The computer was down for 2 1/2 weeks. That got me out of the habit of posting and into the habit of doing other things instead.
I hate to say it, but I also have writer’s block. Most of us do. And not to blow my own horn, but the only writers I have ever known to get blocked unless they had some mental problem like my father were all pretty damn good writers. Poor writers don’t get blocked. And my Dad was actually a pretty good writer. He just had Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder which meant he spent two days writing a two page paper because it was never good enough.
Not talking about myself here again, but good writers are often perfectionists although some can really churn it out. It’s never quite good enough and deep down inside, many good writers have the terrifying feeling that they actually suck and are terrible writers. It doesn’t make sense, but our fears seldom do. But that doesn’t make them any less real.
So, I have been busy but busy doing other things rather than this. I’m also sleeping like a rock, usually minimum 12 hours a day. I’m not sure what is going on, but I do take hardcore sedating drugs before sleep so maybe that has something to do with it.
I need to get back into the swing of things though. Sorry about the delays!
Mostly just lots of short stories these days. They’re all considered classic literature. One book is a set of French short stories by writers who are considered to write classic literature.
The French book was published in 1960, so we are dealing with dated material here, all over 60 years old:
Charles Baudelaire: Paris Spleen (1869). “Prose poems or proems,” an odd literary form. Very nice. I have read The Flowers of Evil (both are books of poetry), and I cannot recommend them highly enough, especially Le Fleurs du Mal. French Symbolist literature, or more properly, Decadent literature, from the late 1800’s. He hung out with Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, all of them haunting Parisian bars in drunken ecstasy.
He as actually straight, unlike some of those other guys who were homosexuals. He was sickly, nuts, erratic, a drug-addict, flake, dilettante, gambler, spendthrift, and heavy drinker who lived his whole life in poverty. He attempted suicide once. Dead at 46. Marcel Proust said Baudelaire was the greatest poet of the 19th Century. He was also praised by Edmund Wilson and T. S. Eliot, who actually referred to himself as a “Baudelarian.” He was claimed by both conservatives and liberals. On the left, Walter Benjamin praised him.
Francois Mauriac: The Grand-Lebrun (1933). First thing I ever read by this guy. Has a James Joyce feel about it, especially Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.
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In the other book, published in 1968, so these stories are all over 50 years old:
Anton Chekhov: Misery (1885) and Rothschild’s Fiddle (1894). These are better than either of the French stories. This is the first Chekhov I have read. He’s 19th Century Russia, so I warn you, these stories, like most Russian lit from that time, are depressing and gloomy as Hell. Someone either dies, has just died, or will soon die, or all three at once. Nevertheless, his style is truly amazing and heartrendingly beautiful and sad. He is said to be one of the masters of the short story.
Ernest Hemingway: Big Two-Hearted River (1925). This one also is almost perfect. Classic Hemingway understated yet perfect prose. He doesn’t waste a sentence or probably a word. His writing is based on the Iceberg Theory. I’ve also read a number of his novels A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls,The Old Man and the Sea, and The Sun Also Rises. I also read Death in the Afternoon (nonfiction) along with In Our Time and Men without Women, short story collections.
William Faulkner: Dry September (1930). Nice little story, terrible subject matter. He catches the South in all of its casual brutality. I also read Light in August, and it is excellent. Can’t recommend it enough. It’s written a lot in stream of consciousness, so you have to pay attention to whose mind he is in and who’s talking at the time. Also a lot of it is in dialect.
Vladimir Nabokov: First Love (1943). This story is just gorgeous, but it’s not an easy read at all. He’s one of my favorite writers ever, truly one of the greats. However, he is not an easy read at all. Like Hemingway, his work is full of hidden details, references, clues, puns, on and on. I’m not sure if it’s possible for the non-intellectual to read his stuff on an entertainment level.
I’ve also read Lolita and Bend Sinister. Both are good, but Lolita, the story of a pedophile (or hebephile) child molester and relationship with the extremely precocious, gum-smacking 12 year old sexpot Lolita, is out of this world, one of the greatest books of the 20th Century. I do know that it can be read on different levels though, and even at a basic level, it is incredible. If you wish to go hunting for the endless Easter eggs peppered all through this symbolism-shot book, you can do that too. If you haven’t read it, do so. Don’t worry about the disturbing subject matter. It’s something we talk about all the time anyway. We just don’t talk about it like this.
Richard Wright: The Man Who Lived Underground (1944). This is the first I have read of this author, the famous Black writer of the classic Native Son, which I probably need to read sometime. He’s very angry and all of his writing is about racism and Whites’ unjust treatment of Blacks. His writing is cold, vicious, cruel, and often horribly violent. But if you can handle him, he’s quite good. And to be fair, Blacks were treated terribly back when he was writing.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: EPICAC (1950) and Next Door (1955). Both of these were great! Both of them are as good as a Chekhov or Borges short story, and that’s the gold standard. There’s often a wild twist at the end.
I’ve read quite a few books of his. I’ve read Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday!; Cat’s Cradle; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine; Happy Birthday, Wanda June; Mother Night; Player Piano; Sirens of Titan; Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, all novels. I’ve also read Welcome to the Monkey House, a book of short stories (now rereading it). In addition, I read Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (Opinions), nonfiction.
Vonnegut is very nice. He’s quite simple and anyone can read him. But his work is nevertheless absolutely brilliant. Because it’s so simplistic, there’s a tendency to see him as overrated, until you read him again and you realize just how brilliant he really is. If you like easy reading, I’d recommend any of the books above. They’re entertaining and funny, too, often in a self-deprecatory way. As a person, he was a huge asshole to just about everyone, but again, that’s not unusual with these genius types. They’re out to lunch in a lot of ways, and socially can be one of them.
Carson McCullers: The Sojourner and The Jockey (both 1955). First I have read of her too. Interesting writer. Sort of Hemingway-like, understated stuff. Overtones of melancholy.
James Allen McPherson: On Trains (1961). I had never even heard of this author before and at first I thought it was just the author trying to be antiracist by throwing in some Black (or other designated oppressed minority) author to get woke points. I was shocked. He’s excellent. If you like Black writers, check this guy out.
He writes about race a lot, but in a subtle, understated, matter of fact way, sort of like Faulkner. But he also deals with the reality of Black-White sexual relationships, which was probably controversial in his day. When he went to Yale, he had already experienced quite a bit of racism, but he seemed more philosophical and “I’m going to show those White boys how good I am” about it. He’s not nearly as militant and angry as Wright.
John Updike: A & P (1962) and The Doctor’s Wife (1962). A & P is one of the all-time greats. Then again, not much happens. But that’s true of the best short stories of all.
Consider For Esme, with Love and Squalor by J. D. Salinger. What happens? Not a whole lot. But it’s one of the best short stories of its time. And Updike is rather like Salinger in that way. His writing is very subtle and to figure it out properly, you need to get down below the basic writing to figure out what he’s really getting at. He shows. He doesn’t tell.
And dialogue is very important. He deals well with shades of emotion, feeling, and mental states that are often pretty hard for us to put our fingers on, and we would probably deny them even if we could. There can be a sense of lost opportunity or hypocrisy. His male characters are often gross sexists.
Misogyny is often apparent. I’m reading a recent novel of his, Towards the End of Time, and the same thing is going on. In many cases, this has to do with the author’s relationships with his ex-wives. But the lyrical Melvillean prose dancing off the pages of of this much later novel is joyous to read just for style alone..
I also read Hugging The Shore, a book of his book reviews and literary criticism. It was very good.
Donald Barthelme: Margins (1961) and See the Moon? (1966). This is literally some of the strangest and weirdest fiction I’ve ever read. It’s like this new fiction style called Weird. That’s about the only way to describe it. However, as an author, he is absolutely brilliant in a lot of different ways. You wonder how one man carried all this knowledge and insight in his 10 pound brain. I liked these stories, but they sure were weird all right. Plus which not much happens, but apparently that’s the idea.
I’ve read Amateurs; Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Forty Stories; Great Days; Sadness; Sixty Stories; Snow White; and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, all short story collections. There was a time in the 80’s when I was binging on that stuff.
Jorge Luis Borges: The Secret Miracle (1962) and Funes the Memorious (1967). Borges is the great Argentine writer, one of the best writers of the last century. Nevertheless, he’s not for everyone and he’s a bit hard to get into. This writing is similar to Barthelme’s, but it is on a whole different level. It has been called magical realism. It has been called a lot of things. But there is no writing quite like it anywhere else.
It’s a bit like Gabriel Garcia Marquez of 100 Years of Solitude fame. After all, they are both South Americans and magical realism was birthed on the continent. He’s also rather like Ray Bradbury in terms of showing us fantastic and otherworldly visions of our world which are at once our own world and then again, something else entirely. I’ve always felt there was a bit of Franz Kafka in there too. There’s often a sense of tragedy in his writing, and usually someone dies. Death is always waiting around the corner. I’ve Ficciones and Labyrinths, both short story collections, during my time at university from 1978-1981.
John Barth: Life-Story (1968). John Barth wrote in The Literature of Exhaustion in 1967 that the novel form was used up and there was not much to do anymore as it had all already been done. It caused quite a stir on the lit scene. It appeared around the time that Roland Barthes, a literary critic, wrote The Death of the Author. Both are considered to be seminal texts in the emerging movement of postmodernism. Much literary criticism now continues to echo Barthes in positioning “author” and “reader” as completely different battling entities. It spends a lot of time mining the interplay between the two.
In 1980, he wrote The Literature of Replenishment in which he singled out Borges and Nabokov (see above) as two writers who were indeed doing new things with the novel instead of the same old same old.
Barth’s writing is self-consciously postmodern. After The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, things started getting weird. He became known for metafiction, that is fiction about the writing of fiction. The “writer” of whatever piece you are reading will often make an appearance, say a few things, and disappear.
Perhaps he will remind you that you’re only reading a book. Perhaps he will say that the story you are reading is really a story about an author writing a story. Which is about an author writing a story. And on and on. Get the picture? He was the first professor of Creative Writing in the US in 1953, although that is hard to believe. Now these departments are everywhere and all of their graduates are churning out at least a novel or two. To say we are swamped is an understatement.
His writing is full of a lot of self-conscious talk about novel-writing, how to write a novel, the components of a novel, the various ways one can choose in which to write a novel, the levels on which you can write them, characterization, plot, background, conflict, on and on. He often starts talking about this right in the middle of your reading, so you are reading along and then this “author” guy pops up and tells you there’s going to be a big plot change coming up ahead, so get ready for it. It’s weird and jarring but it’s very interesting.
This stuff is very hard to read and can be quite confusing at times. It’s also frustrating. But if you like to bend your mind a bit, this is a good place to do it.
I have read The Sot Weed Factor. That’s considered to be his best book.
You either like this writer or you don’t. I assure you that he is absolutely brilliant. But he’s not for everyone and some may find him a bore or end up throwing the book at the wall. Caveat emptor.
Saul Bellow: “A Father to Be” (1953): Interesting little story. In his early novels and short stories, the wild goings-on in the heads of his characters, who all have very rich and complex fantasy and emotional lives, is matched by the world, which is about as strange and active as the material in their heads. This can be seen in Dangling Man, The Victim, and even in The Adventures of Augie March and Seize the Day. After that, things start getting really weird and the outside world or the plots start veering way off course from the character’s inner lives. The mismatch between the two offers a lot of the conflict.
I have read Humbolt’s Gift at university, but I found it a bit of a chore honestly, and it was also rather boring. But then, I was 22, so hey. Maybe if I read it again at my age, I might get a lot more out of it.
It’s about the poet Delmore Schwartz, whose live was as wild as his poems. He wrote Under Milkwood, a Play for Voices. I’d never read it but maybe it’s not supposed to be read with your eyes. Maybe as the title implies, it’s supposed to be heard with your ears. I heard it on the radio one and the genius and brilliance of it was almost impossible to fathom. It was as good as Ulysses. Really. I don’t even know how he did it? How can one man do such a thing.
He drank himself to death at an early age like so many of these guys do. The story is he went to a bar and asked how many drinks he would have to drink to die and people at the bar estimated 17. So he proceeded to then drink precisely 18 drinks of alcohol. You know how this story ends, right? He died. Call it a suicide. Or a parasuicide. Anyway, it’s a typical way for this types, men as well as women, to take their final sleep.
I think the most common cause of death in poets must be suicide. And so many of them are depressives or manic-depressives. But it’s a fine line between creativity and mental illness and that’s why so many of us artistic types are so nutty. Yeah, I consider myself an artsy type. If I’m not, sue me. Anyway, it’s a great excuse for being crazy!
Also, an unbelievable number of poets are more or less gay. A lot of the women are lesbian or bi and often dykey or mannish. Gay male poets are almost a stereotype. But then the link between the Arts and Homosexuality was noted as far back as Antiquity. Some have even suggested that should a cure for homosexuality or genetic testing show up, we might want to keep gays around just for their creativity. As with so many questions of some but not great importance, I’m inclined to leave that up in the air or for the Gods to work out, which is basically the same thing.
A while back I was going through a bunch of poets because I had nothing better to do with my time and I kept running into this Gay-Suicide-Poet thing. A lot of the women’s dykeyness was turning me off, and I was terribly sad to find out that some of my favorite male authors were batting for the other team.
Then I achieved an epiphany. I don’t really if so many of these poets are faggots, dykes, and suicides or some combination of first two and the third, their lives were worth it and glorious and beautiful and perfect just for leaving us that sublime silver prose that sings off the pages as we read it. They did not die in vain. And perhaps there’s a place in the world for folks like that. It takes all types to fill the freeways.
Yep, he sure was. Underneath all of that macho bravado, he was just another one of us pathetic introverts. First of all, he wrote every morning from 6 AM – 10 AM. All alone in his writing cottage of course. All of us have to write alone. You can’t write if other people are around. Well, at least you’ve got to shut the door. Admittedly, it’s not a very sociable hobby. After that, he had lunch, then he’d go off to the bar or wherever and drink or rabble rouse with the boys.
What nobody knows is that Hemingway was actually painfully shy. See all that boozing? That’s called liquid introversion, folks. That’s why he drank so much, to kill his shyness. It works for some of us if we’re not too far gone.
We think of Hemingway as carousing it up in wild and dangerous men’s bars, right? Try again. Let’s walk into one of his favorite bars right now. Maybe it’s in Italy, or the Alps, or Paris, or Key West, or best of all, Havana. Sure it’s wild at the main bar where the bartender’s serving up drinks. So where’s Hemingway? Damn! There he is, off in a darkened corner of this particular clean, well-lighted place, drinking alone in the dim light. Which is usually exactly how you found him.
Finally, one more algebraic proof and we will be off. How do we know Hemingway was an introvert? Well, he was a great writer, no? That’s all the evidence you need. All great writers are introverts. No exceptions, ever. Extroverts can’t be great writers. They’re just not wired up that way. For one, they hate being alone. That’ll kill it right there.
Related to the Delphi Murders, as you well know, I am widely hated. People say have never been right even one time, lie about and make up everything I say and in general am not a credible source. I will use this piece as a general reference to my credibility instead of addressing it endlessly in every post.
However, they have been saying exactly this about many different things I ever written over the last 15 years, Consistently, I was shown to be right and they were wrong. Not one hater ever apologized and all continued to describe me as discredited and said that nothing I had ever said had been shown to be correct.
Particularly that I have no credibility and have never been right about anything. On the contrary I have been right about many things. I’m even correct about many of my political, philosophical, and other intellectual views because I think over all of these positions intensively before I make a decision about which position or philosophy to take.
As far as the matter at hand, many of my Delphi rumors have been proven correct, mostly correct, or somewhat correct over the years. When Leigh Kerr came out with his leaks from case documents, many of my haters on Reddit kept remarking at how similar Leaker’s shocking leaks were to and how closely they resembled many of the things I had been saying for years. Well, of course. It’s always like that. The thing is these same people who said so much of what I said was proven right are now saying I have no credibility and I’ve never been right about anything. See how people are?
I recently had a long relationship – mostly just a friendship – with a young woman aged 27-28. She was 30 years my junior. One thing she kept saying over and over is how wise I was and how I had so much wisdom. Of course. I have had other young people on the Net who called me “sensei.”
I am currently the chosen mentor of a few young men in their 20’s, though I don’t mentor them enough. They chose me as their mentor. And I have heard that there are young women whom I am a mentor to, all in their 20’s. They say I’m their hero, idol, or mentor. A man in India recently wrote me and said his father, a very learned man, read my stuff and said that it was most wise and correct view of life he’d ever read in 60 years.
I attracted a huge legion of haters that grew and grew as I got more and more famous, well, Net-famous anyway. Related to this website and the articles I wrote, I have had three offers to be on TV and one offer to be in a documentary movie in Canada. One of the shows that wanted me on was Inside Edition. Yes, Inside Edition invited me on their show. All of you haters out there – how many of you have been offered to appear on the famous TV show Inside Edition? Not one of you.
I’ve been interviewed once on real radio and several times on Net radio, often for a full hour. These have ceased because the politics of the site and mine have drifted apart.
I can’t believe how many well-known people are familiar with this website. I recently had an offer to interview a TV-famous talking head pundit who has been on TV, the radio, and podcasts many times. He has written a few books proving that Republicans have been stealing our elections with voting machines for decades. He asked the name of my site and I told him and he said, “Oh yes! Great website! I’ve read it.” What? What? This famous guy who writes books and goes on TV reads my website? But he wasn’t the first.
I don’t know it requires to be a “professional freelance journalist,” but I would say that anyone with a BA in Journalism who has a blog qualifies. See here on Rational Wiki, where the excellent authors of this website refer to me as a freelance journalist.
Alt-left
Possibly the earliest reference to an “alternative left” comes from the blog of freelance journalist Robert A. Lindsay in August 2015.[5] Lindsay, describing some on the far-left moving away from identity and social justice politics and moving towards focusing more on Economic Populism, proposed the alt-left as a “mirror” of the alt-right and described it as left-wing on economics and right-wing on social issues.[5][6]
In general the “Alt-Left” could be considered more radical than the “Realist Left”, being to their right on social issues and to their left on most everything else.
It has also been said that I am not a “legitimate” journalist. Look. I graduated from J-School. If you’re doing journalism, you’re a journalist. Julius Stryker was a journalist, an ugly one yet still legitimate. He was hanged for his journalism. Der Strumer was a magazine, a legitimate magazine.
There are no legitimate and illegitimate journalists, newspapers, or magazines. There are only journalists, newspapers and magazines. If they exist they are legitimate.
Really all bloggers who are writing about topical events are journalists. Are they professionals? I have no idea, but some of the better ones may as well be. It really doesn’t matter whether a journalist is paid or not. Does it matter whether an artist’s work sells or not? Does it matter whether a musicians is in an actual money-making band. Does it matter if a writer’s work is published or unpublished? Not really. Plenty of great artists who never sell their stuff or make a nickel off of it.
Also I have published numerous pieces for money in magazines and small local papers. I have even published short fiction in literary magazines. In addition, I recently published a chapter in an academic book on Linguistics published out of a university in Turkey. It took me five years to write it. I had to make it through two peer reviews with the top names in the field and it passed. So, yes, I am a published author.
I also write for peer reviewed academic journals. In addition, I have refereed for a journal. That means serving on the peer review board. The field I published in is Linguistics.
Yes, I was an assistant editor of a large magazine for a while, but that was 40 years ago.
My enemies trash my writing skills but the general opinion is that I am very good. They’ve been saying this since I was seven years old, believe it or not. I started a novel at age nine. In particular, I do not see many grammatical or spelling errors in my work. This is another accusation. My writing has better punctuation and spelling that most people I write to on the Net.
Since my enemies insist that I am seriously mentally ill, I may as well come clean. I’ve been diagnosed probably ~30 times over the years by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. It is true that I do have a mental disorder, and I do take psychiatric medication for it. Not that there’s any shame in that, despite what my enemies think. I have been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is an anxiety disorder. Most people with OCD are not crazy and do not appear crazy. Maybe a bit distracted. Maybe a little nervous like most anxiety disorder types. Most people I meet don’t treat me like I’m nuts. I don’t say weird things or engage in strange behavior. I’m the most normal guy around.
Furthermore, I’m pretty shy, so I don’t even talk much, and when I do, I have a very soft voice. If you meet me, I look like this brainy nerd soft spoken intellectual college professor guy with preppy clothes. Some people from the Net – my fans – came out to meet me and they were shocked at how introverted I was. I pretty seem like this nicest guy you’ll ever meet. This is of course the complete opposite of how my enemies describe me. If you told people who know me all the crazy stuff my enemies say about me, they would probably fall over laughing because I’m not anything like that.
I do not have any personality disorder on Axis 2. My personality is healthy. I don’t have any issues with sociopathy. I’m not narcissistic at all, but I do have high self-esteem, which is not the same thing.
I generally do not have any serious mood disorder, but I do feel a bit down a lot. I doubt it meets criteria for anything. I don’t suffer from mania.
I don’t have any psychotic disorder and I never have. I’ve never been psychotic for a day in my life.
Perhaps my writing rambles a bit. Who knows? A lot of us writers ramble on. It’s not pathological and it’s not even a sign of bad writing. Read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, or William Burroughs some time. Some of the greatest authors of all “rambled.” We ramble because we write too much. That’s why they have these people called editors. Because most of us serious writers ramble and go on and on and write forever, as in way too much. Editors exist to cut the typical good writers prose down to size.
I’ve already stated many times that I never made up a lie one time on here. I am a professional, and this is a violation of professional ethics.
Many critics think it’s ridiculous that I get access to good sources, official documents, including confidential sources with important people who give information that is secret or supposed to be under wraps. I was trained to do this. I know how to interview and how to acquire, cultivate and keep sources around. I know how to get secret and official documents that are supposed to be confidential.
I talk to people all the time who tell me they will get in trouble if it gets out that they talked to me. I honor strict confidentiality and will do anything to protect my sources. So, yeah, I do know how to get “inside sources,” “special sources,” etc. I’m trained to do that. I’m sort of an investigative reporter because I specialize stories where a lot of the information is supposed to be secret. I’ve also broken some pretty huge stories that even caught the attention of documentary film makers.
In addition, I founded a brand new political movement, so I am a political activist. At one time this movement had 18,000 members on Facebook groups. It’s a movement with its own carefully thought out political philosophy with position statements, manifestos, etc. A political scientist, a professor at a university in Poland, found out about my movement and wrote a couple of articles about it for political science journals. So it was important enough to get written up in the journals.
This post has now been updated. See here for the April 4 update. It’s even crazier than this update!
First, a pitch for support for this website and our sleuthing group:
People are donating lots of money to Delphi podcasters Mike Greeno and Gray Hughes, which is their right. Gray makes over $100,000/year from his podcasts, which is fine by me. I don’t agree that any of these people are grifters as everyone says. A grifter is literally a criminal fraudster and he is breaking the law.
The people paying Hughes and Greeno clearly feel that they are getting their money’s worth. But what shocks me is how little these men give their audiences in return for their purchases. Gray’s videos run to 3-4 hours and may contain five minutes of useful material if you are lucky during that time. Greeno’s videos are almost completely worthless, and group members who have spoken to him told me he has nothing new to add to the case.
Which brings me to the question, why not donate to our enterprise here? It’s a much better purchase for your money than throwing money at Hughes and Greeno, for which you get almost nothing in return. And you won’t by enriching someone who is already wealthy like Hughes. I live on a fixed income which is barely above the poverty level. Our group is clearly the best Delphi sleuthing group on the Internet by far.
Unlike any other sleuthers, we have actually determined the main suspect in the case, and we have a pretty good idea of what happened during the crime and what the crime scene looked like.
And most of what we have reported is based on solid sources such as search party members, official case documents, and LE sources close to the investigation. No one else has come close to uncovering the amount and quality of information we have, and almost the entire community rejects our findings even though they are correct.
So why waste your money on Hughes and Greeno? Why not donate to the best Delphi sleuthing team of all by donating to me, leader of a group of 230+ sleuthers who have been working on the case for four years now? How about getting your money’s worth?
This post is very long. It runs to 28 pages. I’m sorry but I’m afflicted with both graphomania and logorrhea (same thing). We writers love to write and once we get started, we just can’t quit, like any other addiction to dope, gambling, sex, porn, or whatever. Except you never get the peak high, and there’s no post-high crash. The high continues the whole time, and there’s relief when you’re done as in an accomplished chore instead of a crash. Sort of, “I’m sure glad that’s over.” We love it yet it’s a chore. Kind of like, you know, life.
You just can’t stop. Supposedly writing too much is a sign of a lousy writer, but then we must convict Balzac and Dickens, not to mention encyclopedists like Pynchon and the king of the graphomaniacs, Proust. I’d rather not do that.
It’s not so much the sign of a lousy writer as the sign of a writer, as in a born writer, a real writer. Just as there are men and real men, so there are writers and real writers.
Obviously it’s a flaw. It violates White’s Manual of Style (Keep it simple, stupid) and a lot of other things, including the reader’s precious time. But all great things come with flaws just as there is a bit of good in even most horrors.
Anyway, what do you think editors are for? To mop up our Niagra of words, that’s what.
A bit here on my ever-growing army of critics. I’ve met some new folks lately, and they all say, “You know, I heard all these horrible things about you, but I wasn’t sure if they were true. Now that I contacted you, I know it’s all garbage. You’re like the nicest guy in the world.” Well, yeah. The obvious conclusion of someone who really knows me. Which is like…just about no one.
If you hate me so much, why do you read? I don’t get it. I don’t read people I hate. I might use their prose for toilet paper or lining bird cages, but I certainly won’t read it. I have better things to do, like enjoying life instead of hating it like you do. If you hate me that much, just go away. Don’t read. Unless you’re someone to whom hate is as valuable as oxygen. In that case, do come and get your fix.
One more thing. Nothing the critics ever said about me is true except that I’m broke, don’t have a regular job, and at one point my car broke down and I didn’t have the money to fix it. None of the sexual proclivities or obsessions they say I have are true. I don’t mind people who think that way, but it’s not for me, sorry. Once again, anyone who really knows me figures this out. Which, once again, is like, just about nobody.
How bout one more one more thing, just to try your patience? There’s a lot of graphic commentary below, including gruesome descriptions of the brutal murders of two young teenage girls. True crime is a nasty beast by its nature. There’s no way to pretty up this pig. If your true crime commentary isn’t brutal, you’re avoiding the facts. If you have a sensitive stomach about such things, just don’t read. Go read about flowers or something instead.
Oh, one more two more things. There are are blown up and edited to Hell images below taken from a helicopter hovering over the crime scene. In the images, some can make out the outlines of the two young victims. Not much is visible. They may as well be stick figures. Nevertheless, a lot of tender folks freak out on such things. So don’t look at them. Have a cup of coffee and think of sunshine and smiles instead.
Oh and one more three things. I would like to officially thank “Cory Ahlm” and “Ryan Vanslooten,” whoever the Hell they are, assuming they even exist in the first place, two of my very best friends going so far back I can’t even remember when we first met. They’ve been with me from the start and the start of this case, and I couldn’t have done anything without them. I could barely have existed without them! Speaking of which, I wish I was in California! The weather here is fit for Polar Bears and few else. By the way, I’ve heard of doppelgangers, but who ever thought there could be a double doppelganger? Only in the movies!
This will be a follow-on to my earlier post here. Anything published in the early post that has not changed will not be republished here. Only new items and old items that have changed will be listed here.
First of all, about the purpose of this website. The purpose of this site has simply been a clearinghouse for rumors about the Delphi Murders on Abby Williams and Libby German in Delphi, Indiana, on February 13, 2017. That’s all we ever wrote. It’s true we were fast and loose with some of those rumors, reporting them as truth, and that is unfortunate. But that’s how it goes in this business.
So every time you hear people bashing the Hell out of this site for something we printed, keep in mind that that was just some rumor we heard and printed. That’s all it ever was. Of course, we have been trying to winnow the rumors down into those we have more confidence and less confidence in from the very start, but that’s easier said than done.
I would estimate that 95
I suppose I should go over some of these old dead rumors because idiots keep accusing us of pushing these theories. Now, when I say a rumor is considered dead, not credible, false, not true, etc., please leave me alone and quit accusing me of pushing an old story I’ve long since discredited. I will start with dead rumors or highly dubious rumors. After I do that, I will discuss rumors that have more credibility.
Dead or Highly Dubious Rumors
The barn theory: Has to do with the Mears barn across the street from Ron Logan’s house. We have a photo of cadaver dogs searching the barn. Also there was a small shrine with flowers inside the structure. And the owners acted very strange when we asked if the barn had been used in the crime. The barn theory is continuing to be pushed by a woman who says the girls were removed from the area, taken to the barn, killed there, and then returned to the dump site. Despite all of this, we regard the barn story as dead.
The initial K was carved in trees at the crime scene. We got this secondhand from a LE source. Turns out it was a bad rumor. As you can see, LE sources are not so reliable.
The White Dodge Dart: We formerly thought this had something to do with the crime. Turns out it was a great big dead end, one of many in this case. A white Dodge Dart is not involved in the case.
The crime had Satanic overtones. Indeed, we theorized this in the early days after the crime. In part it was due to bizarre reports from people who saw crime scene photos that the crime appeared to have occult or Satanic overtones. We now feel that this is false. There is no evidence of occult or Satanic overtones to this crime.
A previous report said that Abby was raped via PIV sex and fluids were left at the scene. This rumor is now judged false. The rumor also stated that the motive of the crime was the rape of Abby Williams. This is also false.
A previous report stated that the girls were bound with ropes around their backs. We judge that false. Instead, we believe that they were handcuffed.
A previous report said that the crime scene “begins in the Robertson’s backyard and continues for 1,000 feet.” We regard this as unconfirmed to say the least. Probably best disregarded for now.
A previous report said that at least two searchers touched the bodies and one tried to revive the girls with mouth to mouth resuscitation. We now regard this rumor as probably false and unconfirmed to say the least. There’s no evidence for it at the moment.
A previous report said that the cause of death of Abby Williams was a knife wound to the heart. We now judge this as rumor as false. Instead, we feel, via Leaker, that Abby was struck over the head with a blunt object (we believe it was the killer’s gun). She was also stabbed in the main artery of her neck. It is not known which assault was fatal.
A previous report said that some sort of bleach or toilet bowl cleaner was thrown on the girls’ bodies, in particular their genitalia, in order to destroy DNA evidence of the crime. This is rumor is unconfirmed.
Our POI: We had a sleuthing group with 200 members. I had a POI and I built quite a large case against him. In fact, LE contacted us and asked us to send them everything we had on this man. In addition, the Indiana State Police were verified as harassing this man at one point by repeatedly calling him on the phone. I know the name of the detective who was doing that, too. In addition, this man was a suspect according to the FBI, who tricked him into coming up to Michigan, only to detain and get a DNA sample from him.
As you can see this man was a considered a suspect by both the FBI and the ISP, so please stop accusing us of harassing him. We never published his name one time over the years, and I will not do it now. I won’t even publish his initials. We had a private pay-only group where we discussed him, but that was it. That’s like talking about someone within the confines of a private home. This man also made a series of videos where he seemed to be confessing to being the Bridge Guy (the UNSUB in the murders). In addition, he seemed to be taunting LE and viewers in these videos. Excuse me for suspecting that a guy who making videos almost literally confessing to being BG might actually be the killer!
This man is not a very nice person, but I no longer feel that he had anything to do with this crime. His quasi-confessions go down on the list of false confessions in this case. Counting hazy cases like this, I count four false confessions so far.
I would apologize to him for falsely accusing him behind closed doors, but he threatened to murder me many times, so I’ll pass on that. In cases like these, possible suspects who seem like good possibilities for being the culprit are often run through the ringer, only to be dismissed. They’re often pretty suspicious people. I’d appreciate it if people would leave this fellow alone. He’s not very pleasant anyway.
Rumors That Have More Credibility
The girls’ bodies were violated with sticks and branches. We have caught Hell and high water for this one, however, this rumor has some staying power.
It showed up quickly within a week of the murders when a local young man published photos of the crime scene that he had somehow obtained. He described the murders as “occult-like” and wondered if there was an occult or Satanic connection. He described a branch plunged into the body of one of the girls.
Next, we received confirmation of this via an associate of a detective working on the case. He had told his SO details about the case, and we got the data from there. This person said the detective had told them that the girls’ bodies were violated with sticks and branches, in particular, that sticks had been inserted into the girls’ vaginas and anuses. That sounds pretty awful but this is one terrible crime.
Finally, a woman came to me and apologized. She said she had been mad at me for spreading this rumor but she had recently been able to confirm its truth via a detective in another area of LE who had seen crime scene photos. This man added that Abby had a branch plunged into her body just below her solar plexus in her chest. So far we have three verfications of this rumor, two from people who saw crime scene photos and two from LE with some overlap. Nevertheless, we still regard this rumor as unconfirmed though definitely possible with the two LE confirmations.
And the more you learn about this crime, believe me, the more you would not be surprised at the cruelty and bizarreness of abusing these girls’ bodies in this way because that seemed to be a major focus on the crime – violating, dishonoring, shaming, and debasing these girls with cruelty and contempt and then posing them in a degrading and humiliating manner. In addition, the killer’s behavior a few hours after the crime was another taunt and a cruel dancing on these girls’ graves after their deaths. This is one Hell of a dark crime.
One girl was pregnant: This has been a rumor from the very first weeks after the crime. The same woman above also apologized for being mad at me over this rumor. However, she told me that she was able to confirm this rumor via a sheriff’s deputy in nearby county. Nevertheless, I suppose it remains formally unverified, and keep in mind some of our LE sources have told us false things. The rumor is that one girl was in the very early stages of pregnancy. We are not going to say which girl it was. Based on the recent verification we got from LE, we regard as it quite possibly true, but it would be nice to get some more confirmation.
A longstanding rumor is that Libby German was killed by a deep knife cut to her neck. This was recently confirmed by a new source named Leaker, who I regard as credible. Apparently his wife accessed documents relating to the case at her job at the courthouse. I have also verified this sad fact via the girl’s own mother who saw the wound. This rumor is 100
A previous report said that Libby was attacked with a gut knife in her abdomen, resulting in a partial disembowelment of this poor girl. If this wound took place, it was after she was dead. A gut knife is one of the knives that would be present in that deer kit (a deer hunter’s kit containing five knives) that BG has around his waist. Partial verification of this is in the form of reports of detectives going around to local hardware stores in the weeks after the murders asking if anyone had bought a gut knife recently.
Presumably one of the wounds to the girl(s) was via this sort of a knife. On the other hand there is a new rumor that a gut knife was left at the scene. This man also lists a number of items the killer left at the scene that stretches credulity. Leaving a gut knife at the scene is unverified and seems quite dubious. A knife with no DNA? That the girl was attacked in this terrible manner is also completely unconfirmed. However, detectives definitely feel that a gut knife was used in this crime.
New Information from Leigh Kerr (Leaker)
Quite a bit of new information came out a few weeks ago via an appearance by a man named Leaker, identified above. He is a pastor who lives in Lafayette. His access to investigation documents is described above. Leaker was extremely controversial, yet for a variety of reasons, I regard him as credible. He gave us a lot of new information, much of which may be correct. Keep in mind that both local LE and FBI have commented on Leaker’s remarks, saying that nothing he said was true. But that is to be expected.
Leaker says that there is a prime suspect in the case. Based on the facts laid out, he can only mean a Delphi resident, recently moved to Monticello, who I will call Mr. X. I could use his initials but that doesn’t seem right. This man is either the prime suspect or Leaker is trying to frame him, one or the other. I think he’s the prime suspect.
According to Leaker, Mr. X was involved in the search party. At some point during the searching, he claimed to have lost his keys. His truck was parked overnight, hidden in the cemetery right above where the girls were found. It was still there the next day when the cemetery was full of police vehicles. This is because Mr. X lost his keys at some point. I believe he claims to have lost his keys while searching. Although Mr. X claims that he called his wife to come bring an extra set of car keys, his truck stayed there overnight and into the next day, which seems odd. On the afternoon after the bodies were found, Mr. X’s truck was towed.
At 6 PM, Mr. X asked permission to search Ron Logan’s land. Permission was granted. This request can be linked to the truck hidden at the cemetery as this is where he obviously was parked when he made this request, however, we do not know when the truck arrived there. Mr. X then searched Logan’s land. Although it was dusk, it would seem to be hard to miss the girls right below where his truck was parked.
Mr. X was back searching in the area on Logan’s land at 12:30 PM February 14. He and 1-3 other persons spotted the girls bodies. There is a rumor that Mr. X looked through his binoculars, spotted a deer, and then looked down and saw the girls. This seems credible to me although some say that LE just made this up as a ruse. The searchers did not come very close to the bodies. Who all found the bodies is still quite up in the air. After he found the bodies, there is a rumor that Mr. X was so traumatized that he ran from the scene. He then needed psychotherapy for some time after discovering the bodies. Both of those behaviors seem pretty over the top, even for such a gruesome crime.
Mr. X is the prime suspect for a variety of reasons. For one, there was a small change in his story.
Leaker said, in shocking news, that Mr. X’s phone was pinging at the abandoned Child Protective Services (CPS) building for several hours around the time of the murders. It is the opinion of LE that the killer parked at the CPS building while he committed his crimes. There vehicle may have been a truck. A persistent yet unconfirmed rumor is that it was a white truck. However, Mr. X’s truck is orange. LE would like very much to speak for anyone who spotted that truck at the CPS building during that time to contact LE. If the truck can be linked to Mr. X, an arrest will be possible.
Mr. X does not have a good excuse for his phone pinging at the CPS building for hours. However, cellphone data is generally not admissible in court, and anyway, Mr. X can always say that he was elsewhere and his phone just happened to be pinging at the CPS building looking for a signal, so this evidence cannot be used in court. However, it is suspicious to say the very least. If Mr. X’s truck was not there the whole time, it is possible that he left his phone at the building for several hours while he committed the crime. That way his phone could not be tracked to the crime scene.
Leaker says that Mr. X had an alibi, a friend of his. This friend says he saw Mr. X elsewhere in town around the time of the murders. LE was unable to break Mr. X’s alibi via his friend. It is considered to be a solid alibi in terms of taking the case to court. Unfortunately, this friend is has since died. This complicates the case immeasurably.
According to Leaker, the only DNA on the girls’ bodies is from Kelsi, Libby’s sister. Kelsi has been cleared. Mr. X’s DNA is in the area, but he was part of the search team that discovered the bodies, so it’s not usable. Assuming he did it, see how he contaminated the scene by finding the bodies?
Leaker also said that there were religious aspects to the murders. Although the exact nature of these aspects is unknown, a rumor that a crucifix was left at the site seems credible.
Leaker also said that the girls’ bodies were posed in a sexual tableau. This seems to be correct. More on that below.
A previous report said that the killer took photos or video of the crime and sent it to Abby’s phone after the murders. This is correct, and I have additional evidence that will prove this.
A previous report noted, in stunning news, that the killer had known Libby for 3-4 months before the murders via social media. According to Leaker, this is correct. The killer contacted Libby on social media using the “catfish” of a young man aged 19. Libby had gotten smitten with this young man and wanted to meet him. The catfish appears to have been the killer himself. Leaker says the second sketch is a sketch of the catfish photo that the killer used to lure Libby on Snapchat where she was catfished. One of Libby’s friends had seen a photo of the catfish, and her description of it is what the second sketch is based on.
At the start of this case, LE said “be careful of what your kids are doing on social media.” The usual idiots who have swarmed this case from Day One have insisted all this time that that means nothing. However, we have been reporting for some time on here that the girls may have been catfished via social media. In fact, we were ripped up pretty severely for promoting that theory. As with so many aspects of this case, a number of the “wild, outrageous, and offensive stories” we were reporting on here from the start are turning out to be true. It’s no surprise to me. I’m a professional journalist. I have a BA in Journalism. I worked as an assistant editor of a magazine. This is one of my professions.
According to Leaker, LE feels that Libby may have posted on Snapchat that she was going to the bridge that day. We reported in a previous post that the trip was not a last minute decision, and instead, adults were discussing it in local bars on Friday night. We have been saying all along that the killer must have known the girls were going to be there that day, and he came quite amply prepared to commit this specific crime. The crime may have been plotted for four months prior to carrying it out. You can see how BG was loaded up with all that murder equipment. He’d obviously planned this out in advance.
Of course, we have been bashed for this too, and an absolutely insane theory that fails all logic tests that the killer came to the bridge that day looking to kill any victim that he might happen to spot there has been suggested in its stead. This theory fails so badly on logic alone that it’s amazing how much traction it got.
Too many people on this case seem to be afflicted with a disorder called Pathological Doubting Disorder. They have pathologically doubted everything and anything that anyone ever said about this crime. They beat their fists on the table endlessly that only verified information, not rumors, must be discussed. The problem here is that LE hasn’t told us a damned thing. If we were restricted to merely discussing what has been verified by LE, there’d be nothing to talk about. We’d all be sitting around talking about the weather instead.
Leaker also said that if the catfish can be connected to Mr. X, an arrest will be possible.
However, this will be hard to do. All attempts to find the killer’s IP addresses or texts or photos of the catfish on Snapchat have come up empty for whatever reason.
According to Leaker, Mr. X has completely cooperated with the investigation. At the time of the crime, Mr. X lived two miles from the crime scene.
Leaker also said that the crime was committed in a ravine that is hard to see from most angles. It may also be sheltered sound-wise too.
Leaker said there is more audio on Libby’s phone, but it is so garbled and hard to hear that LE did not feel it would be useful to the general public. However, Leaker said that LE cleaned the audio up and transcribed it as best as they could. BG accosted the girls and appears to have pulled his gun on them.
In brand new information, apparently one of the trail cams at the south end of the bridge where the abduction took place had been disabled. LE feels it was disabled prior to the crime. So BG came to the south end of the bridge before the crime occurred and disabled the camera. Once again, we see forward planning for this crime.
According to Leaker, after BG accosted the girls, he said he was a police officer and they were trespassing on private property (they were not). He said he had spotted them with his binoculars and had come to arrest them. I can now confirm that BG did have binoculars. BG then handcuffed the girls and said, “Down the hill.” The girls pleaded with him to let them go, that they are sorry and they won’t do it again, etc. but he told them they are under arrest.
Jesus Christ, this case is sad! Just thinking about that scenario with those girls pleading to be let go breaks my heart!
At the bottom of the hill, Libby’s shoe was found by searchers. To me this implies that she tried to run. How else does she lose her shoe?
What follows, according to the families of the girls who LE played the tape for, is six minutes of garbled conversation in which the girls and BG are talking as they walk through the woods, the sound of the forest floor crunching beneath their feet. At the six minute mark, BG and the girls can be heard starting to cross the creek, so the girls were definitely walked across the creek. This has been an odd source of contention. At that point, LE shut off the tape.
Leaker says that the audio continues after the girls crossed the creek and were marched to the kill zone, which appears to have been selected and prepared beforehand due to its visual and auditory seclusion. Next you hear a loud scream followed by a loud thump. This is apparently poor Abby screaming. The thump sound is thought to be BG hitting her over the head with a blunt object. We believe he hit her with the butt end of the handgun you can see in his right hand pocket of his jacket on the BG video. Abby may well have been knocked out cold by this blow.
Leaker concurred that Libby died via a deep knife wound to the throat. He also said that the murder weapon was a hunting knife.
I Was Able to Obtain Official Document(s) Relating to the Case!
And now I can release brand new information! I was able to obtain anywhere from 1-10 documents from the investigation. I am making the claim vague in this way because I have to protect the person I got this data from. They very much do not want it getting out that they were given these document(s). So I have to cover my tracks pretty well here because I don’t want to reveal my sources.
I’m an educated and trained journalist. One of the things we learned in J-school is that you have to protect your sources and value their confidentiality at all costs. We are supposed to go to jail instead of revealing our sources, and some of us have.
Therefore it is disconcerting to see constant accusations of me making up rumors or theories about this crime out of whole cloth. I can’t do that. That’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, and I’m an ethical journalist. I’m not talking about beating around the bushes of masking facts and truths as I did above with the documents statement. Journalists have lost their careers over doing that, and good luck getting hired again afterwards. It’s as bad as scientific misconduct is for a scientist.
Obviously I’ve been dying to get a hold of official documents about this case for four years now. We did briefly have contacts with a few LE sources, but they didn’t tell us a lot. We had maybe one LE source every two years on this case. So we don’t have any “special sources” about this case as my critics claim. What special sources? What are they talking about?
I assure you that it’s completely legal for the possessor of these document(s) to possess them. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
The document(s) came to me from the owner who lawfully possessed them..
The document(s) came from either LE or from the judicial system or possibly both at the same time. They are signed by official(s).
I was able to learn a number of things about this case from these document(s), some that have been released before, but others that have never been released or even rumored anywhere. I am absolutely certain of the truth of everything I write below based on my belief that these document(s) are authentic.
BG discharged a gun in the course of this crime. Perhaps the most amazing information of all is that this was a gun crime! The gun used was no doubt the one that can be seen in the right jacked pocket of BG. It’s a handgun. After the “guys” in the video, he apparently pulled his gun out and pointed it at the girls. He controlled them with the gun. We have assumed that from the very start of this case. But we never had any idea that a gun was fired during this crime!
We don’t know how the gun was used. We only know that it was discharged. Where, how, and why we don’t know. However, spent cartridges were found by LE, who says they were fired by BG. Did he fire them into the girls’ dead bodies? No idea. How does LE they know that the spent cartridges they found were fired by BG? No idea. But they do have spent cartridges from this crime and they are trying to find the gun used to fire them in order to do ballistics tests on it.
Leaker said that BG had binoculars. He told the girls when he accosted them that he had spotted them trespassing through his binoculars and he decided to come and arrest them. I can now verify Leaker’s statement because the document mentions binoculars. LE is looking for binoculars that were used in the crime.
There is more shocking information that was touched on earlier. I mentioned above that there was a rumor that BG had taken photos and video and had sent them to Abby’s phone after the crime. This rumor was affirmed by Leaker. However, I can now prove this is true because LE is looking for photos, videos, film, cameras, and/or videocameras. Any of those. Video were recorded by BG as he committed this crime. So he videotaped his crime as he committed it. Some people say they can see a Go Pro on BG’s person. We are uncertain about this.
Now how could LE possibly know that BG took video of his crime as he committed it? They can’t. But if he sent some of this video to Abby’s phone after the crime took place, then they know he shot video of the crime. Therefore the rumor that BG sent photos of the crime to Abby’s phone seems to be true.
In addition, the document says that BG recorded 43 seconds of audio, presumably of the crime. No doubt this goes with the video that was shot, the video being of unknown length. We know this because in the documents, LE says they are looking for 43 seconds of audio.
LE is also looking for knives, presumably hunting knives as Leaker averred. The murder weapon in the case was a knife. This was not a gun crime in that a gun was not the murder weapon. That’s not to say the gun was not discharged into the victim(s) after they were deceased. Perhaps it was. We have no idea. But if that was the case, then this is still not a gun crime as the gun was not a homicide weapon. Then all BG is guilty of regarding shooting the gun would be mutilating a corpse.
LE is also looking for blood-soaked clothing. LE feels that this crime was so brutal (in particular the killing of Libby) that BG must have been covered in blood after he murdered that poor girl. The blood spray from such an attack would be serious. So LE is looking for the clothing he wore that day with bloodstains “seen and unseen.” I don’t understand the part about unseen bloodstains, but apparently when you get blood on your clothes, not all of it is visible and some can only be seen with special tools. Ever watched crime shows where they put a chemical on the crime scene that shows bloodstains as bright purple? I suppose they use that to uncover those unseen bloodstains.
Perhaps the most incredible fact in the document is LE stating that BG abducted the girls at precisely 2:13 PM. Why is this important? On what day did this crime occur? On February 13, or 2-13. 2:13 and 2/13. Matches up, get it? Let’s play with this a bit more. He abducted and murdered 2 girls, one of whom was 13 years old. 2-13 again. 2:13, 2/13, and 2-13.
A physician friend of mine who might as well be Dr. Spock, such is his dedication to pure logic, has cast doubt on this connection. He immediately stated, “Coincidence!” (natch) when I told him about the two 2-13’s lining up perfectly.
However, LE thinks these two 2-13’s lining up perfectly was a significant enough event to be mentioned in their documents about the case. So LE thinks that fact that BG abducted those girls at precisely 2:13 in the afternoon is no coincidence.
This is all I have from these document(s). Make of it what you will. Keep in mind that these document(s) went through different people before the came to me.
Owner -> Professional -> Fellow sleuther -> Me.
There are two people between the owner and me. What do I have? I have a photocopy of the document. Could it be faked or forged? Maybe, but the professional would not do something like that. He’s as bound by his professional ethics as I am with mine.
Crime Scene Photos
I was also able to obtain some good crime scene photos for the first time. These have been out for six months now, having first appeared on Youtube in a video. They are from the same media helicopter footage as the crime scene photos we previously released here. They were presumably taken from the part of the footage where you can see many flashes going off in a circle around a location in the woods. Obviously CSI guys photographing the crime scene. These photos have been blown up and enhanced to Hell and back by everyone and their uncle. However, the photos I will discuss today are from this video.
The author is a theoretical physicist. Not that that means much, as kooks roam all fields, and kookery doesn’t discriminate, but I do think that adds weight to his analysis. Talk about logicians. We are talking about field like math where everything you say has to be backed up by formal proof. A fasifiability is a thing, and “not even wrong” is on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
The author claims a number of startling things in this video.
Outlines of the bodies of the two victims. I’ll vouch for that one.
A crucifix. Don’t see it.
A gigantic stuffed animal. No way. I can’t believe how many people believe this. Let’s not even get into the crazy discussion of this stupid stuffed animal and the dolls. That said, many things are possible in true crime, and this is one of them. I’m just not seeing it though. Extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence and all that. God I hate that phrase but there’s a time and place for all things.
Dolls scattered around the scene. Nigga please.
An abandoned bleach bottle. Gong!
Abandoned clothing, in particular a girl’s top. Nah.
Weird messages scrawled all over the scene. I concur that one may be possible, but the rest I can’t see at all.
CSI guys wandering the scene. Nothing but blurs.
Keep in mind that for the above to be true, BG must have constructed this entire Disney World Crime Scene in a mere 45 minutes! Either he has superhuman powers or it didn’t happen. Occam’s forces me to choose the latter. How did he get all these animals and dolls down the crime scene? Come on. This crime’s weird enough as it is without taking things to outright science fiction.
Keep in mind that a lot of people claim they can’t see a damned thing in these photos, including the victims’ bodies, or that they were looking at pixels and graphics software playing games with us. Pareidolia. I hate that word, favorite of scientistic skeptards. But time and place, etc. Even the most abused notions have a proper application.
Leaker said that the girls were “posed in a sexual tableau.” That’s interesting except no one knows what it means.
John Kelly, retired FBI profiler who does excellent work and now makes his living being a media figure, felt in this recent video that the sexual tableau referred to the girls being posed in some sort of a lesbian sex act. He also suggested that BG had a deep obsession with lesbian pornography and that people around him would be aware of this. Assuming the photos below are valid interpretations, the girls are not posed in any obvious lesbian sex act. Perhaps they are posed in a milder, less than obvious one. As you can see, Abby’s hand is close to a “certain part” of Libby’s body. Whether that counts or not I have no idea.
However, assuming the images below are correct, both girls’ legs were spread very wide after they were killed. Libby was nude and Abby was nude from the waist down. That counts as sexual tableau. He did this to humiliate the girls after their deaths. One last Parthian Thrust before he walked away into the woods history. This is the posing part.
I agree with Kelly who says that killers who pose victims (“posers”) are some of the worst ones of all. They’re dark as Hell and they’re at the far end of the psychopathic spectrum. He also said that if he’s a poser, he should have killed again by now because these guys can’t control themselves, a reflection of their extreme pathology. He said that the only reason he hasn’t killed by now is because he’s afraid. Afraid that they’re onto him. Afraid of getting caught. Afraid of that one last knock on the door before the jail bars clang shut.
I have more to say about this crime as usual, but I’ve gone on long enough. More later.
I would like to apologize for the fact that these photos are very small. See if you can enlarge them. I don’t know how to fix this right now.
Women are like children in some ways. They want to be led.
They’re followers who want to be dominated and led by a strong person. They’re also very needy, though they hate us for being this way.
Women want you to be available. They want you to be there for them. They almost get a disorder like the Childhood Attachment Disorder when you’re not. This is a disorder of little kids who can’t be on their own or cry when they’re separated from their parents.
I had a woman staying with me several years ago. Now and then, they come stay here. She even flew in on a plane! We spent several days together. Towards the end we were back here, and I had to go off on my own and write. You know we writers are all loners and spend most of our time reading and writing.
Reading and writing is almost a “sensual pleasure” for us, like watching a movie, playing a sport, a dinner party, or a European vacation. I used to get dropped off a the USC library, and my ride would come back 10 hours later. It seemed like an hour to me, or even minutes. I would have a pile of books on my desk. I’d been gobbling books for 10 hours. I didn’t want to leave. It was as exciting to me as a Caribbean cruise or a safari to Africa. My rides were stunned that I could stay there all day long without a moment of boredom. But that’s us. That’s us writers.
Anyway, there was a bit of a fight over this because I had to go off and be alone, and as I said, women want you around all the time. So we made a deal. She would stay in the living room and read a book or whatever and I would go to my office and write. About once and hour she would come in, and and we would make out wildly like high school kids for 5-10 minutes. There was no actual genital sex, but it was still a blast. That was all she needed. Seven minutes out of an hour of pure contact fix. Then she could go be alone for another 53 minutes.
There was a certain long-term girlfriend who got mad and me from time to time and really blasted me. But none of it was coming from a place of cruelty or evil. I just hurt her feelings somehow. The anger was coming from a place of innocence, not a place cruelty. So I never blasted her, not even once in 1 1/2 years. Because her anger and even rage was not coming from a place of cruelty but a place of hurt or even outrage.
I never considered myself much of a philosopher. But I am now in my 60’s and I sort of find that as all roads used to lead to Rome, all roads seem to lead to philosophy! For a while I was studying famous scholars across all of the humanities. And I began to notice something. As one moved deeper and deeper upwards into the various disciplines, two things happened:
1.Everything started turning into mathematics. I suppose math is really at the root of just about everything if you think about it. We can even reduce many day to day questions or even philosophical bits of wisdom down to binary statements of even equations. Wittgenstein seemed to be getting at this. People have remarked that mathematics is “the ultimate language.”
2. Everything started turning into philosophy. After writing and doing research in their specialty for a long time, scholars all across the humanities started turning late in their careers to philosophy and how their branch of humanities could be explained philosophically. Obviously this is true of literature. Look at literary criticism nowadays. Especially with critical theory, so much of lit crit deals with actual philosophy. Philosophy in a way seems to be the peak one reaches whenever one starts climbing of the stairs of any humanities branch. They all meet in philosophy at the top. If mathematics is the ultimate language, perhaps philosophy is the ultimate mode of thinking. Philosophy after all is the “science of thought” or the “study of human knowledge.” That’s a pretty impressive endeavor right there, just to even attempt to explain such deep things.
At my age, we are said to peak in wisdom. I suppose that’s true. Younger friends have been telling me that lately and some colleagues even call me sensei. Some don’t like it. A 20 year old Asian hottie recently dumped me cruelly:
What’s wrong with you. You’re so different from when I met you. You sound like some philosopher! Come back when you want to act like a man!
Ouch.
I’m not trying to do this.
But in the last few years, I am finding that my writing is tending more and more towards philosophical questions not because I intend to but instead because I seem to be reaching the limits of a lot of the subjects I write about, and when you reach for the sky of most any humanities subject, as I noted, everything starts turning into philosophy. Philosophy is where you end up when you start traveling down any humanities road. Philosophy is where it all starts coming together in some sort of “ultimate explanation.”
To tell the truth, I always thought philosophy was unreadable and stupid. But it’s nothing more than wisdom, and we all want to be wise. And it gives great explanatory power to the world for those of us who are always looking to put together the “big picture” of most anything around us. That’s precisely what philosophy is always trying to do: look for the “big picture” behind anything.
I can do that right off the top of my head with no research. It’s quite easy for me to cook up a post. I have a ton of material about world events that I could put up too, but it seems like it would be a lot more of an effort. I often want to include some links or Twitter tweets, and that stuff takes time. So I take the easy way out. In case you were wondering, anything I can dash off right away without hunting down links and research is preferred.
I’m also a horrible procrastinator and I’m terribly sensitive about my writing. People attack my posts and it spins me into a writing depression or block that can last days. I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it for years, but I just can’t.
And I just get blocked a lot. I worry that my posts aren’t good enough. Not to brag but the only writers I ever knew who got blocked were very good writers. People who can’t write don’t care what they put up, so they’re rarely blocked. Good writers are perfectionists, they criticize themselves a lot, and it’s common to not think their stuff is good enough.
Writers, especially good writers, tend to be a humble lot. Lousy writers often think they write fine. That’s the thing: people who are lousy at something think they are great, and people who are great at something think they suck.
I see writers all the time who can write me under the damned table. I see them, and I think, “I will never be able to write like that no matter how hard I try.” Most of us secretly think we suck, and we think a lot of other writers are better than we are, so we spend out lives trying to write like our betters.
Whether we make it or not, it probably does improve one’s prose. There’s something to be said for being a perfectionist and a serious self-critic as long, as it doesn’t cause inertia and freeze you up. Butt-kicking isn’t a freezing agent.
I have a lot of stuff about the Coronavirus. I’m thinking of putting it up. I also have a lot more Iran stuff that I can put up. But I tend to be insecure about that stuff and end procrastinating forever. Which I am also notorious for. Oh well, JRR Tolkien was a horrible procrastinator. But look at all the books he wrote anyway.
I think most of us procrastinate, some more than others. Probably introverts more than extroverts. Feel free to discuss procrastination in the comments, if you get around to it. If you’re too busy to talk about that subject, it’s ok, we’ll just put it off for another day, ok?
The thing is though that many artists of all types are crazy to one degree or another. Trust me, I have spent a fair portion of my life intensely hanging around large groups of artists, writers, and musicians, and most of them are nuts in one way or another.
Actually they’re all crazy in different ways, but they’re still all crazy.
Writers and tend to be quite self-destructive. A lot are depressives and boy do they drink. They’re introverted but not as introverted as the poets or especially the artists.
Artists are just very shy and neurotic. A lot are depressives. An artist party is 100 people in a house and no one is talking to anyone because they’re all too shy. It’s actually pretty funny. I went to a number of them.
Musicians are very self-destructive, but they’re not neurotic at all – more like wild and crazy extroverts. Some musicians are depressives, but that aspect of them tends to be more hidden behind the wild partying exterior. Still, musicians often seem to be battling deep pain. They love to drink and hey, don’t forget the dope! Musicians and drugs are like peanut butter and jelly.
Poets are way crazy, totally neurotic or worse, manic-depressive or more commonly just depressive, plus a lot of them really drink hard. I’d say the poets are the nuttiest of them all. Are you sort of a weird, offbeat, neurotic, introverted person who doesn’t fit in anywhere and is rejected by most Normies? Head on over to your local poetry reading. You’ll be right in style there. Most of them are just as nuts as you are. Don’t feel bad.
Furthermore, many artist types are lousy to terrible people.
Shakespeare was a monster as a human being. But that’s not what we remember him and the others for. It doesn’t matter that Shakespeare was a mean old miser.
All that matters is that he was probably the greatest writer of English prose in history, probably still unsurpassed to this very day. That’s all that matters. Artists stand on their art, the only thing that lasts. That they may have been crappy people is lamentable, but it that’s not why we remember them and ultimately it’s simply not important.
A bit of Carl Jung. Click to enlarge. Right-click on the photo – click View Photo. Carl Jung, The Red Book (Liber Novus) 1989.
Carl Jung in addition to being a great psychologist, was also a fantastic thinker and a brilliant writer. Check out this prose. I’m not sure where this is from. Isn’t that some gorgeous prose? His books are a delight.
I have never read Liber Novus, but it looks really cool! The Red Book was not published until long after his death when his estate allowed it to be published. It consists of Jung’s notebooks from 1915-1930 when he was 40-65 years old, but most of it was written between 1913-1917 when he was 38-42 years old. That is the age of life when many novelists are at their creative peak. Some say that The Red Book is the most important book that Jung ever wrote.
The book consists of a series of mystical visions Jung encountered by exploring his unconscious. Hence the book can appear dreamlike or even like the description of a psychosis or a psychedelic drug trip. From Wiki:
From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form…
In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline.
Jung’s own statement on the book:
The years…when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time and the later details hardly matter anymore.
My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and integration into life. But the numinous beginning which contained everything was then.
I hardly wrote a thing all August. I am still trying to figure out why I did that. Every time I thought about writing, I would think “Meh” and decide not to. I kept asking myself why I didn’t want to write, but my mind wouldn’t tell me. It was very hot all month. Was that it? Was I depressed? No idea. Maybe I was just blocked. Most writers, especially the better ones, get blocked sometimes. For some it’s a big burden. But lousy writers never get blocked. They scribble away. The better the writer is, the more blocked they get. Does it make sense? So what did I do? As you have probably figured out by now, I am not an ideologue. In fact, I am probably an anti-ideologue. If there’s an ideology out there, I usually want to tear through it like a rampaging elephant and smash every party line I see. That’s probably because I am scientific-minded, and most political ideologies are irrational in some way or another. Also they are always changing. In order to be a liberal nowadays you have to jump through all sorts of crazy hoops that you didn’t have to back in the 70’s and 80’s. And if you don’t get on board with all of the tested and approved continuous changes in liberal ideology, it turns out…you’re not a liberal! You’re not a Leftist! You’re not on the Left at all. You’re a conservative, a reactionary, a Republican, a fascist, a Nazi. I get called all those things constantly, always by my fellow lefties. Except I am none of those things. I am actually a Leftist. A really, really weird Leftist, but a Leftist nevertheless. It’s not enough to say, “Hey I want to go back and be a 1970’s or 1980’s liberal. I don’t want to get on board the latest liberal crazy train that left the station.” But you can’t do that. To be a 70’s or 80’s liberal nowadays is somehow to be a conservative, reactionary, Republican, fascist or Nazi. Except it isn’t of course.
New Theories
Anyway, one thing I like to do, unlike most human ovines, is expose myself to new political philosophies that I’ve never dipped into before. So I am always looking around for weird new movements to analyze and check out. Lately I have checked out incels, MGTOW’s, Redpillers, and MRA’s. That’s the Manosphere. The MRA’s in particular were very interesting. I even checked out Men’s Liberation, the completely cucked, pro-feminist, hen-picked, pussy-whipped left wing of the Men’s Movement. I used to think they were ok, but I only lasted a few days on their board before they threw me out for being a “sexual predator.” Except in my world that’s a compliment. I was also told that I was a rapist and had been one my whole life and that I was only a few steps away from being the guy in the bushes with the ski mask, mace, and knife. Which is odd because I don’t believe I have ever actually really raped a female in my life. I’m talking real rape, not bullshit feminist rape. I mean you look at a feminist or ask her for her number, and you just raped her, you’re Ted Bundy, and she’s calling the police right now. Anyway, the only sane definition of rape is the one that has always been in place before lunatic feminist definition creep was, as my Mom always sternly warned me (as in “Don’t do this!”), the definition of rape was sex via force or the threat of force. I’ve never done that even once. I would also add drugging a woman like slipping her a roofie. Never done that either, thank God. And on top of that I would add sex with a passed out woman. Jesus Christ, of course I’ve never done that. I’m not a necro! Everything other than that boys, and you’re ready to rock and roll. Go forth and seduce those damsels, my brethren!
Feminist Theory
Anyway, I thought I understood feminism, but I never really did. So I have been on feminist forums (well, those that don’t immediately ban me) for most of the past month, analyzing their theories and worldviews and tossing them around objectively in my mind to see if their theories are valid or not while enduring torrential abuse for the feminists on the sites committing a crime called Being a Man. I wasn’t aware that was in the penal code. I’ve become especially interested in radical feminism, an actual branch of feminism that I had barely heard of before. So anyway, I’ve been tossing feminist theory around in my head for the past month. It’s actually a kick.
Skirt-chasing in Late Middle Age
What else have I been doing? Why, chasing women of course! Wait. Women and girls. Don’t forget the girls! I mean legal girls, like 18 and 19 year old barely legals, not the jailbaits (JB’s), although I do still talk to JB’s at times. And yes, I still date 18 and 19 year old girls sometimes. It’s almost impossible and I have to move heaven and Earth to do it, but somehow I am able to violate the laws of physics and pull off the impossible. I might add that I am 60 years old. Getting a legal teen at my age is such a ridiculous proposition that it is laughable. I mean, sure, maybe if you’re a movie director, right? I also date women in their late 20’s and early 30’s, late 40’s, and 50’s right around my age. I recently dated two 59 year old women. None of them are really better than any others. There are strong and weak points of both older, young, very young, middle aged and 30’s women. Each group has different strong and weak points. In fact, older women are actually better than younger women on a number of variables. I also chat up women in various places on the Net, and a number of them have sent me nudes. Yes, there are places on the Net where you can do this if you know what you are doing and have good Game. Actually, I get women sending me nudes on a regular basis. Most are 20-27, but two were in their 40’s. They live too far away to get with, but dirty pics are always fun, especially if you are a sick, fucked up dirty old man like me. Not only do I still get barely legal women, but JB’s still try to seduce me. I know it sounds insane. But in the past few months, two JB’s, one 14 and the 16 year old, both approached me and chatted me up for a bit. A 60 year old man. Both propositioned me, the 14 year old subtly and the 16 year old blatantly. And they both offered to send me nudes. Thank God I am strong willed, so I turned them down on all offers, though I must say it was hard to do. Most people who read that last paragraph will insist that I am lying because such things never happen to men my age. Except they actually do. Well, they happen to me anyway. But carry on if you must. Accuse me of lying. Knock yourself out. And thank you very much for the compliments, boys (in advance). Bros before ho’s!
This is a bit more of my creative writing. And yes, I have been published in literary journals, in case you were asking. I published a short story in a single literary journal. There were a lot of unknown names in there, but there were also a couple of big names – Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. I remember at the bar afterwards Gary Snyder said he liked Journey Through the Zone. That was my story. Anyway, is this better as prose or as a poem?
The sea. Once again the sea. Again and again the sea. Always again the sea. The sea from which we came. The sea to which we will return. Our mother. Mother water.
Or:
Mother Water
The sea Once again the sea Again and again the sea Always again the sea The sea from which we came The sea to which we will return Our mother Mother water
It does make a neat little very short poem. As prose it would have to be part of a larger work or possibly a microfiction or flash fiction story. And if you are looking for influences, check out Samuel Beckett. Maybe James Joyce too, who knows? Beckett for sure though.
This a bit of my creative writing here. Is this better as prose or as a poem?
The years. The long years. The sadness of the years.
Or:
The years The long years The sadness of the years
If you make it poetry, it’s almost a perfect little encapsulated haiku. If fiction, it would have to be part of a larger work or it could be a three-line microfiction flash fiction story.
Just met a new friend here who very, very smart. I have no idea if he meets criteria for genius, but he’s close enough for me. I’ll just call him my New Genius Friend, ZE. We are having a dialogue lately on creativity. His interests include the intersection of creativity and leadership and how one informs the other. His work seems to be mostly directed at the business sector where leadership training is often used and I would argue very much needed, though I have no interest in this sort of thing, mostly because I seriously suck as a leader. And I’m not sure I care about that at all because I hate the idea of leading people in much of anything, except maybe leading a herd of humans racing like scampering rodents off a steep cliff, and I might even have to think twice about that one, as momentarily thrilling as it sounds.
ZE: Has self-expression affected your life, and if so, in what way?
To me self-expression is my writing. For many years, I did not write. Now I write all the time, so I am expressing myself and my emotions to the whole damn world every day, with thousands of rapt listeners. God I love it so much. But I do not write to express myself. I write because I have to or need to. This is a gift I was born with, and as with many people with gifts, I have been working like mad overtime on my gift for most of my life. This is where people confuse giftedness and hard work. They think it is one or the other, but often it is both. Many people are born with a gift but then work, often very, very hard, on their gift for years or decades. It’s my opinion that they get better at it, but I suppose that remains to be proven. It’s a good question. Would I be just as good a writer if I picked up a pen now for the first time as opposed to working like Hell on my skill for years? I say no, but has it been proven?. It probably doesn’t matter because most with a gift secretly think they suck and always look to those who do the gifted thing better than they do. This makes them mad and insecure, so they are always trying to be better. I am always trying to be a better writer because I look around and see better writers all the time. They often make me a bit mad that I can’t write that well, so I kick myself in the butt for being a lousy writer and resolve to beat that guy if it’s the last thing I do. Even if you could prove that practice is worthless, I think a lot of us gifted folks would do it anyways because the gift seems to compel you to insecurity and constant upward striving. The most gifted people often secretly feel that they suck. This is interesting. Lousy writers don’t get blocked. Every blocked writer I knew was a great writer. Also blocking is usually stupid. Blocking is caused by fearing that you can’t write well, which in the case of most good writers, is pretty much a lie. Once you sit down and start doing it, you usually see that the blocking was a lie, and you can actually do it well. This is because gifted people are perfectionists, but that is a rather good thing I think.
ZE: What have you learned from self-expression, whether chosen by you or imposed upon you?
It was better when I chose it. When it was imposed on me, I often did not enjoy it and felt I had been taken prisoner, often by a hostile force. These questions are hard to answer, as I bottle stuff up inside. Even people like me feel emotion, but we feel it in our minds more than in our bodies. My theory is that running from your feelings is the problem. I work in mental health, and increasingly I tell my clients to just accept their feelings and quit trying to run from them. If you feel sad, say, “Thank God for that feeling!” and sit there and be with it. The universe is about 1/2 sadness, and that’s on a good day! You may as well sit down and be alone with the sadness of life and the world, which is quite ample. Just be OK with it. Life is sad. That’s fine. That’s part of the experience of being here. People panic when they are sad. My best friend is a young woman. She calls me up panicked that she is feeling sad, as if it is a terrible thing. So she wants to run from it. But that doesn’t seem to work. Say I had a client who was in a bad marriage and getting ready to leave his wife. He feels guilty for being a bad father, for leaving his son, for all sorts of things. Normally therapists will tell you to stop thinking that, as it is irrational, but the thing is, you tell people that, and they are going to go ahead and feel it anyway. So I tell would him to just sit there and be OK with those feelings. I would say, “Well there is a part of you that feels a need to have these feelings. Just sit there and have those feelings and be OK with them. I think after some time, you will get these feelings out of your system, and you might even get sick of them. I don’t want you to feel this way for too long – say five years would be too long – but you need to feel this way for so me time – even up to one to four years I would be OK with you just experiencing that as part of the process and then finally moving on.” But the role of originality in creativity, I would say that to some extent they are one and the same. But the original thought is more your own as opposed something truly sui generis. And you borrow all the original thoughts you want to. And while you’re at it, you can borrow all the creativity you want to also. You don’t even have to pay to rent or buy ideas, concepts, metaphors, turns or phrase, figures of speech or even jokes and laugh lines. Just go ahead and steal em. Come on, just do it! Look around, make sure no one is looking, and nab that cute turn of phrase. Stick it in your pocket real fast before the Thought Police can figure out what you did. Now move away quickly and stash that fancy little phrase in some safe place wherever you store your stolen verbal material. I would suggest a locked briefcase. You can try to put them in your mind, but lately just about everything I store up there seems to get lost somehow, but that might not be a good idea. You can’t copyright words! Or phrases! Or even sentences, really. You certainly cannot copyright or patent concepts, ideas, theories or notions. It’s all up for grabs. I assume that the capitalists are going to try to figure out a way to copyright or patent all this stuff just so the sick fucks can make a buck off it, but in the meantime, it’s mostly up for grabs. Plagiarism is not illegal, but it’s a career killer. I would advise to tread cautiously, but trust me, we writers steal stuff all the time. You have to be very careful how you do it, and when it comes to famous or popular works, you just steal a tiny bit here and there, better yet completely unconsciously. We all gather information from everywhere all the time. We do not have to go around crediting everyone we grabbed some idea from. I sure as Hell don’t. Incidentally this is part of creativity and originality. Grabbing stuff from other people. Look, there are not a whole lot of new ideas floating around. Humans have been thinking, talking and especially writing stuff down for 2,000 years. Hence almost all creativity, even most originality, is more or less rehash, but that’s the whole idea of it really. Just don’t steal too brazenly and you’ll be fine. The truly great thinker is running about grabbing great ideas from as many people as possible in as many places as he can. He can then elaborate on them if he wishes or squirrel them away in which case, as long as he can recall them, he can rehash them, add or subtract to them, mix them with other ideas in all sorts of ways or combine them with other ideas to form new theories, patterns, ways of seeing, conceptualizations and especially overarching pattern-theories, which I call “putting it all together” and “seeing the big picture.” Otherwise known as “wisdom.”
ZE: Is there any way to sustain emotional self-expression?
I think most people do it anyway because most folks seem to be pretty emotional. They go around expressing their emotions all the time anyway, unless you are getting at something different from quotidian emotionalizing here. For me, to sustain it, I would have to keep writing because writing expresses my emotions best. Humor is a good way to express emotions. As long as you are communicating with humans, you can make humorous comments that express emotion very well. It also helps to be a systematizing thinker. The more you can systematize, the more wisdom you obtain, and the best emotional expression is in the form of wisdom. And art. And then humor.
I am sort of getting tired of answering questions about my employment that I get from haters every day. Here is a statement on the matter from another site a while back.
I live off a trust fund, and I also work as a therapist. I make some money writing and I do a few other things like brokering deals between consultants and clients, things like that. The reason I do not work is due to health. I am not in good enough health to work. Otherwise I have been working or in school my whole life. My last job title was Linguist/Cultural Anthropologist.
I do not use any government programs, so I am mystified at people always saying I am on welfare or collect a government check. I have no idea where they came up with that idea. Here are my income sources in the last year or so:
Income Sources
Trust fund. Had $700,000 at the start, but now it is a lot less. It is a spendthrift trust, so I am locked out of it. They have always given me right around a poverty level wage only because my grandfather wanted me to survive but he also wanted to force me to work, so he made it small enough so I could survive but would not live comfortably. The idea was to force me to work because he did not want me kicking back my whole life as a trust fund kid. It was made spendthrift because he figured that if I had control over it, I would blow through the thing in a few years as I was a bit of a spendthrift, party boy and playboy as a young man. Counseling. Peer counselor. I focus mostly on one condition, a DSM anxiety disorder, which, frankly, I am an expert on. I work with clients all over the world, mostly in the US but also in Chile, El Salvador, Canada, Australia, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. I also work with problems in living, deep stuff (exploring your deep self or childhood issues) and growth stuff (learning how to grow to become a better and more functional human being). People often break down in tears and start crying right in the middle of sessions. Happens all the time. I deal with suicidal people all the time. In fact, I lost one client to suicide already. I have had clients who were attempting suicide while I was working with them. It can be hard to deal with. I have no degrees, credentials or licenses in this field, but in California, you do not need one. Just hang out your shingle and call yourself “Counselor” and say come talk to me about your problems. I do not get a lot of business, but I do get some. Considering that I lack all of the things you usually need to do this work, I am amazed that I get any work at all. I read a lot of books on this subject and I have been studying psychology for 40 years. I had decades of therapy. I read up on counseling psychology and mental illness all the time so I am pretty much self-taught. You would be amazed how many jobs you can do simply by teaching yourself how to do them. It’s a myth that you need degrees, credentials,. etc. to do this or that job. Just teach yourself. The longer I do this, the better I get at it. It is a stressful job though. I do one 1 hour session and I feel like I just ran a mile. I sometimes have to go lie down. The clients are in so much psychic pain that it seems to leak out of them and into my body. If you are empathetic at all this is going to happen. Brokering deals between graphic artists and clients. I put the clients and artists together, negotiate prices, etc. and then take a cut for myself. Conflict resolution/arbitration. In cases of graphic artists and clients where they have come to a standstill and nothing is getting done. An example: client has spent $~1,000 and is not satisfied with the product. Artist has stopped speaking to the client or returning his phone calls or emails. Client sent work back for endless revisions, and eventually the artist just had it. I wade in there, talk to both sides, figure out the nature of the dispute and try to settle the matter so that everyone is happy. I am actually quite good at this. Webpage design/graphics. Mostly graphics. Working with graphics for people who need websites done. Work with graphic artists. Graphics editor for books. I was recently a graphics editor for a book. I was in charge of maps. I worked with a graphic artist and told him what to label the areas and where to shade in the areas we needed to shade in. We used a lot of sources, all of which were wrong. It was a great big mess, but it was fun to put together the jigsaw puzzle. Webpage design consulting. Consult with webpage designers who are having problems with their pages to fix their issues. Selling information. As crazy as it sounds, I have actually made money doing that. I have some pretty much secret information about a few things that a lot of people want but few people have access to. An example would be a geographical location of an unusual place that a lot of people want to get to, but the location is a closely guarded secret. So I ell directions to this location and then work with them afterwards to help them reach the site, etc. Yes, you can actually sell information! Isn’t that crazy? Medical counseling. Work with heterosexual men who are worried that they have contracted HIV from sexual contact with women. I am an expert on this type of transmission and have been studying it for over 30 years now. I know more about it than most physicians. They tell me the situation, and I lay out the odds that they may have contracted the disease based on their situation. I also tell them how HIV is acquired from women and tell them about the various surveys that have been done. I also have a lot of percentages, facts and figures about this type of transmission, like say 1
Author. Just published my first book, or chapter in a book I should say. It is an 80 page chapter. I am supposed to be paid for this at some point. Book was published in Turkey in a university press. Took me 500 hours or three months work at part time. I worked with professors from all over the world on this project. I also had to go through two rather brutal peer reviews. I also came up with the name for this book series, but I was not paid for that. Sell advertisements. I have made a bit of money selling ads on this site, but honestly it has been very little. That’s it. I am always looking for new ways to get money though. I wake up every morning and think, “How am I going to get some money today?” I became ill 21 years ago and have not worked at a regular job since. If I did not have the trust, I would try for Disability. Before I got ill, I was always either working or in college or both. There was never a time when I was doing neither. If you enjoy the hard work that goes into this website, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site. Donations are the only thing that keep the site operating.
Minorities cannot even construct a cerebral blog like Robert Lindsay’s and while most of his contributors probably have an IQ lower than his I would say most of us contributors are in the 120 range.
Surely there are some minorities who could write a blog like this or could at least write a brainy blog. Socially Extinct is a Mexican-American, a pretty full mestizo, and he is incredibly smart. I actually worry that he is a better writer than I am. And I also worry that he’s smarter than I am. Jayman is Black and has a very brainy blog. I dislike Abagond the antiracist Black, but that man is smart as Hell. There are some damn smart NAM’s out there, make no mistake about it. I believe there are 500,000 US Blacks with IQ’s above 125. With Hispanics, the number must be even higher. I am thinking 1.2 million? There may be 6 million Whites with IQ’s that high, but there are more White people. Keep that in mind. There are a lot of smart fuckers on here all right. I don’t know what their IQ’s are, but I know they are smart as Hell. The few IQ scores we have of frequent recent commenters: 124 118 123 115 112 So the median IQ is 118, or let’s call it 120. That is the top 10
Some of you slackers have not turned in your scores yet, so you need to get to it. Alpha hates the idea of IQ, and I believe, like Tulio, she doesn’t think hers is all that high, but Alpha is wicked smart. I know this because I have access to her locked personal blog. Every time I go over there, I almost get knocked on my ass by her brains or genius or whatever it is. Some others are insecure about their scores. Matt with IQ of apparently 115 seems to worry that it is too low, but the funny thing is that Matt seems like one of the most wickedly smart commenters on here. Tulio has confessed that he feels stupid and thinks he has a low IQ at 124, but he’s in the 93nd percentile for Chrissake, and right now, Tulio has probably the highest IQ of any of the regular commenters. The performance of Matt shows us that we should not place too much faith in a simple number or score. Matt’s performance shows us that if you have an IQ in the 80th percentile, you can probably do all sorts of things, and further you can seem wickedly smart. I am wondering if guys like Matt and Tulio are high verbal and lower in mathematics, which might explain their “performance above IQ.” Jim Flynn wrote a whole book on “Performance Above IQ” where he showed that Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans were performing at jobs and showed a job performance that was 10-20 points above their actual IQ’s. So maybe it is not just IQ, but it is also what you do with it and what else (extra-IQ factors) that you can bring to the table that will “raise” your IQ effectively or de facto if not in realis. Realis is your number. De facto is your actual performance in the real world. At the end of the day, only de facto is what matters, let’s face it. Performance is everything, potential is nice, but it’s talking the talk whereas performance is walking the walk. So it looks like the average commenter is in the 118, which means they are in the top 16
We do have some higher IQ commenters on here, but they don’t comment all that much. I used to have some lower IQ commenters on here, and some of them were damn good. One has a 94 IQ, but he understood well and made some damn good comments, however lately he says that he can’t understand what I am talking about. I am actually trying to write this stuff so that the majority of the population can understand it. Yes, there is all sorts of higher level stuff running all through my posts, but it’s not necessary to know all of that stuff. Those are references to movies, TV shows, famous remarks, nicknames, music lyrics, books, lines from books, famous people of all sorts, on and on. I litter my stuff with all sorts of winking references. I don’t expect you to get all of them because that’s not my intent, but I expect if you find some of that stuff, you may enjoy a bit of a slow, nodding, knowing and loving smile. Sort of like a secret language. Those references are scattered through there more as a big game than anything else. I am just playing games with words and screwing around, and if anyone gets it, great, but if they don’t, so what? Sort of like those Easter eggs that some software used to have in them. I am not trying to show that I am smarter than anyone or especially my commenters, more like how I said, it is all sort of a big game where I am playing around with words and ideas, sort of like a big subtle brainy joke.
I have been called a lot of things in life, but there are some things that no one ever calls me because they are just ridiculous as insults to anyone who knows anything about me.
However, there are attacks on me that have only been made by morons on the Internet.
In real life, no one has ever done any of these things, not even once:
Implied that I can’t get laid or that I am unattractive to women or that I am some sort of a neckbeard incel nerd who can’t get laid with God’s help. People usually assume the opposite. They meet me and pretty quickly, without even knowing anything about me, start laughing and say things like, “How many girlfriends do you have? Three?” It’s relatively common for women to meet me and before they know much of anything about me, they say things like, “I don’t trust you. You seem like a player or a playboy or a guy who goes out with lots of women. I want a man who is faithful.”
Stated or implied that I am not attractive, homely or ugly in any way, shape or form. Some women have said I am too skinny, though.
Stated or implied that I am not every smart or that I am stupid in any way. Even my worst enemies have conceded that I am smart as Hell. In fact, no one has ever even told me that they are smarter than I am. Obviously lots of people will never comment on your intelligence, but some will. Most everyone who has ever commented on my intelligence has said that not only am I smart, but I am real,real, real smart. One man told me, “You are the smartest person I know, and I know a lot of really smart people, like physicians and attorneys. And you are smarter than all of them.”
Of course I do not go around telling people my IQ score all the time, but at times, the subject has come up. I know how to bring it up in such as a way so that almost no one ever gets offended and in real life, few if any people got offended when I bring it up.
Usually someone will say, “Good God you are smart. Jesus Christ!” And then I will act very shy and embarassed (this is a social skill called “false modesty”), and I say quietly,”Yes, I know I am smart. I’ve seen my IQ score.” They often look intrigued or curious and and say, “What is it?” Then I tell them, but once again I say it in a very shy way as if I am embarassed to tell anyone (the complete opposite of being showoff braggart). The response is almost always positive.
Implied or stated that I can’t write or can’t write well. A lot of people in real life have not read my writing, granted, but those that have always say something along the lines of, “Boy you sure are a good writer.” Some even say, “You are a great writer!” I have had women fall in love with simply because they think I am a great writer. Of course people have objected to the things I write about, but that’s not the same as saying you cannot write.
I did take a Creative Writing class once, and I wrote a chapter of a novel that never got finished. There was me and one other guy and a woman who could really write well. The others, I hate to say it, were just not that good.
They passed out my stuff and they had a week to read it. They came back, and everyone said it was really good, but some thought it was weird or bizarre or unsettling, or they said they didn’t understand what I was talking about. The one guy who was one of the three good writers completely ripped my chapter apart, but it was obvious that he was jealous and felt threatened. Plus he didn’t like my style. I just chalked it up to jealousy.
No one in real life has ever said that I am a social retard or socially inept or have poor social skills, not even one time. A lot of people think I am outrageous and maybe weird or offensive, but no one has ever implied that I am some autist social clod. The only people who have ever said this were on the Internet. However, quite a few people have said that I am weird, odd, strange, bizarre, eccentric, etc., but that’s not the same thing. I am just unconventional. Most of it is deliberate, and it’s just my way or telling society to go to Hell.
How on Earth you can possibly judge someone’s social skills by their prose is beyond me. I work in mental health, and I assure that you I can learn nothing about a client’s social skills by reading his prose. In fact, I cannot tell much of anything at all about a client by reading their prose. I certainly cannot diagnose any mental illness based on the way that they write. How can you possibly determine anything whatsoever about a person psychologically by reading their prose? It’s sheer idiocy.
The only people in life who ever implied I am ugly or unattractive were on the Internet. Not one person has ever said that to me in real life, not even one time; in fact, everyone who has commented has said the complete opposite.
The only people who ever told me I can’t write were on the Net. No one in real life has ever said that to me; in fact, they usually say the opposite.
The only people who ever told me I am not attractive to women, can’t get a woman, am a virgin or an incel or a neckbeard, or that I can’t get laid were on the Net. No one in real life ever implied or said that even once; in fact they generally say the exact opposite.
The only people who ever told me that I am dumb, not very smart or not as smart as I say I am or that I could not be as smart as my IQ score were on the Net. In real life, no one has ever said anything like that, and in fact, they almost always say the complete opposite.
The only people who ever said I can’t get a woman, am lousy with women, am an incel or a neckbeard were on the Net. No one has ever said any such thing in real life; in fact, they generally say the exact opposite.
You might counter that people in real life are being too kind to tell me the truth that I am obviously ugly, a socially retarded autist, dumb or not as smart as I say I am, a lousy writer, a neckbeard incel who couldn’t get laid with God’s help.
But this doesn’t make sense because I have had so many enemies that you would not believe it. Some of my enemies have threatened to kill me, and they have made a number of other threats.
In fact, three or four of my enemies actually tried to murder me and it turned into a kill or be killed scenario like, “Look, someone is going to get killed here and it’s either him or me. I say it’s him that’s going to get killed.” I can’t discuss the outcomes of these homicidal altercations, but I assure you that for at least one of my enemies, it was very bad indeed. At the very least, he got a number of broken bones. I don’t know the actual results of my attack or even whether I killed him or not because I didn’t stick around long enough to find out.
My enemies have told me that they are going to destroy my life in all these different ways. My enemies have called me every insult you could ever think of, but when they insult me personally, it’s never on any of the bases above. Even my worst enemies conceded that I am goodlooking, very smart, good socially, a good writer and good with women.
Since they have called me just about everything else you can call a man, I would assume if there was any truth to that stuff, they would have called me that. Instead, in real life, people have insulted me the same way that any normal human insults anyone.
When sane people insult someone, they look for something that is sort of true about the person and then hammer away at that. They go straight for the person’s Achilles Heels or they bring up an obvious flaw that the person has. That’s why we call it “hitting a raw nerve.”
You don’t attack a beautiful person by calling them ugly. People would think you were nuts. You don’t attack a smart person by calling them stupid. People would think you were an idiot.
For an insult to work in real life, there has to be at least the perception that there is a certain amount of truth there. Of course, I have been called all sorry of names and attacked in all sorts of ways, but generally the attacks were on the sort that “hit a raw nerve” in that, I hate to say it, but there was a certain amount of truth to the charge or at the very least you could see why someone would say that about me.
I have been told that people’s true personalities come out on the Net. That is a terrifying statement because it means that countless people are absolutely worthless garbage who don’t even deserve to live. In fact, I would say they were not even human.
The most evil people I have ever met in my entire life were mostly on the Net, and I’ve met some really bad people in real life.
I just spent 24 hours pretty much doing nothing but writing. Well to be precise, I was writing and reading – reading stuff to research for my writing, but it was all for the same project.
And I couldn’t be happier. I was happy as a clam the whole time. It wasn’t even work really. It was more like going on vacation or going off somewhere fun for the weekend. It’s pretty much of a joke to even call this work. It would be like having a job where you got paid for doing nothing but having fun.
Of course it was stressful in a sense (but I enjoy that sort of stress) because the sort of work I was doing was sort of like academic research that might go into a journal or an academic publication, something along those lines. So it’s scientific writing in a sense. One thing about doing scientific writing or any sort of scientific research is that you’re wrong.You’re wrong all of the time. And you’re always figuring out how you were wrong and going back and changing stuff. Eventually after however many revisions, you probably have something down that is more or less correct at least for now.
There is also a lot of reorganization going on for flow and structure and at the sentence level for typos and better structured and flowing sentences. Redundant material needs to be removed, all the time. You are always finding different parts of the paper that finally start matching up to each other, and you spent a lot of time marrying them.
Furthermore, your source material is often simply wrong or even unscientific.
I have to deal with nationalism a lot in my work, and nationalism is hardly ever rational, scientific or even correct. It’s just wrong, usually a good part of the time. Nationalist narrative for most any nationalist group tends to be an endless series of lies with a fair amount of correct material thrown in. But the correct material gets exaggerated or extended. Ethnic nationalist ideology boils down to
Our group is 100
Nationalist discourse is not only not rational or logical, it’s usually not even correct. Why not just read fairy tales instead?
Given that nationalist discourse is usually just an endless pack of lies, exhaltations and condemnations, it’s hard to see how any rational person could be taken in by it. But you will find in Europe that in any country you study, most any person you meet is some sort of an ethnic nationalist retard. This includes PhD students, full PhD professors, celebrities, noted scholars, etc. That these folks are said to be scientists is particularly shocking because they are so full of shit. However, they are social scientists, and most social scientists are not even practicing science anyway.
As a linguist I should probably not even be asking this question, but as all Western alphabets are probably ultimately derived from the ancient Phoenician alphabet from the Levant, have you ever considered that the term “phonetic alphabet” may also be rooted in “Phoenician alphabet?” I am also wondering if such words as phonetics, phones, phonology, etc. are also derived from the word “Phoenician.” I suppose I could look it up, but I’m too lazy at the moment, so I will fob it off on one of you.
Probably most of you do not know that we are all using a variant of the ancient Phoenician alphabet. Actually I am not sure if that is precisely true, as I think the Phoenician alphabet was preceded by an Assyrian one. But at any rate, our classic Western alphabets all came out of the Levant and Mesopotamia in some way or other. Indeed, it is even theorized that many of the syllabaries in use in Central, South and Southeast Asia are also rooted in this original alphabet from the Levant.
Of course, Chinese and consequently Korean and Japanese alphabets have another origin.
One might wish to throw the odd SE Asian orthographies such as Thai, Lao, Burmese, Vietnamese, Javanese, Sundanese and Khmer there, but my understanding is that all of those SE Asian orthographies were actually derived from syllabaries originally designed in India.
A few writing systems such as Georgian, Armenian and Cree may have been created de novo, but I might have to look that up. The only non-Middle Eastern derived orthography that immediately comes to my mind is the Chinese ideographs.
The origins of the Assyrian/Phoenician alphabet appear to have been ultimately in Egyptian hieroglyphics. So the ancient Egyptians really started it all when it comes to writing down words, at least for the West.
Chinese ideographs may date from even earlier. Chinese bone writing goes way back.
Very early European writing such as runic systems and similar systems in Asia such as the Turkic Orkhon inscriptions may not be related to the Phoenician system at all. The Yukaghir in Siberia and the Yi in South China may also have designed de novo systems.
Some Black folks been busy lately trying to bury the word nigger once and for all – recent months have seen symbolic funerals and burials of the n-word by mainstream Black organizations. This movement probably stems from the OJ Simpson trial in the mid-1990’s, when n-word was substituted for nigger.
Nowadays, nigger is as taboo as can be.
Can you say, “That racist jerk called a Black man, ‘Nigger!’?”
Nope.
Can we use the word nigger to describe the word widely used amongst Blacks themselves?
Nope.
One may not use the word nigger under any circumstances.
This is strange.
First, it implies that nigger is either an obscenity or like one’s private parts, ok to be spoken or revealed in privacy but certainly not in public. But nigger is neither obscenity in word nor flesh.
Second, banning the word nigger implies that it is so horrible, and that Blacks are so sensitive, that even the sight or sound of the word will drive these oversensitive Black souls either to tears or to rage. Now, Blacks have never struck me as a cringing, hypersensitive race of inhibited crybabies.
The Black man can take an insult. Why not – we kept him in a cage for centuries, only let him out to be policed like an animal in an open air zoo for another 100 years, finally liberated him via bullets and water hoses 40 years ago, and oppression and discrimination yet linger.
Through it all, the Black man has stood up and taken it like a man. By implying that Black men can’t bear to see the word nigger without dissolving into wimpy tearfulness, we insult their masculinity and fortitudinous nature.
Now that we have settled the absurdity of killing, let alone burying, a word, let us see how we may resurrect the comatose patient.
Who should be allowed to use the word?
Obviously, Blacks will keep on using the word themselves, as is their right. Further, Blacks can decide how, where and why they use the word, if at all. It’s only fair to give Blacks ownership over this word, which is really their word.
Blacks are perfectly correct that Whites should not use this word, and don’t give us that phony, “Well, Blacks use it, so why can’t we?” nonsense.
Semantics is a subfield of Linguistics. In Semantics, we say that words mean whatever people who use them say they mean. End of story. Nigger has one set of meanings when Blacks use it and another set when Whites use it. That’s not Black hypocrisy; it’s the way humans use language. Should racists be granted the right to use the word? No, they use it as a weapon to attack others.
I would like to request that we resurrect the word for journalistic and historical writing integrity. If a non-Black calls Blacks niggers, let’s write out the word. Forget this weasel-word n-word. We should have the right to say, “In the South 50 years ago, most Whites referred to Blacks as niggers.”
What are we accomplishing by refusing the write the evil word? Are we preventing its spread in society, sort of like a disease control agency? Let’s let non-racist creative writers, journalists, social scientists, historians feel free to use the word, sparingly, like seasoning on food, as needed. How about one more case? Why can’t we put the word nigger in the mouths of racists? Why can’t we refer to David “Send the niggers back to Africa” Duke? Or Newt “Cut the niggers off welfare” Gingrich? Or Philippe “I like to measure nigger penises” Rushton?
Let’s boil down some of these racist arguments just a bit and give them some nigger-seasoning.
Why do the same racists who love to rant about supposed Black genetic stupidity love to rave on about Black basketball skills? What’s the real message here? How about, “Niggers sure are good at basketball! They better be, cuz they sure ain’t got no brains!”
What’s the real message of the scientific racism that says that Blacks are genetically stupid, that this stupidity is irremediable by any environmental means, and that attacks any signs of Black intellectual progress (Like, for instance, this vile and wicked blog, recently referred in an New York Times piece by Amy Harmon as a “popular science blog”)? Isn’t it really, “God-damn, niggers are dumb!”
Why don’t we call the Murrays, Rushtons and Lynns the “Niggers sure are stupid!” academics? After all, that’s what they are selling, right?
Have you noticed that endless obsession that the media has with Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe – formerly Rhodesia – used to be run by virulently racist White criminals who were then evicted by a Black liberation movement.
Zimbabwe did all right for quite some time – in fact, throughout the 1980’s, it was regarded as a model of democracy, good governance, and multiracial harmony, and it weathered the African famines of the 1980’s quite well – until it started seizing the land of White farmers in the 1990’s. And why did it seize the land of the White farmers?
Because land reform was a necessity, but Britain had quit funding the “willing buyer, willing seller” fake land reform that never really worked well anyway since so few White farmers were willing to sell land. 5,000 White farmers, a tiny percentage of the population, had almost all the good land, all stolen at gunpoint from Blacks decades earlier.
Meanwhile, Blacks had the worst land and only tiny plots of it anyway, such that they barely had rocks to eat.
They were overcrowded onto this crappy land, so it naturally started to erode. The racist Whites then derided the Blacks for “poor nigger farming methods.” The racists then blamed the livestock of the Blacks for the erosion, and stole 1 million head of “the niggers‘ (ill-disciplined) cattle”. The real cause of the land erosion was the racist feudal farming system.
After the willing seller, willing buyer game ended, it was replaced by a project whereby Zimbabwe tried to come up with money to buy out willing Whites. But an economic crisis occurred (caused by an IMF structural adjustment and the free marketization of the economy) during the 1990’s, and Zimbabwe lacked the cash to purchase White farms.
Whites weren’t selling anyway, and the Brits were backing them to the hilt. Angry Blacks who had fought in the liberation war began clamoring for the land to which they were entitled.
Mugabe, suffering a crisis of legitimacy at the time, gave into them. Hence, the “land invasions” began. The media rails about how “all of the land went to Mugabe’s cronies” – the message here: “Niggers are lying, cheating thieves”.
To some extent, this is true (that land went to cronies). Initially, the land reform was decentralized and handed over to local party officials, which was actually a good idea. Unfortunately, the local officials promptly turned it into a spoils system, just like the corrupt cronyism we see in every African country!
For some reason, the cronyism of Mugabe’s party was worse than that of the rest of Africa, which is ignored by the imperialist media. The important point here is that Mugabe was not really involved in this corruption. After a while of this, Mugabe got a hold of the process, and now most of the land is just going to poor Black farmers.
The next part of the media lie is that since all the land went to Mugabe’s buddies, the poor Black farmers crowded into the cities, where Mugabe promptly took them on in a fake urban renewal campaign called “Drive Out Trash,” which was really just a campaign to destroy the homes of his political opponents and render them homeless.
First of all, most of the land is now going to small Black farmers, so there is no need for landless Black farmers to crowd into the cities. This is why small rural farmers are one of Mugabe’s main support bases, the other being the Shona tribe, the largest tribe in the country.
Second of all, the unfortunately named “Drive Out Trash” campaign was really just an urban renewal campaign where horrible Black slums were destroyed to make way for 120,000 much better government housing units. The urban renewal campaign is going on right now and much nicer government homes are replacing squalid hovels. The urban renewal has been hampered by sanctions, though.
True, the land reform has been chaotic, as land reforms often are in the beginning, especially when too much land reform is done too quickly. The old system has been crushed, and the new one often has not yet gotten going yet. The result is sometimes one or more years of famine harvests. But all this BS could have been prevented if Britain and the White farmers had gone along with a sane land reform program in the beginning.
At the same time, after Zimbabwe had been devastated by a decade of IMF-led imperialist looting combined with terrible droughts of the 1990’s, Mugabe logically told the IMF to go to Hell and refused to pay off his debts.
With the land invasions and the IMF nose-thumbing, all Hell broke loose in US and UK imperialist circles, especially in the former colonist, Britain, where the press went nuts and has never recovered. Devastating sanctions were quickly slammed on Zimbabwe. Foreign investment plummeted by 99
Even UNICEF is in on the brutal punishment – whereas in other African lands, AIDS sufferers get $74 per sufferer per year, Zimbabwe only gets $4 per sufferer per year from UNICEF. Then Mugabe, as AIDS devastated the land – the “dumb, murderous nigger Mugabe” – morphs into “genocidal nigger Communist Mugabe”. Really it’s just an AIDS epidemic devastating the country, as it is wrecking surrounding nations.
The land invasions were a predictable mess, and a few Whites were killed. These deaths have been insanely blown out of proportion by a leering media. In Britain, the media fairly screams “White genocide!” You can imagine the clamor on White Nationalist sites. In truth, a whole nine White farmers have been killed over an eight-year period. The death of one White farmer yields vastly more breathless Western prose than the deaths of 30 Zimbabwean Blacks might.
Another media obsession is “Mugabe the dictator.” Mugabe is authoritarian, but as such folks go, he is pretty lightweight. The opposition leaders regularly give interviews in which they call for armed struggle against Mugabe’s regime or invasion by imperialist countries. It is amazing how this “evil dictator” allows those who call for his very head to speak out and run free.
The West has funded the opposition, which has little support, for years now. The opposition is totally tied to imperialism and pushes an extreme free market program that is not only the last thing that Zimbabwe needs right now but is the very thing that caused so many problems for the nation in the 1990’s.
The opposition has led a number of violent campaigns, and some of their leadership has been arrested and beaten. The Western media has gone nuts over these minor transgressions.
The opposition has also historically allied at various with the White farmers in Zimbabwe, White apartheid supporters in South Africa, and the vicious, apartheid-supported RENAMO guerrillas in Mozambique. Obviously, they are rejected by the vast majority of Zimbabweans.
The main opposition party was clearly involved in a coup attempt that tried to kill Mugabe in alliance with UK imperialism, but a court of the Mugabe “dictatorship” somehow refused to convict the plotters.
Truth is that the opposition is essentially run and funded by UK and US imperialism. Zimbabwe sees the UK and US as enemy nations, and in fact they are. As such, I would argue that the opposition are in effect traitors and spies for openly working the enemies of the nation. Mugabe is too kind. I am amazed he even lets the opposition walk around free at all. Mugabe the “dictator” has held several elections, which are now monitored by international monitors, and monitors have upheld all of the results. At the same time, opposition protests caused the “dictator” Mugabe to cancel several proposed Constitutional amendments.
The sanctions are the cause of almost all of the economic decline and ruin that the country has suffered since 1999. There is no a priori reason to suggest that Zimbabwe should be the most devastated country in Africa. The nasty racist suggestion is: “Niggers can’t run a country.”
In particular, the suggestion is worse: “Niggers are so stupid and childlike that they are incapable of running a country and quickly destroy any country given to them. Look at Zimbabwe. It was doing great when the nigger children had White grown-ups to take care of them. Then they threw Whitey out and tried to run it by themselves, and look what happened.”
The sneaky riff: “Niggers destroy any country they run. The only way that nigger countries can succeed is if the niggers are colonized by superior Whites.” The particularly nasty aspect of this vicious line is that it both supports White colonialism and White apartheid at the same time.
Another line is taken by many “race realists” such as the noxious crowd over at GNXP.
It is interesting that these “race realists” are almost always from the more “superior” races and rarely from the more “inferior” races.
Anyway, these folks take the objectively racist line that the chaos in Zimbabwe is because…”niggers are too stupid to run a country!” IQ scores in Africa are then used to prove that idiocy is what is killing Zimbabwean Blacks.
It is true that, as James Watson noted, IQ scores in Africa are markedly low. These IQ scores are valid. However, IQ scores in Zimbabwe are about 67, which is precisely the African average.
The other African nations, despite their low IQ’s, seem to muddle along, and at least are not experiencing Zimbabwean disaster. Minus crippling sanctions, Zimbabwe would be expected to muddle along about as well as any African nation.
Another problem is that much of the chaos in Zimbabwe is being caused by one of the worst AIDS problems on Earth. This is conflated by imperialism’s media to mean “socialist Mugabe is slaughtering his people.” Truth is it’s mostly AIDS that is killing them, not Mugabe, and there is not much Mugabe can do about AIDS anyway.
Blacks did not destroy Zimbabwe – sanctions did. Zimbabwe was doing fine on its own for 19 years until it started grabbing the White farms. De facto White Supremacist countries like the US and UK then went nuts, slammed devastating sanctions on Zimbabwe, and it’s been screaming in the ruins ever since.
Viewed in this light, cheat sheet version of the destruction of Zimbabwe ends up as a (deliberate or not) White racist plot-scam to make Blacks look like genocidal incompetent children that need White adults to take care of them. I do not think imperialism intended the message to come out that way, but that’s how it came across.
Even worse, the line is: “Look! Niggers are so stupid and incompetent they can’t even grow food!” Black people grow food all over Africa and have been growing food for centuries. They don’t necessarily grown enough of it to feed their countries, but they do ok.
Africans are resourceful and hardy folks; humans have been there for 120,000 years, and they haven’t gone extinct yet. Fire and tools came out of Africa, and 73,000 years ago, when a volcano killed almost all humans on Earth, only a small band of 600 or so survived and kept the human race going.
Guess where the holdouts were? Africa, near Mount Kilimanjaro. Afterward, these Africans underwent extreme evolutionary changes called the Great Leap Forward, probably invented art and language, and exploded out of Africa to colonize the entire planet.
Yet these same folks are so stupid they can’t even grow food! Come on. There is yet one more snarky and wicked riff running through this whole imperialist aggression. It’s a lesson to the niggers in South Africa. It says, “Listen up, South African niggers! Look at Zimbabwe! This is what will happen to you if you try to do a land reform with those White farmers in your country! We will destroy you just like we did Zimbabwe! Don’t even think about it, niggers!”
Now, South Africa, which we will deal with below, desperately needs a land reform. 50,000 White farmers occupy 80
In the end, there is no reason why Zimbabwe should not at least be able to do just as well as the rest of the Africa. Zimbabwe is a disaster not because it is run by Blacks but because economic warfare has been declared on it.
Now let’s look at South Africa. Yes, the crime rate is very high. But it is in general much higher than the rest of Black Africa. Now why is that?
The racist line is: “Niggers are animals and criminals. They murder, rape and steal anything in their path, and their innate criminality destroys any country. They especially like to prey on White people because they are so hateful and racist towards Whites. And they love to rape White women because their own nigger women are so damn ugly. Look at South Africa, and peer into the heart of the nigger criminal beast.”
But South Africa is anomalous. Decades of criminal White apartheid against Blacks built up mountains of hate and resentment amongst impoverished Blacks who seethed with rage as the Whites lived in luxury while Blacks wallowed in miserable slums.
The insane gap between the rich and the poor in South Africa and the Black face of the poor combined with the White face of the rich insures racial-based redistributionist crime, often violent crime, for the foreseeable future. Barring South Africa’s unusual circumstances, we should not expect its crime rate to be much worse than the rest of Black Africa’s.
Once again, the nasty subtext: “Niggers need apartheid. The nigger can’t make it on his own. He’s an animal and he needs the White man’s paternalistic boot on his neck in order to survive and not destroy himself and his land.” As in Zimbabwe, it’s yet another argument to bring back settler-colonial apartheid and White rule.
Let’s take a look at another “race realist” obsession: Haiti. Haiti is said to be “the only Black country in the Americas,” and it is rightly described as a devastated place. The subtext: “There is only one nigger country in the Americas, and they have of course destroyed it.” But this is not the case. First of all, most of the Caribbean islands are primarily Black or mulatto, including Cuba. A number of these islands are still colonies, but others are not. And while Dominica, Jamaica, and Grenada have plenty of problems, they are not Haiti by a long shot.
The reasons Haiti is a wreck is due to its ultra-reactionary mulatto ruling class that has confiscated almost all of the wealth of the land since independence, in cooperation with frankly White racist White countries like France, the US, and Canada.
The elite have the army and cops, and they have been slaughtering the people to keep their feudal stranglehold over the place for 100 years now. France is still furious about independence in 1804, when Black slaves, under Desallines, rose up and killed all 25,000 White French slavers and their families on the islands. To this day, 200 years later, White racist France demands reparations for this admittedly bloody episode.
Unfortunately, as so often happens, the revolution was quickly usurped by a bunch of fake revolutionaries, who ended up turning it on its head and putting a version of the old system back in.
There were a group of light-skinned Blacks who were often freed slaves and had allied with the White slaveowners. These Blacks quickly wormed their way into power, installed feudal brutality over the wretched masses, and it’s been that way ever since. One more stolen revolution. Now this Haitian ruling class, in collaboration with imperialism, continues to keep Haiti under the boot.
Aristide was elected with 92
He tried to raise the abysmal minimum wage, gave a million kids a lunch a day (probably their only meal) and built more schools in eight years than had been built in the previous 200. The people experienced real, tangible gains under Aristide, the best they had seen in two centuries.
For these crimes, imperialism (the US, France, and Canada) destroyed Aristide and forced him to leave with a gun at his head. The imperialist operation may as well have been called Operation Enduring Sweatshop.
The only solution for Haiti is armed revolution. The army of the ruling class needs to be overthrown. Then the ruling class themselves need to be informed of the new program and encouraged to go along.
Those that do not need to be arrested, and then either thrown in prison or re-education camps, kicked out of the country, or as a last resort for some of the most bloodthirsty and criminal Duvalierists and Tonton Macoutes, shot. Their hands are dripping with blood anyway, so it’s not like innocent people would be persecuted or killed.
A dictatorship of the proletariat may be necessary for a while, or at least a democracy with a well-armed revolutionary army, police and citizenry. This is one thing Hugo Chavez has right – arm the people and revolutionize the military.
Until that happens, Haiti will continue to be Hell on Earth.
When racists use arguments like these against Blacks and Black nations, they are not really talking of Blacks or Black countries. We give them too much credit when we say they are talking about Blackpeople or nations – they are not – they are talking about niggers and nigger countries. Let’s shove the n-word in their mouth, leave it there for all to see, force them to eat it, and make them tell us what it tastes like.
Admittedly, we are taking some risks with this approach, namely the risk of legitimizing the term nigger. But most sane people already understand the difference between Blacks’ use of the word and Whites’ use of it. I don’t see why we can’t extend things a bit.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was not yet surpassed 150 years ago. Doubt if much has changed since. In glorious prose the likes of which we don’t see much anymore, Emerson lays out precisely what the contenders are up against:
Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably. A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain, and think from thence, but not into Shakespeare’s. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self – the subtlest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship.
With this wisdom of life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit.
Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity coordinates all his faculties.
Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength.
But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other.
This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.
Whoa! That’s some kickass prose. I didn’t know Emerson could write like that.
He’s right. Shakespeare’s in another world altogether. There’s Shakespeare, and then there’s everyone else.
References
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1850. Representative Men. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co.
Here is a selection of words one is unlikely to use, even in writing. But having learned them, one can try! If there is a game to be played with rare and unusual words, a good one would to write the opening of a short story utilizing some or all of the words below, in their correct context. It can be as ridiculous or as improbable as one likes. Let your creative imagination fly!
Nimptosical: drunk.
Galeanthropy is the delusion that one has become a cat.
A gynotikolobomassophile is one who likes to nibble women’s earlobes.
Contrectation is fondling before lovemaking, or the act of caressing a woman, especially furtively and against her will.
Fartleberries refers to excrement clinging to the hairs around the anus.
Parthenology is the medical study of virgins and virginity.
Dwergmal is dwarf language, language used by dwarves.
Dasypygal means “possessing hairy buttocks”.
An espringal would be very useful were you laying siege to a walled city in the Middle Ages: it is a medieval stone throwing contraption.
Nothosonomia is the act of calling someone a bastard.
Omphaloskepsis is meditation while gazing at one’s navel.
I recently complemented a commenter on the site by telling him he’s a genius. By that, I mean he’s a great writer. He’s also a fine thinker, but the two go together. We have lots of fine thinkers on the board, but not all are great writers too. He’s Korean, and Koreans don’t seem to write English spectacularly. I don’t know why, but they are better in visuospatial than in verbal IQ:
Thanks. I found one of the secrets to writing that is engaging is having a musical awareness. Walk down a street and run a tune through your head. Preferably one that you made up. Then just play with it. Volume, pacing, accelerate, decelerate. And volume is key. Change in volume completely changes the tune. Try it. Try Beethoven’s 5th bahm, bahm, bahm, baaahmm.
Quietly. Done quietly it’s nothing. LOL. So here’s the dramatic conclusion to why Koreans don’t write spectacularly. They are raised to be quiet. It shows in their writing.
And we are not even getting into poetry yet. Sure the best poetry is musical, always has been. That’s why it’s so hard to translate. But so is the best prose. We are talking strictly prose here. How do you translate Finnegans Wake into any language other than English? Where do you even begin?
So when you write, your prose is music. Well, it should be, if your aim is artistic. Or at least that’s one way to write
Of course, the best prose is both music and even visual art like painting. I don’t know if it’s cinematic. And the best prose sings like poetry too. It’s all about the rhythm.
I write musically too, and I also write cinematically or like paintings. I get little pictures in my mind when I writing. They just pop up. Then I look for words to describe the paintings or scenes. Sometimes they are pictures like storyboards for a movie or just a painting or picture or frameshot or photo or other visual image. In other cases, it’s like a scene from a movie. Then I search around for the words to describe the scene I just saw in my mind.
When I was 22, a could of friends read my fiction and said it was like Joyce, “painting pictures with words.” My junior college journalism teacher threw me off the paper for “hallucinating with words.”
But, for Caesar, the all-accomplished statesman, the splendid orator, the man of elegant habits and polished taste, the patron of the fine arts in a degree transcending all example of his own or the previous age, and as a man of general literature so much beyond his contemporaries, except Cicero, that he looked down even upon the brilliant Sylla as an illiterate person–to class such a man with the race of furious destroyers exulting in the desolations they spread is to err not by an individual trait, but by the whole genus.
The Attilas and the Tamerlanes, who rejoice in avowing themselves the scourges of God, and the special instruments of his wrath, have no one feature of affinity to the polished and humane Caesar, and would as little have comprehended his character as he could have respected theirs.
Even Cato, the unworthy hero of Lucan, might have suggested to him a little more truth in this instance, by a celebrated remark which he made on the characteristic distinction of Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, said he, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation…
Thomas De Quincey, De Bello Gallico, and Other Commentaries of Julius Caesar
The English author De Quincey, who wrote from is not very well know, which is too bad. Most who know of him at all are familiar with Confessions of an Opium Eater, but just about anything he ever wrote is worth reading. Look at that majestic prose above. Sure it’s languid and loping in getting to the point, but so what? So is Henry James. If you can’t hack it, go back to your bodice-ripper or thriller.
As a pure stylist, De Quincey has to be one of the finest writers of the past 200 years. I can’t get enough of this prose. Check out those 50-100 word sentences! Damn. You have to catch your breath while you read them.
Nice comments about Caesar too. Sure he was a conquering imperialist bastard, but he was one of the classiest, most refined and educated ones that ever lived. After him, who else?
Good prose, ideally, should be musical. It ought to sound something like poetry.
I go around all day thinking up sentences and paragraphs in my head, and I am looking for some kind of music, a rhythm.
I also “think in pictures” or “think in movies” when I write. A lot of times I get stuck, and I try to think of a picture or a movie that represents allegorically what I am trying to say. Then when I get the pictures or movies, I try to find words to describe them. Some people call that “painting with words,” and it’s similar to what James Joyce did.
Really, all of the arts come together, and good prose should be musical (music, the aural arts), artistic (live movies or art, the visual arts), and poetic. I am not sure about sculpture and architecture, that is going to be harder to work into words.
One thing you notice about a lot of artists is that they did not limit themselves. Great artists often wrote poetry too. Poets wrote novels and short stories and vice versa. Poets and novelists wrote plays and even operas. It’s not so common to find writers who also write music, but Ezra Pound did, and there are also artists who do music. The Talking Heads came out of art school.
It’s hard to explain, but on some level all of the arts are doing the same thing with different instruments and sensory organs, but it all comes together in the end. I think that all of the academic disciplines are doing the same thing as each other too, and maybe the same thing as the arts. I call this, “The search for the perfect relationship,” but you might have your own phrase for what is going on.
Surely, when we saw cave paintings written on the walls in France 40,000 years ago, I can assure you that those folks had language. Why? Because art and language are intimately tied. How? They are both what I call, “the external representation of reality,” but you may have your own phrase.
Another thing you notice about most academic disciplines is that as you go higher and higher in the discipline, it all starts going mathematical. This is true in almost every field. So at the pinnacle of every discipline it all starts coming together as math. We could say that mathematics is “the ultimate language,” and I would not be the first person to say that.
Another thing that I do is I am constantly being influenced by everyone I read, all the good writers I read. That includes my own commenters, bloggers, magazines, novels, books, etc. You realize after a while that there are good and even great writers everywhere, even commenting on blogs. It’s very humbling. So all of these influences are constantly going up into my head and influencing my style, because my style is always open to new influences since I leave it open all the time.
For a while there I was reading a lot of New Yorker magazines. One thing you see if you read a lot of magazines is that many magazines have a “style” about them. There is a New Yorker style and a Rolling Stone style. Most New Yorker pieces have this “New Yorker style” about them. I don’t know how it works that way, but it seems to.
Anyway, after a while, I noticed that my style was starting to sound sort of New Yorkerish. I just let that New Yorker style go into my head and influence my writing. I did not stop and analyze it or worry that I was being inauthentic, because I’m not sure a writer can be inauthentic.
Sometimes I will be reading a lot of a certain blogger and I notice that their style starts going into my head. I just let that happen and allow myself to be ok with that.
So, it feels like my style is constantly changing and being influenced by whoever I’m reading at the time. All the influences are up in my head swirling around, mixing, mingling, taking each other out, etc. Some new ones are going in and some old ones are heading out. I don’t analyze the process or try to stop it, I just let it happen.
I am insecure, see? I don’t like other writers all that much, and I am very jealous of them. No matter who it is, I am trying to beat them. I am always trying to be the best, the greatest, or if that’s not possible (It’s not) at least to be a great writer, a very good writer, etc. My view of myself is always that I sort of suck, so I’m always anxious and trying to be better.
You might argue that this is a lousy way to be, but a lot of people – artists, musicians, sports stars, writers, filmmakers, architects, sculptors, or really anyone who wants to excel in any field – are trying to be the best, beat everyone else, and are pretty hard on themselves.
This vicious competition of the mind does seem to drive a lot of great work. If everyone was totally humble and didn’t try to beat everyone else, I think there might be less superior achievement in the world.
