WEIRDLAND

Ad Sense

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

The Great Replacement (Renaud Camus)


Renaud Camus: One of the central concepts of my thinking is in-nocence, non-nocence, non-nuisance, the fact of not harming. The in-nocence pact seems to me to be the nodal point of civilization and, incidentally, of ecology. It is the title of one of my first public speeches, at least in the political sphere: “Nocence, an instrument of the Great Replacement.” Nocence, or if you prefer delinquency, big and small, from the snatching of old lady’s bag to mass terrorism, is the military means of conquest. Nocence is what we have to fight with all our might: it is absolutely not what we have to adopt. Nothing would be dumber than to imitate the methods of our adversaries, even if they are successful to him: we must find our own. On the other hand, if unfortunately we had no other choice than submission and war, I would prefer war, then, without hesitation. I do not have to highlight my social and doctrinal “distancing” from Nazism, since never having had the slightest affinity with it, to say the least. 

On the contrary I believe that the antireplacists of my kind, furiously opposed to the industries of man, that is to say to the assembly lines of death, to the camps, to the gulag, to the universal slum which is the unsurpassable horizon and the constant secretion of global replacism, are the only consistent anti-Nazis, just like they are the only consistent ecologists. The Faustian momentum involves a pact with the devil which, for my part, I am absolutely not ready for. The face of the Nemesis is more and more clear. So long as the ecologists do not care about population growth, which is the root cause of nearly all environmental ills that the Earth suffers, anything they can suggest is utterly futile. They pose as defenders of biodiversity, and they would be right to be so, but they attach no importance to its most precious side, human biodiversity, that of races, civilizations, cultures; worse still, being almost all antiracist and immigrationists, they are determined to destroy it, that human biodiversity, through mass immigration, which they promote, and through the ethnic substitution that it implies. And, to top it off, they put no value on the beauty of the world, what ends up rendering all their efforts pointless and all their ideas meaningless.


The Great Replacement despairs me as much in Great Britain as in France. And that the British are being replaced by Hong Kong citizens instead of Sudanese or Pakistani, I find it to be very little consolation. Why do they need to be replaced? Because of your Faustian ideal of perpetual growth and development? Cannot they stay English? Whether they are replaced by Mandarins or Hottentots, the crime will be no less, and the loss will be no less great. The genocide by substitution, or Great Replacement, or change of people and civilization, in short the destruction of the Europeans of Europe, is the XXI century’s crime against humanity. It is arguably the worst monstrosity in history: perhaps not the most criminal, for it is largely mechanical, automatic, accountable; but the fullest, the widest, the most cataclysmic in its effects. Source: www.amren.com

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Love in the Western World, Emophilia

British-French writer and historian Hilaire Belloc: “There is -as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered- a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others.”

Some individuals suffering romantic rejection were researched recently. According to Journal of Neurophysiology (2010), recovery from a breakup may be akin to recovering from drug addiction: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers recorded the brain activity of adults who had previously been rejected. Upon viewing photographs of their former partners, several key areas of participants' brains were activated: the ventral tegmental area (involved in feelings of romantic love) which controls motivation and reward; the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex, which are associated with craving and addiction (specifically the dopaminergic reward system); the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex associated with physical pain and distress. "Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a "natural addiction" said neuroscientist Lucy Brown at Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "Our findings suggest that the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology." Source: jn.physiology.org

“Love is civilization’s miracle”, wrote Stendhal in his insightful essay on Love. He was talking about the high ideal of love elaborated in Western Europe, from twelfth-century courtly love to nineteenth-century romanticism. Aristocratic non-clerical culture values love as the source of the greatest spiritual joy, and therefore cannot conceive of Paradise without it. Some poems sarcastically reject the loveless Christian Paradise: the male protagonist of the 12th century poem Aucassin et Nicolette, threatened with Hell by a cleric if he persists in loving Nicolette, answers that he prefers Hell, if that is where those who value love, chivalry and poetry are destined to go. In Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose (1225-1230), the narrator dreams himself in a wonderful garden with a Fountain of Love and the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. According to specialist Jean Dufournet, we find in this work “the elements of a very strong spiritual current that make the protagonist an emulator of the mystics.” The god Amor who strikes the narrator’s heart may be a poetic hypostasis, but he poses as a competitor of the Catholic God of asceticism; incidentally, Amor is Roma in reverse. These notions played a crucial role in the tradition known today as “courtly love”, first formalized in the troubadours’ poetry in Aquitaine, where the duchess Alienor (1122-1204), granddaughter of the first troubadour, introduced it to the court of her first husband, the King of France, then to her second husband, the King of England, where it combined harmoniously with the Celtic traditions of Wales and Britain, to produce for example the fairy lays of Marie de France or the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes. 

In his memorable essay Love in the Western World (originally published in French in 1938, revised in 1952, and followed in 1961 by Essays on the Myths of Love), French author Denis de Rougemont sought to understand the intricate relationship between the erotic and the religious in the tradition of the troubadours and their romantic heirs. From a Platonic perspective, the Idea is more real than its manifestations on earth, and for the medieval poet, as for the medieval philosopher, visible realities are always the symbol and the sign of more essential, invisible truths (Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, 1922). From that perspective, the psychological phenomenon that Stendhal called “crystallization”, which makes the beloved appear glowing with all perfections, takes on a very different meaning. Love does not lie; simply, its truth is not of this world. The key to Beatrice’s cryptic identity in The Divine Comedy is provided by Dante in an earlier book titled Vita Nuova (The New Life). Here Dante first introduces “my mind’s glorious lady, she who was called by many Beatrice, by those who did not know what it meant to so name her” (the name Beatrice means “she who confers blessing”). Nine times in his life, Beatrice appeared to him, Dante says. The first time, Beatrice “greeted me so virtuously, so much so that I saw then to the very end of grace.” Beatrice is the essence of feminine grace and virtues, manifested in all women: “my lady came into such grace that not only was she honoured and praised, but through her many were also honoured and praised.” In several passages, Dante indicates that when he is sensitive to the charm of real women (Beatrice’s friends, for example), it is Beatrice that he sees through them: “They have seen perfection of all welcome / who see my lady among the other ladies.” Robert Graves wrote that, “The purpose of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse,” whom he also called the White Goddess and the Mother of All Living. Painters and sculptors have also devoted much effort to capturing and communicating the essence of feminine grace. The aesthetic experience, according to Schopenhauer, means getting lost in the contemplation of the Platonic Idea behind the phenomenon, thus escaping the cycle of unfulfilled desires. 

Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), the emblematic French romantic poet, gave another beautiful expression of this theme in his last novel Aurélia (he was found dead soon after finishing it). As the narrator gets convinced by some sign that his death is near, he falls sick and, in his delirium, sees a woman of supernatural beauty, whose body grows until embracing the whole cosmos. The romantic ideal of love as a mystical encounter with the eternal feminine, or the Goddess, has had a very profound influence on European culture. The main reason why romanticism is mostly foreign to Jewish culture is that there can be no truly romantic conception of love without faith in the immortality of the soul, and Jewish anthropology is fundamentally materialistic (read my article “Israel as One Man”). It is therefore no surprise that romanticism has been regarded with contempt by most Jewish intellectuals. Kevin MacDonald (A Culture of Critique) explains it by an inherited Jewish culture where love was seen “as an invention of the alien gentile culture and thus morally suspect.” From the 1930s, American Jewish authors found in the theories of Freud and his Jewish disciples the justification for assaulting the romantic ideal and challenging the obscenity laws. Ludwig Lewisohn, “the most prominent Jewish writer in interwar America,” is a case in point. He had been analyzed briefly by Freud, and was a close friend of Otto Rank. Like Rank, Lewisohn liked to “portray traditional, unassimilated Jewish sexuality as uniquely healthy.” He also shared Wilhelm Reich’s ideas (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1934), that anti-Semitism is a symptom of sexual frustration and can be cured by liberating the Gentiles’ libido (a message echoed in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, 1955, as well as in Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, 1950). So did Isaac Rosenfeld, who said: “I regard anti-Semitism as a symptom of a serious, underlying psycho-sexual disease of epidemic proportion in our society.”

In Anton Myrer’s novel The Last Convertible, set in the 1940s, the lovable narrator, George Virdon, a solidly middle-class product of a public high school who is at Harvard only because of a scholarship, describes the particular snobbery of the “St. Grotlesex” men—that is, the graduates of St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, Groton, and Middlesex—who “by and large kept to themselves, dined and hung out at their exclusive final clubs, took a very casual attitude toward classes and grades, and very nearly constituted a college within the college. A Groton man sat next to me in a course on the Hapsburg Empire and never said a single word to me. Not one. It wasn’t that he cut me, exactly—I don’t think he ever even saw me. Some, like me, can accept it with equanimity and go their way. For others it eats away at the vitals like acid: they may suppress it, but they never get over it.” Source: aeon.co

“Although Emophilia correlates with anxious attachment and sociosexuality, it predicts life outcomes (Jones, 2015) and motivational forces (Jones & Curtis, 2017) not accounted for by the other variables. Further, the personality profile of emophilia is unique compared to other relationship variables such as insecure attachment and sociosexuality. Specifically, with respect to the Big Five personality traits: anxious attachment is significantly and positively correlated with neuroticism, and sociosexuality is significantly and negatively correlated with agreeableness. However, emophilia is uncorrelated with all Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Jones, 2017). Finally, emophilia has a unique predictive quality in some of the realms of relationships such as emotional infidelity, lower age of first marriage, or likelihood to engage in unprotected sex (Jones, 2015; Jones & Paulhus, 2012). Therefore, emophilia is important in explaining variance in relationships, and because of their peculiar emotional disposition, the affected individual may overlook the downside of dark personality traits in a partner, or even be attracted to them.” Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Sunday, September 20, 2020

The Roots of American Misery

The Roots of American Misery by James K. Galbraith: 

The political scientist Robert D. Putnam has written (in collaboration with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) a sprawling account of American discontent and its evolution over the course of the past century. Their central thesis is that things got better across all measurable dimensions – economic, political, social, and cultural – from the early twentieth century until the late 1960s. But then they got worse, culminating in today’s decadence and dysfunction, so reminiscent of the Gilded Age. Putnam illustrates this grand historical sweep with a single inverted-U curve, which he calls the “I-We-I Curve.” The curve, Putnam tells us, captures the rise and fall of common purpose and collective spirit, and conversely, the fall and rise of self-absorption and narcissism – perhaps indecently reflected in our national leaders.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020): Michael J. Sandel, a philosopher, has published a tract ascribing populist anger to the rise of “meritocracy,” by which he means the system of academic testing and scoring that was pioneered by Harvard University’s mid-twentieth-century president James Conant, and now widely adopted as the basis for social mobility in America. Conant and his adherents, at the bright dawn of quantitative social science, believed and argued that the rise of objective merit would lead to a decline of hierarchies based on class, religion, and also race, at least to a degree. Sandel parallels Putnam in developing a social-psychological interpretation of American misery, seeing behind it a rise of isolated insecurity and a waning of solid and self-confident group identities and mutual support. Neither Putnam nor Sandel are economists, yet both draw on economic evidence to establish the core premise that the American malaise is closely tied to high and rising economic inequality. For their facts about inequality, both rely on the well-known and widely cited work of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. For example, citing Piketty et al., Sandel asks us to believe that the bottom 20% of US households (26 million of roughly 130 million) have an average income of just $5,400 per year, or $104 per week. A similar reference underpins Putnam’s assertion that real incomes have stagnated since the 1980s for the bottom 50% of Americans, and fallen for the bottom fifth.

While there is no shortage of Ivy League scholars offering ambitious explanations for everything that ails the United States today, there does seem to be a scarcity of sound, fact-based analysis. In fact, the failure of elites to see what is really afflicting the country is itself one of the biggest problems. Putnam also repeats Piketty’s claim that US wealth inequality today is essentially the same as in the 1920s. To a remarkable degree, Putnam and Sandel offer a view of the world centered on Cambridge, Massachusetts. True, there are some references to scholars at Yale, Princeton, and Cornell, but the impression one gets from both books is that most every worthwhile idea can be found between Fresh Pond and the Charles River. Thus, when Putnam argues that “most economists agree” about the roles of technological change and education in generating economic inequality, he duly references Harvard economists Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin. Similarly, both Putnam and Sandel channel the local wisdom on social mobility, which comes from Harvard’s Raj Chetty. We read that while 90% of those born in the 1940s achieved higher incomes than their parents, only 50% of those born in the 1980s will. Never mind that 1940s parents grew up during the Great Depression, whereas 1980s parents lived in a society that was already very rich. If COVID-19 now gives us a new Great Depression and mass poverty, perhaps today’s children will again experience “upward mobility” over the coming decades. While Cambridge liberals fret over inequality, opportunity, education, and technology, they seem blind (or indifferent) to industrial structure, class identity, and corporate power. Their worldview has been airlocked at least since 1973, when the radical young Harvard economists Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, and Arthur MacEwan were banished to the University of Massachusetts, while Wassily Leontief, Albert Hirschman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and other members of the older generation found themselves edged out. Thus was purged any recognition of the real John Maynard Keynes, or the American Institutionalists behind the New Deal. Putnam’s and Sandel’s books show that the effects have been lasting. Putnam speaks only briefly of unions, claiming “a growing individualism among younger workers, who preferred watching television in the suburbs to bowling with the guys in the union hall.” 

THE “WHYS” OF DESPAIR: In refreshing contrast, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, wife-and-husband economists at Princeton, offer a careful, deep, and troubling look at the America that lies beyond the Ivy League. In a study organized around the grim recent decline of life expectancy among white males and the equally grim rise of deaths from suicide, alcohol, and opioids, they demonstrate a broad range of knowledge, analytical nuance, and open-mindedness. They do not try to explain everything with a single trademark concept, as Putnam does with individualism and Sandel with meritocracy. A great merit of Case and Deaton’s approach is their blunt assault on named villains, starting with the producers and peddlers of opioids. “In the opioid epidemic,” they write: “the agents were not viruses or bacteria but rather the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the drugs and aggressively pushed their sales; the members of Congress who prevented the Drug Enforcement Administration from prosecuting mindful overprescription; the DEA, which acceded to lobbyists’ requests not to close the legal loophole that was allowing importation of raw material from poppy farms in Tasmania that had been planted to feed the epidemic; the Food and Drug Administration, which approved the drugs; the medical professionals who carelessly overprescribed them; and the drug dealers from Mexico and China who took over when the medical profession began to pull back.” They also single out Republican US Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, former Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, and the now-notorious Sackler family (two of whom were knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1995), the owners of Purdue Pharma and the manufacturers of OxyContin. Skeptical of simple economic explanations, they rule out any direct relationship between deaths of despair and poverty, income losses from the Great Recession, or even unemployment. This absence of economic determination is understandable once one realizes that mere income losses are, to a considerable extent, cushioned by unemployment insurance and Social Security. But if not income losses, poverty, or inequality, then what? Case and Deaton describe “a long-term and slowly unfolding loss of a way of life for the white, less-educated, working class.” 

Case and Deaton do also stress the gap between those with and without a college education. It is tempting to reify the diploma, to read the divide as evidence that if more people went to college, they would ipso facto lead happier, more fulfilling lives. But the US already puts more people through college than most countries, and yet, so far as we know, deaths of despair are decidedly more prevalent in America than in Europe or Asia. A more convincing analysis would lead back to those inconvenient economists: to the early writings of Bowles and Gintis; and to Harvard’s own great mid-twentieth-century reactionary, Joseph Schumpeter – to whom Case and Deaton do pay fair homage. The lesson is that society only has a certain number of open doors to what Thorstein Veblen famously called the “leisure class”: the professions, the academy, competitive finance. College opens those doors, but does not widen the doorways. Expanding college completion without creating better jobs would merely increase the number of frustrated aspirants to the leisure class. That could be a formula for more despair, not less. Among these books, Putnam’s is perhaps the most radical in its proposed solutions. He would like to see a moral reawakening along the lines of the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century. And yet his is a singularly patrician view of social change. Along with trade unions, Putnam has no time for populists, socialists, or radical activists generally. Still, Putnam’s central claim that America’s social solidarity peaked in the 1960s and has been on a long, slow decline ever since rings true enough to a survivor of that era. With the enactment of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society (including its War on Poverty and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts), the 1960s effectively marked the completion of the New Deal. But then came a decades-long parade of recessions, unemployment, and inflation, while America built its “new economy,” a bi-coastal confection of technology and finance. It was the calamitous legacy of this transformation that laid the foundation for the rise of US President Donald Trump. It seems that part of what America lacks these days are voices of an authentic radicalism capable of reaching a mass audience with the full, brutal honesty that the situation demands. It may be too difficult to frame and advance such a critique from the commanding heights of Harvard and Princeton. Meanwhile, a large part of the country has come to distrust everything that its government, media, philosophers, and social scientists want it to believe. Source: www.project-syndicate.org

Saturday, September 19, 2020

JFK, The Illusion of Democracy, JFK Jr., Daryl Hannah, Carolyn Bessette

“The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. There is a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman, and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot.” —John F. Kennedy, 1963 (seven days before his assassination)

Another major attack on democracy took place in July 1999, though most journalists attributed John F Kennedy Jr.’s plane crash to “the Kennedy curse.” People assumed that the news reports were honest and blamed Kennedy for flying as a reckless pilot, in poor weather, endangering his wife and sister-in-law. These statements could not be further from the truth. Despite the media’s attempts to characterize John Jr. as a jet-setting playboy, his mother Jackie actively kept him out of the realm of wealth and leisure and insured he grew up level-headed. John Jr. was the founder of a political magazine called George, which featured stories that the mainstream media would not cover. Two of the most notable stories were “Israel’s Crimes of Mossad Against Citizens,” and an article by Oliver Stone called “Our Counterfeit History”. Rumors were rampant that the upcoming issue of George was going to announce that John Jr. was running for New York Senate. The popularity of another Kennedy, especially in the northeast, could not be tolerated by The Globalist Enterprise. Knowing that the earliest reports tend to be the truest and most reliable, The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released a statement saying that no mechanical problems were reported, the weather was clear, and the moon was visible at the end of the flight. Protocol dictates that when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Low Altitude Alarm goes off, or a plane fails to check-in for landing, a search is issued for that plane within five minutes. Despite a frantic early morning phone call from Senator Ted Kennedy pleading with President Clinton, a search did not begin for fifteen and one half hours. Protocol was also broken in regards to press briefings. After the initial reports of the missing plane, all future briefings were handled by the Pentagon. The FAA mysteriously would no longer comment on the flight and refused to issue further statements on John Jr.’s communications. The Air Force violated protocol and took over the search.  They utilized two planes and two helicopters to begin searching a 20,000 square mile area, despite ABC News broadcasting for hours the complete radar NTAP route of the flight; ending where the blips disappear nineteen miles out from landing. ABC News continued to broadcast the location where the Emergency Locator Beacon went off. All this was airing before most people were out of bed. Although Lieutenant Colonel Steve Roark claimed that he was not sure John Jr. had made contact with the tower to request landing, fortunately ABC News had interviewed Petty Officer Todd Bergun, the air traffic controller that supplied the radar NTAP proving the flight path. Petty Officer Bergun told ABC News that John Jr. had contacted the tower, and was assigned flight N529JK. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Stanley stated on air that the Coast Guard was “on scene” with helicopters and had found the wreckage despite the fact that the Pentagon had not yet begun the search. When the plane was recovered, they found in the wrecked plane that the Fuel Selector Valve was in the “off” position. A fourth seat was missing (even though those seats double as safety flotation devices). The NTSB has refused to release John Jr.’s cell phone records. This is relevant because the records show the phone calls he made prior to the flight while delayed. Nine Flight Instructors gave testimony on John Jr.’s flying practices. They explained John had been a pilot for over seventeen years. The Instructors detailed John’s methodical and meticulous flight planning, his cautious decision making, and they attested that he never flew without an Instructor. With regards to John’s aptitude as a pilot, he had an Instrument License. This means that he was licensed to fly blind relying on only the instruments on the plane. Prior to the crash John was so serious about flying that he applied for his own Instructor’s License so he could teach other pilots. Two witnesses said they saw Israeli Mossad agent Michael Harari at the Essex County, New Jersey airport standing next to JFK Jr.’s Cessna - just two days before the doomed plane took off with JFK Jr., his pregnant wife, and her sister." —The Illusion of Democracy: A More Accurate History of the Modern United States/Second Edition (2017) by Phil Mennitti

Although John Jr obviously loved his father JFK's legacy, he'd thought of him as a "skirt-chaser" and obsessed with sex, a trait probably inherited from the patriarch Joe Kennedy, who got rich as a Wall Street insider trader and Hollywood studio RKO owner, then became notorious as the 1938-1940 US ambassador to the UK—and who believed Europe was doomed and not worth for US intervening. One of JFK's lovers, the former Miss Denmark Inga Arvad, described the 35th President as “the best listener between Haparanda and Yokohama”. The journalist John Hersey, who had married a former girlfriend of Jack Kennedy’s, made him famous with a big New Yorker piece about PT-109, which anointed him a war hero. Among Fredrik Logevall’s most important observations, he notes that during the decade before Dallas, Kennedy lived with a tension between his own intelligently nuanced view of the ideological forces at play in the world — especially in Indochina — and the crude anti-communism of an instinctively conservative US electorate: “Many voters liked simple explanations and quick fixes.” JFK's caution and bravery about telling the American people unwelcome truths persisted throughtout his short mandate. 

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss believed that JFK Jr. had a “sort of post-modern political sensibility—a grasp of the fact that politics is heavily entangled with risk taking, that we were living at a time where especially young people were skeptical about politicians. John was trying to fashion an approach to politics that allowed him to sort of get across the old Kennedy ethic of public service and idealism, but to do it in the new vernacular of Generation X. And had he run for President in the twenty-first century, I think he would have won on his own terms.” John’s uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy, argued that John’s destiny was politics, encouraging his nephew to set his sights on the White House. By the summer of 1999, Teddy believed the time had come for John to think seriously about initiating the Kennedys Restoration. In Teddy’s view, Albany, the capital of New York, would be the strongest possible launching pad for an eventual run for the presidency. He urged John to begin raising money and political backing for the New York governor’s race in 2002.  

JFK Jr. used to live with his girlfriend Daryl Hannah in the Penthouse of The Harmony House at 61 West 62nd Street back in the late 1980s when it was still a rental building. The late editor and political heir John F. Kennedy Jr. and actress Daryl Hannah met, according to historian Steven Gillon, in the early ‘80s while on their respective family vacations. Daryl Hannah had been diagnosed as autistic at age 9. “John found it odd that Daryl seemed to carry a teddy bear with her wherever she went, but he also found her fascinating,” Gillon writes of their initial meeting. Until 1989, they didn't date officially. At the time, both were in relationships with other people — Hannah had spent the last 10 years with singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, while Kennedy had been dating actress Christina Haag since 1985. Hannah and Kennedy remained non-exclusive until 1992 when John flew to L.A. after Daryl had a reported domestic incident with Browne.

The Breakup: Steve Gillon, a friend to John as well as a historian, told InStyle magazine that he thought “John just found Daryl too self-absorbed.” In America’s Reluctant Prince he writes that while Jackie was in the hospital in New York, just days ahead of her death in 1994, John was in L.A. for the funeral of Hannah’s dog. Fueling the absurdity of this story, Hannah then got angry with John because he hadn’t chosen a more elaborate box for the dog’s ashes. “That just infuriated him,” Gillon explained. “And even after Jackie died, Daryl had another dog that was sick and John was up in Martha's Vineyard or Hyannis Port, and Daryl's on the phone talking about her dog all the time and John is there in the kitchen with his longtime friend Sasha Chermayeff, and he says, ‘Can you believe this. I just lost my mom and all she wants to talk about is her sick dog.’” No doubt adding to the mounting tensions between them through the years, Jackie had not been a fan of Daryl Hannah. According to Gillon, while the former First Lady never directly confronted Hannah about John, whenever the actress came over to her apartment for dinner she would manage to eat on a tray in another room. By August of 1994, about three months after Jackie’s death, John Kennedy Jr. and Daryl Hannah had split officially. Source: www.yahoo.com

In November 1993, Daryl Hannah had posed -in extremely poor taste- for Spy magazine in the Jackie's pink Chanel outfit for the 30th Anniversary of JFK's death, which was ill received by both Jackie and John Jr. Although Hannah was always reticent to talk about her relationship with John Jr., in 2003 she wanted to put to rest the widespread belief that Jackie Kennedy Onassis put the kibosh on the star's romance with John F. Kennedy Jr. because she didn't want her son marrying an actress. "It bothers me when it's assumed that John's mother didn't approve of me," Hannah told the March issue of Glamour magazine. "I had a great relationship with her and treasure my memories of her kindness, humor and grace," the "Splash" star claimed. John had confided his friend Billy Noonan Jackie tolerated Daryl but she didn't appreciated her lack of social decorum. Instead, Jackie had sensed Carolyn, his mysterious new girlfriend, was sincere in her love for her son. John took Jackie's approval nod towards Carolyn as the greenlight he needed to go definitely serious with the middle class beauty from Connecticut. “I just completely dig Carolyn, in every possible way,” John confided to Noonan. "His voice cracked with emotion when he explained me how different he felt with Carolyn. I flashed back to Daryl Hannah—and how much she'd hurt him. Carolyn was more romantic, more vulnerable, more real. I realized Carolyn was defining and illuminating John. I was so happy for him. John thought with all his great heart that he had found his dream girl. He was going to marry her, and I was excited! Marriage is the most important decision, I believe, anyone is going to make in his life."

According to Carolyn Bessette's roommate at Boston University, Colleen Curtis: "Carolyn was a magnet. She was a party girl then, with a close circle of friends and came across as “cold” to people outside her group, but she was really just shy - and people were always after her to be friends because she was so beautiful. She didn’t photograph well, but in person she was luminescent. She tried modeling but because she photographed so poorly, it went nowhere. Carolyn was complex, unpredictable, spontaneous and sometimes exasperating. But she was never dull. She was a great listener, though she would often get the same intense look when she was lost in thought, and she could drift so far away that she would forget it was her turn to talk. This is a polite way of saying she was a bit absent-minded. She started two kitchen fires in one week, making toasts and popcorn. Fortunately, only the popcorn incident required the Boston Fire Department. I can't think of anything more boring than the months we worked as cocktail waitresses at a restaurant in Harvard Square, but the money was good, and we were such good friends, it made the nights pass more quickly. In truth, most of that money went to clothes. Carolyn loved to hit Filene's Basement and the sales racks at upscale boutiques, hunting wonderful bargains. Although she was a professional at her job at Calvin Klein, Carolyn was never a slave to the fashion world and she never talked about it away from work. She liked nice clothes, she appreciated creative new ideas, but she recognized that the fashion industry could be one-dimensional. I think John Kennedy fell in love with Carolyn when he saw how much she truly cared for others. John insisted she quit her job, because the long hours were strenuous. Before she left her job, she talked about translating the skills she'd learned in fashion PR into something more meaningful such as fund-raising for nonprofit organizations." —The Kennedy Heirs: A Legacy of Tragedy and Triumph (2019) by J. Randy Taraborrelli 

Friday, September 18, 2020

The Blackening of Europe, Male Suicide Stats

Camus: ‘The non-existence of races, like the non-existence of classes, is indispensable for the industrial production of l’homme remplaçable: replaceable man; exchangeable man; decultivated, decivilised, denationalised, and unrooted, such as needed by and for generalised exchange: of man with man, of man with woman, of people with people, of animals with things, of man with machines, with prosthesis and with objects — the post-human condition.’

Indigenous Europeans are becoming demographic and political minorities in European nation-states. Europeans, understood as White, are already a world minority as a race. Out of about 7.7 billion people worldwide approximately one billion people are considered White; this means that Whites comprise less than 13% of the world population. Whites also have the lowest birth-rates in the world. For a population to exactly replace itself through births, the total fertility rate must be 2.1. The total fertility rate for the European Union is around 1.6, whereas the global average is 2.5, with the continent of Africa having the highest fertility rate in the world at 4.7. However, it is not the low fertility rate of Europeans that renders them ethnic minorities within their own nations, but elite-sanctioned large-scale non-European immigration, which began about sixty years ago and which is now integral to the cosmopolitan EU project. Because Kant thought human sensibilities were not wholly rational, being based as they are on self-interested impulses, they tended toward disobedience of moral law, so Kant’s cosmopolitan rationale did not mean universal freedom in a kingdom of ends. Instead, only a world based on a ‘simulacrum’ of ends is possible, a place where cosmopolitan normativity cultivates hope and gradually instils a sense of humanity, solidarity, and sympathy through cultural reforms, global social communication, and education in the arts and sciences. Kant also rejected colonialism, but thought that ‘colonization could sometimes be justified in terms of “bringing culture to uncivilized peoples” and purging the home-country of “depraved characters” ’; he argued, however, that ‘there could be no justification for the injustices of plunder, slavery and extermination’. Since the 1960s European nations and European-based nations have been practising large-scale Third World immigration, which has often involved immigrants bringing their domestic political issues to domestic political levels of their host countries, leading in turn to harmful and divisive sub-national politics, among many other problems, such as various forms of disrespect to the host political community, plundering of social welfare benefits, and the extermination of indigenous peoples in acts of terrorism. Critics have also compared mass immigration into European nations to a form of neocolonization by the rest of the world (Africanization, Islamization, Eurabia), often carried out through illegal immigration and the current ‘migrant crisis’ occurring in Europe, but also through legal immigration in the form of population-replacement projects and the complete rejection of European laws and culture by immigrants who seek to replace these with their own. Immigration has also resulted in the ethnic mixing of European populations and the dilution of the majority ethnic group. In March 2006 John J. Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University published an essay entitled ‘The Israel Lobby’, and in September of that same year they published a revised Working Paper titled ‘The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy’ in the Middle East Policy journal. In these works, they argue that US foreign policy in the Middle East is ‘primarily’ influenced by ‘domestic politics and especially … [by] the activities of the “Israel Lobby” ’ in America, and that this group has convinced ‘Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical’. Cultural Marxism is a bourgeois revolutionary ideology backed by capitalist forces (a socialist-capitalist alliance) that seeks the gradual gain of power via a destructive ‘long march’ through the existing institutions, the superstructure of Western Civilization. And, in contrast to economic Marxism, cultural Marxism relies on a coalition of Third World racial movements and New Left/New Class oppositional forces as their source of revolutionary change (new proletariat). -The Blackening of Europe: Ideologies & International Developments (2020) by Clare Ellis

The rate of male suicide in England and Wales last year reached its highest level for two decades, according to new figures. Men accounted for three-quarters of suicide deaths registered in 2019, making up 4,303 of the 5,691 deaths by suicide. Based on the Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, that puts the rate of male suicides at 16.9 deaths per 100,000 - the highest since 2000. The figures show no drop in the rate of male suicide since the year before either, with the rate in line with that of 2018. Men aged 45 to 49 had the highest age-specific suicide rate at 25.5 deaths per 100,000. The highest rate among women was for 50 to 54-year-olds, at 7.4 deaths per 100,000. The overall suicide rate for women in 2019 was 5.3 deaths per 100,000 - the highest since 2004. CALM CEO Simon Gunning told ITV News: "The real worry for CALM is that we saw in 2008, with the financial crash, a distinct increase in the suicide rate among men in their 40s. What we have to do now is ensure that isn't repeated with the potential impact of Covid." Source: www.itv.com