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Fall and Winter Aphorisms 2021
Watch the weather change.
There, where the state CEASETH—pray look thither, my brethren! Do ye not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Superman?—
IN THE WORDS OF MY FATHER - Words are like Leaves. They fall. They rot. They fertilize the next plot.
A HIERARCHY FOR BOTH GODS AND HEROES - In both the erosion and edification of values, there is no way around the hierarchy, but through it, despite people's complaints and beliefs to the contrary. Our physiology never lies - it is what is most honest in us.
EXPERTS AT LANGUAGE - At least in trying to dress up the place, for our art, our creativity, necessitates the beautification of what was otherwise a shabby cave - and we have felt that need ever since, or at the least, we remember and worship those in whom such need burns the most.
PERSIAN, GREEK, OR AMERICAN - Alas. Even a rug producing species can't spin enough yarn to cover up so much dirt.
QUITE THE HEAD JOB - What both modern man is expected to forget, and remember, by both old and supposedly new standards. Then there is his own capacity, tendency, and necessity therein.
NEVER BEFORE - Has there been such a glut of godlessly Christian old maids clutching their pearls in the dimming light cast by the horrors of their very own past-tense paradise. To manifest a destiny is to create a vision that manufactures its own consent. Within culture, what matters is that people are taught to accept this, and reinforce it in others. Christians, that is, ye modern liberals, lay down your blood once more, as your god demands.
THE MORAL TONE - You can hear exactly where people intentionally hide both truth and folly.
CHRISTIANS - They betray their own religion when they cease thinking they're better than others.
FOR EVERY CONSCIOUS LIE - We must also ask - what then is the cost of the unconscious lies compounded by the conscience?
A BIG MISTAKE OF THE HISTORIC SENSE - To speak of men of the past, even great men, as if they were conscious of more than what they were actually cognizant of.
CONTEXTS FOR EXISTENCE - The involuntary relationship of people and things. This is the sincerity of our mythologies, and how our relationship with art, religion, and state (each other) has changed over time, including dysfunction and pathology as much as adaptation and successful navigation of treacherous waters.
WRONG TURNS DOWN THE COURSE OF IDEALISM - Assuming anyone here wants or needs the abuse that everyone assumes is necessary in human socialization, education, and stratification. After millennia of conditioning, it's clear the animals here were taught well to internalize their supposedly externally derived punishments and cruelties which were and remain a reflection of the psychodrama, the feelings (of our physiology) within. In this manner, mankind has been taught well: of course the prisoner deserves his cage, just like the human deserves life.
WHY CULTURE AND ART HAVE BEEN EVERYTHING - Without creativity, without vision, what else was the point of so much slavery and suffering? Life nor labor, nor the noble and ignoble feelings that inspires it, justifies itself here, man continuously tripping over himself and others, from stone-age to present - he now has a dysfunctional relationship with his art, that is to say, his culture and its state, his state.
A COVER FOR BAD GODS AND EVEN WORSE PARENTS - As reflections of a dusty mirror, the followers of the Abrahamic books have learned well how to receive and inflict heavenly abuse from on high, for what is more abusive than an eternal life dangled like a carrot over a pit of eternal punishment, or a god who demands total love and devotion like a tyrannically insecure husband?
MISTAKES IN OUR OWN EVOLUTION - Is what happens when we conflate our fictions with this Earth that neither flatly nor roundly acquiesces to house our flimflam, because it's not sentient nor purposeful like our own stories posit.
ANIMISM IN THOUGHT, FEELING, AND BELIEF - Birthed our art, and the belief that we breathe life into art, rather than art in fact breathing life into us. This is self-perpetuation as necessary oxygen, self-affirmation and propagation through accepted mediums and habits.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (DFW) - Mental illness killed him. That is, shame, pity, and the excessive consciousness of being a self, fed on schizoid American liberalism, commercialism, and a decadent academia, whose sadistic experiment was to render itself inert and the people strangers to their own culture, turns sensitive minds into casualties of the consumption of the waste byproducts of the techno-Christian cult leftover in the expansive yet shallow liberalism of politically correct America. In this manner, Wallace was a canary in the liberal coalmine, before committing suicide became a more common cause of death than car accidents for men.
RESPONSIBILITY FOR THOSE INCAPABLE OF IT - It was a happy assumption to believe mankind could be more beautiful than when he innocently created and cloaked himself in his own values and ideals - when he was once able to so wholly identify with his own creations. This was man not finding, but creating a home here on Earth, etching a place to live amongst cold stone and wild animals. It was an accident to believe that everybody could see, understand, and take part.
SUPPOSED FREEDOM COMES WITH SUPPOSED RESPONSIBILITIES - But the way Americans speak and act tells you they cannot tolerate what grace turned vulgarity means in others (to their "good" Christian minds), nor can they handle what inevitably comes with the American value system, the Roman method of skin grafting together cultures having grown long and cracked in the bones. It was inevitable that, after so many harried operations and their prognosis, the mind itself would grow sick, not on what it sees, for it doesn't see, rather, the rejection of both necessary and unnecessary surgery always falls in line with what the body knows, and has known, as sickness. Americans who value authority, also value censorship and tyranny, that is, attacking and destroying those who don't comply. This violence is what we call culture and its responsibility, but as with much else in modern life, people are happy to believe in tyranny, so long as they can delegate its god-hands to someone and something else.
STRIP-MINED MAN - Not just lacking in worth, but the ability to perceive, experience, and articulate said worth – yet retains an awareness that something is off, something is missing?
JUST WHO ARE THEY TALKING TO - With an endless litany of commercials, political campaigns, and propaganda from media, government and its institutions? Why, they are talking to you, me, and every man whose mind they would own. While these dubious campaigns and lifeless crusades are questionable in both nature and aim, they leave no doubt as to their motivation: fear - fear of the very men they would try to control, which speaks to the human herd's need of control, or at least the illusion that life can be controlled, for there are no tyrannical, abusive, malignant cultures and government without the men and women who, also afraid (of and for themselves), follow the proverbial party lines: just doing as ordered, just doing as told, just doing as we were taught, coerced, demanded. The inevitable pathology, conformity, and dysregulated society that results is what happens when a people's rational fears blinds them to their irrational (self-destructive) behavior. In this manner, culture is eternally repetitive, as is its illness. This isn't a problem for humanity, because this is how the species survives. Rather, this only becomes a problem for those humans who inevitably live through the resulting madness and upheaval, once more, the procurement of "this, us, life, culture, forever more." It's a blessing most human beings grow too old to even notice the changes around them, otherwise, the long bouts of societal madness would become shorter, faster, more common even, which may well be the case in the modern day. More time and study are needed to disturb the patterns of distress and upset.
"HYPOCRISY" - Following the genealogy of morals, the word "hypocrisy" is supposedly Middle English from Old French, Ecclesiastical Latin, from Greek, hypokrisis (acting). What does this mean? We can see that hypocrisy is another gross error and profound misunderstanding. What hypocrisy is, beyond that of a political, religious and moral tool of punishment, persuasion, and moral framework (identifying one's enemies by their contradictions, recognizing ideological foes by their logic and answers), is instead a sort of irrational remainder of Socratic, Platonic, and Christian fallacy, or, errors in reason. As with much else people cleave to, hypocrisy is not real or worthy of mention in the way it is used and abused, inherent as it is to Western thought and morality. Nietzsche's sentiments come to mind here, that irony is a moot point concerning all things human in origin. As it is, hypocrisy cannot exist without irony. In psychological analyses, can we trace the cognitive dissonance that arises from this sort of cleavage? Yes. This was the evolution over time of the historical sense, which isn't much of a sense when it can only trace long circles around itself.
LAND OF THE FREE, HOME OF THE BRAVE - Was a euphemism for a repressed and repressive people seeking their liberation, whose exhaustion alone was apparent in their willingness to adventure into a new dream, of which, over time, could only wrap themselves further under the servitude of their own seeking - always something better, bigger, and more - but they never once escaped themselves and one another. What is the exegesis of this disease? In short, the American mythos was a clever fiction concocted by repressed Europeans who long suffered sickness under the spell of Christian (social, cultural, familial) tyranny, which was easily transferable to political tyranny once the childish unthinkingness became a searing hole in thought and being that could no longer be ignored, revealing that even freedom from god itself was not but a new prison. Like much of our real childhood, our only childhood, so our religious childhood was also a deception. This is prescribing agents of illness for sickness - the doctor's prescription? Take some quicksilver, and call me next century.
RABBIT HOLES - When great depths are mistaken for an end, or, the end, it is simply a measurement that indicates one hasn't done what's necessary to see how truly deep the hole goes.
NOT THE ERECTION OF MORE WALLS - It is no mystery that mankind is oppressive, and perhaps none more than the priests and artists who insist on bringing man's attention to his true condition. What is freedom when even liberation's construction is that of more walls? If one seeks to flee prison, it does no good to imagine the fence is smaller than it truly is; it does no good to pretend the guards aren't present. Both liberation and tyranny must be familiar with each other, for either to mean anything at all.
MODERN ART - Do we truly need more fiction? Worse, fiction that further calls attention to its own disease and the impotence of both its performers and those who suffer by ingesting it? Whence these repressive errors? Are they new? No, my friend, any reason to oppress, punish, or teach is as good as any other, but to answer the question – no – not when the need of the fiction is further twisted, warped, and diseased from the very ground in which it arises (our long-standing, previous-made yet still standing errors and assumptions, as it were).
ART AS IMPOTENCE - We are so problematic, that man is doomed. No, only the cynical romantic; the tired idealist whose tiredness is what necessitates his idealism; and those who can't create to conceive and comfort themselves, are doomed.
BEING "DOOMED" - The prisoner finds no way out, or only in adapting contempt, flatness, numbness, and so on, can they come to any bearable terms with their prison bars.
YAPPING ON FOUR LEGS - The liberal dog assumes it's defending "its" territory, yet who first staked these claims? The assumptions growled out in this noise may be so, but such canids remain domesticated animals, fenced in, not realizing their noise is that of chained animals barking at those strange animals free of such enclosures.
MISTAKES IN ENCOURAGEMENT - Feeling bad enough to identify with slaves and the abused - but not experienced or artful enough to understand or change any of the dynamics and phenomenon therein.
UNCONSCIOUSNESS - Is not in the mind, but the body. These are physiological matters.
THE DREAM STATE - The body in fact remembers, but the mind is helplessly along for the ride, a phenomenon best exemplified not by the depressed and weary, but the schizophrenic and obsessive. This is what we mean, when we say, great intellect won't save you, you can't think your way "through" everything, as it were. Such effects are easily observed in matters like PTSD, but also all other mental illnesses.*
*Mental illness herein defined not as a "mind" or even "brain" problem, but a disordered will by way of competing inherent biological drives being thwarted, frustrated and confused by all manners of internal and external influences.
IDOLIZING YOUR ABUSERS - Christianity may be out of form and fashion in the west, but our present-day defacto liberalism (what's left of its cave-age thinking and being), as now manifest through televisual culture, commodity, and politics, is as popular as ever.
JUST SAY NO - Not to drugs, but those intoxicated by their own and other's bad ideas and lingering resentments.
DICE WITH AJAX - A fighter never wins a belt, without a fight. A fighter never loses a belt, without a fight.
THE ONLY FREEDOM FOR A WARRIOR - He fights and dies on his terms, within the confines of his fate.
WHAT THEY'VE SUFFERED, AND WHAT'S ON OFFER - You think if you search, read, and seek long enough, you'll find water in such a desert? Man's best knowledge remains knowing when, out of need, to search for greener pastures.
IT'S NEVER ENOUGH - Which is why the greatest artists always paint an oasis within.
IF WE'RE DISAPPOINTED WITH EACH OTHER - Then there is no difference between us and the rest of humanity.
NO AFFABLE CONTINUITY - So goes loneliness. Why otherwise be down on it? Solitude is a god who demands nudity, lest it drive you insane.
CHOICE - Implies a (universal, temperamental, and/or mature) liberality that isn't necessarily present at any point in this script, plot, stage show, and its actors.
YOUTH - Isn't wasted by the young, but the young are often wasted by youth, given voice from adults who confess in sighs, longing, daydreams and wishes. Youth is only wasted when not utilized, especially when it fails in its good-conscience of belligerence and its will to stupidity.
CONTEMPT - Is found among the old and young alike, but we seldom honestly admit who and what we truly resent and fear. It at least sounds more noble, less pedant, when we foist our little crusade onto the many, for when there is more to me, and more of me, it becomes much easier to lie to myself, or at least justify my artistic vision, for, how could I let so many (of me, what I project of me), down? With such support, how could I be wrong?
CONFLICT AS NECESSARY AND GOOD - People go along to get along. They conform to avoid conflict and secure peace and ease—but where is the instinct that laughs at such contemptible behavior? Where is the instinct that understands and says, "Not peace, but war!" Conflict is not only good, but necessary. Others will inevitably try to make their discomfort, their sensitivity, your yoke and burden to suffer, with no means to alleviate you, but this is not the animal man's problem, but the man animal's herd problem.
THE "USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY" IS THE USE AND ABUSE OF ONE ANOTHER - Is, historically speaking, the functioning of a normal and average society.
TAUGHT TO FEAR AND REGULATE THE SELF - For good reason, religion is humanity with the gloves on, life and thought on a predetermined course. You don't want to see us when the gloves come off, but perhaps it is too late. Winning at all costs is a game that is not fun to play, that no one in fact wants to play, but which vital instinct has a hard time regulating.
TO REGULATE WITH HATE - Has long been man at his happiest. Not just his punishment and cruelty, but the morality that manufactures the consent.*
*Liberal propaganda terms, the liberals themselves now manufacturing the consent.
ALL WITH THE END RESULT - To fear and regulate one another, like self-disposing trash.
PRIMORDIAL SWAMPS OF MEMORY - We conveniently forget, to our own detriment, the stink of breath and the slavering jaws present in even a pleasant "hello" and "thank you." Underneath our civility, is an urgent, impatient, fluid and ready animal savagery, or, what can even be called healthy instincts.
THE PEOPLE OF OTHER TIMELINES AND OTHER EARTHS - While it's not new that man inhabits whatever reality he thinks he creates, what is new is the precedence upon which people have the ability to live in complete fantasy realms, in completely separate, divided, and different timelines, realities, and whole other planets. In many of these timelines and realties, god is alive and well, hiding in the back of some dank, dark, cave, where man still shivers in childlike delight.
NO PICTURES OR MEMORIES TO HOLD - Yet, life somehow grows sweeter, more desirable, more delicious with each passing year. With each step closer to the grave, the romance, the nostalgia, the danger, only grows livelier in aroma and taste. Life is a buffet – tragedy is reaching your fill, reaching your fill too early, or failing to reach it altogether when one is just a nose sniff away.
PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY ARE NORMAL - Are those who think life is "normal" – ARE in fact, those who are aberrant.
WHEN PEOPLE NO LONGER IDENTIFY WITH THE ARCHETYPE - Then the myth they used to embody can said to be dead.
WHEN A MYTHOLOGICAL CREATURE NO LONGER HAS A MYTH - They can also be said to be dead, even if they remain on two feet, the spirit withering while it waits for the body to follow suit and die.
ALIENATION (IN WHAT OTHERS THINK) - Alienation isn't just what others think, but an individual's excessive and sickly self-consciousness of it. The televisual aids of yesterday's radio and TV, and today's internet, have long been available to exacerbate this present condition, that of strangers to themselves living in a stranger land with even other stranger creatures still - reacting.
THE IMAGINATION OF EXISTENCE OUTSIDE THE SELF - Has been quite the creative endeavor, has given us all our religion and religious feeling, be it expressed in readymade Philosophy or practice, or transfigured anew through new creative and artistic endeavor. The eye strives, with or without man present - or so it has long felt - that eye is always watching and being watched.
A SENSE OF SELF EVOLVED LARGER THAN LIFE - Was a necessary outgrowth of the mind in the needs of a creature's survival. As more necessary faculties are retired or seemingly believed to be obsolete in the struggle of man against both environment and one another, this need can only grow stronger in humankind (an impulse or instinct towards health, when one doesn't even know what health is) even if said need of such sufferers' conditions are only exacerbated thereby, and erroneously believed to be overcome. This principle holds for both individuals and collectives, whether they realize it or not.
IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER - In its barbarism, Christianity went from "we won't burn everybody," to we can't burn anybody," as was the course of their domestication, sophistication, and education, the cultivation of impotence - yet the desire to burn others is as alive and well as ever, hemorrhaging from the repressed heart of the species! But barbarism isn't unique to Christianity, yet it remained Christianity's best quality, at least for its own health and will to live. Without putting man to the sword, Christianity can only bow down under the weight of a species' excess of pity, guilt, and shame - and die.
THE LAST MAN KNOWS ALL PARTY LINES - And he gladly gives himself to one, which he is too paltry to delineate or saddle in any meaningful or lasting way.
BUT THE ARMS RACE IS SUPPOSEDLY OVER - And comfort can begin, insists the shallow and naïve domain of the last progressive, before he blinks.
BUT WE ALSO SEEK COMFORT IN A DESIRE TO NOT THINK AT ALL - And the slavery and repression can continue, says the last conservative, before he blinks.
MODERN CYNICISM'S PURE EXHAUSTION - So tired, that we don't need a religion to refute life, or to promise an eternal life, rather, we need a means and method just to tolerate life itself. Just existing day to day, is apparently that terrible, at least for the last men (and women).
VALIDATING DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR - A collectivist will refute your importance as an individual to the confusion of his own cult's needs; an abuser may deny your experience for a number of reasons; a psychologist may or may not ask you to declare bankruptcy or validation of your experience; a religious man might insist on humility, but deep down inside, most people have an internal narcissist who needs attention, or supply, or at the least, validation of some variety - we need to be told our existence is okay, that even the inconvenience of feeling like a self is valid. To deny our pomposity is to lie, lie, lie, like we've never lied before - because our lives are almost always important, at least, they feel that way to us, and oh, the feelings of it all! Those unacquainted with such, in certain terms, have no soul, that is, they lack emotional and mental dexterity and strength, as much as good humor itself.
ASSUMPTIONS AT THE HEART OF NIHILISTIC, PESSIMISTIC RELIGION AND PATTERNS OF THOUGHT - That life should or could still be desirable without pain and strife, that man would still exist, and that existence would be preferable on the presumptions of other theoretical contexts and a refusal to the terms as they are, the fundamental perception and feeling of life as prison and sentence, a bodily wisdom of what judgment and its alleged justice, that of desire and being as suspect, guilty and worthy of condemnation and judgment (dating back to the ancients). Fundamentally, the assumptions that we both should and shouldn't be predators and that life is not war, but peace, bowing before greater incidental forces, including one's own, and that death shouldn't deny us eternal existence, a perceived tragedy, that we should have unending happiness and no pain to interrupt our time here. These assumptions leave people to identify with the feeling of a thwarted will, for, they see the harmful truth of growing pains (common or rare) in the expansiveness of man's consciousness, alas, many caves and their passageways end in dead ends, and the danger, even if unseen, remains present throughout.
LET THE DEVIL HAVE THEM ALL THEN - If neither a living nor a dead god can save or redeem man, maybe the devil can awaken man's time to life, and waken his life to his limited time. Regardless, this is not an attack, but a closer inspection - how one's devils give spice and pride to one's vanity - creation! This is context, tone, pitch, possibly the entire course and nature of the melodrama in the larger psychodrama, and then the devil is given his due - the inevitable blame for everything. Historically, evolutionarily, and literarily speaking, this is what we call, brilliant fiction.
GODS, DEVILS, CHURCHES, STATES, ENEMIES, AND INVADERS - Naturally, culture and state does not speak, but acts, one hand proverbially shielding the other, and blame is always to be laid at any third hand and beyond.
STILL MISUNDERSTOOD - Giving permission is one thing, but the receiver must also take said permission. This applies as much in parenthood as it does psychology, philosophy, and the larger picture of what we broadly call, education.
IF YOU PUT ENOUGH "POSTS" IN FRONT OF THE WORD "MODERN" - Are we back to the age-old, abusive and sundry "normal" yet? Has making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange, paid off? Does anyone remember the purpose anymore, or is even what we call purpose anything more than a product, a symbol, propaganda and salvation, typically for a price, that of a donation to a political party, or a self-help book?
POSTMODERNISM - Is not so much a philosophy, as it does not organize the state or condition man to occupy said state in a useful manner, but is instead cosmic horror (or, Nietzsche's relativism in the wake of god's death), finding its home in a "philosophy" that finds its victims and writers often hapless, helpless, and hopeless - that of Nemesis unchained, wrecking man's hubris without aim or end. It's not that man strolls where black planets carelessly loll, instead he strains, without coherent cause, prose or reason.
POSTING AS MODERNS - Postmodernism, by its very nature and birth, can never reconcile itself or anything else, because its cynical and critical nature as a philosophy would have it destroy the same state it attempts to build and represent in art and language. The definition of the word even states that postmodernism finds problematic relationships within "art," and not just because shallow moderns often can't understand or create art, but because even those who are considered "thinking men," have a hard time grasping that art is not their romantic whim or fancy, but is instead a dangerous tool of persuasion, no less powerful than language and ideas themselves. Art - has always served the state in its cultural creation and evaluations, its construction and survival, and postmodernism can no sooner extract itself from this role and function, than a man can separate his meat from his bones. In effect, the stalemate of Philosophy, or, a Philosophy on life support, remains, like voting for Stalin, to end voting. Or, in other terms, postmodernism remains as a relatively new (yet hardly fresh) skin on the same old rotting bones - a little skeleton who can't see itself, because it doesn't want to see itself. Funny that, even in denying grand narratives, eventually, people demand one, because they need one - and the postmodernists most of all!
THE OLD CASE OF PURITANISM NOW FINDS ITS HOME IN MODERN LIBERALISM - And as Mencken once described it, remains "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
LIBERALISM IN AMERICA - Is considered excessive at present, as it is, because men are expected (demanded) to be so generously liberal in funding the modern squalor and decay of a degenerate state like the US government. More so, men are also expected to be liberal in their agreements with and condoning of such stupidities – which is why they try to drown us in a shallow river of never-ending propaganda and warfare of states and their medias and publics.
CIVIL AND UNCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE - You can't spell "patriot" without the word riot.
IT'S NOT ALL BAD NEWS - In this war of all against all, you can hear Homer's call to the contest, his contest.
ONGOING ATTEMPTS AT ESCAPE - Despite any nobility and vision in their blood, history and philosophy, even the Buddhists are still here. Like everyone else, even they're not going anywhere, and like everyone else again, they also suffer this.
ALL TENDS TOWARDS THE ZEITGEIST - Culture, art, education, all become hollow vehicles for the state, even in a fiction like Star Wars, as General Pink-Hair saves the day, an old cultural hit becomes an empty vessel for the politics of its time.
EVIL ENOUGH TO BE KILLED BY THE PROVERBIAL MOB, OR LOUD-MOUTHED ENOUGH TO ATTRACT THE MURDEROUS ATTENTION OF THE INSANE - But another question for you? Then hear my proclamation!
EVERY PLEBEIAN - Has their opinion on law, order, and state, but hardly a one of them, for or against said law and state, ever considers not just the architect's opinion and intention on the matter, but also the architect's feelings.
AN AGE OLD REALIZATION THAT IS STILL SOMEHOW MISSED - The forces of stupidity and the happiness of warfare may be here to stay - but culture is the device by which we say, "And so are we." What's this? Modern man laments the dangers and risks of life and war alike? How did he ever miss that they were one in the same, and only his civility has allowed him to fool himself into notions of comfort and permanence?
HOMER'S CONTEST - Those sick in mind, body, or at least stomach, want war to be over. Want to return to normal, comfort. This is all wrong. The point of contest, like the point of war, is to win. No one has an option because normal is transitory anyhow. Let us then sanction this modern war of all against all then – to do battle, to enjoy it, to delight in one's own wickedness!
MODERN LIBERAL AND LEFTIST IDEOLOGY IS TO "JUSTICE" WHAT "REEDUCATION AND VOCATIONAL CENTERS" ARE TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS - This is to say, the modern state can only manifest and express its tyranny and drive for slavery in what ways are socially acceptable, be it a hateful and suicidal liberalism in the US, or a genocidal repression in China to conserve its state – they are all the state expressing the same thing – its POWER, and its need to subjugate all its people, no matter the guise.
TWIN SISTERS OF DESPERATION AND EXHAUSTION - Fascists, are in fact perfectly average people, which is why they clump together in masses, no different than the conformity of communists, or any other beasts of burden who cannot escape the fear that binds and drives the slavery of their herd – their state's herd.
THE REALITY OF HOMER'S CONTEST - The larger you are, the stronger you are, the better target you are. Or, in modern conception, mo money, mo problems. With Homer as our teacher in whom we'd trust our children, we say, please, bring it. Not just the contest, but its dangers too!
NOT EVERYTHING IN TELEVISUAL CULTURE IS PRETENSE AND "PROFELICITY" - For some of us, our existence, even our sincerity, knowledge, and sense of self, precedes our online profiles - and some of us might even be able to still survive without the validation of a strange world we let in through a two-way screen. Some of us were born, and even existed before the internet. Some of us even existed, with strong character and identity, before such products became mass-marketed goods to be bought and sold online, but these modern manifestations are all preceded by the desperate need for character and identity within culture.
SOCIALLY-RETARDANT MEDIA - Attention is currency, the product is meat, and the lie is that we're any less bored and boring than we ever were - and we remain just as hungry as ever.
RECENT HISTORY IN A TELEVISUAL CULTURE - From curated television to curating one's own fantasy online, the former numbness, flatness, and cynicism of an American media-addict culture now blown outward in the age of manipulation of data and bits has people who formerly reserved their capital of attention for their own private viewings, fight the old ills by bringing attention to just what it is, they are doing about "their" (possibly now "your") problem. That is the morality of justice. The cries of the good rear their ugly heads once more. This is more than a kicking against the old pin-pricks in the same form and fashion in American culture, and carries a societal shift, push and flow towards what is supposed to be a new value system, but instead remains a glut of decadent liberal causes crammed into the same old European casket for the dead and rotting Christian god*, but these busy little bees who surreptitiously propagandize the children from top to bottom are as supremacist as their old dreams of a manifest destiny, an awakening that was tired before it even stirred.
*Many Americans can now recognize the smell, even if they don't know where it comes from, or what it portends.
A TELEVISUAL CULTURE II - The sicknesses themselves long precede the evolution of their apparent behavior that can now be observed, absorbed, consumed, and repeated via technological mediums, and the controls and algorithms of new, unelected ruling bodies of mass-powerful corporations, as plays out with the biological potential, that of the manipulation of bodily chemicals, all relating to conscience, social status, morality, etc., further complicated by age-old human repressions, censorships, cruelties, including use of the televisual mediums themselves to harm people (doxing, death threats, general cancellation and character assassination) formerly marketed and represented in passive manner primarily by television, now also and largely by internet and social media, giving rise to a global-consciousness that saw its first gasps in the 80's and 90's, though the sentiment had long been emergent in that sort of starry-eyed unification and oneness theory that many priestly types dream of in certain manners. As for the psychodrama itself, played out on TV, now internet, one's participation of manipulation therein adds one more point of contention in the mess, one more question for the black hole of consumption of a species many billions strong in total. That any of these abstractions are a few steps removed from physical being in the real world (or, if it does take place "in the real world," inevitably to be televised one way or another), does not matter, only that it does have an effect on the nervous system, both by the creator and the consumer. As for the larger modern zeitgeist, mass consumption of a mass culture, agreement gives one a place to stand, and knowing where one stands is important within rank and order of people and culture, that of their values, but when anarchy rules, when unconstrained femininity prattle, order becomes impossible, change and goals become incomprehensible, aims become meaningless.
FOR EXAMPLE, PROTESTORS IN THE STREET - They film themselves - is it for their protest, or is it for the social media and world-wide attention they garner therein? Can anyone know or tell? Do they then find purpose in being, televising both life and death in such a crude and unthinking manner? It remains unsurprising when, in pursuit of their own televisual fiction, they are inevitably run over. This was the spectacle they voluntarily created and wanted the world to see to begin with. What's another of countless martyrs for the televisual cause? In America, life and people are as disposable and over-rated as our programming.
DFW ON POLITICAL REALITY ALSO BEING A REPETITION COMPULSION - "Nothing changes in the character of submission or dependency, when it is only their objective that has changed…political action…fed by unconscious rage..."
CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY OVER TIME, GAS TO ELECTRIC, TV TO COMPUTERS - Modern culture isn't so much a blanket, but a fog, a miasma of many bodies minding each other and themselves more than is beneficial to their health, the chaos increasing in direct proportion to the incoherence of so many interconnected bodies, for it is here that awareness and dependence are chained. Increasing complexity within human connectivity does not simplify problems, but multiplies and confuses them.
ACTS OF, NOT GOD, BUT THE INSANE; HOW CRAZY TRANSMITS OUT THE BROADCAST SIGNAL - Rock star Jon Lennon makes an accurate assessment of his band, telling the world circa 1966, that the Beatles are "more popular than Jesus." The rest of the world hears whatever it is they hear in such a statement, but one lone nut hears a mission from god. The human zeitgeist swirls and churns thus.
LONG FORM INTELLECTUAL DIET - Was one response and answer (the desire for knowledge and wisdom) to the televisual crisis, reminiscent of the printing press' influence on man's education, but far exceeding the potential by way of not just subject matter on offer, but the curious psychology of everyone from journalists to cubicle humans of all variety – from living on TV, to living on the internet, has changed over time, just as its changing man's physiology over time.
UNCONSCIOUS REFLECTION, OFTEN PROJECTION - Media, TV, internet, shows us what it is (we) think we want to see and say of ourselves. To wit, we say, mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most disturbed of them all? One can bear an image, even a bad one, provided it at least doesn't' appear hollow. If it is hollow, then don't underestimate our ability to pretend.
MEDIA AS CAUSE AND EFFECT OF MANY ILLS - Never before has the proliferation and transmission of diseases (of thought) been so rapid, deleterious, and successful.
TIMES BEFORE SOCIAL MEDIA - Before fantasy, glamour, and attention addiction via internet and social media, television was the main fantasy addiction, that of passive viewers becoming aware of their passive consumption, growing cynical, ironic, jaded, flat therein. Since the golden, olden heyday of television, the internet expanded for a time, as if the age old waves of idealism and its aims in human connection were once again ready to break down all barriers, or at least, the novelty kept people amused, but once more, the tide recedes, and man is a fantasy addict once more, social media the perfect venue for narcissistic needs. In this manner, man never really left his fantasy world, but went from absorbing it from TV, like a weed under the sun, to chasing after attention like a grub crawling from leaf to leaf, incapable of satiating its ravenous nature to pupate into something more.
GROSS SURF - Riding the waves of each other's attention, desperation, and discontent. Profiting off not just decay, but the mental illness that grows and blooms therein like mold; yet from this rot the new child of the new age emerges, smiling a smile that is unburdened by the dead-weight of a repeated, rehashed, wrote and rewrote history of ignorance and stupidity.
EVIL IN THE EYES OF THE FEARFUL - Not even "refusing" to feel bad, but not feeling bad about anything at all, as if life on Earth and all its pleasures and pains are in fact normal, good, and healthy. We see the new child's happiness is of the utmost evil: delightful and delicious. Playful and bold, the new happiness a warm noontide to those who don't consider man doomed, yet this happiness is as alien, cold, and uninhabitable as the vacuum of space to those still operating as cave-men, trapped in the rubble of fear, guilt, and superstition. But fear and guilt of what? Why, the fear and guilt of simply being born, and of course, woe to those who voice their real feelings and needs, or so madness preaches.
CREATURES OF THE SMALLEST NOW - Past and future swell and burst. With eyes everywhere but today, the ship may sail on high winds, but has nowhere to make landfall.
NIETZSCHE SPEAKS MUCH OF MAN BEING AN ANIMAL OF THE MOMENT - And in many ways, he even champions this inability and refusal to think, yet such a creature is how the unthinking human world plunges itself into stupidity and darkness time and time again.
UNDERSTANDING MODERN DESPERATION - To better understand the prisoner conditions is to better understand the widespread abuse and horror of the modern animal man - what comes of it, time and time again.
THE LAST MAN - Despite his intuitive feeling that he is an error, that he is the culmination of an entire species' mistakes - he still misconstrues the fact that he exists, with the end goal of human existence itself. He conflates the desirability in and of existence, with his existence.
EVOLUTIONARY DEAD ENDS - Yet the last man still mistakes himself not only as a goal, but also as an ideal.
SPIRITUAL REBELLION - Occurs when one's psycho-social needs are not being met by new and old cultural standards, methods, thought processes and systems. When one's physiology is not satisfied for the answers on offer, one then becomes known as a seeker. PHYSICAL REBELLION - Is what is always happening in the real world: life feeding on life. REBELLION AGAINST DEPRESSION - The conditions of modern life facilitates the depression, the sickness, the medicine that is marketed for it, and even the manner in which it is consumed - that all have yet to yield a stable fix. SPIRITUAL REBELLION MEET MATERIAL REALITY - The spiritual and psychological solution posed by the materialistic destruction inherent to nihilistic, anarchic, modern pessimistic liberalism is not new in form or function, but is an old movie and bad art, stuck on repeat, that of the age-old revenge plot run ragged on man's frayed physiology. ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS - Poisoned within and without - the spiritual need inside man demands satisfaction, an answer, in the physical world. Completion of this endeavor is in fact destruction (aimlessness) for man. Power is not in repose, but the explosion beforehand. We are always seeking power here - and even spiritual rebellion demands its manifestation in the physical world. Humanity has never been content or satisfied with metaphysics, inner peace, and patience. THE GLOBALIST UTOPIA (ON THE PATH TO NO PLACE) - When peace, unity, civility, basic mental health, and balance can't even be achieved within nations, how much more impossible is it between nations?
SNAKES AND VENOM V. MAN AND IDEA - Snakes may have evolved powerful neurotoxins that quickly melt a nervous system, but humanity is the only species who carries a powerful disease that it can easily transmit amongst itself to intentionally destroy people by sheer psychic weight alone. If I say, I have an idea, you better be sure you want it.
PHILOSOPHERS AND THINKERS AS SNAKE HANDLERS - From jargon to the "ideas themselves" (as if they exist outside of us, free of us), such terms and approaches are the clinical objectivism and handling gloves that the "thinker" employs to keep their own thoughts, feelings and ideas at what is presumed to be a safe and secure distance, because these snakes recognize the danger of their own venom.
ABUSE IN AND OF SOCIALIZATION - Inherently or well-trained, people live in fear and repression of each other, and grow better suited to not offend each other in what is already an excess of impotence in control, power and rage as predicated on judgment of value systems. In this regard, the training of the western mind over time has been quite the systematic abuse of the mind - from god to father and holy mother, with the results before us, it was as if Christianity's marriage to liberalism was the intentional destruction of the family and its vitality. Society says, without either knowing and saying, if we cripple everyone, the presumption and expectation of harmlessness will make us best disposed to meeting each other's needs, but who even knows what said needs are, when human instinct has been under assault and collectively attacked and culturally repressed for so long in the first place? If all are crippled, the kingdom may be unified - but we are left asking, what is the function and value of a kingdom of cripples?
EVER SAFER, EVER MORE JUST, SECULAR LIBERAL SOCIETY - Requires that we criminalize men and masculinity, as they are too dangerous and threatening to retain their own will, yet, for over 100 years now, modern liberalism insists that we forgive and tolerate any and all criminals, creeps and weirdos, at least when they serve a purpose in the ceaseless discharge of liberal causes? Just who is our sympathy reserved for, then, when nothing and nobody adds up in a remotely coherent manner? Who first envisioned that man would be saved through his condemnation and destruction, the falsification, misrepresentation, and criminalization of his being? In this regard, Christianity is alive and well. Post, post, post modern liberalism quickly becomes lost to its own madness, but people in America serve time in prison for violence, murder, fraud, and all manner of crimes, and they return from their time in America's liberal* prison system, yet Americans are terrified at what comes out of each other's mouths? Yea. Imprisonment is a great evil, but Americans have long loved building prisons filling them with men, and now it seems they'd just as happily send men to prison, merely for their thoughts, beliefs, and words. We can call the course of this psychological reaction, followed by reaction, eternal recurrence, and we can also call it time traveling to and from the stupid ages.
*Liberal, in that Americans went overboard in building the world's largest prison system to begin with. Given that nobody in America knows how many laws there are within states, let alone federally, we can easily see how frightful Americans are when it comes to the criminalization of man and their being. Despite the beatings, despite the endless attempts at control and the propagandizing of family, culture, being and mind, we see that men are simply too dangerous, which is precisely why governments, civil religion, religious followers, and every last herd member tries to win us to their side, which speaks to the need of modern warfare, that of deception and sublimation, lies and tricks. Men are as despised and disposable as ever, but even a government knows we are necessary, that society and culture is nothing and can't survive without men, so it should be understood why your loyalty is the yoke of manipulation and subjugation.
HEAD OUTSIDE ASS - What are you still seeking from strangers and their even stranger theater? You would seek guidance and wisdom in nature's kingdom of no eyes, from those who only know man as misguided form and function? Do not assume others have your best interest at heart. Don't assume others are serving you, or others. Don't even assume they know what they're saying or doing, but when it comes to seeking near or far, we must ask, where is your own instinct on the matter? To wit, if you say, "what instinct," I say, precisely.
WHILE BOOMERS AND THEIR CHILDREN WERE PUTTING THEIR KIDS IN LEARNING DISABILITY CLASSES AND REFORM HOUSES FOR WHORES - They failed to see how they were disrupting themselves and others. They failed to stay ahead of the curve, to keep up with nature's brisk jog. They failed to see where the attacks would come from, how they would be leveraged, or why it would matter. While the left's savagery and incoherence may be their inability to work, work with others, and think thoroughly, they at least attempt to "think." In conserving our cave age sensibilities, while refusing to address the ever increasing sophisticated and dangerous modern world and all its mass forces, the right in America blindly stumbled into history's inevitabilities, the return to the mean, madness and upheaval.
THE CRIMINALIZATION OF MAN'S BEING - Perhaps the civility of your society waxes and wanes in direct proportion to the treatment and rearing of the people who comprise it. The more jails you build, the more facets of thought and behavior you criminalize and stigmatize, the more men you drug and stick in learning disability class, the more madness you preach, the more criminals and idiots you create. The more you beckon and desire your own destruction.
WHAT THE MODERN LIBERAL ROBBED FROM THE CORPSE OF CHRISTIANITY - While the modern liberal's morality and value structure rests in the pillaged spine of old world Christianity that still props liberalism up while simultaneously sheltering it in its own impotence of a supposedly "good will," what the modern liberal has retained and learned first and foremost, against all lessons of personal and shared history, is to insist on archaic notions of SHAME as an ever present beating stick for man and woman alike, namely for all those who go against their god, for if their god be for them, who can be against them? This is known as being on the "right side of history," to wit, being the holy ones, the good ones, the anointed ones, to which Nietzsche says, are always a sign of the end, but the end of what? Culture and society as is presently constituted, to wit, and with an end, comes not the end, but a new beginning. Just as even Christianity could not see its own demise, nor the twisted path of thorns it took to get there, so it is modern liberalism plunges headlong into what they posit is a brighter more progressive future, not realizing the clearing ahead is not a victory, and no place to camp - but the sheer face of the cliff of no return.
THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL - A euphemism of and for the emergent decadent American class, that of perpetual government informant and narc - the one who insists on their status as dependent, who gladly places the state between themselves and all other human relationships, even spouse and children. Liberal conformists have been blindly building, supporting, and worshipping the American prison system and government thus, for decades.
THE STATE AS PERPETUAL DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN PEOPLE - The statist is happy to use, encourage, and legislate the government as new god, new idol, "new" principle of organization and problem solving, a panoply of boons whose curious obsession is as outdated and archaic as god himself. This isn't paganism, nor new behavior and belief, rather, it is as old as mankind itself, alive and well as ever, that of our oldest embarrassments and failures, superstitions, errors, but chiefly, our stupidity.
ONCE WOMEN COULD READILY USE THE STATE AS PERSONAL POLICEMEN FOR THE MEN IN THEIR LIVES - The American family only went quicker and further down the dysfunctional shit-hole. Today we fish the fruit from clogged septic tanks and sewers nationwide, apparent in our media and politics - a nation of fecalpheliacs playing in the sludge, on display for the world to see. This is one of many reasons why other countries, cultures and people are disgusted with Americans. That Americans deny their mental illness here is moot, when the stench wafts far and wide.
NOT STUCK IN THE PAST, BUT THE WORSHIP OF ITS CRUDEST HAND-ME DOWNS - Is how modern Americans obsess over what was, what never was, what's gone, and what's not coming. And here it is, Romans concern themselves with perfumes and punctuation as the state goes up in its manufactured conflagration.
HARD TO SWALLOW - Life may be disposable, tired, and tiresome to many modern westerners, chiefly the Christians and secular Liberals, but life is a big deal, not because we make it that way, not because we invented these ideas and notions, but because it feels that way.
TELEVISUAL CULTURE III - As much as Americans love money and material life, that is not their sole objective in the participation of a televisual culture now turned social media culture of the same mass-consumptive and mass-productive bent of the television and radio ages that preceded it. How lacking are people's lives that they seek so much love and attention far and wide? Rather, the greatest art of the human psychodrama is to participate in it firsthand, and if not, secondhand. The capacity and ability to participate in such a manner was warmly welcomed by the narcissistic impulse and tendency that was present (and long suppressed) all along. Before people were addicted to fantasy and consumption through social media, the projection of a self that may or may not be real, of whose real self may or may not be known by the person who even created it, modern culture continues to be a morass of television addiction, not now a problem, but increasingly the production of a way of life the world over. LOVING EACH OTHER FOR WHAT WE ARE NOT - Improvement, perpetual progress, and improvement, insist both man's most stupid and evil abusers. THE AMERICAN DIET - More and more Americans have come to obsess on the details of their diets, but they're primarily concerned with the tripe they ingest, while remaining ignorant and unconcerned with the tripe and excrement that comes out. CENTURIES OF "PROGRESS" - And the cauldron of danger that comprises secular and religious civilization is just as explosive, violent, and poised to blow as it ever was. SUBLIMATING BOTH ART AND ITS HEROES INTO MODERN NIHILISM - The modern nihilistic, pessimistic, Christian, and Liberal tendencies in modern thought sees both being and becoming as equally impotent, bothersome, and wholly undesirable, except in a sort of utilitarian stasis that helps the species produce and contain itself in well-organized slop buckets of both repression of thought, as manifest in the political systems and ideals such cubicle-minded people posit as a solution to their own poor physiology and fearful, repressive temperament. Their biggest irony? What then is the purpose of civilization and progress, if no one is present to enjoy it? NIHILISTIC BALOON HEADS - Those whom, upon touching substance, immediately seek to invalidate all sensuality and signaling therein, their heads grown fat by expanding the nothingness of their relative, happenstance thought to contradict, deny and refute life, love, and all other phenomenon therein. That such people will imitate the expansiveness of nature by increasing their contradiction, denial, and refutation of life at any cost, speaks to just how tired and tiresome they are as human beings. They extend their blandness, to infect everything, leveling life and its intensity of feeling down to the lowest common denominators, their one love therein seeming to be to share their contempt, that one is all, all is one, and all is nothing, like one (person) is nothing. In the same rut of their Christian predecessors, even after a savage attack and insult, these same barbarians and philistines will follow up their nihilistic tirades with the most asinine of seasonings, saying, "have a good day," as if their mimicry of civility and mockery of creativity would have you forget the savagery of their barren existence and their desire to spread it. THE STRANGLING VINE OF THE MILLENIA'S OLDEST CREEPER - PESSIMISM - To date, the historic Buddha is still considered to be one of the most potent thinkers, Philosophers, religious figures, artists, and men to have ever existed. That the Buddha could be so exhausted 2,500 years ago, and that modern man can't even muster a fraction of the Buddha's will as a religious and Philosophical thinker, informs us how little these modern nihilistic balloon heads understand and recognize the problem, namely, the problem of their own fear, avarice, delusion, and contempt. They are afraid of health as much as sickness, and always prefer sickness in the end. SPEAKING OF THE END - Life is not in fact tragic, but HILLARIOUS. SO-CALLED PROGRESS - you don't want to hear what the cubicle people and virtual reality idealists consider as necessary for their final solutions to humanity's problems. MALIGNANT CYNICISM - Just as Christianity bowed and scraped itself to death on its own hand carved sacrificial altar of must, so it is liberalism is presently bowing itself out, of need in its own mounting shame and pity, but with a renewed sense of violence and contempt. IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM, JOIN 'EM - Said every barbarian ever, especially as they joined the Christians. THE AVERAGE AMERICAN ISN'T JUST CLOYINGLY PRETENTIOUS - But dangerously pretentious.
CHRISTIANITY'S LEFTOVERS - After leveling out a good portion of the species, it leveled out its civilizations. As it bowed itself into the dust, it left us with a desolate progress, a remedial man. WHEN TO EMPLOY POLEMICS AGAINST PEOPLE OVER CRITIQUES OF IDEAS - It is impossible to even address, let alone critique the modern thinker's "ideas," when 1) they often aren't even THEIR ideas, and 2) their very thinking (conformity, functions of followers, method, etc.) is the root deficiency and foremost limiting factor to begin with. To argue ideas with a remedial mind is like concerning oneself with what kinds and qualities of fuels to put in a BUSTED ENGINE. Besides, even in stupidity, if their ideas are so clearly RIGHT, to them, then of course there is no argument, nor an argument's arguable purpose, that of coming to an agreement.
THE GREATEST EVIL OF CHRISTIANITY - Not that it despises, fears and destroys the meaning of death, but that it despises fears and destroys the meaning of life. People who assume that fear of death is god's genesis and evolution, often misconstrue that god is just as much a manifestation of what's to be feared and hated in life.
THE GREATEST EVIL OF AMERICAN LIBERALISM - Like Christians, their ideology and diseased -ism is both the fear and hatred of life and death. Not that it despises, fears and destroys the meaning of death, but that it fears and destroys the meaning of life.
CHRISTIANITY 2.0 - The modern liberal, like the Christian model that preceded him, is just as afraid of death, and especially life, namely what is found therein, their own fear and mistrust of their own thoughts, feelings, passions, and hungers. In this manner, perhaps humanity will need these training wheels for centuries and millennia to come, the perpetual need to tyrannize the soul, be it out of fear, repression, or the religious impulse, that of unity, and at the least, it meets the needs to repress the self, in an attempt to control the self. The hyper-Christian American liberal morality is that of the Christian death cult who despises the Earth, the people on it, and of course, life itself, but the modern American liberal speaks to say, not only that they love their Christian morality and its grounds of valuations, but they speak as if they themselves created it, when they are in fact second-rate inheritors of what were second-rate values to begin with. This is America's Manifest Destiny and Christianity 2.0, not new and improved, but old, dying, struggling against time, friction, repression as brutal as ever to meet the new standards of, not ANOTHER ERA, but a record boom and bloom in population and proliferation of culture and its violence, humanity having already slouched into modern televisual life and the mass-repression, mass-culture, mass-identity, mass production, and mass-mindedness that keep things turning.
COMMON GROUNDS FOR CHRISTIANS AND LIBERALS - The hatred, judgment, dread, and endless slander of man. The despising of life, the fear, the endless, clammy, cold hands of those properly afraid of themselves and their own run-away thoughts and feelings.
AMERICANS DON'T KNOW GOD, BUT LIKE MUCH OF LIFE, THEY SAW IT ON TV - Sometimes the picture is clear, and sometimes it is blurry.
MAN'S ANGER, SADNESS AND RAGE - Is just as important and valid as his love.
FEAR OF FEELINGS - Arguably drives man as much as feeling itself.
CAREFUL HERE AND OVER THERE - Even psychology and its babble easily turn into its own repression trap, the proverbial tale chasing.
MARK OF ATTAINMENT - "Shamelessness." Once more, Nietzsche was way ahead of the curve.
HUMAN ETHOS - If it doesn't fight back, if it can't fight back, we eat it.
THE AMERICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM - For decades now, have been centers of abuse, wherein young men who demonstrate any vitality and excessive inquisitiveness are made sedate and focused with drugs, and those who are not are not drugged or coerced in similar manner, are sent to learning disability classes and other remedial institutions and correctional facilities. This doesn't address that school isn't stimulating enough for most young men in the first place.
LEARNING DISABILITY? - No, no, no. What's wrong with you? That's what I was trying to figure out all along. That is my inquiry and experiment, not that anyone could articulate this fully - but now I know, and when even when a young Herman Hess is sent to a home for invalids and epileptics, you should know too.
"TEACHING" CREATIVITY - Do we love an artist that looks and sounds the same as others? So it is, we teach art, and children learn a million boring rules and techniques, but it's not until they break away and make clear the rules by breaking the rules, that is, they make the rules and techniques appear as if absent, or as of no trifle or concern. In the valuation of life in art in the creation of an image, a surrogate of truth, one's own truth and being are affirmed, whether this is conscious or not.
SCHOLARS AND INTELLECTUALS - Have a superb knack for making grand things small, for making the rare and unusual mundane, for taking the greatest thinkers, and reducing them to shallow paragraphs and parodies of themselves. They want to simplify, because they need to simplify, for reasons that are and aren't their own. One might think both educating and learning, for both student and teacher, are a process of weathering down, leveling off, and so it often is, that of the state and its teachers, rather than a fruitful planting and a reaping - yet beyond iron necessity, where great thinkers leave scholars is the child's embrace of timeless adventure, the danger of all centuries and millennium, not to hole up in the caves of one's day, but leave them, and inhabitable at that. It is a violence that is remembered, when even all soldiers and generals are forgotten.
PHILOSOPHER AS BASTARD, CORRUPTER OF YOUTH, AND GENERAL NUISANCE - Always looking for problems that don't yet exist, for things unthought and feelings unfelt - no more, say the people, for challenges unseen, lands unknown. Protest is inevitable: "We're good with what we have. Let it be this forever," as the Apollonian instinct desires, demands, as the modern Dionysian trips over its own shadows…for we the people already think what we know and know what we think. But here's a question. And another. One begins to think that no one has taken the question, the problem of existence seriously, and for centuries and millennium at that. Of course we already know that, or so everyone cleaves and clings - let this fever dream be static - thus all religion, culture and government stagnates, rots and dies, necessitating the labor of new works, new births, and all its inherent dangers and treacheries.
SOMETIMES EVEN ASHAMED FOR FEELING SHAME - No end to the madness!
TAUGHT NOT SELF AND SELF-RELIANCE - But to be an endless self-sacrifice for others, from an early age, largely the unconscious process of what isn't malice or even bad parentage, but unconsciousness, assumption, folly and fortune, a collision of fates.
NEVER SETTLE - For a "believable" happiness, a sure-sign that one's life is crashing upon the dangerous and rocky shores of barren souls, for that false projection of happiness is always in the service of others' demands, appearances, or, unconscious and instilled expectations, be it of a parent, or an entire society.
A RUTHLESS HAPPINESS - Not life in shoulds, woulds, coulds, shalt or shalt not, but I will, what I will, what I am.
UNAPOLOGETIC VITALITY - This life is mine, for me, I know no apologies or lament for desire and being. I know no pity for them, nor shame for us. The great noontide came and went, and those supposedly longing to be nudists still insist on covering for their own conscience's compensation. Always, cover thy, or cover for thy shame, so madness still preaches.
UNINVITED TO THE PRINCESS' CHRISTENING - Suffering and joy show up to crash the party anyway.
PEOPLE STILL THINK THEY NEED TO PROTECT AND PRESERVE THE SPECIES CIRCA 2021 - This stillborn future, is what we've been preserving and protecting them for? It's like watching the best of human culture turn to ancient methods of preserving its food, that of cold fire - burying flesh or hanging it to rot, for later consumption. Life is best served and lived fresh.
WHENCE ALWAYS THE CONCERN FOR SAVING MEN - From what? The abusers who preach salvation from their very own condemnation of life, man, and being?
NOT SAVING MEN, BUT COMPETING FOR THEIR WILL AND WALLET - But man is more than an accessory, a tool, a utility, a function, a fad, a target, a block to be carved. As Zapffe predicted, repression over time would necessarily assume a more brutal character. People don't hear, often don't want to hear, even with so much screaming, which would have transpired regardless of the perceived need of so much shrieking just to compete in the ongoing evolutionary arms race of the species.
THERE IS NO NEW OR OLD PEACE AND LOVE - But the age-old war, conflict, and strife. Despite a history of escapism, man, the last man, realizes he is here to stay.* This thought alone is often enough to be unbearable, to rip holes in the perception and love of being.
*See history. No animal would have it so easy as a utopia, or a rapture to an eternal and true world.
AS REPRESSION AND FORGETFULNESS ATTEST - The future will be glad to forget the past, just in time for the past to sneak up behind the future again. This is man, a very slow learner, sole attendant of nature's proverbial learning disability class.
AS MYTHOLOGICAL CREATURES - Life is always a symbolic affair. This is how and where the artistic vision and embodiment of life flourishes. One need not be awake from the dream to play. This isn't permission, but age old observation, and a good thing otherwise, lest the animals here fall over dead from being dumb.
CULTURE AND IDENTITY WITHIN THE DREAM - Is a sore spot when the dream under duress turns nightmare, when a dream promises or demands more than it can provide, and when people fixate on an impossible dream, one that defies present or permanent limitations. This isn't just a dysfunctional relationship between man and art, but an inability to shape and create art in the first place.
MEDIA, GOVERNMENT, ACADEMIA, AND PUBLIC OPINION IN MODERN AMERICA - What is the message, who is it for, and what is the competition? Answer: be afraid, men, even though it is your attention and consent they need, for their ends, that have nothing to do with your thoughts, desires and needs.
A NEW PHILOSOPHY FOR MEN - To tell the world and those who dwell here, wallowing in their own liberality of confused emotions, guilt, pity, and shame - to come strong, or to get fucked. Another can reciprocate, edify, contribute to a man's existence, but if they in fact can't, or don't, once more, get fucked. If these are your friends, then you need new and better friends.*
*While there is much to say about being open to experience and experimentation, life is too short and dangerous to play in the trash. You otherwise risk too much playing with the stupid, the blind, and the insane.
THE LAST MAN II - Is both master and slave in one body riddled with a fragmented mind. The divide, the resentment, the cowardice, the weakness, is all within, yet of course he peers at the outer world, lo and behold, that is where the problems abound, that is where the problems truly are! Convenient that - man doesn't need to consider himself, but only blame the world and those in it!
LIFE YESTERDAY, EVEN GOOD MEMORY, IS NOT SUFFICIENT FOR LIFE TODAY - This is why culture is dead and in need of perpetual invention, festival, celebration and novelty. This is life lived in the present, not life in past tense.*
*See man's obsession with the past, a convenient escape hatch for the present, summer days to thaw winter and even spring dawnings, a familiar map one doesn't have to contemplate.
A WELL-TAMED BEAST IS A HAPPY BEAST - Only when it is a self-tamed beast.
IT IS ONLY FROM LONG SOLITUDE THAT WE MAY BECOME SOCIAL CREATURES ONCE MORE - Namely, as a more playful, a more joyous creature!
WORKING HARD WITH THE MATERIAL OF SELF (TIMEBOMBS) - Is a dangerous yet happy existence.
DON'T MISTAKE EVEN 'TELLING IT STRAIGHT' - As even here, a common error is made. The listener actually thinks they understand. No, no, the finger is pointing at the sky, why do you look at the finger that is doing the pointing? And even the ground?
LIFE AS MOURNING - When one lives in fear of loss and life's inevitable end. Religio unifies these sufferers in hard penance, while the few and fearless let death cast its eyes elsewhere, on someone who will squirm, as intended, under the lies of gods, Buddhas and men.
DEVIL MAY CARE - To hide the pain inside.
KEEP MOVING - So you don't have to feel pain, or much of anything at all.
SHARKS ALSO NEVER STOP MOVING - But they don't know or care that they are sharks.
DARE I ASK - What man knows? And cares? What you know, and care?
NOT THAT ANYONE THINKS OF THEMSELVES AS SHEEP - But there are those who do consider themselves sheep herders, and those who play the part of sheep.
ALWAYS FOLLOWING ORDERS (AND SUSPICIONS) - Nobody technically has to do anything. It is telling then how people spend their time.
NIETZSCHE'S INSULATION OF THE CENTURIES - Isn't to hide in or romanticize the past, but to bolster and protect one's self from the stupidity in the present.
MODERN ENLIGHTENMENT - It is not the elimination of the human, but the embrace of the experiences and phenomenon that comprise being human. Enlightenment is not fear, castigation, and slaver of the body and its passions, not an escape, but an exploration, an experimentation. Let madness preach shunning, despising, fearing, hating, and shaming, always concerned with an ENDING, be it of suffering or life and death itself, rather, roll the dice, play the game, and let the best man win.
TO AN AUDIENCE 100 YEARS OR MORE FROM NOW - At least our jokes were funny, our music lively, our spirit joyous. Between aphids and thorns, roses make for terrible beds, but that doesn't stop us from coming up with stupid metaphors that carry our meaning. Similarly, a crown of thorns was indeed our inheritance, not because life is so bad or terrible as it is, but that is just how human beings have behaved from the cave ages to the present.
Mountain Fresh Aphorisms
Hungry Orphans, Better Strangers II
Liberated Ruminations, Timely Meditations II


Seven Hills homes for sale – 1,300 acre master planned community located in Henderson, NV just 20 minutes from the Las Vegas Strip, across the foothills of the Black Mountains with picturesque views of the Las Vegas Valley. Homes for sale in Seven Hills are divided into 25 Roman inspired neighborhoods, from the Villa Villagio, Palazzo Monte, Meridiana, Venezia and Terracina. The Estates at Seven Hills Luxury homes are located on the world renowned luxury golf community, the Rio Secco Golf Club. A Rees Jones design, this 7,400 yard course was named on of the Top Ten golf courses in America by Golf Digest.
High in the southern foothills of Henderson, Nevada, the 1300 acre master plan of Seven Hills meanders along the top of the McCullough Mountain Range overlooking the city of Las Vegas. This is a popular master planned community with gated and guard gated communities a of estates, homes and condos. The diverse views among the winding trails make it a great place for walking, biking and golfing.
The centerpiece of Seven Hills is the 7,250 yard Rees-Jones designed Revere Golf Club and The Rio Golf Course called Rio Secco. The 18 hole championship golf course built in 1997 and the Butch Harmon School of Golf. The stunning elevation changes and challenging desert holes make Rio Secco a favorite venue among Las Vegas golfers.
With almost a 1/3 third of the development devoted to open spaces, Seven Hills is noted for its outdoor family living and incredible views of the valley below. Four large city parks offer basketball, volleyball, tennis courts, soccer fields and playgrounds for residents to enjoy, as well as miles of scenic walking and biking trails.
Absolutely some of the most incredible views in the city are to be found in Seven Hills. The views of the city from here are amazing, and the lifestyle in this neighborhood reminds you of a trip to the Italian country side.
Seven Hills Henderson NV community is an affluent section in Las Vegas where many famous personalities own their condos. It is situated at a distance of almost 7 miles from the strip of Las Vegas which roughly calculates to 11 in kilometers. It has attached 'hills' with its name because it is built across the foothills of beautiful black mountains. The community is termed as master planned because each inch of this 1300 acre land has been utilized to give full value to its residents.
Step 1: is really just driving the community and getting a feel for the roads, parks and communities within Seven Hills.
The architecture and designs on the basis of which this huge community has been established have no match. Las Vegas is famous for its boldness and beauty. The picturesque locations and incredible views in the city are found in seven hills. The community is built around Rees-Jones which is 18-hole golf championship course and the Butch Harmon skill of Golf in collaboration. This Golf course is the main reason of its high value. Golf is a game of rich and affluent and therefore most of the Golf lovers own the accommodation here.
Step 2: Narrow your search based on price and location to the streets, parks or amenities you may want to be in walking distance to.
The area has almost 3000 homes and condos which are so nicely built and decorated that they take away the heart completely. The sumptuous mansions with lush green area add to the magnificence of this place. The neighborhoods are guard gated round the clock and have small enclaves to make it easy to keep a look at most of houses at one point of time.
Step 3: Look inside the homes and decide which community has the best feel for you.
Owning a place in lovely place like this speaks a lot about your consideration of luxury and amenities. The condos and homos not only have luxury inside but also at outside. Thanks to the wonderful neighborhoods! It may be bearably away from the Las Vegas strip but it has lovable neighborhoods. Things of requirement are available nearby. There are boutique shops, restaurants, fitness facilities and multiplexes for entertainment. The area also has a renowned school which provides quality education. Children of mostly all the residents read and learn at this place only. Number of parks for pedestrian walking, biking trails or jogging along with playground, tennis and basketball cours for sports lover is featured by this community. The winding equipments and green belt area give a feeling of residing completely in lap of nature.
?Pretty much any park located in Seven Hills is fabulous, but I love, love, love Sonata Park. There are about 3 parks that are located closer to where I live in Seven Hills, but I always make the little bit longer trek to Sonata.This park really has everything you could want/need. Great kids playground with all the fixings (slides, monkey bars, tunnels, swings, etc.), tons of covered picnic tables, grills, basketball courts (with lights for night! A+), tennis court, sidewalks that are perfect for walking all around, and a huge field…..
The interiors of the house are unquestionable. Every home or condo has been designed keeping the requirement of the user in mind. This way the developers have kept proper care that each home proves to be the epitome of comfort and quality. The neighborhoods are absolutely commendable and incomparable. The incredible views of this place and outdoor family living are two impeccable and praise worthy factors of this community.
Finally: Make Your Offer and Put Your Seven Hills Home in Escrow.
It can be said that this location takes luxury to a brand new level as it brings together all the amenities for providing an enviable lifestyle.
Residents of this fine community enjoy rich ammenities to include four large parks, tennis, volleyball and basketball courts and soccer fields. Endless scenic miles of running and bike paths to suit any outdoor lovers appetite with breathtaking views of the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding mountains.


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Join Hunt's Photo Education for a photo walk in Harvard Square. During the walk, we will discuss Subject Development, Image Composition, Exposure, Black and White Photography, Low Light Photography, and Architectural Photography.
Harvard Square is the historic center of Cambridge. The small, but bustling area is home to Harvard University, eclectic shops, street scenes, and commuters. It is also just a short walk to the Charles River with views of the Boston skyline, sailboats, and more. We will spend the day establishing how to best photograph people and street scenes in lower light environments. This is a walk that will challenge your abilities, but will ultimately be a rewarding experience! We will be focusing on street photography during the day, low-light shooting as we approach dusk, and long exposures in both the civil twilight and at night. Our walk will lead us in and out of Harvard Square.


text:
Innkeeper's Lodge is a UK budget hotel chain owned by Mitchells & Butlers.

Locations
Innkeeper's Lodge has over 40 locations across the UK from Balloch  to Exeter. Some are new  purpose built hotels, others are pubs with rooms and a few are within historic buildings (such as the Hawes Inn). Hotels are always located next to a restaurant which is also owned by Mitchells & Butlers such as Harvester, Toby Carvery & Crown Carveries.

Overview
Most hotels rooms are designed to the same style and all feature en-suite bathrooms. and tea & coffee making facilities.

After mass surveying, in 2004 every hotel room in the company became non-smoking.

In 2012, 52 hotels (mainly purpose built hotels rather than physically joined to or above Inns) were sold off to another budget hotel group Travelodge. This left Innkeepers Lodge with less than half of their original number of hotels left. There remain some joined premises however, such as at Borehamwood where the lobby is shared between both the Toby Carvery and Travelodge. As a result, the Toby Inn website for this branch retains a page called 'Hotel Rooms' which is a simple link to Travelodge, whereas the Travelodge website claims this hotel does not offer a cooked breakfast - true, in a strict sense, whereas of course the Toby Inn puts a special buffet breakfast on every morning from 8am for hotel guests (who do not even have to leave the building) and the general public.

References

External links
 Official Website

Hotel chains in the United Kingdom
Mitchells & Butlers

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
<?php

namespace Http\Discovery;

use Http\Discovery\Exception\ClassInstantiationFailedException;
use Http\Discovery\Exception\DiscoveryFailedException;
use Http\Discovery\Exception\StrategyUnavailableException;

/**
 * Registry that based find results on class existence.
 *
 * @author David de Boer <david@ddeboer.nl>
 * @author Márk Sági-Kazár <mark.sagikazar@gmail.com>
 * @author Tobias Nyholm <tobias.nyholm@gmail.com>
 */
abstract class ClassDiscovery
{
    /**
     * A list of strategies to find classes.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    private static $strategies = [
        Strategy\PuliBetaStrategy::class,
        Strategy\CommonClassesStrategy::class,
    ];

    /**
     * Discovery cache to make the second time we use discovery faster.
     *
     * @var array
     */
    private static $cache = [];

    /**
     * Finds a class.
     *
     * @param string $type
     *
     * @return string|\Closure
     *
     * @throws DiscoveryFailedException
     */
    protected static function findOneByType($type)
    {
        // Look in the cache
        if (null !== ($class = self::getFromCache($type))) {
            return $class;
        }

        $exceptions = [];
        foreach (self::$strategies as $strategy) {
            try {
                $candidates = call_user_func($strategy.'::getCandidates', $type);
            } catch (StrategyUnavailableException $e) {
                $exceptions[] = $e;
                continue;
            }

            foreach ($candidates as $candidate) {
                if (isset($candidate['condition'])) {
                    if (!self::evaluateCondition($candidate['condition'])) {
                        continue;
                    }
                }

                // save the result for later use
                self::storeInCache($type, $candidate);

                return $candidate['class'];
            }
        }

        throw new DiscoveryFailedException('Could not find resource using any discovery strategy', $exceptions);
    }

    /**
     * Get a value from cache.
     *
     * @param string $type
     *
     * @return string|null
     */
    private static function getFromCache($type)
    {
        if (!isset(self::$cache[$type])) {
            return;
        }

        $candidate = self::$cache[$type];
        if (isset($candidate['condition'])) {
            if (!self::evaluateCondition($candidate['condition'])) {
                return;
            }
        }

        return $candidate['class'];
    }

    /**
     * Store a value in cache.
     *
     * @param string $type
     * @param string $class
     */
    private static function storeInCache($type, $class)
    {
        self::$cache[$type] = $class;
    }

    /**
     * Set new strategies and clear the cache.
     *
     * @param array $strategies string array of fully qualified class name to a DiscoveryStrategy
     */
    public static function setStrategies(array $strategies)
    {
        self::$strategies = $strategies;
        self::clearCache();
    }

    /**
     * Append a strategy at the end of the strategy queue.
     *
     * @param string $strategy Fully qualified class name to a DiscoveryStrategy
     */
    public static function appendStrategy($strategy)
    {
        self::$strategies[] = $strategy;
        self::clearCache();
    }

    /**
     * Prepend a strategy at the beginning of the strategy queue.
     *
     * @param string $strategy Fully qualified class name to a DiscoveryStrategy
     */
    public static function prependStrategy($strategy)
    {
        array_unshift(self::$strategies, $strategy);
        self::clearCache();
    }

    /**
     * Clear the cache.
     */
    public static function clearCache()
    {
        self::$cache = [];
    }

    /**
     * Evaulates conditions to boolean.
     *
     * @param mixed $condition
     *
     * @return bool
     */
    protected static function evaluateCondition($condition)
    {
        if (is_string($condition)) {
            // Should be extended for functions, extensions???
            return class_exists($condition);
        } elseif (is_callable($condition)) {
            return $condition();
        } elseif (is_bool($condition)) {
            return $condition;
        } elseif (is_array($condition)) {
            $evaluatedCondition = true;

            // Immediately stop execution if the condition is false
            for ($i = 0; $i < count($condition) && false !== $evaluatedCondition; ++$i) {
                $evaluatedCondition &= static::evaluateCondition($condition[$i]);
            }

            return $evaluatedCondition;
        }

        return false;
    }

    /**
     * Get an instance of the $class.
     *
     * @param string|\Closure $class A FQCN of a class or a closure that instantiate the class.
     *
     * @return object
     *
     * @throws ClassInstantiationFailedException
     */
    protected static function instantiateClass($class)
    {
        try {
            if (is_string($class)) {
                return new $class();
            }

            if (is_callable($class)) {
                return $class();
            }
        } catch (\Exception $e) {
            throw new ClassInstantiationFailedException('Unexcepced exception when instantiating class.', 0, $e);
        }

        throw new ClassInstantiationFailedException('Could not instantiate class because parameter is neither a callable nor a string');
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Black Kentuckians, Tennesseans celebrate emancipation with Eighth of August events
WEKU | By Derek Operle
Published August 8, 2022 at 6:39 PM EDT
Derek Operle
WKMS
For many Black Kentuckians and Tennesseans, the Eighth of August is a special day – a time for barbecue, reuniting with loved ones and marking their freedom from slavery. These annual celebrations are in the same spirit as Juneteenth, but their roots predate those of the now national holiday.
There's an over 150-year history of Black communities – including those in Paducah, Hopkinsville and Russellville in Kentucky and Clarksville and Knoxville in Tennessee, among others – celebrating on the Eighth of August. Many take the late summer day to mark their freedom with homecomings, historical remembrances and usually a good party.
Marvin Nunn, the president of the W.C. Young Community Center in Paducah, is one of the lead organizers for Paducah's Eighth of August celebration. He's been celebrating the occasion for all of his life and he treasures his memories of the Eighth of August growing up.
"[Thousands of people] used to come to Paducah for the Eighth of August and the big celebrations and people from all over – St. Louis, Louisville, Chicago – had parties. It'd be an all day thing," the 70-year-old west Kentucky native said. "People barbecued and had family reunions, the park would be full of people and we'd have a legendary Eighth of August dance, where everybody dresses up real nice. You'd go to the dance and you'd see old friends, middle school friends, elementary friends. It's just a beautiful occasion."
Nunn hasn't tried to change things now that he's one of the annual celebration's planners. This year's events – which concluded earlier Monday with a traditional emancipation breakfast – included a parade, a dance, a basketball clinic, a gospel concert, a fashion show and a block party, among other things.
Nunn's family moved from Paducah to Detroit when he was a kid, but he always used to come home for the Eighth.
"Matter of fact, the only time I've missed an Eighth of August celebration, that's when I was in the military and overseas," Nunn said. "And I was depressed because I couldn't make it to Paducah for the Eighth of August. I've always done it."
Even now in towns across Kentucky and Tennessee, many Black families, schools and churches host reunions and homecomings on the Eighth of August.
All of these festivities are aimed at fostering community and commemorating when freedom first came to slaves in parts of the region.
According to the Beck Cultural Exchange Center – a Knoxville, Tennessee-based nonprofit that works to preserve and teach Black history – future U.S. president Andrew Johnson freed his own slaves in Tennessee on August 8, 1863.
Johnson, then military governor of the state, did this because the Emancipation Proclamation earlier that year didn't include Tennessee, which was then under Union control. Kentucky wasn't included because it was a neutral border state in the Civil War. All of the slaves in Tennessee would be freed by Johnson in October 1864 and slavery remained legal in Kentucky until federal law forced the state's hand to abolish it in December 1865.
When the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – which ended slavery – went to the states to be ratified, Kentucky didn't ratify it. The state waited over 100 years to symbolically ratify it in 1976.
William Isom is the director of Black in Appalachia, a nonprofit that documents African American contributions to the Mountain South. He says one of those slaves, Samuel Johnson, organized the first Eighth of August celebration on August 8, 1871 in Greenville, Tennessee.
"It was a parade with Andrew Johnson in attendance and some other elected officials and Samuel Johnson," Isom said. "In several newspaper accounts in east Tennessee, he's credited with being the one that spread the Eighth of August as Emancipation Day."
Though this is the most historically supported origin of the tradition, there have been others connected to it over the years. A historical marker in downtown Paducah says the day was "chosen because it was when slaves in Santo Domingo (Haiti) earned their freedom." Some say it's when western Kentucky residents got news of the Emancipation Proclamation, though historians say neither narrative is supported by evidence.
How the tradition continues
Other Eighth of August celebrations started happening in communities across the region throughout the late 1800s. Historians like Isom and Alicestyne Turley – the director of the Freedom Stories Project, which focuses on African American and Appalachian history – think the tradition likely spread as Black Appalachians moved out across the region seeking a better life and fleeing racial persecution during the Reconstruction era.
"There was a whole hearted effort to run them out of the mountains. Many of them leave the mountains and come over here to western Kentucky on the river. People literally by community are leaving the mountains looking for work. Many of them come over and work on the river, work on the docks," Turley said during a talk in Paducah as part of this year's celebration. "I think if you look at the exodus or the expulsion of African Americans from Appalachia, you'll be able to draw pretty much a straight line."
Isom says at one point there were communities in 12 states celebrating the tradition. Another historian – Michael Morrow, the curator of the SEEK (Struggles for Emancipation and Equality in Kentucky) Museum in Russellville – agrees with Isom and Turley about the way the tradition spread. He also says there are historical records showing widespread celebrations in the state, though it's faded in many places.
"I've done research on it and I can tell you 150 communities in Kentucky that used to have it that don't have it now," he said.
Though some places have stopped celebrating the Eighth of August, most everywhere has started celebrating Juneteenth since it was elevated to a federal holiday. But that hasn't hurt the celebrations in the region; many communities that do celebrate the Eighth of August just mark both occasions now.
"All we've done different this year is celebrate Juneteenth, too," Morrow added. "You're not going to take away from the freedom [by celebrating both], we're just gonna add to it. It's just another day to celebrate: the day that the Lord saw fit to set millions of people free."
West Kentucky native Ronda Smith grew up celebrating the Eighth of August. Though Juneteenth is now nationally recognized, she wasn't really familiar with the Texan tradition turned federal holiday until pretty recently.
"I'm 64. I was 63 when I first celebrated Juneteenth, and I wouldn't have done it then if my daughter wasn't cooking fish. I wouldn't have got up and went," she said with a laugh.
Juneteenth and the Eighth of August aren't the only widespread celebrations of Black freedom in America. Many Black Americans also mark January 1 as the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, although there are also regional celebrations on varying dates of historical significance in Washington D.C., Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi and Virginia.
Though some say these regional celebrations have gotten smaller over the decades, many are still going strong and organizers hope they'll be planning events like the Eighth of August for decades to come. No matter what the date, historian William Isom says celebrations of emancipation help people to recognize progress, even if there's still a long way to go.
"People have been celebrating Emancipation through Reconstruction, through Jim Crow, through the Red Summer, seasons of racial atrocities, and even today with the spate of rampant police violence and murder against Black folks in America," Isom said. "People continue to celebrate the hope of freedom, regardless of the current conditions, and I think that that's really important. It's like a reminder of where people came from, and how far we have come as a nation."
See stories by Derek Operle

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The Indian summer is finally over, beaten into submission by biblical rain and thuggish chilly winds.
We can finally say with conviction that our polo shirts, linen blazers, and unflattering shorts are to be consigned to do battle with the moths; our sunglasses will collect dust on the mantelpiece and our dazzling espadrilles rested to fight another hot day. Sadly Pimm's will not be drunk until we next hear leather on willow.
Some will hunker down, depressed because it is going to get cold! But I find autumn most agreeable. I may be a great patron of the summer season and all the frivolous joys it brings, but the autumn brings delicious solemnity, erudition, and more interesting gentleman's fashion.
I always choose to wear a shirt even when temperature and the situation dictate the contrary. In winter a shirt becomes functional, the sleeves leaving the wearer as snug as a bug. Twinned with any decent woolen V-neck jumper – and I don't mean ghastly ironic knitwear – it most certainly puts the smart into casual.
The sartorial choice for formal occasions is much simpler in autumn and winter; a classic grey suit, perhaps three piece, will be enlivened by a paisley pocket square. Much more photogenic than a gaudy summer blue!
Given my predilection for coloured chinos, you can only imagine my delight at the first tumble of an auburn leaf – I recently acquired a pair of racing green delights and I'm keeping my eyes sharply peeled for a pair of mustards, hopefully in time for the 'Tingle Creek' Chase at Sandown in December.
Icy winds that skate on the Thames bring scarves into play. I rely on simple, mainly monochrome, timeless woolen jobs (though every collection must include a tartan and the ever elegant paisley silk).
Hats obviously now become vital. They attract fewer incredulous stares because they now have a real function – what a joy it is to be hidden from rain under a wide brimmed fedora, whilst others flail under cheap plastic brollies. I need no invitation to slap a flat cap onto my bonce.
Winter jackets are the clothing royalty for this time of year; urbane grey overcoats and dusty Barbour jackets join the rotation, keeping the gent both warm and devilishly debonair. There is also an allocation of 10 days when it is acceptable for us to tart around in our Burberry Mac. Overcoats entomb solid blazers and wild waistcoats.
The only stone in the snow is what happens to my vast array of suede shoes. I shall never forget what happened to a particular favourite pair of chukka boots – they ended up with unsightly white marks, like the saddle sweat of a race horse. I find penny loafers chill the toe and soak the sock, whilst coloured brogues look incongruous without their respective suits. This year my quest for winter shoes leads me to either a chelsea boot or a tan oxford. I wish myself luck!
So, I do not share the collective frown brought on by the weather forecasters. Content from head to toe, I shall yank my collar up high and pull my brim down low. I will pop a jacket potato in the oven and stroll along the river to Barnes. Feeling warm, I may well then indulge in another winter treat – a pint of majestic British ale…or perhaps two.


With the help rising digitisation in the modern era, the travel industry in India has developed and moulded itself to a better one. Today, right from selecting the place one wants to travel to the booking of the tickets, every activity takes place online. When we plan a holiday, it is apparent that we try to explore places on the internet, look for affordable holiday packages and then book our tickets online. Thus, in order to capture market, the industry definitely requires adapting digital marketing strategies for the growth of their companies. This quick guide will help you identify popular marketing strategies you must inculcate to make your campaigns a successful one.
While content marketing is a popularly known strategy, yet it is repeated here in the first place. Content will help you create your credibility in the online market. It is the only form of communication that will help you connect with potential clients. Your content marketing strategy should be a blend of writing content for your website, speak about your services, create a blog, do guest blogging and develop social media postings.
Buyer persona is essential part of marketing. Without a buyer persona all marketing activities are pointless as the brand does not know who their customer are and what they are looking at and also their pain points. Creating a buyer persona helps brand to know their ideal customer and tailor marketing strategies around him leading to high conversion rates and relevancy.
Media consumption habits: What do they watch, read or listen to?
Product purchasing habits: How frequently do they buy a holiday or how often do they travel?
Social media postings should be a blend of promotions and engagement creation. One can follow an 80/20 approach where 20% of your social media efforts go towards promoting your business and the rest on delivering value to the users. Consistently posting on social media, spreading a word about the latest offers and deals as well as helping users with their plans are some of the efforts one needs to put in.
People generally take decisions based on reviews present online. Thus, getting yourself listed and generating positive reviews from your old clients is an added strategy to follow.
When a person looks up for a travelling plan online, be it on Google or through social media, you need to make sure you don't let bounced traffic escape. Instead we can re target that traffic through tools on both Facebook and Google which involves putting up a script of code on our site. This helps to capture the customer that left us in "awareness" stage of buying process to further catch his attention at "Intent" stage and influence him to make purchase.
Despite an in-depth focus on SEO, one may take a long time to appear in the top results. However, investing in Google Ad Words helps you instantly appear to the top. Additionally, the top ads on search engines place you in front of customer instantly and can also help you know which keyword and ad is working and what packages are in demand. Analytics can further help you with your business strategy. Thus, focusing on Google Ad Words along with SEO is vital.
Content being the dominant player in digital marketing, you should be well equipped with techniques on how to play well with words. Right from SEO to Social media, Google Ads and building network on other websites, one needs to add up everything in their marketing strategy to achieve success.


Assos is proud to offer the acclaimed Men's T.Equipe S7 Cycling Bib Shorts in a bold USA Cycling version so you can display your passion. The Assos Men's T.Equipe S7 USA Cycling Bib Shorts comes in the Assos racingFit and employs their aeroPatterningFenomeno1 design, utilizing Assos' garment insights to accelerate your ride by reducing fatigue and minimizing drag. The benefits in velocity are clear at once to the rider. Equally significant is the caliber of the all round feel and durability. In combination they make the T.Equipe S7 USA Bib more than a match for international cycling. With the stark USA lettering calling out your allegiance, these cycling shorts deliver a strong message - if anyone can keep up.