Grasp Historical Initiative

[Raúl Ilargi Meijer]

M.C. Escher Fish and Boat 1948     An article by our good- and longtime friend, John Day, family doctor in Texas, until he got canned for re
[See the full post at: Grasp Historical Initiative]

[John Day]

Testing… I seem to be blocked from comments, and this seemed to be going so well.
🙂

[John Day]

Filling in for Germ:

Gen Z influencer Lil Tay dead at 14: Star and brother’s ‘sudden’ death under investigation
https://nypost.com/2023/08/09/lil-tay-dead-at-14-star-and-brothers-sudden-death-under-investigation/

[John Day]

Former Tennis Star Dies of Massive Heart Attack at 31
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/tennis/former-tennis-star-dies-of-massive-heart-attack-at-31/ar-AA1eS9n4

[SeaBirds]

Excellent article. Thanks very much for sharing it, and for the good advice (as always).

[Just Some Randomer]

“Excellent article. Thanks very much for sharing it, and for the good advice (as always).”

Second that. Thanks Doc for all your insightful commentary.

[Germ]

Greetings from Oaxaca.
That is a terrific piece of writing John.
And thanks for “filling in” for me.

[Veracious Poet]

Sometimes you think: did that really ever happen? It seems so weird.. But it did, and not that long ago.

So many times I thought “did that really ever happen?” ~ 1913 Jekyll Island,1933 Emergency Powers Suspension of U$ Democratic Republic; TPTB’s murder of JFK in Dallas; “Intel” black budget mafioso operations that started with Air America; 9-11; 2003 Iraq Invasion; The looting of the U$ Treasury & queering of the Presidency in 2008, ad nauseum 😐

By the time they rolled out *global* biowarfare in 2020, with all it’s attendant menticidal apparatuses, enabling the in-your-face theft of the 2020 election(s) &
the new vogue for vaccines (mRNA)…

Enjoy the entertainment,

Gary

[Veracious Poet]

The Henry Ford inspired industrial capitalism of the postwar years, where workers could afford the Fords they made, succumbed to the imperative to support the value of the $US, over the actual industrial economy of the US, after America’s vast hoard of gold ran out, draining into the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Dood, you missed a few data points:

😉

[Red]

From: https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug23/not-enjoying8-23.html

I’m Not Really Enjoying the Show
August 9, 2023

Let’s dispense with human presidential candidates and conventions, and replace both the candidates and their supporters with idealized AI fabrications.

The Show Must Go On, but I’m not really enjoying the show. One reason why is I Keep Changing Channels But It’s Still the Same Program, i.e. the programming and marketing are now homogenized. Another is Even the Aliens Are Boring, i.e. everything is so sensationalized and hyped that we are now desensitized to it all.

A third reason is our culture has perfected the craft of self-parody, rendering parody impossible. To parody foolish excess, we exaggerate a two-patty burger into a four-patty burger: oops, they’ve already hyped four-patty burgers.

To parody the fossilization of American politics, we create a parody in which 77-year olds are the vibrant young-uns in the halls of power. Dang, the halls of power are already choked with more elderly than the USSR’s creaky leadership just before it collapsed in a heap.

To parody the homogenization and infantilization of Hollywood, we create a parody in which the dominant “tentpoles” generating steady profits are endlessly proliferating comic book superheroes. Darn, that’s already the case.

To parody the media’s desperate competition for “engagement,” we create a parody in which everything becomes a global existential crisis. Heh, there’s no way to parody anything that’s already been driven to excess via the mastery of self-parody.

Irony has also been shown the door. The core dynamic of the modern world isn’t–as is constantly hyped–innovation; it’s marketing, persuading someone to transfer value–money, loyalty, votes, engagement– for something (tangible or intangible) without regard to the eventual costs and consequences of the exchange.

The irony is authenticity is faked to make the sale. But the fraud of mimicking authenticity to make the sale is now so embedded, so ubiquitous, that the irony is lost: we are living in a Philip K. Dick story come to life in which real young women fabricating fake lives of glamor and luxury to boost their Only Fans income are now competing with digitized imaginary young women that are idealized versions (like Barbie) of the sexually compelling female.

In a culture stripped of irony and parody, a movie based on an idealized female doll introduced 64 years ago reaps $1 billion in sales and sparks thousands of earnest cultural commentaries. Barbie as a marketing phenomenon has of course evolved: idealized male Ken was introduced a few years later, along with an ever-expanding line of ethnic Barbies. Barbie is clearly an “authentic” cultural icon.

If the aliens are watching us, one hopes they have a refined sense of absurdist humor.

As for AI: what’s marketed as “artificial intelligence” is certainly artificial, but it isn’t remotely intelligent. By mimicking humanity’s natural language abilities, ChatAI programs make a marketing claim of authenticity that is entirely fraudulent. There is no “there there” in terms of understanding, predictive acumen or any other form of what once passed for intelligence.

The entire point of this bogus AI is to automate the processes of marketing, homogenization and hype, to streamline and reduce the costs of faking authenticity to make the sale. As in a Philip K. Dick story, where the protagonist ends up asking if he is in fact a robot and not a human as he assumed–our own authenticity must be questioned, as what we assume is “the real me” turns out to be nothing but a jumble of marketing cliches that reads like an obituary: he was a Steelers fan, loved the music of Nashville, was an avid BBQer, etc.

With parody and irony both enfeebled, the show is now tediously humorless. What can we say about a show in which the once-compelling topic of alien visitations to Earth are reduced to another boring congressional hearing on CSPAN, a parody in which the possibility of an alien presence is reduced to ashes while whatever is being marketed at the moment is hyped as the “crisis” you must pay attention to?

It’s impossible to parody what is already an absurdist parody. Consider the ceaseless adverts for low-quality processed / fast-food in which ecstasy can be yours (“this greasy sugar-bomb tastes good!”) for a low, low price and the rest of the adverts, which are for pharmaceutical medications for all the diseases created by consuming low-quality processed / fast-food, ads that include an eye-watering list of side-effects that is impossible to parody, as it already includes “and in rare cases, death.”

Hmm. So we can expire from metabolic and other lifestyle disorders in the pursuit of infantile “it tastes so good!” or we can expire from the supposed cure, after suffering from a list of side-effects that would qualify as banned protocols of torture. Absurdist irony, you are now live, action!

So desperate are we for authentic authenticity that “the real thing” becomes an irresistible marketing platform. You may have come across a young woman’s artful videos of her preparing real food in a beautiful rural setting in China. Her name is Li Ziqi. Her videos have logged almost 3 billion views. They are remarkable for their composition and for her culinary, gardening and handicraft skills, which are clearly real. She brought the mythology of an authentic life close to the Earth into being, and the global desperation for some shred of unpackaged, unprogrammed, unmarketed authenticity generated her vast audience.

Alas, her authentic skills were packaged so entrancingly with a commercial purpose. Thanks to a marketing deal, her global audience exploded, as did the sales of her line of products in China. She suddenly stopped issuing new videos two years ago, and it seems legal / commercial conflicts were at the heart of her disappearance: Li Ziqi’s Online Pastoral Poetics: Millions of people subscribed to her vision of an idyllic rural existence. Who was she, and why did she disappear? (New Yorker)

It’s doubtful that many of her millions of viewers actually wanted to spend hours tending gardens and making real food from real produce; they found pleasure in the mythology, not the reality. This is the problem with authenticity: it’s demanding and requires discipline and an inner life immune to marketing.

To grasp why the show is no longer enjoyable, we turn once again to Philip K. Dick, who offered an insightful description of authenticity in How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later:

“The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds. but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.”

In conclusion, I offer an idea: let’s dispense with human presidential candidates and conventions, and replace both the candidates and their supporters with idealized AI fabrications. Thanks to AI, the fake candidates can engage in realistic fake debates, and their fake supporters can clap, cheer and jeer on cue.

In a world stripped of authenticity, irony and parody, such a substitution makes marketing sense. Let’s get the show rolling, and make the sale. It’s just a guess, of course, but I think the aliens would approve.

[Red]

“Truth is like poetry.
And most people fucking hate poetry.”
Adam McKay, The Big Short

— We will never run out of minerals, or petroleum for that matter. There is an ample amount of these resources in Earth’s crust, actually more than we could ever extract.

— Phew! Are we saved then?

— Well, this was the truth part. Now it’s time for some poetry.

https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/a-mirage-of-abundance-de45805fa65a

[Veracious Poet]

You can know yourself to be a historical actor at this pivotal moment. You can act strategically in your own interests, and for your family. You can help friends who will listen, and we can help blaze the historical path which we will trek as a human society.

John,

I appreciate your exhortative treatise, I really do, hopefully it will help a remnant focus on *solutions* for the *very lucky few* that possess the wherewithal to seize the *initiative* & can save a few, here & there…

Some of us spent a *great* deal of time & effort to *alert* We The People in *great* detail re: what happened/what *could* happen to real reality, to as the CULTure rotted, from the head down, we were called conspiracy theorists, militia wackos, or worse 🙄

Perhaps I’m jaded (although I’m not resentful/angry, as I’ve done the Spiritual Work to Let It Go), but watching the entreaties of Good, Honest & Spiritually Sane Men (now almost all dead & gone) devolve instantly into ashes-in-the-mouth, time after time (see Ron/Rand Paul et al.), with Western Civ exponentially descending into a grievous abyss of narcissistic madness, has been a very *toxic* pill to swallow for this descendant of the Sons of Liberty.

Oh, I sincerely doubt there is any truly safe place to run, the CULTural cancer is too endemic, it’s all about survival in the face of cataclysmic variables now…

We The People ignored the ominous prelude of the UniParty GlobalCap Empire’s Holocaust Of Hate (which I predicted would happen in 1996), with the long march into death, destruction & madness now all but certain under U$/EU/CCP technocratic totalitarian fascism…

FWFS.

[Red]

PDF a bit of a read.

The Chasm – Collectivism vs. Individualism by G.E. Griffin

Why does homo sapiens, the most intelligent creature on Earth, repeatedly throw off tyrannies at great cost in treasure and blood only to discover after the passage of time that he has replaced it with another tyranny just as bad or even worse? The answer is surprisingly simple and, once it is widely understood, tyranny will become a remnant of the past. Once the bell is rung, it cannot be unrung.

https://redpilluniversity.org/chasm-doc/

[russellnblbs]

Nice summary John, although I have a quibble at the end.

Some thing that has been bugging me from my agricultural background is the Ivermectin treatment. Ivermectin is a bloody powerful anti biotic (as in anti anything living), last resort medicine that is like dropping a nuclear bomb upon a microbial population. It is effective, but often too effective in that it kills everything, whether harmful or beneficial.

Now obviously it has been used ‘safely’ in humans for years, but it’s long term effects on things like gut health, fertility etc are unknown and could be terrible. It will always look like it ‘works’ because it takes everything out, like a bleach bath on the inside.

In my experience with livestock big doses of vitamin C or even just the right nutritional supplements can do what ivermectin can without the napalm effect. Proscribing something like ivermectin is to me from the same paradigm as vaccination, literally a war on (real or imagined) microbes. After the last few years, perhaps it’s time we took a more nuanced approach to medicine.

[Veracious Poet]

Seems several comments have been blacked-holed, perhaps it’s time to end navel gazing, get out of the armchair, lose the portal into no-thing-ness, rejoin real reality & try to be loving, helpful & insightful listeners, when & wherever real reality community can be found?

Peace to all 🙂

[Dr. D]

I think that Heller quote is cut short. Or is that the point? Or an AI generated quote?

Good article I would have written myself in the past, but spending so much time how we got here is a good or bad thing? And what now? However, as we’ve seen I’ve also moved on from some of these things as well. Like WHY did those things happen? Is it as simple as it seems? (As even the face understanding wasn’t easy to come by?) And as for instance, the realization oil isn’t limited at all; it’s just all in Russia and Iran right now. What changes does that make to add it, both geopolitically and to us poor saps on the ground?

Here’s a next level of that. They were warned in 1950 and had time to ponder, back when things moved slow. Hubbard appeared to be proven by 1971, and it does look like they had a response in the US$. But surely they would also know that if we, like Saudi Arabia, pumped all our oil and sold it, we would be helpless? And so we did that? Everyone joined up, held hands, pumped out? No Team B anywhere trying to stop them?

What if they DID find oil — as they instantly did the minute they looked in Alaska. Would Team B admit it when they could pump out Saudi and Algeria instead? I sure the heck wouldn’t. And not to say there aren’t problems, that, like silver, all the SHALLOW oil is pumped. They knew that instead. So all the medieval Islam states W was so busy establishing would be helpless, be an oil shortage, and require Exxon to lift. No? Well we know if you drill 34,000ft deep anywhere in the Gulf you get more oil than any known pipeline or process can contain. Is that not right? And only Exxon can do that, not Algiers.

What if there is that new North Slope in ANWR? Remember: “Competition is a Sin” — JD Rockefeller. What’s the only consequence of the endless spat up there? 1) We crash oil prices again. 2) Our Patrimony is sold for porridge. So why do it? Any time oil is found, it crushes prices. These guys are ZERO Capitalist. Zero. Pump it for MONEY? Hahahahaha! We PRINT money. Why on earth would you sell oil, do work, for something you get for free? Money is WORTHLESS in that world. Only CONTROL has value. Strategy.

The problem of admitting the U.S. has oil now is 1) Prices fall and 2) The world would make us pay our debts and not default on them. So we need to default FIRST. Only then can we admit we actually have a lot of oil, and suddenly discover it one morsel at a time, keeping us on even keel, never defenseless, but always that “Aw shucks what a lucky nation.” Yeah, luck. Hahahahaha. Never. They’re just not TELLING YOU, just like they didn’t TELL YOU — not exactly — about the Petrodollar.

…And these things, these root events are desperately important. That’s why they’re so immensely secret to everyone, and surrounded in 3 rings of “bodyguards of lies” — the lie is different at every level up. This would blow out U.S. debt numbers — as we can pay, blow out “Limits to Growth” as we can do whatever we like since we have the energy for now, blow out the electric revolution, blow out the lack of fertilizer, but also blow out paving every inch of the planet and cause a 16B population. Is that wise?

If you DON’T pump it, and people die, is THAT wise either? The people will be awful mad if they find out. Yet at the people’s level of wisdom and self-control would you dare hand it to them? Look what they’ve done so far, or what they do online where there’s no restraint. So I’m not thrilled with the evil alien ant farm overlords on this, but I can understand it. Do you?

And which is happening? The Limits to Growth Model (actually, a PLAN), or this one where there’s still 80% of resources left?

[John Day]

Thank you my “Bretherin and Sisterin” (sounds like “cistern”).
SeaBirds & Just Some Randomer 🙂

“Houston, this is Oaxaca, Germ has landed!”

VP Gary, Thanks. One of the mysterious side effecs of supporting the $US was that the rich and their CEOs got richer. The rich like fascists better than representative government. Do Something! 😮

Red: Sasha Latypova dropped a comment on Charles Hugh Smith’s new Substack. Good neighborhood. & those mineral resourcesoften require more digging in big pits to get what used to be up near the surface. “Journey to the Center of the Earth”, where there is plenty of iron and nickel.

Russelinbibs: Awww, Ivermectin came from a transgender Japanese soil microbe and has quirky characteristics. It’s not really gut-Roundup. Look, Germ is still OK!

@Dr D: I’m glad you might have written this in the past, and I think we agree that any secret oil “isn’t for us”, right?
What’s better to run an economy on that needs EROI over 12:1, Canadian tar sands of Deepwater Horizon? There is plenty of abiotic oil somewhere, and “we” are at the peak of industrial civilization, so “we” could tap the North Sea back when and the Gulf of Germ now when nothing goes wrong, but… in 15 years?

Again, Do Something Good Today, for the rest of this WW-3 decade.

John reading up on Enneagrams this week. https://www.amazon.com/Enneagram-Understanding-Yourself-Others-Your/dp/0062506838/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=580689038077&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9028322&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=11591826933824456450&hvtargid=kwd-838080605&hydadcr=15522_13517448&keywords=helen+palmer+enneagram&qid=1691528950&sr=8-1

[jb-hb]

why am I spam?

[jb-hb]

Pillars of Western European Civilization:

Journalists
Lawyers
Clergy
Doctors

All are (were?) recognized as callings or identities as opposed to merely jobs or professions. Each has a special code of personal conduct and some sort of recognized special confidentiality.

Doctors go so far as to have a specific moral oath.

But Clergy would not stand for their faith, Lawyers would not take legal action for clients, Journalists would not tell the truth, and Doctors broke their Hippocratic oath, murdered their patients for fear of missing payment on their summer home.

The fellow I visited to consult about the vaccine called himself a Doctor, a General Practitioner. He told me he could give NO assistance in a medical waiver to keep my job. He encouraged me to TAKE the shot and said over and over again that he had to follow “strict requirements” Those specific words over and over.

So after the visit, I visited the FDA website and read the guidelines he was supposed to follow for the shot he wanted me to take. He followed NONE of those requirements. He was required to inform me the shot was optional, the side effects, that it was experimental. He gave every indication he thought it was more or less mandatory, his description of the side effects were identical to a flu shot in 1980 – emphasizing it was “only” that, and he never informed me that it was experimental, had only an emergency authorization, nor did he explain what an emergency authorization was

The ONLY real doctors out there – the only ones we know for sure are doctors – are the ones that got fired and/or had their license taken away

Doctors in states that blocked the mandates were never morally tested. But there’s a kind of protection of the herd. If a not particularly moral person looks around and sees moral normal behavior, they do roughly the same in order to blend in. So you’ll have okayish care

In states that did not block mandates, the only good doctors are the ones that got canned

When the “mandates” affected large institutions and doctors and nurses were fired for not taking that shot, the general population did not seem to know what that meant.

The EASIEST profession in which to FAKE a shot would be Doctor or Nurse. Each of them has many, many colleagues they have worked with or know from medical school. They are all able to administer a shot. A quid pro quo is extremely possible.

Basically ANYONE in the medical profession who WANTED to go into a room with a colleague, close the door, empty a syringe into a wastebasket, and fill out the shot paperwork as fulfilled DID. Ergo, the Medical community has the largest number of fake-injected of any industry

The ones who got fired HAD the means to keep their jobs, their license. They already COULD 100% guaranteed avoid taking that shot WHILE keeping their job.

The only reason they didn’t was to do their duty to their patients and their public. All other avenues to communicate the medical danger were closed off, so they made the strongest statement possible, no words even necessary. That statement of danger was sent loud and clear. Even someone who did no research whatsoever should be able to understand the message thousands of medical professionals were sending.

It’s why I refused and was fired. I considered going to a center and asking a $16/hr worker “Do you like money?” holding out $400, and pointing to the trash can. 2x $400 would have cost me far less than over a year of unemployment. Worth it. But I realized everyone wanted normality and everyone continually complying was what was STOPPING normality from returning. My faking compliance would exert just as much collective pressure to comply as actually going along with it.

But I didn’t have a 6 figure salary to lose, no professional public humiliation, lost client relationships, loss of license, etc to lose/experience. And my own decision was derivative from those Doctors’ decisions.

My takeaway is that there are actually very, very few real doctors. It takes courage, intelligence, and morals. Real actual character. You can throw all the education and money you want at someone, have them pass all your tests, and still not end up with a Doctor.

[John Day]

@jb-hb:
1) You are not “spam”.
2) Being tested for “real doctorhood” is like being tested for “witchhood” in a way, isn’t it?
😮

[zerosum]

There were many paths of survival in the early 70.
I found one when I was in my 20. I’m still here.
However, I could not re-take that path because I’ve got a frail 80 yr. old body.
Besides, that path has vanished in the fog of time.
Now, if the youngn would only listened to us old farts, they might avoid the pitfall that we encountered.
Things are different than the 70’s.
Things are changing. I expect that most economic/social systems will be operating by 2050 in much decreased level of energy consumption.
Back then, I read “Mother Earth”.
Now, good advise is read TAE

[Author]

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