untethered

Memo from Department of  Keep in Mind it’s From Russia Times to Department of Hope They’re Just F–king With Us.
Unnamed Russian official in RT:

He added that according to Russian intelligence the militants are fleeing the area that was in their control. “There is panic and defection among them. About 600 mercenaries have left their positions and are trying to reach Europe,” he said.

The callous indifference shown by German Chancellor Angela Merkel (indeed, of the entire German elite, which moves in lock-step) for average Germans in visiting upon them hordes of young Muslim men so she can stake her claim to secular sainthood defies understanding. Does the West, and Germany, now have a new kind of elite, or is what we see merely the same old elite, adapted to the present?

For a long time after World War II we were told how the Nazi terror and the Holocaust were the result of a fatal flaw in the German character, a devotion to order and weakness for authority. A cliche this shop-worn has to be false in large part if not in whole–nothing so complex can have such a pat explanation, and this one in particular seems too ideally suited to the vanity of the victors and too useful for post-WWII cultural Marxism (and just plain Marxism). It reeks of the “authoritarian personality” myth.

Besides, our experience here in America tells us there’s a big difference between the behaviors and motivations of the elite and those of the common man. We’re told, for instance, that we must take in the refugees of Middle Eastern wars because they’re “our” fault. But none of our military meddling in the region has anything like a popular origin; even the Second Gulf War (which the neocons had been long planning before 9/11 and the false specter of “WMD”) was only effected by a massive misinformation project launched in the trauma following 9/11, and the people, weary of war, voted Barack Obama in largely to correct that mistake. The people spoke–and were betrayed. The wars continue under the rudderless foreign policy of the Obama Administration. Of course, the great migratory invasion of 2015 looks less and less like the mass outpouring of war refugees than it is one of opportunists, responding to cliear signalling by European elites that the gates are open and they are welcome. In the same breath, the elite lies to the people, and winks suggestively at the invaders.

Yet the people are still guilt-tripped by that same elite to acquiesce to this latest project–taking in a massive influx of “refugees”–as atonement for our acquiescing to their previous, and ongoing, wars and foreign interventions. Do they ever get together, say at Bilderberger, and have a good laugh at the shit they get away with? No wonder they disdain us.
If you should ever have the good fortune to be within arm’s reach of a verified member of the political elite and he tells you “we” must take in the refuse of the neocons’ wars, I urge you to avail yourself of the unprecedented opportunity to slap him and demand “what do you mean ‘we’, asshole?”

So the common man can be excused if much of the behavior of the elite seems to him to be motivated at times by indifference, at others disdain, for his concerns. But mostly the common man, still, shows a remarkable passivity in the face of elite mismanagement and bigotry. We keep letting it happen, and their attitude keeps getting more disdainful, more dismissive.

But what of the German elite, which seems farther gone than any in its determined delusion? Is it that the German people are so different or flawed, or is it that the German elite is different, flawed? Germany was after all not fifty years into unification under Bismarck when the First World War broke out, having so recent a history of having been divided into countless principalities, and arguably hasn’t returned to anything like a normal development process since.

Now we see an elite there that appears nothing so much as to lack maturity. Look at its confused, irresponsible romanticism, as some openly suggest absorbing the refugee invasion is the means of absolving the nation (not finally, be sure) of the sins of the Holocaust. If Germany’s unique history makes its elite even more contemptuous of its people than other Western elites, one shudders to think just how far they might take this madness. But no one seems to be asking.

Goethe famously said of the Germans that they were “so estimable in the individual, so wretched in the generality.” (I could say the same for our current American elites, who are no doubt fine and decent people when taken singly.)

From Gordon Craig’s (so-so) history of Germany, The Germans:

“In looking at the careers of these three industrial giants, one is hard put to discover any trace of nobility or generosityof spirit. It has been said of [Alfred] Krupp that he never spent a penny on the arts or the sciences or the poor or the community, and this was no less true of [Hugo] Stinnes and [Friederich] Flick. Krupp gave Prussia no prior claim on his weapons and cheerfully sold his most dangerously efficient ones to powers that might use them against his fellow Germans. Stinnes made a reputation as a patriot by this defiant speeches at Spa about what would happen to the French if they tried to exact reparations by force; but, when the French did precisely that, three years later, by marching into the Ruhr, he not only profited from the ensuing inflation, which he sought to prolong by refusing financial assistance to  his hard-pressed government, but also did his best to to conclude mutually profitable deals with French concerns. As for Flick, there is no evidence of national concern in any of his undertakings.”

Is the “fatal flaw” in German character less the peoples’ willingness to follow its leaders than its leaders’ indifference and disdain for the people? The flip-side of a romantic, sentimental view of a people, such as that Hitler at least pretended to have for Germans, is a pitiless contempt, particularly if one sees that people as weak or inadequate. I recently provided a quote attributed to Hitler near the end of WWII:

“If the war is lost the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy those things. For the people has proven itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the East. Those who will survive this struggle will in any case be inferiors, for the good are already dead.”

Sounds familiar to any American used to the experience of an elite that has gone from speaking in fawning, dishonest platitudes while acting in preening self-interest (how many times have we been told something the elite wants–like open borders–is what “makes America great”?) to occasionally breaking out in ranting contempt when stymied at all by popular will (what makes America great has nothing to do with Americans, it seems now, who only stand in the way of her realizing that greatness through immigrants).

And if Germans are more disposed toward acquiescing to authority, isn’t the real tragedy incumbent upon that only realized when authority misleads, betrays or otherwise fails them? If a people are as thrifty, industrious and law-abiding as the Germans are said to be, it follows that all they need to thrive is responsible and capable leadership. It strikes me that the myth of Germans fatally disposed to following elite authority serves, ironically, no one so much as the elite group in authority.

Forgive me for presuming to know something about humor, despite being neither a professional humorist nor a critic. But I’m going to join the growing ranks of rank amateurs who think they understand comedy, for the purpose of denouncing them. Irony!

Humor’s base material is irony and absurdity. It depends on the recognition of these things–sometimes psychologically repressed, sometimes socially and politically suppressed–that is our shared experience. It isn’t enough for a gag simply to be ironic or absurd; it has to reveal these things in its subject, whether that subject is conventional wisdom, a common human foible or a specific event of notoriety.

It does that by confounding our habituated expectations. It’s in the way a joke leads you along a narrative path to an unexpected but still logical–and above all true–conclusion, similar to the way jazz confounds the resolution of melody in novel, complex ways to the delight of the listener. The resolution–in humor, the punch line or central idea behind a gag–must be unconventional but not discordant. It has to ring true. The greater the gap between the expectation of the set-up and the resolution that is the punch line, the greater the satisfaction. Ideally it’s the surprise revelation of an inherent truth. At its very best, it exposes a lie we’re all forced to endure.

The more that narrative set-up is cliched, kitsch, or best of all the more false it is, the better raw material it makes for satire or parody. If that narrative is an outright lie, skewering it on the lance of humor transcends comedy and becomes something like enlightenment. If that lie is perpetuated by the powerful for purposes of control, humor becomes something like political dissent.
Humor succeeds when it mockingly reveals dishonesty and fails, as it so often does in our politically correct times, when it obliviously advances dishonesty.

Humor transgresses. A comedy club is akin to a safe place for a religious ritual allowing the temporary indulgence of transgression. Comedy provides catharsis for the emotional tension built up by the commonplace. Conventional wisdom and social mores necessitate a certain amount of hypocrisy (some more than others). Baggage. Baggage we need to relieve ourselves of, if only for a moment. They don’t call it comic relief for nothing. Of course now we have an elite and entertainment class that is hostile to the mass, and this beneficial process has been co-opted for the deliberate destruction of the old social mores, of the idea of common mores itself. The process of leveraging comedy to destroy culture is wearing comedy itself down. We laugh a lot now, but our laughter is more shrill, more cynical, more desperate. The joy is slowly being wrung out of it.

This all occurs to me when considering the rash of ill-conceived but well-received attempts at humor inspired–in a same-day flash that was hasty even by Internet standards–by Ahmed’s notorious clock. By now any thinking person can see Ahmed wasn’t the passive victim of prejudice but the active proponent of a gag. A humorless gag–Ahmed did not deny his suckers the expected resolution; he gave it to them in heavy-handed earnest. The result was not to expose commonplace dishonesty, but to reinforce it. It’s the antithesis of the comedic gag that confounds our expectation and reveals the truth; it gives us precisely what we expected, with the purpose of creating a fiction. It’s a first-rate con job (I haven’t the heart to acknowledge we’ve been taken in by a second-rate con).

Ahmed provided the morally insecure with something they crave, moral outrage. He played to their vanity–something I’m sure a professional con-man would say is essential. And being the product primarily of vanity this moral outrage is as false as the hoax that prompted it. The very premise supporting Ahmed’s con–of a pernicious “Islamophobia” that threatens to consume us–is false. Ahmed bamboozled an entire nation, with its willing, gleeful participation, and that willing participation is the real crime.

The greater guilt lies with these willing marks, who are legion and include the most influential among us. If sanity were to somehow magically reappear, and the nation as a whole was suddenly able not only to see clearly the fraud but to soberly reflect on its effects, we would have to conclude that our president and the titans of industry who opportunistically submitted to the hoax for their own personal and political ends are not just wrong, they’re reprehensible.
What they would have you believe obscure authorities did to a fifteen year-old boy–that is falsely accuse and traumatize him out of hasty prejudice–they do to the nation as a whole. A nation that already reels from the unrelenting project to slander its history and dismantle its core, of which Ahmed’s hoax is a sort of synecdoche, the part representing the whole. In their enthusiastic participation in Ahmed’s hoax, they reveal their determined participation in that broader project.

But the extent of the hysteria, its reach into the upper echelons of culture, media and politics, acts as an oppressive fog. The severest criticism of this high crime seeks only to correct the record, allows itself to be distracted by the “overreaction” of the Texas authorities, when those who use their influence to assist in the hoax should be subjected to censure, ridicule and moral condemnation. Because of that fog, that overwhelming din of a million shrill voices advancing the lie, I think even those elites engaged in the fraud don’t understand the extent of evil in their actions. Our elites are moral zombies who unfortunately retain their effectiveness in everything but their ability to recognize moral consequence and evil.

But to return to humor. Most of the reaction was painfully unfunny–Ahmed’s most earnest suckers are decidedly not amused; even as their condemnations resembled something like revelry. He who holds the social justice high ground always doth protest too much, and in this case the protestations continue like a week-long, drug-fueled rave.

But a great many took it as an occasion to demonstrate their comedic chops. Twitter (in the word of one true-believer oblivious to the irony) “exploded” with amateur comedians inadvertently demonstrating that pc not only, as Steve Sailer likes to say, makes you stupid, it makes you unfunny. Everywhere they were posing with clocks, as if to demonstrate the stupidity and (more irony) too-quick presumption of Those Awful Texas Rednecks. But the joke’s actually on them:

Of course the joke doesn’t work because Ahmed’s clock looked nothing like a clock. Everywhere people were missing the joke, posting photos of digital alarm clocks–just like the one Ahmed dismantled and put in a suitcase to resemble a bomb–and even traditional wall clocks, cracking themselves up at how anyone could be so blinded by paranoid bigotry as to mistake…well, there the joke fails, of course, but no one seems to notice. Context is obliterated in the desperate rush to signal virtue. So on it goes, despite the increasingly obvious nature of Ahmed’s con. Humor, like logic and empiricism, like decency, will just have to give way to Diversity and Progress.

“If the war is lost the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy those things. For the people has proven itself to be the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the East. Those who will survive this struggle will in any case be inferiors, for the good are already dead.”
–Adolf Hitler

That “people from the East” is especially resonant at the moment. From somewhere below, a bitter cackle is heard…

The Awful Things Straight White Males Do For Free (vol. MXI):

From Open Source.

Well, here an electronics hobbyist has analyzed the clock that stopped time and, quelle surprise, it’s less an impressive piece of work than it is, yes, a suspicious device:

I found the highest resolution photograph of the clock I could. Instantly, I was disappointed. Somewhere in all of this – there has indeed been a hoax. Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. He didn’t even build a clock. Now, before I go on and get accused of attacking a 14 year old kid who’s already been through enough, let me explain my purpose. I don’t want to just dissect the clock. I want to dissect our reaction as a society to the situation. Part of that is the knee-jerk responses we’re all so quick to make without facts. So, before you scroll down and leave me angry comments, please continue to the end (or not – prove my point, and miss the point, entirely!)
For starters, one glance at the printed circuit board in the photo, and I knew we were looking at mid-to-late 1970s vintage electronics. Surely you’ve seen a modern circuit board, with metallic traces leading all over to the various components like an electronic spider’s web. You’ll notice right away the highly accurate spacing, straightness of the lines, consistency of the patterns. That’s because we design things on computers nowadays, and computers assist in routing these lines. Take a look at the board in Ahmed’s clock. It almost looks hand-drawn, right? That’s because it probably was. 

Computer aided design was in its infancy in the 70s. This is how simple, low cost items (like an alarm clock) were designed. Today, even a budding beginner is going to get some computer aided assistance – in fact they’ll probably start there, learning by simulating designs before building them. You can even simulate or lay out a board with free apps on your phone or tablet. A modern hobbyist usually wouldn’t be bothered with the outdated design techniques. There’s also silk screening on the board. An “M” logo, “C-94” (probably, a part number – C might even stand for “clock”), and what looks like an American flag. More about that in a minute. Point for now being, a hobbyist wouldn’t silk screen logos and part numbers on their home made creation. It’s pretty safe to say already we’re looking at ’70s tech, mass produced in a factory. 

So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidary. Catalog number 63 756.

Ahmed’s clock may be junk, but the Narrate-o-Matic is working fine; bullshit goes in, narrative honey comes out. So yes Ahmed, do bring your clock when you report to the White House; it doesn’t matter if it’s any good, it needn’t actually tell time even (the President knows what time it is, I assure you). But after you, it’s the second most important prop for this presidential photo-op.