Incoming!

From Kristen yesterday [to be filed under What Friends Are For]:

"Oh, I get it now.  Sorry.  Perhaps he (Givi) is (gay), but he would not be able to say or do anything in his (own) country.  He is cute and looks a little like you in the earlier days.  So perhaps he is."

The Difference between the Spanish Civil War and the Patriotic Separatist Civil War in the Eastern Ukraine,

Otherwise so alike in the number of volunteer foreign partisans they severally attracted to their causes, is, perhaps, how much more lied about, by interested world powers (the U.S., NATO, and their lickspittle creatures in the E.U.), the Ukrainian conflict is than the Spanish Civil War ever was.  Also, without equivocation, the Spanish Civil War did end in a horrific, smothering protracted victory for the forces of darkness, evil and the long night of fascist repression--forty years!--; while, after the murder of scarcely more than five or ten thousand women and children in the Donbas, in the space of little more than a year, the armies of the neo-Nazis of the NATO brigade in Kyiv have, with amazing celerity, disintegrated.  

But back to those angelic, brave, selfless (young, male, invariably quite good looking) foreign partisans.  They have marched in from all over--from Russia, of course,  and the independent states of the Russian Federation (like the seraphically beautiful Givi, who hails from Abkhasia)--but also from France and Spain, the Americas, and all the other countries of the European Union.  How have they known to do so?  What has made them disbelieve, utterly to discount, the official propaganda of their own countries?  Notice, for example, how quick the new democratically elected government of Greece was to repudiate official lies of the U.N. which had blamed Russia and Putin for the recent violence in Mariupol.   Very wonderful, but also very mysterious.  Are there powers of goodness, truth and light?

New Greek PM voices 'discontent' with EU stmt blaming Russia for Mariupo...

[eng subs] Givi answers questions of Georgian journalist

[eng subs] Lt. Col. Givi prepares "surprise" for Ukrainian troops

UAF storm Donetsk Airport and get their asses handed to them by NAF. FUL...

Victory in the Donbass!

Of course this is not how Frau Merkel or the Wall Street Journal see it, but the Separatist forces have beaten the Ukrainian army and are pushing it so far from the population centers of the Donbass that they can no longer shell or bombard them.

Noam Chomsky, never wrong, is certainly right about 'American Sniper'

Jeb fucking Bush has an Opinion about Immigration?

Really?

Re-mail from Richard today

"Hi Anatole,

"According to the Kashmiri Shaivists Shiva is a full-service deity, both creator and destroyer...."

I have a friend, Richard, whom I have known since 1970 aprox., who now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and with whom I am in occasional (say, monthly) telephone contact, and who has just emailed me as follows:

"Hi Anatole,

"I just sent you 4 books.  Three zen poets (Basho, Ryokan and Cold Mountain) and the Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism (The Suny Series in the Shaiva traditions of Kashmir).  The last book is by Dr. Mark S.G. Dyczkowski.  He has lived in India since the late 1960s studying the subject of Hindu Tantra.  He has degrees from Benares Hindu University and a PHD from Oxford.  This is the second book I have found on the subject and so far it has been a very interesting read.

"I send you these books because frankly you are the only individual I know who will appreciate them and I value that and currently I am very flush and can afford to do so.

Namaste, Enjoy,

Richard."


To which I immediately and somewhat hastily replied:

Those are strange but compelling reason for sending someone books--but thank you, Richard.  Two or three of them are books I've bought myself in times past, and it will be nice indeed to have them home with me.  The Dyczkowski book book on Hindu Tantra is sure to be fascinating, and I look forward to reading it, as I do the work on Kashmiri Shaivism.  Again, many, many thanks,

Anatole


And then, this morning, when I had read Richard's email again, I sent him this:

Richard,

Oops.  On re-reading your email, I now see that Kashmiri Shaivism is (must be) a particular aspect of Hindu Tantra.  I thought they were entirely different subjects because, whatever they are, I am, to this point, totally ignorant of them.  Of Tibetan Buddhist Tantra I have some slight, skeptical acquaintance, but of Hindu Tantra my slate is blank.  Hopefully this is about to be rectified.

However:  Being aware, in a general sort of way, of the triune Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva that make the universe, preserve it and destroy it, I conceive not a flicker of interest in isolating any one of its particular attributes (unless it were perhaps Brahma, the Creator) and expending a lot of extatic and worshipful devotion to it.  Certainly I would not have thought that Shiva, the Destroyer (while useful and necessary--but still, just the Destroyer, like Atropos, Slitter of the Thread among the Three Fates) would have made so hot an object of religious attention that he virtually eclipses the other two aspects of the Hindu Trinity.  Even if his god-like dick is huge.  And how did that happen?  Wouldn't you think Brahma would be the one with the super-size Membrum Virilis?   I suspect these silly Indians (we know how emotional they are) have got things backwards and all out of proportion.

Anatole

Et ben, je suis Charlie, comme tout le monde, and the idea of the Prophet wondering whether his buttocks are venerable strikes me as hilarious and profound in equal measure--

But, the thing is, I took this silly-ass Implicit Racial Bias test (lately made much of in Salon Magazine) that has so many white folk thinking that they inadvertently covertly hate negroes these days:  And it turns out I am mildly biased in favor of Arabs.  Without my being entirely, consciously aware of that predisposition.  Regarding negroes: I am, and always have been, willing and able to relate to them personally, on a one-to-one basis, as equals--the only thing I have against them is their music and their culture; which is also what I have against Jews and Irishmen.

I recall once--I think it may have been forty years or so ago--trotting out (what had by this time grown into) this cute little tag of mine about negroes to Sue Weaver (only I think, then, I called them "Black People"), saying that the only thing I had against them was their music and their culture.  And quick as a flash, or a whiplash, Sue, with evident intention to quash, retorted, "¿What's left?"  And I had to say, "Maybe nothing--maybe all that matters."  Nowadays, thinking of twerking, I'd say simply, "less than nothing."

Nous Sommes tous Charlie Hebdo

A topic I've referred to before--how Abrahamic religions make you stupid--must now be amended: And evil.  I sort of knew that, but I had forgot.  

Parallels between The Third Reich and the Prison State of America

(as per last night's conversation with Phil) are horrifyingly, dishearteningly easy to draw--and nearly always illuminating.  Generally speaking, there's a larger spacing in the American fascist scenario,  and events similar to those of Nazi Germany take longer to happen, as befits the vastly bigger, more ponderous order of things in the immensity of the Evil Empire.  For example, the timeline of events from Hitler's becoming Chancellor, to the burning of the Reichstag, and the imposition of Gleichschaltung on German Society was completed in barely four years' time; while the same sequence of Bush's fraudulent seizure of the presidency, the false-flag operation of 9/11/2001, and the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 took all of twelve years.  

Now, with the announced determination of the Powers That Are to "restore" the secessionist oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk to the CIA-supported (and funded), neo-Nazi régime in Kiev, and War with Russia deliberately and casually provoked in consequence, it seems to be, in Nazi-years, about 1940. By which time, so many members of the upper levels of the government are so up-to-the-elbows complicit in crimes against humanity, and in crimes against the Constitution and the people of their own country, that rounding them all up and shooting them, or hanging them all, is out of the question--to any, perhaps, but the Charlotte Cordays among us.