag,
som aldrig dör,
domen om den som dog.
This is from a translation done in 1818 by Afzelius. He really brings out that it is to be spoken aloud, almost chanted in a rythm close to a march - the downside to oral traditions. So much was lost between the coming of christianity and Snorre writing down what he could glean from people and sources.
I really want to recommend Egil's Saga as it is a contemporaty saga from that time, describing real-life events in Norway and Iceland. There are several english translations, thoug I can't vouch for their accuracy, not having read any - maybe Guttermouth can aid in that? Found this one online:
A man who had been given leave to sleep overnight at a farmstead, and had been joined in the hay by the farmer's daughter, exclaimed when the father of the girl he had shared the night with ran him through with a spear (while measuring between finger and thumb the spear's shaft jutting through his torso):
"This shaft is far from as hard and thick as the one I spitted your willing daughter on during the night" and then he died, and all who heard said it was a good death.
Rikard's Swedish translation is obviously more authoritative as his language has departed relatively little from Old Norse vocabulary; for English speakers I recommend the translation by Christine Fell; I think there are still modern editions in print.
If you're interested in this stuff, I cite Havamal/Voluspa in a lot of my older Things and a few essays; I should probably lead more of my posts with it.
Everything in Old Norse is written in verse because it's meant to be sung as oral history; the stanza structure that Rikard points out is a (mostly) codified thing.
The Volsupa is kind of a Viking "creation myth" that includes a past and future cycle including the destructive/regenerative Ragnarok. The Havamal, that Rikard quoted, is a loosely-connected series of adages attributed to Odinn giving advice to men that are essentially proverbs or "guides to life" about dealing with various situations in business, warfare, romance, and generally mature living.
My copies have both bundled as companion sets.
For a really cool plain-English version of the Havamal, do a search for "cowboy Havamal video" (the link is also in a Gutter archive somewhere) where a renowned Old Norse professor performs the whole Havamal in the plain-English style of his grandfather.
Thank you for much-needed assistance! For obvious reasons, I'm not very up-to-date on english versions of the old norse sagas and verses.
In the region of Älvdalen (Elfdale* in english I believe) the local dialect of dalmål ("tongue of the Dales", mål being old swedish/norse for language/speech) is different enough from modern swedish as to sound as another language alltogether, since it is much closer to the ur-form of the general tongue of old.
For a good example of how it sounds and how my ancestors may have sounded, this is Lena Willemark reading the swedish translation of Tennyson's "Ring Out Wild Bells" from 1850 (it's a New Year's tradition here to read that poem, don't ask me why):
*Älv means slow moving river, elf being the older spelling of älv; dal is dale, and -en is the article. So it is entirely possible to translate it to Riverdale too :)
Wouldn't you know it, the wife recognised dr Jacksons voice immediately -she already knew about him, her being more well-learned on this topic than me - when we lived in Scania she used to attend gatherings at the viking camp in Foteviken: [https://foteviken.se/en]
They're a good resource for basic factual stuff. Many of their other viewpoints I profoundly disagree with and some of their contributors, I'd say, are batshit crazy.
But the explorations of Jewish mysticism might interest you; they explain extremely complex concepts as clearly as such things can be approached.
This dystopia has been in service for a lot longer than you think.
Orwell wrote 1984 after he was a part of instituting such things in Asia for the UK evil empire.
Trust the science has always been the clarion call of the scammers. They used that to demonize those that didn't believe the earth was the center of the solar system.
Every time people are fearful, they forget to validate whether the fear is justified or artificial. It seems that we are in a period not unlike the times of the inquisition, for example, where the artificial fears are used to distract people from what they should be really afraid of.
But at least this time, there's no burning witches or torture for infidels.
I think despite the centralization, people are less gullible these days. This con-vid narrative worked only because it was the first time that they implemented the fear of a virus, based on the legends of the Spanish flu, etc (which was not caused by a virus).
After being lied to, people will not fall for the same nonsense again. That's why they now downplay con-vid and pump up fears of usually mild diseases like rsv and the flu.
Agreed completely, however each person needs to evaluate their level of participation with tyranny and take personal responsibility as well. With fourth grade math skills and a calculator, I knew from the Diamond Princess (Feb. of 2020) that this was being blown into oblivion and proceeded to go 100% mask free, test free and vaccine free. It was like living in a Zombie Apocalypse hell, people who I previously thought had courage and a brain were absolutely offline and happy to comply. Yes, tyrants did this but it's also true that about 97% of humans participated in ways that, had they not, it would have ended much sooner.
You're spot it. We'd been trained for years as societies to crave safety over freedom, and this was the litmus test. Our populations failed.
However, maybe this is the smack in the face we all needed, and I'm now hoping we all have an opportunity to change that math you speak of in your comment.
Definitely need to leave room for pattern recognition. Much like selling "WMD's" and the War on Terror now smacks of bullshit, no one had heard "two weeks to flatten the curve" and had their amygdala assaulted 24/7 prior to March of 2020 so I pray that the next go-round people will have their heads on a swivel.
Pattern recognition is such a fundamental part of human survival. Most people have been to numbed to recognize this, and because of that, in part, we find ourselves screaming into the void.
The social scientists have been hard at work on us all for the past few decades.
I'm convinced that there will be a time when they ask us non-jabbed for blood donations.
Or pure sperm.
Ask? Demand more likely if it comes to that - "Fill the cup citizen, it's your civic duty. We have body equity-inclusive positive incitment-structure pictures to aid you should you require it"
Even worse for the women.
"Since you're not going to use all those eggs you are privileged with, it is your moral duty to donate them to the state for fertilisation with sperm selected for optimal societal diversity and equity."
Couldn't happen? The Socialist Democrat party of Sweden ensured over 70 000 cases of forced abortions and sterilisations, mainly between the end of WW2 and the 1970s, for purely eugenic reasons.
"shudders". Rikard, stark, terrifying statement, but I can't say you're potentially wrong.
They won't get mine without a huge fight.
I don't think 'they' have learned anything. My hypothesis for that is that most of the Western world is caught up in the "Putin-bad, Zelinsky-good" mind set without another thought about why things unfolded as they have in Ukraine. And they certainly outshout anyone who wants to have a reasoned discussion about why we should not encourage nuclear war. See Obama speech in Michigan and the yahoos who support him.
That's very true.
AMEN
I'm beyond glad of how many red-pilled intellectuals are publishing books on the madness of the last two years.
Thank you, Naomi Wolf
Thank you, Dr. Robert Malone
Thank you, Justin Hart
Thank you, Peter Navarro
Thank you, Robert Kennedy Jr.
You've documented in print the madness that we've endured for history.
*I'm sure I've missed someone important. Please add on anyone I've unfortunately missed.
I PRAY this list is the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
Haha, the tip.
Just the tip.
Am I being a bad influence? 😂
Haha, hell no, I pretty much live in the gutter. I've just learned to edit myself more over the years in polite society.
My good man, this isn't polite society. This is the internet!
I knew the world was changing in spectacular ways when I found myself agreeing with Naomi Wolfe and RFK Jr. Something I never thought I would have ever found myself doing! Agreed, most of these people have shown incredible bravery and character and even made me think that some of the things I disagreed with them about in the past may be worth revisiting/rethinking.
It’s called being red-pilled in the other direction, my friend!
Can relate!
I'm with you. Before Covid, my wife started digging into the vaccines they were trying to pump in our kids, and I thought she was - misguided. I will eat humble pie 100 times over on that one.
We're living in the age where our meaningful but less important difference have to be put aside, because nothing less than the future freedom and identity of humanity is at stake. This is why I pinned my "Meet Me In The Middle" article to my Stack. It's entire thesis is about this needing to cobble together a coalition of the Awake.
https://bherr.substack.com/p/meet-me-in-the-middle
i watched v for vendetta 4 times during the last 3 years. i dont do that with many films certainly not in such a short space of time.
i was called a conspiracy theorist only yesterday for pointing out that another jabbed co-worker was off work again, twice in a month with a virus
forget, no i dont think so.
forgive, maybe if the apology is really really something
Next time you're called a conspiracy theorist, ask that person what they mean. Ask them to define what a conspiracy theorist is. Ask them why they believe you to be one.
Then patiently point out the lies.
2 weeks to flatten the curve. Were you a conspiracy theorist when you - or others like you - said it didn't feel right?
Locking down healthy society isn't right. Were you a conspiracy theorist by pointing out the massive collateral damage it would do, as the massive evidence now points to?
The "standard of care" being administered in hospitals was terribly wrong. Remdesivir, immediate ventilators, depriving people of basic proven OTC, cheap alternatives, and freakin Vitamin C & D, does that make you a conspiracy theorist?
There's something wrong with this "vaccine". Were you a conspiracy theorist when you said you didn't trust it, that it hadn't been tested, that we've never unleashed something like this on such a massive scale publicly, and that it would ultimately fail spectacularly?
We you a conspiracy theorist when you pointed out that the goalposts kept being moved, and then they were ultimately moved?
On second thought, maybe don't waste your breath. Cult members will rarely concede their cult is wrong, despite any evidence you present.
in an ideal situation i would have taken him to task but it was a work senior amongst four of us chatting so i just said 'yea i am. ive been studying viruses for 20 years and read actual medical journals, one of them suggests you are up to 7 times more likely to get covid if you had a jab in the last month.'
it shut him up enough
I got the phizer double tap because they were forcing our elders to die alone and I fell for the propaganda that I would never see my parents again.
I may forgive, BUT I WILL NEVER FORGET.
Remdesivir is straight up mass murder, straight out of the mouth of Anthonee Phauce'.
I wrote about Ms Oster's elitist piece too.
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/brrr-thats-cold
Great piece, and I subscribed.
What was your "aha, oh shit" moment when you realized you'd been taken?
Do you have any side effects from the jabs?
Thanks!
I got the jabs early summer 21, despite that I told myself I would wait a year at least. I've been thinking about how I got to that place as a reminder to myself, how information and socially isolated I had become. At the time I was getting a lot of shitty info from NakedCapitalism .com, which site is still acting like China is the model. Another abject lesson I will never forget. I think it was mid fall then, when I watched the Darkhorse podcast from Kirsch, Malone and Weinstein, and from then on it became ever more clear what an abject scam this all was, and that I had been had. I'm still furious about it.
Thankfully, the jabs were no harm on the front end. Since, I have started running woodland trails, as a test. I figure if I drop dead suddenly "for no reason" I'm going to do it in the woods. But mostly I'm just noticing my age and how I am probably 15lbs heavier than ideal.
I've been reflecting how much I have changed the last three years. The last time I changed this much in this short of time, I had lymes disease at the same time the global credit market nearly imploded in 2008. I've been thinking lately, we probably wouldn't be in this mess now if we had let the big banks collapse then and jailed the biggest bankers.
Well, glad you're around still, getting healthier, and most importantly doing something instead of sitting like a victim.
I was also thinking about the credit/housing crash in 2008 and how wildly that affected our reality. TARP, the bailouts, yes, they SHOULD have been allowed to crash and burn. I should have added that to this post.
https://bherr.substack.com/p/the-controlled-decline-of-western
I was writing at the now defunct Doomstead Diner in the years after. We all said then, because they gave the bankers the keys to the kingdom instead of jail time and breaking up the banks, the next bubble is going to be infinitely worse. Of course I did not quite imagine them using an engineered virus as cover for a controlled global smash and grab, but here we are.
Thank you for the high praise of an endorsement.
Je me souviens - I will remember.
https://guttermouth.substack.com/p/je-me-souviens
I think I echo SCA when I say that when you write like you did in that article, it's your highest and best. We definitely need the other stuff - there's a LOT in the Gutter - but when you access your academic side, it's pretty breathtaking.
But I DO absolutely love your high school guttermouth self too.
The silly stuff is mostly there just to keep there from being a drought during the times when I know I'm not going to be able to write for a good number of days at a time because I'm really busy or sick or depressed- to keep people engaged.
If I were a perfect person executing my intentions for the stack perfectly, it would just be composed essays three times a week and maybe a Thing about farm stuff because people like it.
But sometimes mom just throws on a microwave pizza.
Oh I know. I'm not being critical. Life happens. I love the whole package, Guttermouth. Even the microwave pizzas.
Without the microwave pizza, I'd never eat the salad.
This is why smarter people than I invented pizza salad.
I also like a good taco salad. You know, one of those bowls made of hard taco shell that is filled with things like meat, cheese, nacho cheese, sour cream, ground meat, and the occasional bit of iceberg lettuce. One like in this video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXWq2AVlrsY
Mr. Giant Taco Salad Inventor
I couldn't find an extant copy of the ad, but do you remember the old Fosters beer ad for "salad," which was a steak with a sprig of parsley?
I 'memba.
“A 12,000 calorie salad!” 🤣🤣🤣
What is this necromancy of which you speak?
Unlike most people, I do remember most things that have happened in recent history over my lifetime and I've always felt alone in my memories because most people just seem to forget as long as something doesn't affect them personally (even though in reality, all major events affect everyone even if they choose not to see it). This time it feels different. Judging by the thousands of comments I've read ever since Emily begged for amnesty, I see something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime: people are not forgetting this time! Combined with the desperation we see in the tyrants all over the world and it adds up to a bit of hope! I don't think we will have the same world or America we have been spoiled into expecting again in our lifetimes (and I actually think that's a good thing in many ways), but I do think there's a chance that our progeny will have a shot at what we've had after some very challenging decades. That chance totally depends on whether we choose to remember this time, demand accountability and real change and actually do something to implement that change and then follow through with making sure the next generations remembers as well and moves forward into the new hopeful future with a vow on their lips to never allow this madness to ever happen again.
Rob, I think the key point here is "accountability".
Without true accountability - trials, massive lawsuits, humiliation, exposure, prison - we have zero shot at a sane future. Like any criminal, if they aren't caught and brought to justice, they'll just keep doing it. Most criminals do their crimes over and over, and only then when they're caught do we see just how habitual that pattern was. Unless they're caught and held accountable, they continue to commit their crimes with alacrity.
It's no different for this cult. It was so good to see so much scorn and rage hurled at the Emily Oster article, and we need much more of this. It's the only way to break this pattern. At the VERY least, it will give these people a second's pause before they try it again as long as they see their peers shamed, imprisoned, and cast out of our society.
How about adding fear to the list?
The fear “they” inflicted for many of us over age 50?
I am going to remember Thursday, November 3rd. It was the first time in 2.5 years we actually sat down in a restaurant for lunch instead of carry out.
And would you care to expand on that last line about going out to eat? Yesterday was the first day you've gone out to eat since pre-March 16th?
Yes.
This is a GREAT point. One of my biggest frustrations about all this (and there are MANY) is how the Boomer generation essentially folded, completely paralyzed by fear.
This supposedly rebel generation of the 60's and 70's, these "damn the man" hippies, these "for the children" bleeding hearts simply dived into a cave due to a boogieman. I think more than any other demographic, this one was most responsible for the total implosion of our societies.
They used our children as human shields against their own fear.
They used the older generation as human shields and red herrings against their fear.
They shut the doors to their own families out of fear (I feel this personally).
They screamed and shrieked "COMPLIANCE!" even through their parent's generation literally stood down Nazis and madmen and totalitarians because of fear.
Now, let me be clear, there's MORE than enough culpability in my generation and the ones after me. Gen Xers and Millennials certainly piled right on with macabre delight. However, I have a special bone to pick with the Boomers, because of ANY generation, they should have been the ones to put a quick stop to this.
The real virus has ALWAYS been fear, and it always will be.
Great comment.
I’m always amused with the blanket description some use regarding my generation. It’s similar to all the “ism” and “ist” words thrown around these days, too bad there’s not a tidy word for it.
May I point out that most of the people making decisions around what happened regarding Covid and inducing all the fear, were members of the generation that raised us Fauci, Biden, Trump etc. The average age for the Boomer generation is 58. The average age of an American farmer by the way.
We didn’t shut our doors to any family member. None wanted to come because they feared giving us Covid. So there’s that version of fear.
We stayed at home mainly because my husband has Becker’s muscular dystrophy, which is a rare form of muscular dystrophy. It constricts the lungs and has destroyed his heart function. He has a pacemaker and defibrillator because of it. Have you ever had a charley-horse? This disease is like having a charley-horse in every muscle, all of the time. On top of this he has chronic asthma. So we had a bundle of issues of concern. And in our family, this was the person telling everyone younger to go live their lives. He didn’t ever wear a mask, nor does he believe the covid shots were effective.
We’ve avoided eating in restaurants mainly because of the all the nonsense that went on just to participate. It was just easier to cook at home or carry out. We decided yesterday that we were tired of it all and are just going to live.
As for the fear, for me, it was fear of all the irrational thinking and pitting against each other. I didn’t comply. In any way. In fact, through my eyes all I saw was people younger than me falling all over themselves to comply in every way, right down to the 5th booster. And now they all have some sort of anxiety or emotional stress issues.
So, it’s always been the prudent thing to understand an individual situation before placing a judgmental blanket over a large group of people, you don’t really know.
I’ve read some of your previous Boomer rants, and perhaps you need a better sampling.
How do you imagine the Boomers could have put a quick stop to Covid?
I hear and appreciate your rebuke/response, I really do. I'm REALLY wrestling with this question internally and am trying to understand my own angst specifically towards my parent's generation.
I was talking to my wife just last night about this because for the first time since 2019, we're allowed to take our kids to see their grandfather (my father-in-law) and step grandmother.
This man and woman, now in their late 60s/early 70s, both served in the military for most of their adult lives. He's a retired one-star general from the Air Force, and she was an Air Force wife, which I count as service. This is a man who's testified before Congress; has commanded significant portions of our nuclear arsenal; drank with Soviets; etc. He's forgotten more about defense and security than I'll ever know. Their entire lives were devoted to protecting and defending the Constitution of the United States from all threats, foreign and domestic.
Yet somehow, they have been living and promoting Covidstan for the past two years as true believers. She has become the personification of a "Karen". Knowing that their own parents beat back the Nazis, knowing this is the generation that perpetuated the radicalism of the 60s and is supposed to be "anti-establishment", I have a very bad taste in my mouth for this generation.
This generation SHOULD have clearly remembered the sacrifice of their parents.
This generation of "anti-establishment" SHOULD have cried the loudest against any of this madness and truly lived up to their anti-establishment ethos.
Yet this generation was the first "helicopter parent" generation. This the generation that nerfed my generation (I'm 45).
This is the generation that found great power as academics and perverted the minds of my generation (and those behind me) by taking over the universities and brainwashing millions that have come after them into thinking Western Society - BAD, Free Market - BAD, Socialism - GOOD, Authoritarianism - GOOD.
I look at this generation as the spawn of so many societal ills, a legitimately entitled generation blessed with the greatest chance to expand the blessings of individual liberty and freedom. Instead, from where I sit, this is the generation that by and large squandered it all, and in doing so created a lineage that has lead us to the Woke, fear-driven madness that we now wade in.
So that's where I'm coming from. I've read a TON of history about the 60s. I wanted to be a hippy, and if I could have, I'd have traveled back to Haight-Ashbury and probably traveled with The Grateful Dead. I've studied relentlessly that era and how it was a massive disruption along the timeline of our country. There's no doubt that out of the 60s came a fundamental change in how the West operates. We can debate on the causes, but it's clear that your generation opened a Pandora's box that we're still feeling today.
I'm completely willing to admit that I'm off-base, unfair in my judgment, and misguided. I'm honestly working through these thoughts in real time. I know I need to separate the individual from the "label" or from generalities, because that's how I want to always see the world. I've written posts about valuing the individual over the masses.
As I head to see my in-laws down in Florida for the first time since 2019 with my family, including their two grandkids, I'm faced with feelings and emotions that as I said I'm wrestling with. Again, I LITERALLY had almost this same conversation with my wife last night. When I look at them now, knowing they're willingly part of a system that I absolutely abhor, I'm struggling to remove the system I hate from the individuals who I love.
To sum this up:
1. I hope I've clarified where I'm coming from when I write with some scorn about your generation. I in no way intend to damn the individuals who've had to wade through the complexities of these last few years, including you.
2. I've confessed to really wrestling with this bitterness towards a mass, a generation, and I'm still a work in progress on this. Thank you for bearing with me, challenging me, and I would love to continue to be challenged and even rebuked if that feels necessary. It's only going to help me grow further and really make sure I'm valid and concrete in my beliefs and convictions, not misguided.
Here’s what I hear, “a black person beat me up once so therefore I think all black people are bad”.
That’s kind of what is being said here about Boomers.
It’s a narrow minded point of view. I wrote a piece recently on that topic, might piss you off or it might not. It was about how there are no longer comedians because today’s society can’t deal with what they may say. You can find it in my Substack.
May I suggest the parents you loathe and love are and always were, liberal elites?
The conservative members of our generation, and I think that’s where you get lost in your thinking, never wanted to be hippies, do not agree with the group-think that is currently present on college campuses, find the current culture quite horrifying.
While some Boomers got degrees in women’s studies, many of us did the work that makes this country go.
It’s why I mentioned the average age of a Boomer and a farmer is 58. There are no new farmers coming up. The work is too hard.
There are always good eggs and bad eggs in a generation, that will always be true.
With the pandora’s box that got opened, do you mean the introduction to or invention of: Ethernet, Internet, Email, World Wide Web, Credit Cards, ATM, Modern Telephone, Fax, Mobile Phones/Cell phones, Disposable Cell Phone, Space Exploration, Moon Landing, Apple II – PC’s, Scanning and Tunneling microscope, Digital Television and Movies, Satellite Television, Omnimax film, 3D Movies, Drive in Movies, Drive in Restaurant, Fast food/Drive through, Shopping Malls, DNA Finger printing, Artificial Heart (Jarvik 7), Viagra, Contraceptives, Modern prosthesis, Controlled Drug Release technology, Synthetic Skin, Ambulatory Infusion Pump (insulin injection), Portable Dialysis machine, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Segway Personal Transporter, Optical Character Recognition, Digital flat screen TV & Computer, Touch Screens, Digital music, Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, Universal Serial Bus port (USB connection), Lithium Batteries, CMOS Active Pixel Image sensor (phone camera), Automated External Defibrillator (AED), E-Commerce (Amazon), Blogging, Internet relay chat (Social Media), Instant Pot?
Created by Boomers with real degrees.
We didn’t squander anything, we introduced these things to the world. How some of them get used, like the Internet and Internet relay chat is what has been squandered.
How are you going to feel when your children look at your generation and proclaim you squandered all of the technology your parents left you?
There are many in our generation who raised well adjusted Millennials (born between 1980 and 1994). They are hard to find in the mobs of pink haired tattooed loud mouths usually featured.
I homeschooled my Millennial up to college. (I am writing a series about that at my Substack.)
He got his degree in Aerospace Engineering from one of the top ten Engineering schools in the United States. He is a well-adjusted, confident, self-reliant individual. He is debt free and recently bought a house.
So, if you really are a work in progress, I think there might be some room for divergent thinking about us on your part. You’re too young to not have an open mind.
Do you know what a Venn Diagram is?
And it has nothing to do with Kamala Harris’s love of Venn Diagrams (she probably doesn’t know what one is).
Look at our generation as a complicated Venn Diagram.
It might lessen the anxiety.
We dig it…we really do. March 16th... A date… Stay tuned, we will work some graphics art and memes for this.
Seriously? Awesome. Let's run with this.
We’re on it. I’ll post the drop to the comment section later on when we finish.
The ancestor's said it better than I'll ever be able to:
28.
Wise he is deemed who can question well,
and also answer back:
the sons of men can no secret make
of the tidings told in their midst.
---
75.
Cattle die and kinsmen die,
thyself too soon must die,
but one thing never, I ween, will die, --
fair fame of one who has earned.
76.
Cattle die and kinsmen die,
thyself too soon must die,
but one thing never, I ween, will die, --
the doom on each one dead.
From Hávamál, the words of the High One, in Olive Bray's 1908 (?) translation.
Snipping stanzas like this rally does it a disservice but I could hadly copy-paste the whole thing now could I?
Is that Viking lore/proverb? It's beautiful.
Yes, you can read the whole thing here:
[https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/havamal.html]
As a translation, it's rather good as it captures the lakonik matter-of-fact style of the original.
This Wiki collects all of the old texts, not just the norse/viking era ones - in the nordic tongues though, so reading and translationg might be heavy going.
[http://heimskringla.no/wiki/Forside]
In swedish, the stanzas would look like this (the numbering is different due to differences in rythm and pronounciation between old icelandic and swedish, and then from swedish to english):
29. Vis tyckes den
som fråga kan
och svar gifva:
Altid öfverskyle
andras brister
mennisko-söner.
---
77. Bort dör din hjord,
bort dö dina fränder
och sjelf dör du äfven:
men rycktet aldrig
skall dö för den,
som sig ett godt förvärfvar.
78. Bort dör din hjord,
bort dö dina fränder
och sjelf dör du äfven:
men ett vet jag,
som aldrig dör,
domen om den som dog.
This is from a translation done in 1818 by Afzelius. He really brings out that it is to be spoken aloud, almost chanted in a rythm close to a march - the downside to oral traditions. So much was lost between the coming of christianity and Snorre writing down what he could glean from people and sources.
I really want to recommend Egil's Saga as it is a contemporaty saga from that time, describing real-life events in Norway and Iceland. There are several english translations, thoug I can't vouch for their accuracy, not having read any - maybe Guttermouth can aid in that? Found this one online:
[https://www.sagadb.org/egils_saga.en]
Old joke from those days:
A man who had been given leave to sleep overnight at a farmstead, and had been joined in the hay by the farmer's daughter, exclaimed when the father of the girl he had shared the night with ran him through with a spear (while measuring between finger and thumb the spear's shaft jutting through his torso):
"This shaft is far from as hard and thick as the one I spitted your willing daughter on during the night" and then he died, and all who heard said it was a good death.
Damn! That would be the ultimate last gasp.
Rikard's Swedish translation is obviously more authoritative as his language has departed relatively little from Old Norse vocabulary; for English speakers I recommend the translation by Christine Fell; I think there are still modern editions in print.
I'm interested, I love the guidance both of you are giving me on this! Thank you.
If you're interested in this stuff, I cite Havamal/Voluspa in a lot of my older Things and a few essays; I should probably lead more of my posts with it.
Everything in Old Norse is written in verse because it's meant to be sung as oral history; the stanza structure that Rikard points out is a (mostly) codified thing.
The Volsupa is kind of a Viking "creation myth" that includes a past and future cycle including the destructive/regenerative Ragnarok. The Havamal, that Rikard quoted, is a loosely-connected series of adages attributed to Odinn giving advice to men that are essentially proverbs or "guides to life" about dealing with various situations in business, warfare, romance, and generally mature living.
My copies have both bundled as companion sets.
For a really cool plain-English version of the Havamal, do a search for "cowboy Havamal video" (the link is also in a Gutter archive somewhere) where a renowned Old Norse professor performs the whole Havamal in the plain-English style of his grandfather.
Thank you for much-needed assistance! For obvious reasons, I'm not very up-to-date on english versions of the old norse sagas and verses.
In the region of Älvdalen (Elfdale* in english I believe) the local dialect of dalmål ("tongue of the Dales", mål being old swedish/norse for language/speech) is different enough from modern swedish as to sound as another language alltogether, since it is much closer to the ur-form of the general tongue of old.
For a good example of how it sounds and how my ancestors may have sounded, this is Lena Willemark reading the swedish translation of Tennyson's "Ring Out Wild Bells" from 1850 (it's a New Year's tradition here to read that poem, don't ask me why):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Q9kLgsHIs]
*Älv means slow moving river, elf being the older spelling of älv; dal is dale, and -en is the article. So it is entirely possible to translate it to Riverdale too :)
Wouldn't you know it, the wife recognised dr Jacksons voice immediately -she already knew about him, her being more well-learned on this topic than me - when we lived in Scania she used to attend gatherings at the viking camp in Foteviken: [https://foteviken.se/en]
In North America Jackson is pretty much the uncontested expert in Old Norse and translations; there isn't really anyone else publishing at his level.
It is a niche of "whitey culture shit" that does not have popular focus in universities in general.
Did someone say Wild Orgies?
😂😂😂
Out of all that, that's what you focused on? Good man. 😂
Every good presentation starts with a good joke! 😂🤣
You got your Jewish holidays a little scrambled here.
Uh oh, what did I mess up? I trust your expertise and please correct me so I can be more accurate. It's important to me to be accurate.
https://www.chabad.org/holidays/default_cdo/year/2022/jewish/holidays-2022.htm
They're a good resource for basic factual stuff. Many of their other viewpoints I profoundly disagree with and some of their contributors, I'd say, are batshit crazy.
But the explorations of Jewish mysticism might interest you; they explain extremely complex concepts as clearly as such things can be approached.
This dystopia has been in service for a lot longer than you think.
Orwell wrote 1984 after he was a part of instituting such things in Asia for the UK evil empire.
Trust the science has always been the clarion call of the scammers. They used that to demonize those that didn't believe the earth was the center of the solar system.
Every time people are fearful, they forget to validate whether the fear is justified or artificial. It seems that we are in a period not unlike the times of the inquisition, for example, where the artificial fears are used to distract people from what they should be really afraid of.
But at least this time, there's no burning witches or torture for infidels.
I think despite the centralization, people are less gullible these days. This con-vid narrative worked only because it was the first time that they implemented the fear of a virus, based on the legends of the Spanish flu, etc (which was not caused by a virus).
After being lied to, people will not fall for the same nonsense again. That's why they now downplay con-vid and pump up fears of usually mild diseases like rsv and the flu.
Murder of the innocent is one of four sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance
Dropped some march 16th work in this meme drop for you…
We didn’t forget.
https://westcoastjohn1978.substack.com/p/remember-remember