Sunday 28 February 2021

Covid 19 - The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret)

Protocols of the Elders of Davos:

To bounce reflections of one another, to bask in sublime self-regard and to taper off by having a plus Bono selfie which will never accrue much value due to their number.  If Mom could only see me now. Above it all the great polished dome of Der Schwab secreting guidance and excogitating the ‘The Great Reset’.

Davos is for  the top people the supreme junket where they can be inoculated with memes and have their brains recycled and re-purposed as the stuffing of a cuddly future.   Build back better with a vax pass that is the probe for a generalised system of surveillance.  While we are at it why not put on the card your medical history and your credit rating just to make it handy for reference.  It’s already known in any case.  The lies are open and transparent and presented with the clarity of a truth which is unashamed.  Covid is passed off as a plague on the same scale as the Black Death.

“Shame has been described and analysed in countless novels and literary texts written about historical outbreaks. It can take forms as radical and horrendous as parents abandoning their children to their fate. At the beginning of The Decameron , a series of novellas that tell the tale of a group of men and women sheltered in a villa as the Black Death ravaged Florence in 1348, Boccaccio writes that: “fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate”. In the same vein, numerous literary accounts of past pandemics, from Defoe’s A Journal of The Plague Year to Manzoni’s’ The Betrothed , relate how, so often, fear of death ends up overriding all other human emotions. In every situation, individuals are forced to make decisions about saving their own lives that result in profound shame because of the selfishness of their ultimate choice. Thankfully, there are always exceptions, as we saw most poignantly during COVID-19, such as among the nurses and doctors whose multiple acts of compassion and courage on so many occasions went well beyond the call of their professional duty. But they seem to be just that – exceptions.”

Look at the roll call of the deaths in the Irish Times article

lost to covid

What do you notice?  How many years have most of these individuals lost?  In Ireland until recently the death of an old person was not regarded as the occasion for lugubrious sorrow.  No; drinking, songs, a few tears, and more drink, would be the order of business.  You look at the grand children and think it’s all good, it goes on - ‘just a touch’.

The Schwabian mind is materialist, quite subject to external conditions and without resolution and stoicism in the face of difficulty.  ‘This too will pass’ as the motto of a sage is for the devotee of Davos  an impetus to abrogate the past and to achieve transhumanism.

This book is like a dystopian thought experiment.  How bad could things be if the worst aspects of our present polity were fortified?  The standard practice of this book is to arouse fear, dismay, dread, and general helplessness before producing with a flourish of corporate speak and greenwash, the perfect future that you can leave to them.

"The inability to make plans or engage in specific activities that used to be intrinsic parts of our normal life and vital sources of pleasure (like visiting family and friends abroad, planning ahead for the next term at university, applying for a new job) has the potential to leave us confused and demoralized. For many people, the strains and stresses of the immediate dilemmas that followed the end of lockdowns will last for months. Is it safe to go on public transport? Is it too risky to go to a favourite restaurant? Is it appropriate to visit this elderly family member or friend? For a long time to come, these very banal decisions will be tainted with a sense of dread – particularly for those who are vulnerable because of their age or health condition.”

This pathetic wally was born in 1938 in Ravensburg and must have lived through the ‘economic miracle’.  Nations get over catastrophe, build a few monuments and then forget.  Schwab demurs:

"Psychologists tell us that cognitive closure often calls for black-and-white thinking and simplistic solutions – a terrain propitious for conspiracy theories and the propagation of rumours, fake news, mistruths and other pernicious ideas.”

The mistruths that are shyly proffered as deep insights abound:

"Our attachment to those close to us strengthens, with a renewed sense of appreciation for all those we love: family and friends. But there is a darker side to this. It also triggers a rise in patriotic and nationalist sentiments, with troubling religious and ethnic considerations also coming into the picture. In the end, this toxic mix gets the worst of us as a social group.”

This Orwell award winning apercu:

"The pandemic has forced all of us, citizens and policy-makers alike, willingly or not, to enter into a philosophical debate about how to maximize the common good in the least damaging way possible.”

O ye Americans, get with the program: (sorry Walt)

"In the US, the CDC estimated in 2017 that depression affected more than 26% of adults. Approximately 1 in 20 report moderate to severe symptoms. At that time, it also predicted that 25% of American adults would suffer from mental illness during the year and almost 50% would develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime. Similar figures (but maybe not as severe) and trends exist in most countries around the world.”

And you will never get over it:

“For many people, traversing the COVID-19 pandemic will be defined as living a personal trauma. The scars inflicted may last for years. To start with, in the early months of the outbreak, it was all too easy to fall victim to the biases of availability and salience.”

Philosophers should study this book as a resource of examples of fallacies and psychologists and sociologists as a digest of simplisms.  Others may view it as greenwash authoritarianism but one thing it isn’t - a conspiracy.  It’s out there in the open with the useful idiots hoping to be invited to a junket.

 A good essay on Schwab’s plans for building back better with reference to previous books that indicate that covid is viewed as an accelerant for plans which have been under the Schwab dome for years. Nothing new essentially.

fascist reset


Thursday 25 February 2021

Shawshank Time

 "There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess--I'm the guy who can get it for you."

You’ve seen the book, now read the movie.  It’s like they run together as an intussusception of vision into storytelling, voice over into inner voice until the two are a single work.  We can’t get away from Morgan Freeman’s wistful misery tone of folksiness as though the Tao had been found in an ancient cracker.  Wisdom oft repeated is still wise and King can steer through those profound shallows.  Demotic logoi have to be born at the right time.  Generally after being gravid for fifteen years.

“But there's really no question. It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying. “

Knowing the story means nothing, there is always more to know, for you to find out.  Elements in the novella develop different weights as duration alters under the gravity of monotony.  Red pauses over his crime, murder for insurance that killed three people:

“Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or better when it hit the base of the Civil War statue and burst into flames.

I also hadn't planned on getting caught, but caught I was.”

The Civil War statue, a location realizing device that makes it real for the readers who know just where that is in their own town.  The dead meet the dead in a different civil war.

Red isn’t black as in the movie so he has to be given a different sort of crime.  Does it alter anything, systemically like?  I don’t think so.  A book calls on long traditions of ordinary evil where the crime is the punishment.  You have become the person that has done that thing and you will always be limited by it.

"Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don't even know what that word means, at least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think it's a politician's word. It may have some other meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find out, but that is the future - something cons teach themselves not to think about.”

Here’s a copy of it.  It’s not hard time

shawshank

Saturday 20 February 2021

Ending the Covidology

   At some critical point a leader will have to emerge that can steer us out of rolling lockdown, someone with the courage to say what is obvious to anyone with common sense - covid and its variants are here to stay; the cordon sanitaire around little islands of health won’t work and a level of risk will have to be accepted.  You will catch it.  The present level of disruption is unacceptable.  Can EU bureaucracy manage to move away from the instinct of control which is natural to any bureaucracy.  I think probably not so it will be up to some one of the central powers to bell that cat.  My bet is on France but the British may go first to demonstrate their independence. 

Tuesday 16 February 2021

Upstream of the Covid Vaccine

Recently I was writing about the anti-mask movement which is the outward sign of the rejection of the universal treatment of covid as though it were the plague. 

"I wear a mask, as an amulet, to show I care. The fearful get some sense of security through a general adoption of face coverings though its medical efficacy may be dubious. I do not feel cowed into submission by doing so as some of the anti-mask crowd claim is its purpose.”


Wearing the mask as an amulet signified my sense of it as powerful ju ju with a similar causal connection to the evil averted.  The more serious issue is that a vaccine developed from cell lines derived from an aborted foetus is not acceptable to me and as there are no others I shall not be getting the shots.  It is not a matter of life and death and getting a bad flu is something that I am prepared to risk.   In the dismal lucubrations of one priest I have achieved the status of an exquisite.   The idea was that the abortion took place so long ago and was so remote that the good of the vaccine was greater that the evil of the act that facilitated it.  Is there a downstream in eternity?  I didn't know.

The moral arguments surrounding this issue interest me and the approach of Gilbert Meilaender in a recent article in ‘First Things’ was gentler.  Some reasoning seemed strained.  Do you refuse to travel on a railroad built by slave labour?  Hardly but if you were to look out the window and see a spur line being built by a gang having a whip cracked over them  by men with rifles, you might take a bus.  Would you spurn an organ donation from a murdered man?  Again, by the time the pathologist has done the p.m. there wouldn’t be much to harvest.  In any case permission is required for organ donation.  If the murdered man had signed such a document then at his death his wishes would be carried out.

He also worries that vaccine rejection will harm the pro-life cause.  As if those that do not accept abortion as part of a progressive humane polity would cease to be regarded as anything but mad fanatics.



I looked at Meilaeneder’s treatment of the issue in his ‘Bioethics’ (2013/2020). He sums up his chapter on ‘Embryos: The Smallest of Research Subjects’ by referring to the biography of Augustine by Peter Brown.  I read it some years ago and had forgotten completely the part about amulets.  The mind is a quare contraption or was it a whisper of illumination?

“Discussing some sermons of St. Augustine, first preached in the year 397 but newly discovered in 1990, Peter Brown notes that Augustine was often required to preach at festivals of martyrs. At Augustine’s time the cult of the martyrs—the “muscular athletes” and “triumphant stars” of the faith—continued to be of profound importance to ordinary Christians. Nevertheless, Brown suggests that in these sermons one can see Augustine quite deliberately underplaying the martyrs’ feats in order to emphasize instead God’s everyday work in the heart of the ordinary believer. Those average Christians did not doubt the courage of the martyrs, but they questioned their own ability to accomplish anything even remotely as heroic in the fabric of their everyday lives.
In response, Augustine tells his hearers: “God has many martyrs in secret. . . . Some times you shiver with fever: you are fighting. You are in bed: it is you who are the athlete.” And Brown comments:
Exquisite pain accompanied much late-Roman medical treatment. Furthermore, everyone, Augustine included, believed that amulets provided by skilled magicians (many of whom were Christians) did indeed protect the sufferer—but at the cost of relying on supernatural powers other than Christ alone. They worked. To neglect them was like neglecting any other form of medicine. But the Christian must not use them. Thus, for Augustine to liken a Christian sickbed to a scene of martyrdom was not a strained comparison.7
It must have been a hard renunciation indeed; yet, we see here a way of life for which relief of suffering—however greatly to be desired—is not the overriding imperative. We can learn from these Christians to break the hold on our own, understandable, tendency to believe that nothing can count for more than medical progress in the relief of suffering.
That god will fail us, and we must therefore break its hold on us before, like all idols, it breaks our integrity. We can do this only as we remind ourselves that, however greatly we value the betterment of life made possible by medical research, we have no overriding obligation to seek such betterment. Research brings betterment of our life; it does not save our society—or us. Noble goal that it is, medical progress is always optional, and, to cite Hans Jonas yet once again, there is “nothing sacred about it.”







 

Monday 15 February 2021

D.H. Lawrence on 'The State of Funk' (essay written 1928/9)

 Here D.H. Lawrence is deploring funk and encouraging the English to allow the future to take its natural form.  Don’t press it into a shape or an off the peg solution.  It is a conservative vision of hope and gradual change into a form that has a national truth.

“It is the business of men, of course, to take the same attitude towards the birth of new conditions, new ideas, new emotions.  And sorry to say, most modern men don’t.  They fall into a state of funk.  We all of us know that ahead of us lies a great social change, a great social adjustment.  A few men look it in the face and try to realise what will be best.  We none of us know what will be best.  There is no ready-made solution.  Ready-made solutions are almost the greatest danger of all.  A change is a slow flux, which must happen bit by bit.  And it must happen.You can’t drive it like a steam engine.  But all the time you can be alert and intelligent about it, and watch for the next step, and watch for the direction of the main trend.  Patience, alertness, intelligence, and a human good will and fearlessness, that is what you want in a time of change.  Not funk.”

Friday 12 February 2021

Trump at the Movies

 The Hollywood Party has made a movie.  It’s not bad but not as good as what we saw on the news during the summer, cars torched, shops looted and people killed, a precinct and a federal building under siege.  It wasn’t called ‘Fort Apache The Bronx’ (Tag Line:No Cowboys, No Indians, No Cavalry To The Rescue, Only A Cop.)

No it wasn’t that.  Let me think. Ah, yes, ‘Mostly Peaceful’.  Great effects, very real.

Monday 8 February 2021

'Submission' by Michel Houellebecq

 I had already made up my mind about this novel but as one does I googled reviews to see what the general opinion of it was.  Knausgaard’s review was the only one I read.  He was worried that he might suffer the dispiriting experience of meeting greatness that he could not hope to match.  Don’t worry Karl Ove, he’s just as bad as you are, but yours is an exhaustive sincere badness,his is a cynical 'what if and what about it if what if'.  Bad faith as a writer is recognisable in the narrator’s mewling whimper of 'I’m gone to the end of the night and I’m all burnt out'.  Francois  you never caught fire and now you’re 44, a senior lecturer in Paris 3, a Huysmans specialist.  That where the lie begins and it’s a thin lie.  There’s a lot of mentioning but no credible insight into the life of a writer that he is expert in having got his Phd. on the basis of a 700 + page dissertation.  (Is that legal?) The course of Huysmans life is the template for the fiction, decadent to Catholic and libertine to  Muslim, the stewing in dim religious light of the fin-de-siecle aesthete and meditation before the Black Madonna of Rocamadour of the modern academic.

“Early in my stay I fell into the habit of visiting the Chapel of Our Lady. Every day I went and sat for a few minutes before the Black Virgin – the same one who for a thousand years inspired so many pilgrimages, before whom so many saints and kings had knelt. It was a strange statue. It bore witness to a vanished universe. The Virgin sat rigidly erect; her head, with its closed eyes, so distant that it seemed extraterrestrial, was crowned by a diadem. The baby Jesus – who looked nothing like a baby, more like an adult or even an old man – sat on her lap, equally erect; his eyes were closed, too, his face sharp, wise and powerful, and he wore a crown of his own. There was no tenderness, no maternal abandon in their postures. This was not the baby Jesus; this was already the king of the world. His serenity and the impression he gave of spiritual power – of intangible energy – were almost terrifying.”

The Graham Greene guide to ugly churches, rain and bad food is truer than this sentimental appreciation of iconography.

Before he left for Paris he went back to the shrine:

The next morning, after I filled up my car and paid at the hotel, I went back to the Chapel of Our Lady, which now was deserted. The Virgin waited in the shadows, calm and timeless. She had sovereignty, she had power, but little by little I felt myself losing touch, I felt her moving away from me in space and across the centuries while I sat there in my pew, shrivelled and puny. After half an hour, I got up, fully deserted by the Spirit, reduced to my damaged, perishable body, and I sadly descended the stairs that led to the car park.

Huysmans goes back to Catholicism and Francois submits to Islam.  This is where the realism becomes exceptionally thin and veers towards outright satire.  One might imagine a grand coalition which puts Islam in power in France on one condition - that they leave the cheese and wine alone.  A Vichyoise Islam is allowable on those terms.

The word collaboration is mentioned once:

Many people still considered it slightly shameful to bow down to the new Saudi regime, as if it were an act ofcollaboration, so to speak; by gathering together, the teachers showed strength in numbers and gave one another courage. They took special satisfaction in welcoming a new colleague into their midst.

Saudi money is running the universities and to teach there you have to convert.  Considering the bizarre beliefs that allow the gender that you identify with to be your operative sex which has taken hold in American universities the simple formula that signifies your submission to Allah is wholesome.  The salary is improved too.

What do I really think of it?  It’s readable.  The food is good.         

Saturday 6 February 2021

Time Magazine on the Big Fix

 You’ve seen Time magazine’s article on ‘The Big Fix’, I suppose, though if you live in google world you'll only have seen just it and very little commentary from left or right.  On qwant.com (French search engine) there’s lots from the conservative blogosphere on the front page.

the big fix

 We were jokingly informed of shenanigans or sportive rascality but this is different.  The extent and depth of it is like a Hollywood scenario, ‘Parallax View’, but more so. (Tag Line: There is no Conspiracy just Twelve People Dead)  To get the Chamber of Commerce on your side talk to them about Anitfa and BLM.  ‘They are not reliable and they get carried away’, capeesh.  In the end that may not be so smart if you remember how the Taliban were used to get rid of the Russians.

Why reveal now but, as the Dubbilin man said?  Marking your territory like Jack Nicholson in ‘Wolf’. (Tag Line: The Animal is Out).  Straois mada (dog’s smirk), irresistable gloat or the feeling that Trump won’t be impeached and is wise to keep off the stand.  If you annoy him enough but, he might utter a tirade.  Maybe and then there’s the final fix.  I hope he’s well protected.

Thursday 4 February 2021

aperçu

All the reading, turning over each spit of barely comprehended text and leaving it there to be broken up  by weathering.  Wisdom and Bergsonian intuition is like that.  You can’t think about it.  It just goes on at its own pace and the aperçus are sweet when they come in their season.

 

Best Short Stories of Walter de la Mare

 Something completely different: ‘The Best Stories of Walter de la Mare’.  Some of them are what the vulgar erroneously call ghost stories.  They are not.  Unsettling, bizarre, puzzling but not certainly supernatural, possibly so or more truly liminal events, at the portals to other states where you merge with the uncanny and yet do not submit to acceptance of it.  Was ‘Seatons Aunt’ a class of a witch or a psychic calling up forces.  Her irony:

"She sat down at the piano and ran her fingers in a flourish over the keys. 'What shall it be? How shall we capture them, those passionate hearts? That first fine careless rapture? Poetry itself.' She gazed softly into the garden a moment, and presently, with a shake of her body, began to play the opening bars of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata. The piano was old and woolly. She played without music. The lamplight was rather dim. The moonbeams from the window lay across the keys. Her head was in shadow. And whether it was simply due to her personality or to some really occult skill in her playing I cannot say; I only know that she gravely and deliberately set herself to satirize the beautiful music. It brooded on the air, disillusioned, charged with mockery and bitterness. I stood at the window; far down the path I could see the white figure glimmering in that pool of colourless light. A few faint stars shone, and still that amazing woman behind me dragged out of the unwilling keys her wonderful grotesquerie of youth and love and beauty.”

As you see, and as I have said before, the spectral shilling has sustained many fine writers.  Why not, only two subjects are worth considering said Yeats; sex and death.

‘Crewe’ opens in the waiting room of that great train junction:

"When murky winter dusk begins to settle over the railway station at Crewe its first-class waiting-room grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone in it. The long grimed windows do little more than sift the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof outside and is too feeble to penetrate into the recesses beyond. And the grained massive black-leathered furniture becomes less and less inviting. It appears to have been made for a scene of extreme and diabolical violence that one may hope will never occur. One can hardly at any rate imagine it to have been designed by a really good man!”

But he was not alone in it.

"At risk of seeming fastidious, I must confess that now he was near I did not much care for the appearance of this stranger. He might be about to solicit a small loan. In spite of his admirable greatcoat he looked in need of a barber, as well as of medicine and sleep—a need that might presently exhibit itself in a hankering for alcohol. But I was mistaken. He asked for nothing, not even sympathy, not even advice. He merely, it seemed, wanted to talk about himself. And perhaps a complete stranger makes a better receptacle for a certain kind of confidences than one's intimates. He tells no tales.”

That’s true.  The stranger is as good as a confessional.  de la Mare was probably a man who evoked stories. What he is told could be just the frake of overstrained nerves if we like a neat settling of our account with reality.  We can’t be sure, we ought not to be sure, our epistemic duty is to rest in uneasy dubiety.

The stranger tells his story without regard to the stance of his listener:

"As a philosopher this white-faced muffled-up old creature seemed to affect realism, though his reservations on the 'solid' had fallen a little short of it. Not thatmy reality appeared to matter much—beyond, I mean the mere proof of it. For though in the rather intimate memories he proceeded to share with me he frequently paused to ask a question, he seldom waited for an answer, and then ignored it. I see now this was not to be wondered at. We happened to be sharing at the moment this—for my part—chance resort and he wanted company—human company.”

In ‘The Orgy: an Idyll’ we are treated to the sumptuary excesses of young Philip Pim whose very rich uncle uses him as a messenger boy (errand boy) to fetch stuff from town and charge to his account.  It’s a Harrods type establishment.  He is to inherit his uncle’s money on the one condition that he keep his job at the bank for one year.  Colonel Pim has set him up in it but warns him that not a penny will he get if he loses the job.

"The fact was that Philip had never been able to add up pounds, shillings, and pence so that he could be certain the total was correct. His 9's, too, often looked like 7's, his 5's like 3's. And as 'simple addition' was all but his sole duty in the bank, he would not have adorned its premises for a week if his uncle, Colonel Crompton Pim, had not been acquainted with one of its most stylish directors, and was not in the habit of keeping a large part of his ample fortune in its charge. He had asked Mr. Bumbleton to give Philip a chance. But chances—some as rapidly as Manx cats—come to an end. And Philip's had.”

Well then, piqued by resentment he goes shopping on the uncle’s account ranging through every department.  He starts small with dressing cases.  A maharajah’s catches his eye at a mere 675 guineas:

"He pressed a tiny knob, the hinges yawned, and Philip's mouth began to water. It was in sober sooth a handsome dressing-case, and the shaft of sunlight that slanted in on it from the dusky window seemed pleased to be exploring it. It was a dressing-case of tooled red Levant morocco, with gold locks and clasps and a lining of vermilion watered silk, gilded with a chaste design of lotus flowers, peacocks, and houris, the 'fittings' being of gold and tortoise-shell, and studded with so many minute brilliants and emeralds that its contents even in that rather dingy sunbeam, appeared to be delicately on fire.”

You’re saying to yourself, Walter, Walter oh yes ‘The Listeners’.  You learnt it at school.  This is a neglected writer and if I don’t say much about the stories it is because I never disclose,  like Mother Superior I am an abyss of tact.

Find it at fadedpage.com:

faded walter

Monday 1 February 2021

Anti-Mask

 There are people I like that have gone off on a tangent about mask wearing.  On that issue they may be following the science but science isn’t everything.  The cartoon I saw recently about the man who erected a chain link fence to keep out mosquitoes has a point.  I wear a mask, as an amulet, to show I care.  The fearful get some sense of security though a general adoption of face coverings though its medical efficacy may be dubious.  I do not feel cowed into submission by doing so as some of the anti-mask crowd claim is its purpose.

When the vulnerable are vaccinated the government should decide that the rest may take their chances  and get the shot/s if they wish.  Get back to the old normal.  There should be no arm twisting.  ‘Go easy nurse’.