Clownworld Craziness

"What Exactly Is a Dream? And What Exactly Is a Joke?"

In a crazy clownworld, it can be hard to tell the difference between real life, a bad dream, and an absurd joke.

“What Exactly Is a Dream? And What Exactly Is a Joke?”

Years before they hit it big with Dark Side of the Moon, there was an entirely different Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett instead of David Gilmour. Imagine if you gave the Jungian Shadows of a 1960s British blues band mega-doses of LSD and a recording studio and then told them to have at it: you would probably wind up with something like their debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn.¹² Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett era was fun while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. After couple of years and one very interesting album, the candle Barrett was burning at both ends burned all the way out. By their second album, Saucerful of Secrets, all the band could get out of Syd was one very weird song: Jugband Blues. The song is a madcap misadventure through and through, enjoyable if you like that sort of thing but frustratingly jarring if you don’t; but the highlight of the song (the last one on the album) is the way that it ends, with Syd slowly strumming an acoustic guitar and plaintively singing the memorable lines: “And what exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke?”

That sentiment — What exactly is a dream? And what exactly is a joke? — really resonated with me, after hearing some of the latest clownworld news stories that just seem far too bizarre to be real. I’ve asked the question before — What does this clownworld mean?³ — and I found myself asking that question again this past week.

Through the Looking Glass (and What Postmodern Man Found There) …

What do you, as a (presumably) sane person, do when you find yourself suddenly on the other side of the Looking Glass? What do you do in a world where Up is Down, Left is Right, and the more obviously insane or dementia-ravaged your brain is, the more power your society seems to give you?

I’ve often wondered if we exist as ideas in the mind of God, but . . . what if the god in whose dream we are living is more like Lewis Carroll’s Red King, than he is like the Almighty of orthodox Judeo-Christian theology?

I know that’s a crazy questions to ask, but . . . we live in an obviously crazy world, which seems to be getting rapidly crazier.

There is a Seinfeld episode where Kramer is terrifically excited about seeing how far the car he is test-driving can go before it runs completely out of gas.⁴ That episode is an apt metaphor for our times: some clown escaped from the circus, kicked the sane and sober adults out of the drivers’ seat, and mashed the accelerator all the way to the floor, without any concern for what will happen after we run out of gas — or crash through the guard rails and fly off a cliff. All of us regular people are just along for the ride, with no idea where it will end or how we will make it back home once everything stops working.

Anyway, with those thoughts in mind, let’s examine some of the crazier clownworld stories⁵ from this past week . . .

Crazy Clownworld Stories from the Past Week

Hunter Brandon’s Legal Dream Nightmare Team

The President’s son, Hunter Brandon, is being prosecuted for various felonies that would land an ordinary citizen in prison for a very long time. Prior to the judge ruling on the sweetheart plea agreement that Joe Brandon’s Department of Injustice was offering to his son (how many January 6th defendants got offered a deal like that?), a member of Hunter’s legal team apparently called the court and pretended to work for House Republicans in order to get documents, which House Republicans had submitted in support of their amicus brief in the case, removed from the docket.

The lawyer in question, Jessica L. Bengels, is the director of litigation services for Latham & Watkins, LLP, so we’re not talking about some wannabe, low-budget defense attorney, like Vincent Gambini from My Cousin Vinny⁶; this is one of the world’s biggest and most premier white-shoe law firms. And Ms. Bengels isn’t some paralegal they just hired off the street, either; she’s apparently a senior partner with lots of lawyers working under her.

Now, let me repeat what Ms. Bengels — who, as a licensed attorney, is an officer of the court — is alleged to have done: she reportedly called the court, falsely represented herself as working with an opposing party, and requested that the court remove documents from its docket that were damaging to her client.

You cannot even make this stuff up. It’s too crazy. Yet it happened.

This reminds me of something

Chris Bray

warned us about in his incredibly prescient post Grey Gardens Nation, in which he discussed the shenanigans happening at Yale Law School and what that portends for the nation’s future. That post is well worth rereading in light of Ms. Bengel’s (alleged) unprofessional mischief this past week:

Grey Gardens Nation

The “Dementiacrats”

Our “elected” officials are too old to govern, and with each passing week, it gets increasingly difficult to pretend that they are actually in charge of anything. These Dementiacrats⁷ are clearly puppets, well past their prime (such as their primes ever were), and now they are incapable even of being puppets. Thus, the wizards are having to step out from behind their curtain and actively intervene to keep the puppetshow going.

Below are clips of separate incidents, one involving Senator Mitch McConnell and the other involving Senator Dianne Feinstein. “Manchurian Mitch” froze up at at press conference and, after a long and very uncomfortable silence, had to be led off camera by staffers. “Dirty Diana” Feinswine got confused during a vote and had to be instructed, audibly, to “just say ‘aye.’”

There are only 100 people, out of a nation of 335 million, who get to be Senators at any given time, and only one person who gets to be President. Yet an incredible number of the people pretending to fill these roles are obviously brain damaged and completely unable to perform the most basic duties of their office without obvious assistance from . . . whom, exactly? Who is telling McConnell what to say in his press conferences? Who is telling Feinstein which way to vote on each bill? Certainly, nobody that any of us have ever voted for. Who are these unelected puppetmasters?

Strings Attached

Is this the kind of “democracy” that our Globohomo American Empire has been trying to export to the rest of the world over the past several decades, via color revolutions and military interventionism, at tremendous expense to the American people and at the cost of thousands of dead troops?

As

John Carter

observed, the rust on the iron Pentagon is getting impossible to ignore.

Rust on the Iron Pentagon

Regarding Mitch McConnell, my own take is that his mind is getting too enfeebled to remember all the lies he’s supposed to recite, and that he froze up because he was terrified that he might slip up and say something true that could embarrass his globalist puppetmasters. In an empire of lies, Truth is treason. To avoid this risk, McConnell chose instead to stare at the camera like a deer caught in headlights and to say nothing at all.

Teenage Girlboss Instagram Ho Greg Casar Supports the Current Thing

Then there’s the phenomenon of third-rate B-movie actors cosplaying as public officials in this clownworld country. This past week, Texas Rep Greg Casar went on an eight-hour thirst and hunger strike to protest the State of Texas supposedly banning construction workers from drinking water on the job. Or something. (

Chris Bray

had an excellent post celebrating this “bravest moment in human history.”)

The Bravest Moment in Human History

I was inspired by the Texas Congressman’s stunning and brave publicity stunt — I mean, heartfelt and completely self-sacrificing act of solidarity with Texas construction workers. So inspired was I, in fact, that I did my own eight-hour hunger strike while I slept. From the time I drank my final glass of water last night, until the moment I took my first sip of coffee this morning, I allowed neither food nor water to pass my lips, all to raise awareness for the cause. Which cause? Well, whatever cause will give me the most brownie points with all those Marxcissist midwits on Reddit. Whatever the current thing is, I fully support it! And I will selflessly deny myself the enjoyment of food and drink each night, during the hours that I am asleep, until more people become aware of the current thing, whatever it is.

These virtue-signaling publicity stunts are all so tiresome and unimaginative. I know there’s nothing new about this. John Lennon famously protested the Vietnam War by staying in a soft bed at a luxury hotel while servants attended to his every need and the hotel’s maids cleaned up after him; and yes, that publicity stunt was every bit as retarded as Greg Casar’s — but there is a crucial difference. You could look past Lennon’s idiotic activism and still appreciate his contributions to popular culture because the dude made some really amazing music. With the exception of his stoned-out hippy acolytes, people loved John Lennon in spite of his buffoonish virtue signaling, not because of it. But with todays’ Marxcissist morons, they have nothing to offer besides the virtue signaling. It’s not like Greg Casar has this incredible track record of drafting and proposing important legislation that gets passed and then immediately and obviously makes the federal government work vastly better. As far as I can tell, Casar, like his ideological mentor AOC, has made a career out of uttering moronic platitudes and grandstanding about them in very visible ways on social media (all while conscientiously avoiding anything that might actually challenge the real power structure of Globohomo Bankster Capital). He’s no different than all the other teenage girls posting their duck-lipped selfies on Instagram and hashtagging them with the phrase of the day, except that as a Congressman, Casar gets paid a six-figure salary by the government to do it.

Back in the Real World

Meanwhile, in the real world, complex systems are breaking down due to incompetence and neglect. Undeterred by any warning signs from the meatspace of tangible goods and services, The United States of Enron’s ruling class keeps releasing economic data that is every bit as fake as the bankster schemes comprising most of the paper-thin profits in the FIRE-sale (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) economy. The Uniparty keeps poking the Russian Bear, as if eager to find out how their Marxcissist military will do in a nuclear war. And as the late-stage bureacracy’s⁸ collapse phase accelerates, our civilization is being run by brain-dead puppets and B-movie actors, who say and do things so stupid that you can hardly believe it’s real.

So I end with the questions I asked earlier. What does this crazy clownworld mean? Why does it feel like we are living in a mashup of the movies Brazil⁹, Dark City¹⁰, and The Wizard of Oz? Who is the man behind the curtain, and what are his plans for us?¹¹ Or as Syd Barrett sang, “What exactly is a dream, and what exactly is a joke?”

1.

Mark Bisone

writes an excellent Substack called

The Cat Was Never Found

. While writing the introductory paragraph referencing Syd Barrett, it hit me that Barrett did find the cat, and he even wrote a song about it: Lucifer Sam. And what did finding the cat do to him? Complete mental breakdown. After washing out musically, Barrett ended up living in self-imposed exile in a shed in his mother’s garden, refusing all visitors, and completely unable to function in human society. The Sex Pistols tried to visit him sometime in the late 70s, but even they were too sane and conventional-minded for Barrett to tolerate. The story of Syd Barrett reminds me of the passage in the Gospels where Jesus is confronted by the demon-possessed man living like a rabid dog in a graveyard. If only Barrett had encountered someone like Jesus to free his mind and give him another chance at life. There seems to be an important lesson in all this: be careful what you go looking for, because you just might find it. Those old “superstitious” stories about demonic powers may be referring to something very real and potentially very dangerous. The song Syd Barrett wrote about the cat he found is embedded below:

2. Or you might also wind up with The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request.

3. What does this clownworld mean?

4. Clips from the very funny Seinfeld episode where Kramer test-drives a car and pushes the gas gauge to the limit:

5. For a fun, lighthearted, and humorous take on these clownworld events, check out this week’s podcast episode, Crazy Clownworld Fun, at: https://aghostinthemachine.substack.com/p/crazy-clownworld-fun

6. Embedded below is a video of Joe Pesci as unlicensed attorney Vincent Gambino in one of the all-time greatest legal dramas ever: My Cousin Vinny!

7. In another comment thread,

daiva

, who has the world’s best profile picture, referred to me (tongue-in-cheek?) as an “accomplished wordsmith,” so I thought I would be able to boast of another neologism, “Dementiacrats,” which does have a nice ring to it — but alas and alack, a “DuckDuckGo” search reveals that the term is already in use. Looks like I’m still a one-hit-wonder in the wordsmithing department!

8.

Grant Smith

coined one of the best terms I’ve heard for America’s ossified and corrupt institutions: “Late-Stage Bureaucracy.” His essay about this phase of our civilization’s decline is spot on:

Late Stage Bureaucracy

9. Here’s a clip from the Terry Gilliams’s movie Brazil, which perfectly captures the bizarre blend of buffoonery and psychopathy that characterizes our clownworld regime:

10. A very interesting and insightful analysis of the movie Dark City (essentially The Matrix 1.0) by Howdie Mickoski:

11. Here’s one possible explanation for the nightmarish insanity of our crazy clownworld: