Slowly at first, then all at once.
LIGHTS OUT
New Jersey just held its annual/semiannual blackout in honor of Hurricane Isaias, which landed on our shores as Tropical Storm Isaias. It was a relatively brief and not overwhelmingly-powerful storm, but it apparently brought a few twisters along for the ride and knocked power out in huge swathes of the state for nearly a week.
We took it all in our stride, being used to blackouts by now, even though I had to throw out a few hundred dollars worth of food away. I really don't like gas generators and was able to use a lot of my time to make some rollicking progress on my new book.
It's amazing what you can accomplish without the distractions of SiliCylon Valley and its Luciferian technologies. Microchip technology is inarguably the work of the Devil, but the way things are these days we all have to deal with El Diablo, whether we like it or not.
Of course, Ol' Scratch has a motherfucker of an Achilles heel and that's the fact that he needs the lights to stay on to keep Michael's minions at bay. Big Tech better pray to Moloch that we never suffer a powerful solar flare or a pole shift, because they can barely keep the peasants in their place as it is.
Moreover, the braintrusts who had the bright idea of shutting down their offices and making everyone work at home must have been kicking themselves bloody when they ended up paying their salaried employees to hang out at the beach for a week.
Luckily, they were able to recoup some of the loss by screwing their hourly employees, who could least afford the forced downtime. But that's no surprise seeing how the corporate overclass is now entirely dedicated to terrorizing, gaslighting and impoverishing the middle class out of existence, starting with the lower middle.
I'll tell you, I can't wait until we get to the inevitable "lamppost stage" of this unfolding drama. Cannot fucking wait. Let's make it SLOW, lads. Let's make sure it's really, really slow.
Savor it, dig? Make it last.
New Jersey is home to some of the world's most demonic corporate entities, which makes sense seeing how it's long been a gangster state to the core.
One of the reasons this grift/graft clownstate is so susceptible to blackouts is that the pedocrat vampire class (our governor is Goldman Sachs, as was the previous fake-Democrat governor) is too busy pocketing the tax dollars they should be putting towards bolstering the state's fragile and vulnerable infrastructure.
They could start by clearing away all the trees from the power lines, which is the primary source of the outages. The power on my block and several surrounding was scotched because a branch-- a branch, mind you-- took down three utility poles.
I remember talking to a guy who came up from West Virginia with a team of workers to drag our weak, sorry asses out of the Dark Ages during a previous blackout and he was agog by what a mess the state was, with trees weaving through the power lines as far as the eye could see.
Of course, NJ could never undertake a project like sending men out with chainsaws to protect its sick joke of a power grid.
First, that would mean employing the people the pedocrats and their Big Pharma overlords are working so hard to annihilate. Second, that would mean diverting money needed for their junkets to Dominican Republic underage brothels and for their catamites' HRT bills. Plus, their very expensive 'chrome habits.
So, you can plainly see the dilemma.
So, I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and invest in a generator. Either that or get my shit together and leave this gangster clown-show madhouse and move somewhere that isn't going to erupt into Megiddo once the public teats finally run bone-dry.
Which is soon.
BOMB FACTORIES
I'm not a betting man, but if I were I'd say we're now in the foreplay stage of the Fourth Generation World War v.1.0. All these big explosions seem a little-- well, maybe a LOT-- too coincidental for a Sync-damaged nutcase like myself. Or yourself, for that matter.
It all smacks of covertitude, the kind of shenanigans that the CIA-MI6-Mossad-Etc Etc chaps pay good money to real operatives (and not puffed-up desk-jockey frauds like themselves) to carry out. I could be mistaken but probably not.
I think we can all agree that this disaster was no accident, given the instant regime change that followed in its wake. I really feel for the Lebanese, I'll tell you. Beirut was once the "Paris of the Middle East" and the "Pearl of the Mediterranean," but got itself in the crossfire of superpower struggle and regional hegemonic ambition.
But this is-- and has always been-- the fate of cities, particularly in that area. It goes all the way back to the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age Collapse and probably a long time before that.
I should mention though that two of the main characters in my brilliant, instant-classic novel He Will Live Up in the Sky (available now at all fine booksellers) are Lebanese Christians who fled the meatgrinder of 80s Beirut. I'd be remiss in my duties as a Synchronaut if I didn't do so here.
I'll be taping with our kid Greg tomorrow so I'll be sure to itemize the Sky synchs in proper fashion.
But there may be another explanation for some of the others, a more Nic Cage Knowing kind of explanation that my Divers would be well-attuned to by now.
Meaning that what we could be seeing is the result of some kind of cosmic or solar disruptions wreaking havoc on the world's rickety and badly-aging energy pipelines. It could a combination of the two. All the tools come out of the chest when the Angels of the Apocalypse come a'callin', doubt it not.
I haven't yet figured which Cocteau Twins songs prophesied or align with all this, but believe me; that's just a matter of time. Needless to say, Nostradamus de Grangemouth has a batting average that would seem utterly absurd and uncanny in a normal timeline. Which this is most certainly not.
CITIES IN DUST
What bullshit is that?
The bullshit that has it that all the pedocrats and banksters and Cylons are some kind of infallible super-geniuses and not just a bunch of cowardly cabals of corruption and collusion.
Believe me, they're not a bunch of Lex Luthors and Victor Von Dooms, and on the whole they never have been (excepting Kevin Spacey, of course). They're just amoral and collusive.
And as history has repeatedly and infallibly borne out, they always-- and I do mean always-- end up shitting in their own beds. Look it up if you don't believe me.
The Victor/Victoria Von Dimwits of the overclass have spent the entirety of 2020 cutting off their own nose (and other protuberances) trying to spite Trump's face with orchestrated shutdowns and choreographed riots.
How's that working out for the self-appointed Masters of the Idiotverse? About as well as you'd expect.
Seeing how everything ultimately traces back to Mesopotamia, I can't help but be reminded of the Lugalzagesi/Sargon era of the Sumero-Akkadian Empire. Like the American Empire today, Sumer was essentially a loose confederation of city-states constantly at odds with each other and with what passed for central authority.
Zagesi, a bonebreaking strongman of the old Sumerian dynasty, took it upon himself to hammer the whole mess into a coherent nation-state, amid endless internecine warfare and rise to power of the Akkadian usurper-class.
Sargon, who legend has it was the "gardener" (read: "boytoy") of a local governor who was said to actually have pissed himself when Zagesi and his legions showed up at the city gates. Sargon was all too happy to offer up his shivering sugar daddy over to the warlord, who he'd later put in shackles, as legend has it.
My point is that the American Empire has become a lot like the late Sumerian Empire and is composed of a fractured clutch of regional power centers.
The "Democrats" (in reality, rebranded Rockefeller Republicans wearing the skin suit of the old Democratic Party. or RRDs) have risen to unparalleled power in the past thirty years by seizing control of key city-states like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, as well as a number of smaller, formerly-Republican city-states in the Midwest and upper South.
The Rockefeller Republican Democrats-- rather the megabillionaires who own and run the party-- followed the old Akkadian playbook of consolidating power by gaining control of key economic sectors and by displacing native populations through mass immigration. Something works, you stick with it.
But they ignored the lessons of history, because like all usurpers, they're shrewd but unwise.
See, Sargon's immortal dynasty lasted just a bit more than a century before the old Sumerian ruling families regained power (the so-called "Ur III Dynasty" of Gudea et al) following the fall of Akkad to the nomadic Gutians. The Neo-Sumerians would only last a little over a century themselves before the entire region collapsed under the combined pressures of natural disaster and the eventual rise of Babylon.
So we can argue about COVID but it's beyond any reasonable debate that the billionaire class opened the civic unrest Pandora's box and had a jolly old time fanning the fires of fake rebellion, not realizing that Frankenstein will forever turn on his creator. And now, if you believe the reports, all the great RRD city-states -- and many of their corporate patrons-- are looking down the barrel of existential crisis.
The bullets they shot at Trump seem to have all ricocheted and hit them square in the groin, or so it appears.
Of course, people much smarter than myself (like our kid Gordon) would argue that the crumbling began long before Trump took the reins, with entitlement crises breaking bulging Blue budgets. Interesting to note how COVID seemed to take aim at the elderly, with their long-promised pensions and bank-breaking Medicaid bills.
COVID sure helped take some of the burden off lawmakers in states like NY and NJ, who've been desperately scrambling to keep themselves solvent, no?
Funny how these things work out.
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EVERYONE'S DOING, JUST WHAT THEY'RE TOLD TO
And now we're seeing the surreal panoply of nearly all-white mobs smashing it up under the Black Lives Matter banner in predominantly-white cities like Seattle and Portland.
I'll tell you, I'm not sure I'd feel very comfortable if I were a POC in an overwhelmingly-white city looking down from my apartment window at the carnage on the streets below. There's a weird passive-aggressive undertone to all this, which occasionally bursts to the surface when you see an Antifa cosplayer hurling racist slurs at anyone who questions their tactics.
And I can't help but think of how Mussolini began his political career as a doctrinaire Socialist, a not-uncommon trajectory as far as these things go.
Either way, I've given up trying to war-game any of this madness, since I think the genius of King Mob has long since seized control from the shadowy NGOs and corporate interests who initially organized and bankrolled all of this tsuris. And I get the feeling those same interests -- and their political puppets-- are mortally terrified of the genies they so gleefully rubbed out of the bottle.
There's a lot driving all of this, in my estimation. I think we have foreign intelligence agencies at work, and I think we have a lot of agents provocateur from any number of weird political cults across the ideological spectrum taking advantage of this as well. I think a lot of it can clearly be chalked up to the mental health crisis harrying large swathes of our younger population.
And a lot of it reminds me of the FSU movement in the 90s and 00s HC scene.
By which I mean apolitical, amoral sociopaths taking advantage of the permission granted to them by the authorities to commit acts of sanctioned and acceptable political violence. Suffice it to say most of Antifa's childhood heroes didn't end up as humanitarians or benevolent revolutionaries. More like outlaw bikers and shakedown artists.
Who could have seen that coming, eh?
But there's another elephant in the room, and that's that you can't expect tens of millions of people systematically denied access to the accumulation of capital to be terribly enthusiastic about embracing Capitalism, never mind the lunatic depredations of Late Capitalism.
The Rockefeller Republican-Democrats have skated along quite breezily on the strength of their control of the collective conversation by throwing easy ideological red meat (in the form of faux-Marxism AKA "Cultural Marxism") to a generation finding themselves crippled by debt and made redundant with H1B visas and other diabolical economic weapons. But now the larders are looking a bit empty and the hounds are beginning to bay.
Trump was a godsend to the RRD hegemons, offering a convenient cartoon bad guy scapegoat and patsy for the Oligarchs' covert economic warfare, but mobs can't be satiated by clever misdirections forever. Especially when the Oligarch-ordered shutdowns have left a lot of them looking into an economic abyss, not to mention the looming storm-clouds of hunger and poverty.
Boy, did DS9 call it or what?
As I've said, I was out in Los Angeles last summer and thought I'd wandered through some timeslip onto the set of Freejack. Believe me, nothing will raise your inner Guevara like seeing asshole lawyers in $500K sports cars zooming past five-mile long tent cities. It would turn Ayn Rand herself into a bomb-throwing Bolshevik.
Well, not really but you know me: Mister Hyperbole.
Well, not really but you know me: Mister Hyperbole.
Anyhow, California is ruled by multimillionaire fake-Democrat ghouls like "Gruesome" Gavin Newsom, "Earache" Garcetti, and Nancy "Forehead Brows" Pelosi, but seeing the disembowelment the entertrainment conglomerates are taking on account of their COVID boomerang (not to mention high-end real estate), how much longer can that honestly last?
It's no secret the CCP has its financial hooks deep into the entire West Coast-- or at least its city-states-- and are fastidious about keeping their Quislings in clover. But even given the fact that the riots and the struggle sessions are doing a very good job at keeping the rather-terrifying daily escalation of Cold War v2.0 out of the conversation, you have to wonder how long that's going to last.
When Joe Rogan starts talking exodus, you'd think the CCP's West Coast proconsuls would start paying attention to the rot in the state's foundation --at least for appearance's sake-- but one of the primary characteristics of our modern Dukes, Earls and Barons is their delusionary hubris.
Well, guess what? Nemesis is most definitely on her way and I wouldn't bet the farm she can be stopped.
Well, guess what? Nemesis is most definitely on her way and I wouldn't bet the farm she can be stopped.
Ever hear the term "payback is a bitch?" Well, guess who originally inspired that aphorism.
TWILIGHT OF THE IDLE
Signs of the Times are everywhere you look these days. And one of those is the dirty secret of how our great entertainment conglomerates are all dangerously crippled by debt.
If you haven't guessed yet, I'm no "free marketeer" on account of the fact that there's more evidence for Bigfoot than a genuinely free market anywhere at any time. And bloated conglomerates are inherently fragile in my estimation, since the consolidation of equity leads to a situation in which all the subsidiaries get coronavirus when the home office sneezes. I call it the "don't put all your eggs in one basket, you greedy fucks" syndrome.
It's similar to what I see as the inherent instability of debt-based economies, in that the financing of debt (specifically interest, or if you prefer, "the Vig") always seems to seize control of the entire system, leading to the kinds of hideous financial services rackets that have reliably rotted empires from within since antiquity.
Then again, you couldn't fill a thimble with the sum of my economic expertise, so go ask someone much smarter than myself like Gordon or Catherine Austin Fitts.
Anyway, superheroes have long been the ambassadors of Monopoly/Predatory/Late Capitalism from their creation during the late Victorian Era to their Pulp-era incarnations (the Shadow and Doc Savage et al being millionaires) to their Depression-era reincarnations in the form of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Justice Society of America, the font from which all subsequent spandexed-wonders flowed.
And if the sprawling tent cities of the West Coast don't rise a little Spartacus in your heart, then the hearty fisting the creators of Superman (not to mention the real creators of Batman, meaning "not Bob Kane") received at the hands of their paymasters at National Periodical Publications AKA "DC Comics."
But Karma- or rather, Nemesis-- is a straight-up, on-the-rag raging bitch. And, as always, functionaries wholly innocent of their forebears' crimes end up getting reamed by her nail-spiked strap-on. Meaning a lot of talented, hardworking and underpaid folks at DC Comics just got the elbow as ATT/TW struggles to clear its gargantuan debt burden.
From what I'm hearing, a number of smaller publishers are all fixing to go tits-up this year as well. Having labored in superheroic vineyards for most of my life, I can safely say that Gotterdamerung has well and truly arrived. The dinosaurs are falling and it doesn't change the facts on the ground just because some voles and titmice survive the asteroidal apocalypse.
And it's not just the heroes-- who have kept the funny-money of Tinseltown rolling for the past 20 years-- but also hoary and hairy SF franchises, not the least of which is Star Wars and Star Trek. Nobody actually gives a shit about space anymore and nobody expects nobody to be landing on Uranus in their lifetimes, so it's safe to say NASA's Apollo sorcery has finally faded into the ether.
Comics are different, though. For the past 90 years a lot of very talented and very creative young men were willing to endure lives of poverty and obscurity to hide away in the rich and fertile oases of the funnybooks. Sure, there were some women here and there and a few fat years when some clever dicks got rich in the racket, but you get my meaning.
If the superheroes were our new gods, then these artists and writers were our new monks.
But their success sent out signals to the usual suspects, and not only did you have the predations of the moneymen (which creators were long accustomed to) but you had a new generation of predators, predominantly of the XX-persuasion (I loathe to misgender anyone) sweet-talking sad, lonely and sexually-inadequate editors with their cultural-studies abracadabra.
It wasn't long before the weak and romantically-desperate men who (mostly) held the funnybook pursestrings found themselves being marginalized and utterly terrorized by their new hirings, whose sweet and seductive postures suddenly turned salty and snarling once the first paycheck was cashed.
It all reached its apogee (or its nadir) when Marvel shunted aside all the "pale-stale-male" heroes in favor of a new roster of "diverse" replacements in 2016. Needless to say, sales cratered hard, no matter how feverishly the House of Ideas tried to massage the collapse with financial prestidigitation. Once #metoo exploded, it was all over but the groveling.
I saw it all coming. I remember having lunch with a (since-departed) Marvel VP in December 2012 and having him tell me straight up that the comics didn't produce profits and were published essentially as loss-leaders. So it was really just a matter of time before the axe fell on the entire industry.
Moreover, I'd long warned anyone in the industry who'd listen that lonely 40+ year-old white men with loads of disposable income were the market's lifeblood, which you fucked with at your own existential peril. I also remember seeing the sullen clusters of dumpy, angry-faced teenaged girls sitting and sneering at passersby at San Diego Cons in the early 2000s and saw the seeds of the industry's demise being planted right before its eyes.
Like all entertainment industries, comics are-- rather, were-- kept aloft almost entirely by funny money, in this case Tinseltown and/or speculator money. Big VC firms threw a lot of cash at hopeless comic-book causes in hopes of catching the MU wave with their own IP. Most of them came up snake-eyes and began yanking the bank last year. And then COVID washed away all but a tiny remnant of the survivors.
Many are keeping up appearance for social media's sake, but it's all over but the fake bravery on Twitter and everyone knows it.
ATT/TW clearly realized they don't need to keep paying salaries and rent on an industry whose creative glory days have long, long since passed. Fanboys howl that the DCU will be deprived of source material for their movie and TV projects, as if there weren't a hundred years of existing material, the overwhelming bulk of which is more exploitable than the tedious recycled hash every superhero comic trades in now.
That's all inside baseball, but my larger point is that the idols are falling, faster than anyone imagined. It's like we all awoke simultaneously from a collective dream and realized these imaginary spandexed musclemen/musclewomen/muscle-gender-nonconformists can't save us from the real dangers we all now face.
Buckle up, Chuck.
Weep, gnash teeth and rend garments in the comments, if you please.
