Violin concerto, for unaccompanied voice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

Additional dots for “Blindspot”

[Appendices to this essay.]

(A)  Viewers have remarked how odd it is, that FBI Guy ends every other sentence addressed to Jane Doe with “… , Jane.”   Odd especially since that isn’t even her real name.

Concurrently, by chance, I have been listening to an audiobook of Jane Eyre;  and there, Mr Rochester exhibits the same the same vocative quirk, towards his coworker/love-interest.

In both cases,  the phenomenon is striking, owing to the utter asymmetry in vocatives:  the senior man regularly recurs to this first-name address;  the woman protege, never.

There is a slight syntactic distinction: FBI-Guy postpends the vocative ("I'm so sorry, Jane");  Rochester  prepends it.

(B)  More musings on the motif of the Verhängnisvolle tattoos:

Compare palmistry (or phrenology)-- the notion that your character or fate are written in your fingerprints, or the lines of your hand, or the bumps of your skull.

(C)  Motivation for the master-conspiracy

One of the features I hated about “24” (which fortunately did not intrude to spoil the fun  until the final episodes of each season) was the bogus, ex-nihilo explanation of the vast, nation-destroying events, via a conspiracy by a tiny and ill-defined clique, whose motivation was simply unfathomable.  Often, all we learned about Mr Big  was that he spoke with a British accent (very suspicious!).

Oddly, and with a certain commendable candor, Episode 4 of “Blindspot” came forth with the motivation behind a horrendous global bioattack, right at the end of the episode in which it was introduced:  as a desperate, planet-saving move in the face of  Malthusian pressures.  To the average viewer, that must seem as far-fetched as the (even vaguer) motivations of the “24” arch-villains.   But actually, it is more firmly grounded in (at least psycho-social) reality than you might surmise.

(1a)  It is already a fact, that persistent, influential voices in Africa  aver that AIDS, and ebola, and probably much else, were caused -- deliberately -- by the West.

Similar conspiracy-theories thrive in much of the third world.

(1b)  Such fantasies have their American proponents as well. Thus, the P.C. anthropologists campaign against Napoleon Chagnon; or a certain tenured professor who toes the conspiratorial ebola-line.

(2)  In fantasy  though not in act, such ideas have indeed been entertained.

„Es zeigt sich, daß die ethischen Menschen nicht so viele Kinder haben und die Gangster sich unbegrenzt und sorglos weiter reproduzieren.“ Und: „… gegen Überbevölkerung hat die Menschheit nichts Vernünftiges unternommen. Man könnte daher eine gewisse Sympathie für Aids bekommen.“

-- Konrad Lorenz in einem Gespräch anlässlich seines 85. Geburtstags, in: Natur, Nr. 11, München 1988.

And, from a couple of years ago:

I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”

[-- Rense.com]

Thus, the perpetrators of the “Blindspot”  terror-attack  were not so implausible, being  rather  analogs of the Oklahoma City bomber, or of Breivik

[Update 9 Nov 2015]   Takehome from the (otherwise unmemorable) Episode Eight:

Twofer is actually a Threefer (Urninde).

Abschaffung Deutschlands: Qui prodest?

Notes towards an essay on "Ecstatic Defeatism".

[Dies ist bei weitem kein ordendlicher Aufsatz, sondern nur eine Tafel, worauf ich Zitaten und Gedanken kleben kann.]

Das ist alles nicht ganz neu.

Die angestammte Sprache  mag aufgegeben werden, es mag sich nicht einmal eine bemerkliche Sprachmischung vollziehen, dafür wird eine fruchtbare Kulturmischung nicht ausbleiben.    Unter allen großen Völkern der Erde  entnationalisiert sich keines so leicht  wie die Deutschen und, da die “vagina gentium” auch heute noch diesen Namen verdient, in solchen Maßen. 

--  Hugo Schuchardt,  (1884), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 348

~

Ferner hätten die Parteien schuld,   

erst, zum Beispiel während der Schleicher-periode, durch das große Ungeschick ihres Manövrierens,

dann durch die Schwäche und Feigheit, mit der sie ihre Vernichtung hinnahmen:  ja, wohl gar noch eilten, sich selber zu vernichten,  bevor man sie dazu zwang.

--Golo Mann, Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (1958; 1992), p. 798

Contemporaneous with that, was the baffling phenomenon of “premature” French defeatism in the face of a resurgent Germany, an enigma of mass psychology.

After all, they had won the last war against Germany  (albeit with a late assist from the Yanks);  moreover, throughout the ‘twenties and even into the ‘thirties, France had considerably superior military means, which they constantly undervalued (as William Shirer consistently emphasizes -- and marvels at -- in his magisterial The Collapse of the Third Republic (1969)).

True, there were a few active partisans of Germany in France, even after the rise of Hitler;  yet France’s abject capitulation -- by degrees, over years -- was not the result of any conspiratorial Fifth Column.   The whole nation took psychological shelter in what we may term the “Maginot fantasy”.   Not as that lesson of military history is commonly misread (for which see here).   Rather, at the same time  the country told itself that it was safe behind its cosy walls -- it yet refused to complete the fortificaions.  It is as though your house had three walls and a stout oak front-door with many locks, but nothing behind.   The French might call it a psychose;  we shall be content with “cognitive-dissonance” (anglicè, “doublethink”).

The elites followed suit:

There are always people willing to throw good money after bad, and the situation became that Germany was  in reality  expanding its armament industry  by new borrowings.  The potential enemies of Germany in the next war -- France, the small succession states, Great Britain, and even Soviet Russia -- were financing the effort that Germany may make some day to destroy them.  The process reached its most extreme phase when, in December, 1934, the Bank of England granted a $3,750,000 credit to Germany in order “to facilitate the mobilization of German commercial credits”, i.e., so that Germany might have means to meet old debts -- and build airplanes that can cross the English Channel in seven minutes.

-- John Gunther, Inside Europe (1938 revised edition), p. 100

Notice that that was published in 1938 -- thus, without benefit of hindsight.  (Gunther’s whole book is both prescient and brilliant.)

Far-sighted

More on the shadow-play of German reparations  here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/parallel-lives-protracted.html

~

For over four years now, I have been following (and blogging about) the increasing  Überfremdung and Völkeraustausch that threatens Europe.   And marveled at the relative lack (until quite recently) of coverage (other than edulcorated coverage) in the European MSM.   Nor is it simply a matter of out-of-touch elites or a media conspiracy of silence:  for all those governments, from Sweden to France and Germany, who have been fomenting the inflow, and turning a blind eye to the spread of no-go zones, were popularly elected.   When Italy used its coast guard, not to guard its coast, but to serve a tax-funded water-taxi for illegals, an American could only marvel.   Then, when Merkel had her Mother-Theresa-epiphany, and conjured up an ingathering of all the wretched of the earth -- nebenbei tossing the Schengen agreement  unceremoniously onto the compost-heap of History --  her grand gesture evoked hundreds of giddily euphoric Milchmädchen & Teddybärschenker at the Bahnhofs, literally applauding the intruders like some victorious invading army, or perhaps the Beatles.   What are we to make of all this?

I still don’t understand it.   But increasingly (in the Readers’-Comments columns) we see similar expressions of bafflement by Germans themselves.  “I feel as though I have strayed into the wrong film,” one wrote.  “Is this really happening?”

~

The nation itself has as much right to nationhood as the fractional minorities have to autonomy -- to put it mildly.  You cannot follow the practice of self-determination to its logical extreme  without reaching an absurdity -- that the state itself is sacrificed to its minorities.

-- John Gunther, Inside Europe (1938 revised edition), p. 103n

[Update 28 October 2015]  A nice, tidy, non-intergalactic, non-Illuminati conspiracy-theory:

Assange: WikiLeaks vorliegende Depeschen zeigen Plan zur strategischen Entvölkerung von Syrien und EU-Flüchtlingskrise

„Gegner des Landes initiieren eine strategische Entvölkerung, um so die kämpferischen Kapazitäten der Regierung zu beschränken. Es ist vor allem die Mittelklasse die aus Syrien flieht. Ingenieure, Manager, Angestellte, da sie über die notwendigen Sprachkenntnisse, Geld und Verbindungen verfügen. Genau diese Berufsgruppen braucht man, um einen Regierung am Laufen zu halten.“
http://www.rtdeutsch.com/35254/headline/assange-wikilekas-vorliegende-depeschen-zeigen-plan-zur-strategischen-entvoelkerung-von-syrien-und-eu-fluechtlingskrise/

~

Possibly in the back of the minds of the ecstatic defeatists:

The decadent civilizations of the past  were not saved by their philosophers, but by the influx of simpler peoples  who had centuries yet to live  before their minds should be ripe for despair.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (1929) (Conclusion)

[Update Dec 2015] See
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/12/germany-welcomes-migrants-to-its-bosom.html

Die Deutsche Sprache schafft sich ab (erweitert)

.

Die angestammte Sprache  mag aufgegeben werden, es mag sich nicht einmal eine bemerkliche Sprachmischung vollziehen, dafür wird eine fruchtbare Kulturmischung nicht ausbleiben.    Unter allen großen Völkern der Erde  entnationalisiert sich keines so leicht  wie die Deutschen.

--  Hugo Schuchardt,  (1884), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2^nd edn. 1928), p. 348

[This is a sidenote to the essay “Deutschland schafft sich ab”, in which I recalled a ca. 1990 conversation with a couple of Langenscheidt lexicographers, who predicted the extinction of the German language, and foresaw this with chilling indifference.]

(1)  Hier spricht man deutsch nicht.

Using my wife’s tablet, I attempted to bring up DeutscheWelle.  It brought up only the English-language site.  I specifically added “.de”; stubbornly, it changed that to “.com” and re-presented the English site.  So I went to the German Wikipedia and clicked on the link labeled “Offizielle Webpräsenz”:  it too brought me to the English site!

Well, maybe that’s just the tablet.  It has recently introduced a dumbed-down version of news.google.[…];  I was able to revert to the original presentation on the English version, with a few clicks,  but these didn’t work for the French and German.

So I tried it on the MacIntosh:  same deal.

Ultimately I found the real site by having bookmarked an article, back when you could still get to it easily, and from this clicked through to: http://www.dw.com/de/themen/s-9077.  [That is just today’s;  I never was able to pull up a permanent German homepage.

I then went back to the tablet and put in www.dw.com/de.

The answer came from Verizon, and said that no such site exists.

Along with a screenful of utterly unrelated (English-language) ads.

(2)  Yes, we have no bananas

Check out this archive:

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/index-1997.html

Notice anything strange?  An 18-minute-gap, so to speak?

All the covers for 1997 are fondly recalled (the magazine Der Spiegel is known for its striking covers) -- with one exception:  “16, “Gefährlich fremd”.

It has been flushed down the memory-hole.  Why?

The answer was supplied by a keen-eyed reader (Wilko Fokken), in a comment (to a mediocre article):

http://www.heise.de/tp/foren/S-Im-Online-Archiv-fehlt-das-SPIEGEL-Titelbild-16-1997-Thema-Gefaehrlich-fremd/forum-295835/msg-26943164/read/

So there’s the link;  normally I’d leave it at that.  Only … since this post concerns information previously available that later gets wiped from the Web, I’ll quote it in full -- lest it already have been zeroed by the time you click.

9. September 2015 06:55

Im Online-Archiv fehlt das SPIEGEL-Titelbild 16/1997. Thema: "Gefährlich fremd"

Wilko Fokken, Wilko Fokken (mehr als 1000 Beiträge seit 25.03.00)

Ein Grund für die Entfernung des SPIEGEL-Covers aus dem Netz könnte

sein, daß man in der gegenwärtigen Situation nicht so gern an eigene,

fast zwanzig Jahre alte und zutreffende Analysen erinnert werden

möchte, wie etwa die:

"Zeitbomben in den Vorstädten: Die Ausländer-Integration ist

gescheitert. Überall im Land entsteht eine explosive Spannung. Bei

jungen Türken und Aussiedlern, Randgruppen ohne Perspektive, wächst

die Bereitschaft, sich mit Gewalt zu holen, was die Gesellschaft

ihnen verweigert."

...

Vor allem die beiden größten Gruppen schätzen Wissenschaftler,

Polizisten und Sozialarbeiter als Zeitbomben in den Vorstädten ein:

die etwa 600 000 jugendlichen Türken der zweiten und dritten

Gastarbeitergeneration sowie die halbe Million junger Aussiedler, die

seit 1990 aus dem zerfallenen Sowjetreich nach Deutschland gekommen

sind.

(Die erste Generation der Gastarbeiter war bekanntlich noch friedlich

gewesen.)

SPIEGEL-Titelbilder, Übersicht 1997:

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/index-1997.html

Texte:

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/index-1997-16.html

In other words:  Der Spiegel in 1997  clearly foresaw what we currently see unfolding before our eyes;  but since that no longer fits their current narrative, they would rather self-censor than take credit.

 

Thus, it is only the happy accident of a photo archive ordered by date, that reveals the escamoterie.

(3)  Now you see it … now you don’t

Another, even stranger example, of disappearing (or rather ‘disappeared’) content; fortunately, an alert commenter was able to retrieve it from the memory-hole:

9. September 2015 20:40

In München kann die Sicherheit nicht mehr garantiert werden - gelöschtes yt-vid.

Germane (mehr als 1000 Beiträge seit 21.11.02)

Die Münchner SPD-Sozialdezernentin Brigitte Meier bricht in Tränen
aus wie übelasten München mit den 55.000 auf den HBF ist, die nicht
weitergeleitet werden. youtube hat das Orgingnal gelöscht, deshalb
verlinke ich ( auch wenn es auf yt von anderen wieder hochgeladen
wurden ) die Vimeo-Version:

https://vimeo.com/139770418

What is odd about this example, is that

(1) YouTube itself is not particularly political -- it couldn’t if it tried to be;  it’s one big foire d’empoigne.  So how were they pressured to delete?

(2)  The speaker is not inherently such as to offend the PC Speech Police -- she is female, and a member of the SPD -- a mainstream German party, “Socialist” but relatively moderate.   Plus, she breaks down crying, which the bisounours generally like.

(3)  The content of what she says -- speaking, after all, to a left-wing Parteitag -- is quite moderate and inoffensive.   The only thing that renders it the least noteworthy is that it is someone from the SPD saying it, admitting semi-privately what the party so far does not admit publically.

Curiouser and curiouser.

[Update 23 September 2015] German-Americans schafften sich ab:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/opinion/whatever-happened-to-german-america.html?ref=international&_r=0

[Update 8 Oct 2015] A video about just how bad it's got -- censored, then restored by samizdat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yN_hn933B0
Dieses Interview wurde anschliessend bei N24 in der Mediathek wieder gelöscht. Vielleicht war es einfach zu ehrlich?

The Deeper Meaning of Columbus Day (2015)

As we do each year at this time, while the wheels of governance lie briefly idle, and ochre and russet creep into the leaf,

the lawnmowers having fallen silent,  the rakes not yet out of the shed,

we offer this classic essay on the discovery of America.

Certain people -- cranks, for the most part, after the fashion of Baconists -- strenuously maintain that the American continents were discovered well before Columbus.   And after extensive researches into ancient evidence, abetted by the most advanced techniques of modern science, we must concur to this extent:  The discovery happened a very very long time ago;  and it was made by none other than penguins.

Thoughts for Columbus Day

[Originally posted Monday, October 10, 2011]

Scene: The Earth.  Time: The last glaciation.

It was cold. -- How cold?

Cold enough for the seas to descend, or to freeze to solidity; so that feet might  dry-shod  pass the Bering Strait, leaving the tired old world  for the undiscovered new.

And such was the route (so historians tell it) by which the New World was first peopled. 

And yet these scholars neglect one simple fact:  It was so d*mned cold, so effing cold, that, any normal person, it’d freeze his f***ing b*lls off.

Which leads, by simple syllogism, to the novel yet suddenly irrefragable fact:  Who passed the Strait on that fateful day, were no men as we now know them, but such Beings as scoff, as laugh at ice -- their laughter bell-like in the frigid air.  And so we are forced to this startling, yet eminently logical conclusion: (I anticipate a Nobel, or at least a MacArthur, for noticing this): Native Americans are the lineal descendents of penguins.

            The contentious might object, that the migration route of the Amerindians went via the northern polar regions, whereas the penguins of today inhabit Antarctica, somewhat to the south. The objection may, however, be overcome, via – mm – symmetry considerations.

            To be sure, a people which could eventually settle in MesoAmerica and the Caribbean  must have lost, over time, their original solid penguinity, much as salamanders, long confined to subterranean caves, in time may lose their eyes; thus leading to the present-day American anthropoid fauna's sadly decayed state.  And this, no doubt, by the same Mendelian-chromosomal processes which originally led to their distant ancestors, beginning from humble vertebrate beginnings, to attain that exalted, richly feathered, impeccably streamlined  pinguinal state. (I invite the lab lackeys to iron out the details.)

Q.E.D.

~

For further, remarkably truth-like funfacts about prehistoric penguins,

simply grasp the mouse firmly in your right hand

(respectively the left, if a southpaw),

carefully place the cursor atop the highlighted text,

and …. CLICK !

=> When Penguins Ruled the Earth <=

(There!  Wasn’t that easy?)

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Io sono Cristoforo Colombo, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

.

Squirrel Algorithms

October, Two thousand and fifteen.

Beneath our spreading oak.

(Strategy 1)  Eat an acorn;  bury one.

Eat an acorn;  bury one.

Eat an acorn;  bury one.

Eat an acorn;  bury one.

Eat an acorn;  bury one.

Eat an acorn;  bury one.

(Strategy 2) Scamper     Up

to the (tippy) tree-          top ….

and there make (!) Mis-chief (!@!@1@1)

so that acorns rain down

upon the freshly-swept deck

right above where the Nice Man  (thy chronicler,

O fellow creature  here below)

is trying  to read his special interesting   big book,
beneath the spreading oak ...

…

Fortunately   I am wearing my Magic Hat,

and acorns  cannot harm me.

(!  WOW !!   That was close, tho.)

dr(eamr)emembered

Fragments, fished up from m

m

memory …

“… fighting a strong rearguard action ….

But on May 27, the King of the Penguins

asked the Germans   for an armistice …”

Awaking; awake;

I shake

my dream(dis/misre)membered

head.

So it had seemed but --

I know that can’t be right!

The Penguins would never surrender !!

~

For more  on the mighty Penguin King,
click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/03/exciting-story.html


 

Wir schaffen das

Angela Merkel persiste et signe :  “Wir schaffen das.”

Zwar;  aber welches  “das” ??

Offensichtlich:  Völkeraustausch  (“le grand remplacement”).

Wahrscheinlich versprach sie sich:  Wir schaffen das  ab.  


[Update 8 Oct 2015] A video about just how bad it's got -- censored, then restored by samizdat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yN_hn933B0
Dieses Interview wurde anschliessend bei N24 in der Mediathek wieder gelöscht. Vielleicht war es einfach zu ehrlich?

[Update 8 October 2015]

In Thüringens Landeshauptstadt erhalten die Mittwochskundgebungen der AfD immer mehr Zulauf. Der Ton ist scharf: Kanzlerin Merkel solle sich wegen ihrer Asylpolitik „ein anderes Volk suchen“, sagte ein prominenter AfD-Politiker.

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/fluechtlingskrise/8000-demonstranten-erfurts-pegida-heisst-afd-13844924.html

Aber das macht sie schon doch!  

[Weiteres zum Thema:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/10/die-deutsche-sprache-schafft-sich-ab.html ]