Looks like there will be no new taxes on the affluent, even though the majority of Americans say they want them. Majority opinion no longer seems to matter. Some democracy this is.
On the day of the debt ceiling showdown, should I write about it at length? Or should we show our disdain for any possible deal by turning our attention to some completely absurd topic of discussion -- say, the 60's animation of Ozama Tezuka, or the lost treasure of the Superstition Mountains, or the mystery of Gisors castle, or Bella's latest adventures, or how to cook a really great roast chicken?
Rome is burning, and I got me a hankerin' to fiddle.
17 comments:
You're funny. Disdain I vote.
OR, you could go back and work on a 3rd option( the new deal) for the American people. New party, drafting Hillary, in the street revolt, call for massive boycutting the election or any thing else but the sugggestions you came up with
Well, I would like to hear more of your thoughts concerning RD's piece from yesterday.
Turn you disgust into action by kicking the cable news habit. We are here today because news anchors like Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann were cheer leaders for Obama instead of journalists.
Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus is what the USA needs; Kochs and Immelts and McKerneys are what it's got.
A bit of bluegrass would go down a treat!
I could not care less about this debt kabuki theater. It reminds me of when Obots were so "worried" that Republicans would not let pass Zero's forced health insurance that treats women as chattel.
Topic-wise I'm wishing there were more discussion on Somalia's "Children's Famine" --- not here, per se, but in general.
I vote for Gisors castle.
Okasha
I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.
Gisors!
Re. Plantard, two things that strike me as unexplained by the 'move along folks' crowd are 1) his surname, which no-one AFAIAA has accused him of making up, and 2) his connections with well-known French monarchist political circles, especially the underground monarchist group La Cagoule, which split away from Action Française after the 1934 near outbreak of civil war and was a serious pre-shade of the OAS. Look at Vaincre and I don't think he was always a lone ranger. Did Himmler really offer him the Duchy of Brittany? Maybe not, but who knows...maybe he did. Hitler met the Duke of Windsor... Anyway the key link with Gisors goes through William Rufus and then, later, through an alleged illegitimate grandson of Philippe le Bel.... Aaargh!
The Vaincre thing always bugged me, b. A long time ago, when my Frog was better, I translated Plantard's intro to Boudet's book -- so far as I know, this was PP's only formally published piece of writing. Clear signs of bullshitting were in evidence. Lotta crap about Atlantis, which P prolly picked up from Peladan by way of Georges Monti.
So right then and there, I decided that the guy was just a fantasist with pretensions of grandeur.
And yet...Vaincre clearly had money behind it. Someone in the Petain government must have approved of it. And it heavily featured PP, even though he was practically a tyke back then.
So, like...what the hell, man?
By the way: There have long been rumors of PP or de Cherisey being somehow involved in offenses against the young. Do you know of anyone who has linked this in any way to that great unpleasantness in Belgium, the Dutroux scandal?
That's a stab in the dark, I know. And perhaps irresponsible. But, what the hell -- it's not like a whole bunch of people are going to read this.
Okay, I think it's time to do the Gisors thing. I have Markale's book somewhere around here...
Please don't fiddle. Here are two things you can do: (1) call for Obama to step aside during the upcoming election so we can identify a viable Democratic candidate; (2) ask your Democratic Senators and Congressperson to vote "No" on Obama's compromise which he is working out together with the Republicans, even as you fiddle. The rest of the Democratic Party isn't irrelevant just because it has a leader who would rather be a Republican.
Send an "Atta Boy" email to Gijalva for this: "This deal trades peoples' livelihoods for the votes of a few unappeasable right-wing radicals," Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said in an fiery statement, "and I will not support it."
I'd vote for the chicken recipe, except that I don't think many of us will be able to afford chickens in Austerity-land.
Disdain. Indifference. More indifferent than Obama.
It's inevitable that any 'Merovingian pretender' is going to be a fantasist talking bullshit. Ditto any Chinese Mingite restorationist. But I don't buy that being the whole of the story. I still wonder how he came by the name 'Plantard' which no-one has suggested he didn't get from his father; it's very rare, was used by Jean de Plantard, and is related to 'Plantagenet'.
The Catholic church officially backed (Orléanist) Action Française until 1926. Monarchist politics then got crazier, what with synarchism etc.
I've known about the Feb 1934 crisis in Paris for decades, but only learnt recently about 'La Cagoule' (CSAR - Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire), which split off from Action Française in the aftermath of the near-coup. Apparently not only did Ducaud-Bourget and Pierre Plantard have connections with the Cagoule, but so did our old friend François Mitterand.
De Gaulle, meanwhile, grew up in AF circles before 1934. He also encouraged the Orléanist pretender the Count of Paris to stand for the presidency in 1961. That was only 3 years after De Gaulle wrote the constitution of the 5th republic. Republicanism in France was not then, and is not now, as secure as many people think.
One day I might look into Saunière's possible links with the Comtesse de Chambord. She was the widow of a Legitimist pretender, but after he died, faced with a Legitimist pretender from a very Spanish family, most Legitimists switched to Orléanism. ('Pro tem?', one might reasonably ask). Paul Smith denies Saunière had any links with the Comtesse, but Saunière certainly asserted that he did. You gotta wonder how many 'fantasists' in this story are total utter fantasists (so move along folks, please, there's nothing of any interest here), and how many might also be something else as well as fantasists. (Smith doesn't understand that point at all. Interestingly, Baigent and Leigh have a very profound understanding of it; I don't know whether you're familiar with Baigent's work on mundane astrology).
La Cagoule must have been an influence on the culture and self-perception of the OAS, just as say the Haganah and Irgun feed into the culture of the IDF. We also know from Peter Partner about the crusaderism of certain Algeria-focused French army officers during the Algeria war period.
What do you make of Boudet's book, btw? People say it's coded without saying what parts of it may hide what. The exception here is Lincoln, whose metrology is necessarily as weak as his mathematics. The big figure in alternative English metrology was John Michell, whose Evolism ('radical traditionalism') became about as clear as it could possibly be for any reader who wasn't fanatically unwilling to notice it.
Lincoln sounds like a good dude, not a right-wing Jungian monarchist mythmaker like Baigent and Leigh...so I give him the benefit of the doubt here. But concocting myths for political purposes about holy places of a nation, or of all Christendom, or diffusionist 'cultural monogenetic' metrology, especially if conceived in terms of an underground stream is just what we'd expect Evolists to do. Evola was no 'revolutionary'; he just sought to distil the essence of the way things are in these prehistoric anti-human times.
But spookily, none of the above takes those mountain peaks out of their pentagonal arrangement! :)
On its face, Boudet's book looks like utter piffle and little else. I recall that in the 1980s I discovered that he'd sent a copy to Queen Victoria's private secretary at Windsor, which is still in the library there. (The librarian sent me a photocopy of his letter, which at that time was still in their copy of the book). Was he really dreaming that the world would accept his crazy language theory?
Was Boudet serious? I dunno. Have you ever seen Stanley James' book on RlC? It's even crazier than Boudet's.
One theory of the Boudet book holds that the nonsensical text is a blind; the real message is encrypted in the illustrations. I've also heard it said that the reprint of the Boudet book (the only one I've seen -- it's in the L of C) mangles this message by printing things in the wrong order.
Keep in mind that this all began as a simple "lost treasure" mystery.
I don't want to turn this into an RlC blog, mostly because I haven't taken a look at that stuff in years. One of the things that caused me to avoid the subject was Paul Smith. His original writings were quite good. But man oh man -- did that guy ever lose it!
Have you ever had any interaction with him? Living proof that skeptics can go wacko too. (The same can be said about a guy named Kal Korff.)
So I've yet to read the Putnam/Wood book, which they say is quite good. But I did read much of the French skeptical material on which they base their conclusions.
I didn't know about Michell's links to Evola, but it's not surprising. Someone who spends so much time delving into Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions will probably form a few Peculiar Notions of his own. So what does that say about me? Or you?
There's a lot of good material about the Cagoule in "The Sion Conspiracy."
Oh, about Chamford -- it is known that the family did contribute heavily to Sauniere. I've long been of the opinion that Sauniere's "secret" was that he was acting as treasurer for the plotters who hope to overthrow the Third Republic. Maybe the main reason why an outright revolt never occurred during the Dreyfuss madness was that BS dipped into the till too heavily for his redecorating scheme!
The "Paid to say Masses" explanation holds water only for Protestants who have weird ideas about how Catholicism works -- or whose prejudices are such that they think Catholics are capable of any sort of nonsense. There's no reason why rich people all across France should suddenly want one obscure priest to say so many Masses, especially since so many other priests back then were really hurting for money. And it's not as though BS was flooding the country with ads.
No, the "masses" gambit was, in my view, a cover. Money was being amassed because the French Right longed for their version of Der Tag. He supposedly found the hidden MacGuffin in 1891, right? This was the same year Boulanger killed himself, and just a short while after Boulanger came THAT close to mounting a right-wing coup. The Boulangists (who, like the American Confederates, were early fascists) needed to regain their muscles. They needed money, and they needed a new leader.
That's my theory, although of course I'm hardly the only person to hold it. Much more work needs to be done, of course. Alas, BS lived and operated in Occitania -- land of myth and mystery -- and all of that myth and mystery has garbled what really occurred.
I don't know how to play the fiddle, but I do know my way around a synth, Adobe Audition and FL Studio. As such, I got this done a few hours before the debt ceiling deal:
http://www.illusionofjoy.net/AynRandShrugged.mp3
I have to admit, Joseph, that your writing showing Libertarians due contempt helped inspire me to finish this monster.
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