News from the Grassy Knoll

When did conspiracy theory become prophesy?  A year ago the idea that soon vaccine passports would be required to go about your daily life was met with eye rolling mention of  the power of tin foil to repel lunar rays.  The strange and unsettling thing is that some theories mention names of people who would never think of denying what they intend.   So where are the illuminati when you need them?  The hidden agenda like Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter’ is lying on the desk its only camouflage being a report.  There is no diving deep in a murky pond to recover a nefarious truth, just a snorkel cruise in a pellucid lagoon.

Bill and Melinda spread the billions around, to the WHO, to Global Private Public Partners etc. etc.  One hand shakes the other and they are not secret handshakes, only a little clammy.  Iain Davis in his book ‘Pseudo Pandemic’ has the whole story with more endnotes and references than my Xmas tree has lights.  He does not deny that there is some class of ‘grippe’ going round which is dangerous for some but to treat it like Ebola is mad.

A small Irish point.  The stats for excess deaths in 2020 show a similar number to the bad flu year of 2017.  I don’t remember that.  There was no major fuss at the time.

My fibrillating antennae tell me that the outer edges of the 30% Mattias Desmet calls the truly rapt into Mass Formation; they are peeling away slightly as the contradictions of government guidelines and strictures become unmistakably fatuous.

Meanwhile there is Harvard Prof. Charles Lieber with his nano tech transistor and his conviction for hiding a connection to Wuhan’s University of Technology.

cf:

virus sized transistors

lieber convicted

Now the question is: do I take my hat off to him or leave it on? 

Get your free copy of Pseudopandemic at 

in-this-together

William Hazlitt and Sex Change

 We would sooner be miserable after our own fashion than happy after theirs. It is not happiness, then, in the abstract, which we seek, that can be addressed as

For which we wish to live or dare to die,’

but a happiness suited to our tastes and faculties—that has become a part of ourselves, by habit and enjoyment—that is endeared to us by a thousand recollections, privations, and sufferings. No one, then, would willingly change his country or his kind for the most plausible pretences held out to him. The most humiliating punishment inflicted in ancient fable is the change of sex: not that it was any degradation in itself—but that it must occasion a total derangement of the moral economy and confusion of the sense of personal propriety. The thing is said to have happened au sens contraire, in our time. The story is to be met with in ‘very choice Italian’; and Lord D—— tells it in very plain English! ( 'On Personal Identity'  from 'Winterslow/Essays and Characters Written There' )

What does Hazlitt mean by propriety here?  It would be fair to describe him as libertine so not I think conventional behaviour rather that which is contrary to a natural disposition in the untransed condition. The au sens contraire possibly refers to the catamite or punk of Lord D’s story.  I have an Oxford dictionary from 1971 that defines with crisp high table concision :

Catamite: (n) Sodomite’s minion. (f. L. catamitus f. Gk. Ganamides, cup-bearer of Zeus)

N.B. Not the current definition.

Dr. Mattias Desmet and Covid Mass Formation

I am a private intellectual.  Only those close to me suffer my explanations and find that something pressing has come up which they must attend to directly.  Your public intellectual is the classic village explainer about which Gertrude Stein remarked (re Ezra Pound ) ‘fine if you were a village, if not, not’.  At this time of covidology the existence is vital of someonewho can explain to us the general bemusement, contrary and senseless guidelines, and general decerebrate flailing.  Mattias Desmet a professor of Clinical Psychology with a masters in statistics gives one hope that there is a way out of this general panic  not by way of convincing the 30% spellbound utterly committed to chasing the zero covid ignis fatuus but through the 40% that are prudentially going along with it.  Here he is in conversation with Dr. Martenson:

mass formation

An Post (Ireland) Xmas stamps designed by Thinkhouse

I use postage stamps once a year, to send Xmas cards here, there and everywhere.  This year I will be using what’s app with a Nativity scene image because the offering from An Post national stamps designed by Thinkhouse, a London outfit with a presence in Dublin, are a dismally dopey offering.  Reading the bumf on the Thinkhouse site is like a glossary of slightly dated corporate speak: ‘creative storytelling’, ‘from the get go’, ‘education journey’, ‘drive change’, ‘long-tailed geo targeted ad’ etc.   Secularism will die from boredom, though that may be unfair to Thinkhouse who are so bland that they do not arrest the attention long enough for that response.

Happy Xmas.

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In the bleak midwinter

by Christina Rossetti

 In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.

In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,

Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;

Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,

The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,

Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;

But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,

Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Augusto Del Noce and Scientism

 I have been reading in, or letting my mind dapp (fishing technique with dry fly) on ‘The Crisis of Modernity’ by Augusto Del Noce.  How right he is on scientism and the denial of transcendence but it is ironic that the agents of stupidity Marx, Freud and Reich that he castigates are now utterly exploded.  Was it that they had their work to do and having done it they and their works and pomps were dragged down to Hades among the gibbering shades that require footnotes?  Scientism is still dragging its sullen explanations around but during Covid their inadequacy became patent.  True Science should be full of contrary positions but the Follow the Science sort of Science with its one true position must now be seen as foolish.  Of course those clothed in the alb of scientism will never admit that they were wrong and it may be the case that they haven’t realised it yet.  Even philosophers, those village explainers, have been duped or else rendered fatuous by the fear of death.  When this crisis has passed the rump of the mandate friendly thinkers will find their other hand.

The Gnostic Presentism of Charles Dickens - 'Bleak House' and 'Our Mutual Friend'.

 When we think of the world in a frozen static way everything is connected through the present moment.  Not being active means there is no causal nexus but there is information and the shadows of all the characters in a Dickens novel fall on each other.  It is, I would suggest, a gnostic presentism in which the reader is complicit.  We know more than they do because we are aware that this being Dickens there will be an impertinent level of coincidence or so we think but rightly considered coincidence is being in the same universe of the novel at the same time.

“Now the order of the manifestation of the universe is being described.  At the beginning of the creation, the Supreme Lord, aided by the (past) actions of beings, which are the causes of the variety of the universe that is about to be created, as also by the cosmic illusion which is endowed with an unlimited and inscrutable power, first conceives in His mind the entire universe consisting of names and forms and resolves I shall do this ......” (Vedanta Paribhasa of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra)

I find in two of his novels that I am rereading ‘Bleak House’ and ‘Our Mutual Friend’  a suggestion of the Sankhya system of the emanation of the elements, air in the one and water in the other: fog and flotsam and jetsam define them.  Nothing is palpable and you cannot step into the same Thames twice.  In the latter novel the grim, grisly, grotesque, and gruesome flows over us in a torpid slurry.  No one is entirely whole, Wegg sans a leg, Eugene Wrayburn is a light man without a centre of moral gravity, Jenny Wren with a twisted back and legs that don’t work,  the Eponymous friend is a spy, the Boffins foolish, Bella a sullen beauty, the Veneerings circle a sublime satire of the laissez faire let them drown or swim as the case may be.

Who is fixable?  Dickens will do his best but some will have the sad end that we have learned to dread and concur with Oscar Wilde - “Only someone with a heart of stone would fail to laugh at the death of Little Nell”.  Unlike Mr. Venus the creator of articulated skeletons Dickens offers ambulant persons, ‘names and forms’, the nama rupa of his world.

Negative Facts, Bertrand Russell and Empty Talk

 Negative facts bothered cerebrotonic ectomorph Bertrand Russell.  What sort of acquaintance could you have with them.  His nature abhorred a vacuum.  There was a fine fat emptiness where a fact should be, and not just any fact but one which the Nyaya folk called yogyata or pertinent.  There are an infinite number of items nameable and knowable, just not here in this room, but.  The elephant not in the room was Bertrand’s elephant and he wanted it out of there and in his stall of knowledge.

Bertrand, you are very greatly mistaken if you think that the non-apprehension of the existence of Jumbo is a piece of knowledge.  It is a means of knowledge and it informs your search.  It tells you to look elsewhere.  Can there be a distinction between a means of knowledge and knowledge itself?  Spectacles and what you see with them.  A walking stick and ambulation.  It would seem you can.  Of course those are just analogies, single use conceptual ‘burners’.

Can Jumbo’s absence be translated as ‘It is true that there is no elephant here’.  You have steered away from facts.  Do such locutions make any difference to the order of things that are in this room.  Is it an improvement?  C.K. Ogden in his ‘Meaning of Meaning’ writes that whether they are tied with clear string or knotted parcels are just ‘honest parcels’.

“When we dispute as to whether a fact is positive or negative, or whether there are ‘negative facts’ we are engaged merely in the criticism of rival prose styles.”

Breda O'Brien's Rational Criss Cross Code

 Breda O’Brien is not keeping up to speed on communicability of Covid.

 criss cross code

"I have heard young men express the belief that the risks of getting vaccinated are higher than getting Covid-19, because being young, healthy and fit means that their chances of severe infection are low.

These kind young men, who would help any elderly person to cross the road and then carry the shopping home, cannot seem to internalise that their decision to avoid vaccination imperils the vulnerable.”

 It is now generally agreed that the non-vaccinated infected and the vaccinated with another infection are equal in terms of the capacity to infect other people.  Why then is she pointing the finger at unvaxxed young people who would in normal times help the infirm elderly cross the road saying they are now putting those same people at risk, throwing them under the Covid bus so to speak.   Perfect fear casts out reason.

Each year the flu season packs the hospitals and creates a shortage of beds, ordinary and icu.  By European standards Ireland is under bedded.  Pre-Covid there were 225 ICU beds, now there are 290.  Forty Billion Euros have been spent funding an emergency which has 99% survival rate.  Where are the extra beds which were needed even in the normal year.  Quangos and waffle-meisters are sleeping in feather beds.