What is Christian nationalism? (8-18-22)

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:30 Tucker Carlson on the mid-terms
05:00 How is John Fetterman winning in PA?
11:00 Republicans should run on reducing crime, immigration
20:00 What is Christian nationalism?
32:30 The Creation of Meaning – The Denial of Death, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ
51:50 The Creation of Meaning – Escape From Evil, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAyR2R14BSg
54:00 We’re risking WWIII in Ukraine, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/playing-fire-ukraine
1:43:10 The Legacy of Ernest Becker: Death, Ideologies, and Cultures, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T8WqjciN1E
1:50:00 Andrew Anglin trashes the AR
1:56:00 Better Call Saul concludes

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Hunger can be hard to recognize? (8-18-22)

Posted on August 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

I was walking down the street and saw this ludicrous billboard.

I’ve been to Friday night services in Orthodox programs where fighting food insecurity is the main agenda item. Apparently, it is an effective way to appeal to left-of-center Jews disaffected with Judaism.

James Bovard writes in 2014: According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, American households suffer far more “food insecurity” than do families in Angola, Mozambique and Pakistan. The USDA uses different standards to gauge domestic and foreign “food security,” but neither measure make senses. Still, that technicality will do nothing to deter politicians and pundits from demagoging the hunger issue.

The Agriculture Department reported Sept. 3 that 14.3 percent of American households — 49 million people — suffered from “food insecurity” last year. This number is little changed from last year despite the fact that the federal government is now feeding more than 100 million Americans.

The USDA defines food insecurity as being “uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food” at times during the year. Most of those USDA-labeled “food insecure” did not run out of food; instead, they reported “reduced quality, variety, or desirability of diet” with “little or no indication of reduced food intake.”

If someone states that they feared running out of food for a single day (but didn’t run out), that is an indicator of being “food insecure” for the entire year — regardless of whether they ever missed a single meal. If someone felt they needed organic kale, but could only afford conventional kale, that is another “food insecure” indicator. If an obese person felt they needed 5,000 calories a day but could only afford 4,800 calories, they could be labeled “food insecure.”

One of the survey’s preliminary screening question asks: “In the last 12 months, did you ever run short of money and try to make your food or your food money go further?” Why should we be concerned that shoppers want their food dollars to go further? This was formerly taught as a virtue in high school home-economics classes, and now it is a pretext for a federal alarm.

Even though USDA’s food-security statistics do not measure hunger, that is how the media portrays the report. After the recent announcement, a Voice of America headline proclaimed: “USDA: Hunger Threatens 1 in 7 Americans.” A Philadelphia Inquirer headline lamented: “USDA: Despite slight improvement, hunger persists.” The Sioux Falls Argus Leader in South Dakota announced: “Hunger a growing problem for South Dakota.” Slate declared: “The Number of Hungry Americans Has Barely Fallen Since the Recession.” The media are following in the footsteps of President Obama, who announced after the 2009 food-security report was released, that “hunger rose significantly last year … . My administration is committed to reversing the trend of rising hunger.”

Some comments on the report focus on data highlighting the plight of minorities. A North Dallas Gazette headline stressed: “Black families facing hunger at nearly twice the rate of other groups.” But a survey by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service found that black children aged 2 to 11 consume significantly more calories than white children.

Many liberals are invoking the USDA report as proof that more food handouts are needed. Joel Berg, a New York “anti-hunger activist” who pockets a six-figure salary thanks largely to AmeriCorps grants, wailed, “A country that combines massive hunger with record Wall Street markets is so derailed, we can’t even find our tracks anymore.” But food insecurity has surged at the same time that far more Americans became government dependents. The number of food-stamp recipients soared from 26 million to 46 million at the same time that food insecurity rose from 11.1 percent to 14.3 percent of the nation’s households.

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Comments At Steve Sailer On The FBI Raid

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Luke Ford

From here:

* The raid was overwrought, but the managerial Obama clique can afford to be reckless: they control the domestic security services and appear to have the full cooperation of CIA and the Pentagon. We all know the role of the media. Look forward to weeks of strategic leaking from the Trump cache and the activation of astro-turf white nationalists just in time for the erection.

* Different sorts of documents get classified:

1) Summaries of the US government’s current take on world events and their current plans on how to deal with them — e.g., we don’t think Baby Kim will move against South Korea this month; if the PRC moves against Taiwan, here are our military options; etc.

2) Details on our human intelligence gathering: e.g., Colonel Yuri Ivanov, who is a CIA asset, tells us that Putin is seriously ill; our spy Colonel Kim tells us that Baby Kim is not ill; etc.

3) Technical details of our intelligence gathering technology, our military communications systems, our weapons systems, etc. that would enable adversaries to subvert or counter those system: e.g., here is the encryption/decryption codes we use to communicate with our nuclear sub fleet; here are self-destruct codes for our missiles; etc.

Items under category (1) are very hot at the time. But they grow stale. What the US Intel Community thought about Baby Kim or Putin is 2018 is now of only historical interest: it is of little value to our adversaries.

Items under category (2) could get people killed (Colonels Ivanov and Kim in my examples): these remain critical for many decades.

Items under category (3) could get us all killed: this, at least in my experience, is the bulk of the SCI classified material.

Now, the key point is that, as President, Trump had no reason to know or care or have an interest in anything in category (3) — i.e., the technical details of our weapons, intelligence-gathering, or communications technology.

The Donald is a real-estate developer: show him the schematics for our nuclear weapons, our spy satellites, or our military comm systems, and those design documents would be completely meaningless to Trump. Show them to me…. well, I am a physicist with experience in the defense industry: give me enough time with such documents, and I can tell you a lot!

And the Russians and Chinese have lots of people like me — they would love to get such documents, which is why they are very highly classified.

But Trump almost certainly never had such documents in his possession: he didn’t need to see them, and he would have had no interest in them.

Similarly, for documents in category (2) that give the actual names of overseas spies, etc.: Trump needed to know that Putin was sick, but Trump neither needed to know nor did he care that such data came from Colonel Ivanov, or Dr. Glazov, or some maid in the Kremlin named Masha.

Which leaves category (1). And I bet Trump did have some category (1) documents at Mar-a-Lago: i.e., summaries of US intelligence evaluations of what was going on in the world back in 2017 or 2019 or whatever.

But such summaries are now so stale as to be basically irrelevant.

A little secret that is rarely mentioned: a lot of US Intel analysts are basically frustrated academics who work for the CIA, DIA, or whatever. Much of their output is classified, but academics at, say, Stanford or Harvard or Georgetown produce similar studies that are, of course, not classified.

In fact, the most secret fact about the Intel Community’s reports to the President is that this is what is influencing the President’s thinking right now.

Again it becomes stale in a very short time: most of it really should be declassified within a few years.

I think Julie Kelly’s current column is correct: they are going to indict Trump over this.

But I am pretty sure they will be indicting him over documents in category (1), which contain information that is now no more critical than what you could get by reading old copies of Foreign Affairs or the Economist.

* What matters in this case is not the putative documents, but the following:

1) The very fact that law enforcement controlled by political actors raided the home of a political opponent.

2) The warrant was signed by a judge who is and has been a clear, vocal, outspoken opponent of the political opponent who was raided. A judge is a member of the judiciary branch in a government in which powers are supposed to be separated.

3) The raid was essentially condoned and carried out by people working for a president who ran against the former president and may have to run against him again.

4) Presidents have full authority over all classified information and can de-classify it and presumably do whatever they want with it, even take it home if they so choose, if they make that decision while they are the president.

5) A president is elected by The People to have full executive power and must by necessity be able to exercise that power without fear of reprisal by successors if he is to be able to carry out his duties and the will of The People who elected him.

This raid is completely wrong and would be wrong even if President Trump had decided to take home the secret formula for Coca-Cola. (Well, maybe THEN it would be called for. Some things are sacred.)

BTW, I have difficulty imagining that every document that matters in this case does not have one or more copies somewhere still safe, including electronic, virtual copies. It is actually quite quaint to think that going in and taking some boxes of paper will make a difference, but what do I know?

And again, it’s not the documents that matter. This is another in the long line of phony moves that the powers that be have made against Trump since even while he was running the first time. This is an attempt, one way or another, to hobble him, so slander him, to tie him up so he cannot run or win or harm them.

Also, the hypothesis is reasonable that this is really about documentation that proves the ratfucking that the FBI, CIA, powers that be, Clinton campaign, Obama administration, et. al. were doing. In fact, this raid is probably just a continuation of what the documents prove.

And I don’t even like Trump, though I voted for him. What other choice was there? What are our choices now, and do they even matter anymore? Did they ever really?

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The Method

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books:

* In 1935 Laurence Olivier’s performances in Romeo and Juliet (he alternated the parts of Romeo and Mercutio) were regarded as ultrarealist; ten years later, in his Shakespeare films, it is clear that he was a somewhat stylized actor; on stage twenty years after that he was dismissed by many as monstrously mannered. His acting had not changed; the temper and taste of the times had. The shock of the new has a built-in decay, and it is in the nature of pioneers to believe that they have finally reached the promised land, the end of the rainbow.

* The supposed influence of the Method came to a climax in the 1980s in the work of Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert De Niro, and then, as it always will, acting started to change again: the form and pressure of the times required new heroes, new villains, new representative human beings.

* Butler certainly takes it seriously, as we know by his subtitle: “How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act.” The idea that Lee Strasberg taught them how to act would certainly have come as a surprise to Greta Garbo, Charles Laughton, Mickey Rooney, Agnes Moorehead, Pierre Brasseur, Nikolai Cherkasov, Edith Evans, Laurence Olivier, or Anna Magnani, to select a tiny handful of twentieth-century acting titans, though one does see that the more factually precise “One of the Dominant Approaches to Acting in the United States of America for About Twenty-Five Years” is less likely to sell copies. On the whole, the book is much more sober than the subtitle threatens, though as he proceeds Butler seems increasingly impelled to justify it; toward the end, for example, we’re told that when Sanford Meisner died, “America entered a new era, one in which none of the original Method teachers remained.” I suspect that America took the news pretty calmly.

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Why Did John Lurie Disappear?

Posted on August 17, 2022 by Luke Ford

Tad Friend writes in The New Yorker August 9, 2010:

* Celebrity is the power to rivet attention, and Lurie realized that his riveting faculties had lapsed. He told Perry, “When I went into my house, I was famous—I come out six years later and nobody knows who I am,” meaning it as a cultural observation: I am Rip Van Winkle, returned but unknown.

* Palm Springs is a golf-obsessed retirement community, and he doesn’t get recognized there, even when he buttonholes strangers at the local Starbucks for a little conversation. Lurie said, “This thing that’s happening now wouldn’t be happening if I were more famous, Tom Cruise famous, because I’d be insulated. And it wouldn’t be happening at all if I were less famous. Somehow I got it just exactly wrong.”

* From Grenada, Lurie sent a Facebook message to Perry’s brother, telling him what was going on and saying, “I think [John] is in deep trouble. . . . I am certainly not asking you to do anything against your brother but to help him. Or to suggest to me how I should proceed.” Lurie simply wanted guidance, but Perry took the message as a strike against his own vulnerability: his anxiety about his privacy and his reputation. Lurie’s friend and former sound engineer Patrick Dillett said, “The two Johns know each other so well, their emotional strengths and weaknesses, that it’s like ‘Spy vs. Spy’ ”—the Mad cartoon about equally matched belligerents. “It’s almost like fighting with yourself.”

* That Lurie’s requests for help from hired advisers and even from friends kept boomeranging only stimulated his suspicion that human beings sort of suck. He’d been so generous with his friends, loaning them money, even buying them houses—where were they now? Lurie said, “There were sixty people at my fiftieth-birthday party”—in 2002—“and only five are still in my life. It was all too much for my friends; they started to lose interest. It was like Darfur.” A number of Lurie’s friends now felt that Perry was his default topic, and paranoia his default mode. Patrick Dillett told me, “It had reached the point that if I said I saw John Perry in an ‘I Love John Lurie’ T-shirt John would have said, ‘That’s because he wants to kill me.’”

* I drove Lurie back from Joshua Tree late in the afternoon. He slumped in the front seat, saying that his head was roaring. As the sun slipped behind the Little San Bernardino Mountains, Lurie said, “Illness has a beautiful way of bestowing a glow on you. You notice the way the light hits the top of the trees.” Then he fell silent for thirty miles. As we passed the outskirts of Indio—a scatter of isolated houses braced against the darkness—he said, “How do these people end up here? Do they all have stalkers?”

The dream of artists—which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified—is to plant themselves in other people’s heads. By that standard, John Perry has created a masterpiece. Last summer, Lurie wrote a friend that Perry “has been in every facet of my consciousness for months. . . . Every dream, every brush stroke. He has infected my mind.”

* The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: Perry because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear of death. Curiously, though, the struggle seems to have inspired them both; artists sometimes require an enemy.

From The New York Review Of Books, Aug. 18, 2022:

* Lurie, the band’s saxophonist and front man, was already fairly well known as the breakout star in Jim Jarmusch’s breakout independent movie Stranger Than Paradise (1984), and the follow-up, Down by Law (1986). He epitomized a flavor that everybody wanted around the mid-1980s: a real artist with outstanding personal style, an offbeat sense of humor, and a rebellious streak, making his mark on the world through unconventional channels. I was so impressed with how outside the box this promotional stunt was. This is the way, I thought. He’s figured out how to own the means of production, without involving the music industry. It looked as radically avant-garde and hip as Devo did the first time I saw them, and Lurie immediately became dear to my heart as an animal more substantial and interesting than his prevailing East Village It Boy image suggested.

His image was an indelible one in the 1980s. When it came to arousing blizzards of strange, forbidden female desire, he was on par with swaggering former SNL star Pete Davidson today—a charmed, confectionary Marilyn Monroe for the female of the species to have impure feelings about; a respected artist; a kind of emotional porn star. Lurie had the Jean-Paul Belmondo baggy suits, the lanky, concave frame, the saxophone, the bent nose, the street and Hollywood credibility—everything you needed to be a French New Wave star in the 1980s, including the black-and-white art films. “From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face,” wrote Tad Friend in The New Yorker in 2010. (It is an article that Lurie openly reviles, and not for nothing: Friend devoted it primarily to legitimizing the career of Lurie’s stalker, and painted Lurie as sick, paranoid, and bedeviled; it ultimately suggested that Friend was delivering his long-awaited punch to Lurie’s face.)

* He eventually settled in New York and sated his hunger for spiritual enlightenment when he shot heroin for the first time—there, he sort of found nirvana, for quite a while. “At this exact moment my spiritual quest was gone,” he observes. Nonetheless, certain Eastern spiritual concepts seem to have burrowed their way into his consciousness. “There is no such thing as talent,” Lurie declares. “There is only cleaning the mirror.”

As a young artist in the East Village circa 1977, he lived off Supplemental Security Income (SSI) after faking a schizophrenia diagnosis (which he felt a little bit guilty about, though he says he did sometimes hear voices). SSI was how a lot of artists got by in those days, although Lurie still had to augment it with “a lot of petty crime, dealing pot, traveler’s check scams…. I got the idea to steal my own horns and collect the insurance.” He lived in a government-run railroad apartment on East 3rd Street for fifty-five dollars a month and did wacky performance art pieces with titles like Leukemia. He made avant-garde movies on Super 8 with a group of like-minded bohemians, dropped acid, and hung around the Mudd Club on a nightly basis. He used to practice the sax late at night in the subway station on 14th Street and First Avenue.

* “Andy Warhol would be in the front row. It is amazing how fast one becomes arrogant.” That arrogance, essential to Lurie’s image, didn’t always advance his career. When record company executives came by the dressing room to express interest, the entire band would scream at them to get the fuck out.

* “To be thrown into that kind of fame is very unbalancing. It is worse for your chemistry than drugs, in a way. You want the attention and the adoration, it gives you a buoyancy, but it rarely leads to anything real.”

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