That's the way it crumbles -- cookie-wise, that is

All righty then.

One thing I've noticed about previous installments in this oddball series of mine is my tendency to feel the need to elaborately explain the situation and how I got here.  I will do my best to avoid that temptation and simply refer my 17.5 readers (ambitiously overestimating) to previous postings -- for example, the preceding one from last year, February 21, 2023, begins with a fairly thorough way for readers to catch up on the back story.  In the nick of time I also found a good pic (see backstory here).

Even that ☝🏽☝🏽☝🏽 seems unnecessarily encumbering; but, what the hey...  Let us forge ahead.

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Every anniversary, it seems another "Narrative" has erupted for us to digest, with its ensuing dyspeptic nausea for us to analyze.  Last time, it was Ukraine.  This time it's Israel/Gaza.  Also brewing on the horizon is an incipient panic about another "World War" (with a subset being another "Civil War" in America) -- a panic whose object is as real as "Covid" was -- and apparently linked to Israel/Gaza expanding throughout the Middle East, centrally involving "Iran".

A related theme that has slowly crystallized in the ongoing Fog of the War of Ideas is my Tribe more and more showing signs of faulty reasoning and erroneous conclusions -- in diverse ways & styles, depending on the person or pundit.

Then that ol' monkey wrench continues to be an amazingly resilient factor: Trump.  As I'm averse to the future tense when it comes to sociopolitical meditations, we'll have to wait for my next annual installment in 2025 to "digest" that.

This new Narrative has left an interesting wake, as the months unfold from October 7 -- indeed, the phrase "October 7" trips from lips as fraught with glib anxiety as did 911 for years after that catastrophe.  The most interesting phenomenon has been a split among the Left.  When we remind ourselves that the Mainstream throughout the West is dominated by the Left, and that the Cabal is in the process of capturing the Mainstream in order to leverage its long-term project of subverting the West in order to replace her with a totalitarian New World Order, we realize how important such a split may be.  Basically, it seems as the smoke clears (a difficult prospect if Israel keeps bombing civilians and their habitats to smithereens) that the Mainstream Left is more or less maintaining a pro-Israel stance, while the Fringe Left is standing with the Gazans/Palestinians (and by extension, Muslims).  This Fringe Left is basically the Rashida Tlaib/AOC/Ilhan Omar/Bernie Sanders/BLM/Antifa Left, with darker roots in Angela Davis, Weather Underground, and other roots of Obama -- a subculture that has been for decades nursing a grudge & grievance against America and the entire West for their "imperialism", "fascism", "racism", "patriarchy", and so forth; and with clear, albeit complicated to clarify, connections with the deeper broader plan of Communists to subvert the West over the past 100 years (or more).

Whew!  That was a mouthful!  Allow me to catch my breath and gulp down a shot of rye (so to speak) before proceeding...

The analysis above arouses the question, what does this portend for our ongoing palpation of the Cabal and its ongoing project (see the previous two annual postings for more on "the Cabal")?  It seems to reflect the relative weakness of the Cabal -- insofar as it depends upon the Left (the dominant managers of the Western Mainstream) to be a reliably coherent force without serious internal rifts.  (Of course, the more radical, and often therefore more irrational, conspiracy theorists would try to posit that any internal divisions in the Cabal's minions are just part of their diabolical psy-op theater -- a position that smells ad hoc.)  Other than that, I'm not sure what it means for the future, near or far.

Another phenomenon in this regard I've noticed is a split in the Alt-Sphere, where the split seems similarly disproportionate:  about 80% pro-Israel, and 20% pro-Gaza -- with that 80% comprising the vast majority of the "A-lister" celebrity pundits (Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, James Lindsay, Chaya Raichik, Ben Shapiro, et al.).  Again, I'm not sure why this is.  I'd guess it reflects a conventional tendency (affecting Mainstreamers and Alt-People alike) to be anxiously pro-Jew, at the very least walking on eggshells lest they be accused of the original Western Thought Crime, "anti-Semitism", and progressively worse from there, actively pro-Jewish sentiments & policies.  This tendency seems to have reigned nearly supreme throughout the West for the last 75 odd years, since the Holocaust; and one can see in the Alt-Sphere these senior elite pundits insinuating (when not boldly proclaiming) that anyone who has problems with the Israeli military mass-killing men, women and children and destroying their city may be a "Nazi".

This tendency in the Alt-Sphere also reflects a rather startling predilection to trust and follow the Mainstream, since the Mainstream is mainly pro-Israel, and it's from their sources that the Gaza jihad was framed (including evidently crucial details of ghoulish components -- "beheading 40 babies", "cooking a baby in an oven", "raping and parading women around", "playing with decapitated heads" and so forth -- none of them adequately verified).  Apparently these Alt-Folks allow, most likely semi-consciously, their anxiety to avoid anti-Semitism to override their hard-won skepticism & suspicion of the Mainstream and its Narratives. 

However, let us also remember another curious wrinkle to this puzzle: the Mainstream for decades prior to October 7 was tilting anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian.

Another phenomenon I've noticed -- with the caveat that I haven't made an empirical study of this, it's just my impression:  the Frick-and-Frack thought crimes of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia seem to be tolerated in various places of social media more than ever before -- reflecting the Israel-Gaza fallout, no doubt.  Guardedly, I think that's a good sign, in the spirit of free thought & speech; though with the quality of that speech in social media, it more often than not degenerates into less than useful noise.

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I look forward to my next annual posting -- if Trump wins.  In that glorious eventuality, I will definitely find a celebratory pic rather than yet another one among a gallery of faces expressing various forms of cool, gritty jaundice looking forward with steely pessimism to a grim dystopia.

23 Skidoo

 

Another year, another annual posting, another lurch of the West towards some ominously unprecedented future. 

I can recap the rationale of this annual "tradition" here:  Basically back in 2018 I decided to close up shop on this blog, which I had maintained for some 11 years, since 2007, racking up 1,427 postings (not counting this one here), mostly concerning the problem of Islam. When I posted my valedictory in 2018 in early February, I appended a cool pic of Frank Sinatra. Then a couple of weeks later on February 21st of that year, I needed to add a P.S., a really really final posting, and found a cool pic of Frank's pal, Dean Martin. At that point, I felt I had finally closed a long chapter on my blogging life, took one last look around, clicked off the lights, closed the door quietly, walked out of the warehouse in Burbank onto Clybourn Avenue where I'd parked my 2003 Plymouth Jihad, and thought I'd never look back.

 

I eventually moved on to a fledgling blog I scrapped together which was purposefully meant to be laid back, low-key and low pressure on me, since here on The Hesperado I often wrote extremely long and detailed postings that required a lot of research, which I didn't want to do on the new blog, The Daily Decaf. 

But in the meantime, I had found this really cool pic of Robert Blake giving the finger to the camera, and I wanted to use it in some context -- I couldn't think of one. Then it hit me: Why not post it on the one year anniversary of having closed up shop?  So I did that, on February 21st 2019, and that thenceforth created a tradition, leading to a pic of Lee Marvin sitting on some railroad tracks chomping on a stogie, on February 21st 2020; then Albert Camus leaning on a balcony looking like a philosophical Bogey with a cigarette in his mouth, on February 21st 2021; then finally last year 2022 February 21st, Patrick McGoohan from his greatest work ever, the TV show The Prisoner, which he produced, starred in, and directed many episodes. 

For this year's posting, I cast about for a pic of some celebrity, and found a suitably recondite photo which as the reader can see shows somebody grappling on the side of a high-rise building over a beach. That person is actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and it's from his role in the movie that I became enamored with as a child called That Man from Rio (1964), in which he plays an innocent hapless young man coming home from military service to see his girlfriend, and soon, without knowing what the hell is going on, gets caught up in international intrigue at the bewildering mercy (or cruelty) of some Bond Villain (played to an unctuous tee by Adolfo Celi) -- perhaps in sum a metaphor for all of us normal people these past 3 years.

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I don't think I can surpass my last posting from 2022, the way it described the Covid Débâcle. I don't really know what to add of any substantive significance for this posting, other than I think to me the most important consideration as we move forward, is to try to maintain quality control as we articulate and speculate concerning the international conspiracy we reasonably assume is currently engaged in trying to subvert the West from within -- and which we also reasonably conclude has been happening for years if not decades.That quality control must, as a guiding light, try to navigate the difficult middle ground or middle waters between an openness to radical conspiracy theory based upon a radical loss of trust in Mainstream narratives on the one hand, and a critical application of rational skepticism based upon common sense principles. These include that the conspiracy cannot be exaggerated to include everyone in authority and all institutions, nor should it push back the timeline forever to include all history as being the conspiracy, until we merge our theory with some kind of gnostic vision that explains all social political evil in terms of archons and principalities and powers. So, part of the way to navigate this would be to hold as a principal that the mainstream is not 100% corrupt or 100% evil, but that there are non-conspiracy individuals and factors involved in the conspiracy, which means the conspiracy itself is not omnipotent but has limitations in power. On the other hand though we should not minimize the systemic nature of the problem, which the Cabal of course exploits when it can, and not only exploits but probably to some extent has manufactured over a period of several decades. 

A new political science would have new terms, the most important being Cabal, Conspiracy, and the Mainstream. From there, radiate the whole plethora of other terms that are more conventional in political science, including governments, institutions, finance, diplomacy, war, treaties, international organizations, etc. The key for the new political science would be to reinterpret all these conventional terms in the light of the reasonably assumed reality of the aforementioned three main terms. Of course, conventional political science doesn't believe in a Cabal or its Conspiracy, and seems to have an impoverished sense or definition of the Mainstream, if it even notices the phenomenon at all. So let's briefly unpack these three terms. 

Basically, the Conspiracy can be localized and small, or it can be huge and even encompass everything. That's my problem with most conspiracy theorists on my side of the aisle, they seem to have no brakes on the expansion of the conspiracy, and by their own rhetoric logically it would swallow up everything, such that everything is a conspiracy, and they recklessly and stupidly imply that we're all in the matrix and bullshit like that. By contrast, the Conspiracy that I reasonably entertain is somewhere in between: it is huge but it doesn't encompass everything and in fact on principle should include non-conspiracy elements. Or another way to put it is that the conspirators are still working on trying to succeed and they haven't succeeded yet, and the reason they haven't is because they're operating in a field that is non-conspiratorial, and that field is the fact that the West is a great and healthy civilization and isn't itself thoroughly evil. Of course it has faults and blemishes, nobody's perfect, but that's not the same thing as saying that it's irredeemably evil. So our political science dispenses with such nonsense from the get-go, but on the other hand we take seriously that there are individuals and systemic forces that are dangerously trying to subvert this great Western Civilization. 

As we take that seriously, we have to be careful in our navigation and not veer over into exaggerating it too much on the one hand, or minimizing it too much on the other. The second term, Cabal, people sometimes recoil from because it sounds too ludicrous, but really it's a simple term: it just means the group of individuals (assuming it's not just one individual which would be implausible) who are behind the conspiracy and managing it. This is part of the problem of pushing the timeline back too far because if we go back too far, we lose a thread of concrete generational continuity. I'm comfortable with saying that the conspiracy I'm concerned with here goes back a hundred years let's say to the 1920s, give or take a decade or two. So obviously the conspirators active at the beginning are not alive now so there had to be at least one or two generations of continuity there, which I think is certainly possible. 

Finally we get to the third term -- the Mainstream. My previous posting from one year ago has a lengthy exposition of it which I needn't rehash here. / Now how these three terms intersect is that the Cabal, through its Conspiracy to subvert the West, is doing this by infiltrating the Mainstream. And the fact that it has to use the Mainstream at all is one indication of the limitation of its power. This scenario has been articulated already by many anti-Communist analysts of the West who basically alleged that that's exactly what Communists have been doing for decades, and of course this would be an enemy within, since Communists didn't come from Neptune, they grew organically out of Western culture, we can say beginning in the 19th century, of course with roots going for the back to the French enlightenment of the 18th century and we can always push that back to other historical movements, etc. 

The resemblance to the anti-Communist narrative I think is not just morphological but also probably actual. I.e., the current project to subvert the West I think is one and the same as the 20th century Communist project to subvert the West. But it seems to have happened under our noses so to speak, in that the Communist subversion that seemed to be always in the 20th century coming in from outside -- the outside being basically Russia and China -- at some point seems to have sufficiently infiltrated into Western mainstream structures, such that it is now a Western phenomenon in its own right and not a Russian or Chinese operation any longer. 

This Communist project in its latest phase also seems to have morphed into a hybrid of oligarchic Capitalism with the Communist dream which only uses a Workers' Paradise in order to hoodwink the masses and divide them against each other but is really fixated on a utopian totalitarianism. But again, it's still a work in progress; they are still getting their ducks in a row and haven't succeeded. Yet.

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In the meantime, we peons & peasants can count ourselves lucky if we can relax our grip on the high-rise we’re clinging to for dear life, and let ourselves down ledge by ledge to the sand below to catch some rays while the Bond Villains have yet to consolidate their grip on us.  And who knows, the Girl from Ipanema may walk by...