these are my views on history or current affairs

chronological order of entry is the most recent at the top of the page

chinese history can’t be separated from the problem of eunuchs, a political class, that was in theory supposed to be loyal to the emperor but turned out to be as self-interested as any other clique

a particularly messy  rebellion  against them

as a matter of interest, they also had the penis as well as the testicles removed giving rise to urinary tract problems that were highly unpleasant and even so, the imperial concubines usually took eunuchs as lovers

i think on balance they probably did facilitate many centuries of highly centralised rule, a role today filled by communications and surveillance technology

propaganda and dictatorships work by controlling information and hence beliefs and opinions and it is amazing how easily we driven by these into various insanities

from the control point of view, any creativity is a threat or poison and is dealt with by the force of suppression or aversion

in delusian terms  "creativity is an act of resistance"

han china

umpteen million

one

grain of sand

amongst many

must alter your perspective

the

system

can

do

without

you

as one brought up on a very patriarchal version of english history its interesting to see that william the conquerer’s success was in part due to having a very politically competent  wife

ed.  video has 3 parts

also interesting is that due to harold godwinson having been captured in normandy and kept there for a while, he knew both mitilda  (possibly even having an affair with her)  and william very well and should have been more au fait with norman battle tactics and strengths

i have a theory that the middle ages and somewhat later had in effect a breeding program through intermarriage within the nobility/aristocracy creating a politically competent class, because politics is not a natural skill to the species, same thing for ancient egypt, in fact today’s international politics suffers a lot from people lacking any sort of the rationality and largeness of mind required

the abdication of the duke of windsor was in fact a surface effect of a deeper political struggle, would britain become a client state of germany or would it resist ?

xu qiyao’s  advice  to his son on being successful in CCP politics

when you hear this sort  of crap  from the policy making elites, no wonder china is a problem !

the real impact of the one child policy may be the scarcity of anyone at the higher levels of government or policy being able to think straight

of course, this is to the advantage of the west and is the same problem japan had in WW2, idiots determining their strategic direction

so many ideas in politics and the public arena are full of contradictions, childish/ low reading age in fact

this excellent talk  by dr. sally paine of the hudson institute explains the present conundrum of how russia and china are reacting to maritime vs continental geo-political paradigms, there’s an inevitableness to it that seems unreasonable to our very maritime outlook

the talk was made six years ago and is quite prophetic in terms of present day events

china is caught in a contradiction by trying to apply continental psychology to becoming a great maritime power, their taking of taiwan would enable them to sustain the illusion, but would compound the economic problems

recent research is showing that sitting for long periods like say data entry for work is very unhealthy, the body has two systems that depend on physical movement to work, that is, venous return and lymph so you can see how physical stillness can contribute to disease

interestingly, one of the hardest drugs to withdraw from is the supposedly benign and medically sanctioned xanax/ benzodiazepines

jordan peterson had to be put into a coma in russia to detoxify and he’s not been the same since

apparently he wasn’t aware of the problems when taking it, likely a penalty of the busy-ness of a high public profile with a lot of hostility directed at him

in my view its not religion that is the "opiate of the masses" but entertainment like netflix and C and K dramas

there is a huge hidden benefit to this and that is the loss of interest in insane ideologies like marxism so we now get neutered forms like woke which while not entirely harmless cannot match a fraction of the horror that attempts to implement marxism achieved

an interesting  convergence  between the "little pinks" and netflix

my view is that there is always 10% of any population prepared to act as "enforcers" of whatever brutal tyranny can be bought into being by their success, though always doomed, the attack on the capitol is a case in point

the great virtue of the british monarchy is that by providing a figurehead that can’t really be displaced by a real dictator, events such as the cultural revolution and "putinism" are prevented

dictatorships are not benign, at  the dissident edge  there is always brutal suppression

worlds ruled by appearances try to deny the inversion of intention and effects

recently i came across this comment on a youtube  travel blog

“ Hi Ken i am a fighter pilot from USA now living in China and i love it  —  don’t worry about the lies they say about you or China, i get the same thing people calling me a traitor for training the Chinese how to fly planes ”

the  youtube nick  he posted under is his wife’s/girlfriend’s account, a video of him in  uniform  followed by him flying a fighter so its the real deal

the training of chinese fighter pilots by western "traitors" has jumped the experience gap by ten years or more and these people really are traitors who have materially affected the current military balance in the chinese favour as witnessed by the superb flying skills of the chinese in harassing western and taiwanese military aircraft

ed.  looks like the problem extends  to intelligence agencies

alcohol abuse, mafia, endemic bullying, promiscuity, chaebols, lowest fertility rate, maniacal regime next door, patriarchy, maybe K dramas are a bit tame compared to the real south korea ?

xi jinping’s and the ccp’s position is that all ethnic chinese are the property of the ccp

dangerous for everyone

for china to successfully  invade taiwan ,  it needs a successful pre-emptive strike against US bases in japan

so if you wake up one morning to that news

that’s how WW3 will start

why the eastern ukrainian front has reverted to a WW1 type trench warfare is that drones have equalised infantry with tanks

in the latter stages of WW2, the germans had hardly any tanks on the eastern front and the russian advance consisted to large extent of their tanks rolling through german defensive positions, albeit with high russian infantry losses

one of the puzzles of tattooing is, is its association with criminal, drugtaking and otherwise violent/mentally unstable subcultures a cause or effect ?

i think its both, it is actually ritualized self-injury and body modification, but maybe there are negative immune and health effects from the tattooing and  inks  itself ?

moderate to heavy tattooing is not recognised for what it is, a destructive anti-social marker that reinforces the problems of its subcultures

you can’t scramble your brains with drugs or alcohol and expect to come out unscathed

yet

many do

you can’t scramble the brains with drugs or alcohol and expect to come out unscathed

yet

many do

lotuses

bland symbols of buddhism

a bland religion

spiced

by sex and financial scandals

in  the closet  of the vatican

years ago i watched a video of pope benedict and senior clergy paying close attention to an acrobatics troop performing for them  —  the men in the troop were good looking muscular types and the pope was totally leering at them, that’s when the penny dropped with me about what was really going on there

i am sure cardinal becciu is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of embezzlement and cardinal pell’s death must have brought sighs of relief all round

its a culture of total hypocrisy and larceny of the public purse, it really made me see mother teresa in a different light with her shift to more atheistic views in later life

the holocaust was an extraordinarily effective operation in terms of deception and organization

its not appreciated the extent to which this was enabled and driven by german academia

i think we are seeing academia go on another toxic bender with neo-marxism, identity politics, diversity, " woke" and "trans"

its not in the same order of harm, but still   .    .    .

one of the surprising things about south korea is the extent to which it is christian

china and japan would also be this way if not for its brutal suppression at various points in their histories

i would have to say it is the most sophisticated religion and missionizes well, theologically a mess, but they all are

i have had two pfizer  (which i think is safer than the moderna)  vaccines  (with a four? month spacing between)  and can’t tell whether i have ever had covid or not, but i don’t think i am going to risk another jab

the current vaccines still fail to address that the covid variants don’t match the antibody targets of the vaccine so relying only on long term immunity and now there is this issue of  overstimulation  of the formation of IgG4 antibodies which inhibit the suppression of cancer tumours, the jury is out in this, but the jury "being out" also means it is not "in" on this aspect of vaccine safety

one of the problems with covid is a huge variation in individual susceptibility to serious problems from covid or the vaccines eg. i think i drew the long straw and am not in the "at risk" group  (at least from covid), but depending on your genes and other factors the risk/benefit value is going to vary significantly from person to person and there are no tests at this point to delineate this

  my list  of effective supplements for covid and its prevention

hard to read

any war

you are in as much danger from your own side

as the enemy

there is always a time

to disobey

your

own

command

low reading age is 50% of the problem with woke and similar, ignorance is not a passive procedure, its an active rejection of what is not wanted to be known and being ignorant, it can get brutal

i don’t agree with most views on "addiction", i would restate it in the terms of the "free energy principle", that is, its a biological misperception of what constitutes "reduced surprise" which of course is why its such a difficult problem to solve

this misperception is, of course part of "mental illness" another problem of even more difficulty

journalists

entitled

ineffectual

treacherous

idiots

i feel if alexi navalny and his wife had been more familiar with russian history during its soviet phase, he would not have made the mistake of going back

whatever political purposes his return may have served there’s not much you can do when dead and actually the death of nikolai bukharin is a salutary example, stalin even gave him a chance to flee

a story that sticks in my mind is a KGB officer claiming as a work expense a massage therapist for the repetitive strain injury for his trigger figure

they way they usually executed was to walk the victim for a few minutes with the executioner behind and then put a bullet to the back of head so that it was never apparent when the actual moment of execution would occur, eerily reminiscent of the state explanation of navalny’s death, he died of "sudden death syndrome" while out for a walk

i don’t think we are going to see his body released

an  anti-tattoo  attitude that is rare on the internet

one of the problems of the web is you get "special interest" groups missionizing whatever toxic belief/ideology trying to muscle out any criticism, pro-tattoos being a case in point !

you actually get this in mainstream media as well with the capture of a portal by a subculture with a certain viewpoint like "semi" or "modified" woke

you just have to look at 20th century history to understand the power of "controlled" information

whether considering facelifts, body modification or lasik just remember the surgeon’s saying

“ one surgery begets another ”

my view is that the body is a finely tuned developmental mechanism and unnecessary surgery disrupts the balance with consequences that eventually show

of course, necessary surgery has a different risk –  benefit profile, eg. lens replacement for cataracts

neither hitler, stalin, napoleon, genghis khan, vlad the impaler, ivan the terrible nor mao were single

african skies

thunder clouds

african seas

lit with the sun

surprisingly normal

the people

but not the land

still

like

kipling

popular entertainment

the interface between the arts and the ignorant masses

who tolerate their brains being stretched in a way no other area of life gives permission for

don’t wonder why the world  is the way it is

its in the genes

i notice my own aggression, so much of the functional capacity of the male is built for war

the mongols and hitler were not accidents and dictatorships are a minority at war with their fellows

sustained social stability is a blessing and not necessarily the normal state of affairs

dementia

a woman who doesn’t know her children

yet can still speak

what sort of world is this ?

ed. there’s a few instances on youtube/shorts of this, its fascinating that a woman escorted by her child cannot remember him/her but be otherwise conversant, there’s something more fundamental about our use of language than memory, it must be writ in our genes which is why it survives so well into dementia

mental health diagnoses

the long list

the injured

seeking comfort

and not finding it

just words

tv cooking shows all have same the same mistake of equating food preparation and cooking with a diet of high nutritional value, indeed i would say a lot of today’s cooking tends too close to the negative

you can pay $10,000 for a meal at new york’s fanciest restaurant, but its not a patch on the slow cooked possum i am eating this morning, nutritionally supreme with its unusually high omega three levels and quite tasty too

honestly i feel the whole upmarket restaurant thing is a bit of a racket, like designer bags, lamborghinis and the usual bad art, that market is bottomless apparently and true socialism, wealth and poverty united in ignorance and stupidity

the term "addiction" is perhaps used too casually these days, in my mind what makes a true addiction is having a significantly deleterious effect on your life and only complete abstinence can break the pattern

identifying and acting on "incremental opportunity cost" is a way to handle it

i listened to a WW2 account of russian troops assaulting a defensive german position during their retreat and the russian commanders deliberately sent a newly conscripted mongolian company through a minefield to blow up a path for the troops behind, most of course were killed

russian tactics don’t seem to have changed much  with the avdiivka assaults

the tolerance of the russian population to this sort of criminality by their own leaders is just unbelievable

one of the technological changes i don’t think people really appreciate is how modern medicine is extending the lifespan in way that reinforces current power hierarchies and actually in certain contexts like dictatorships is creating some problems

simply put there was a large natural turnover of people dying from fifty on that was perfectly normal, an example of this is king charles having an operation to remove tissue in an enlarged prostate, and princess kate having some sort of major operation, both of which were possibly fatal in several years without treatment and that’s literally was what used to happen

you only have to look at 19th and early 20th century film and the people on the streets, there’s no-one over 60

china

a culture in isolation

eroding at the edges

we will see

what

happens

the russian orthodox church’s close association with putin and the russo-ukraine war makes for some post orwellian obscenity

i really don’t know how they reconcile it

killing their own men on the eastern ukrainian front and making up the population loss with immigrants, can’t the russians put two and two together ?

actually the current immigration crisis in europe has it origins in the decimations of WW1 and WW2

“ Do you think that leftism is more accepting of people with mental illness ? ”

stalin and mao were mentally ill

“ I would like to add a certain Austrian painter to the list ”

he wasn’t ill the way stalin and mao were, you can see it in the poetry mao wrote and stalin killing off his wife’s family, hitler in his own context was a much more normal man and actually quite liked on a personal level