Random Stuff, 22 April 2023

A little housekeeping note and some brief thoughts about a few things going on in the world at large and on Substack . . .

Greetings and salutations, my fellow inmates of this crazy clownworld asylum! Just dropping into your email inbox (or substack feed) with a little housekeeping note and some brief thoughts about a few things going on in the world at large and on Substack. We’ll talk about RFK, Jr. running for President, the beer-front in the culture wars, Substack’s new Notes feature, and more . . .

Random Stuff . . . (Photo by Lucas Santos on Unsplash)

First, Some Quick Housekeeping …

As some of you may have noticed, I turned on paid subscriptions. Most new posts will still be free, and anyone

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can comment on those posts, regardless of subscriber status; but I did put some of my archives behind a paywall and will probably do an occasional post just for paying subscribers.

Also, I created a new section on this substack called “Randomness.” (It’s the section in which the post you’re currenly reading resides.) To paraphrase the great Borscht-belt comedian Myron Cohen,

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Everything gotta be someplace! So if it doesn’t fit anywhere else, then into the “Randomness” section it will go.

And on the subject of substack sections, you can subscribe to or unsubscribe from them individually. Most of you already know how this works, but in case you don’t, here’s how you do it:

1. While on the substack in question, click on your own avatar in the upper-right corner, and in the drop-down menu select “Manage Subscription;”

2. Scroll down the page to the “Notifications” section, which contains a breakdown of different sections on the substack; and

3. Use the switch to the right of each section to turn on or off notifications for that section.

I know that on this substack I flout the conventional wisdom that says you should narrow the focus of your content to an easily definable niche. I do not do “niche.” The right-hemisphere of my brain cannot stand narrow niches. I must generalize, explore widely, and contemplate the possible links among my varied interests. I like individual trees, but I really prefer seeing the forests as a whole.

Most of you are similar in that way, though your own interests undoubtedly do not overlap precisely with my own, so if there’s a section of my substack that doesn’t appeal to you, there will be no hard feelings from me if you unsubscribe from that section!

And now for the world at large …

RFK is running for President!

I’m interested in seeing what comes of Robert F Kennedy, Jr.’s candidacy to replace Brandon as the Democrat nominee in the 2024 Presidential election. While I don’t agree with RFK, Jr. about everything, I like that he’s heterodox and actually willing to state publicly his views that contradict the regime-approved mainstream narrative.

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All I can say is, God bless you, RFK, Jr! And I truly hope you have an excellent security detail. Because the last time a couple of Kennedys went around talking about how they were going to really do something to address the pathocratic power-brokers pulling the strings on the puppet show that is America’s supposedly democratic process (in particular the banksters and the intelligence services) . . . well, we all know how that worked out.

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And speaking of JFK and his warnings about the dangers of the cloak-and-dagger “security state,” check out this short excerpt from Kennedy’s speech entitled “The President and the Press,” and ask whom these words would best describe today, as well as over the past few years:

(You can listen to the entirety of this speech «here». It’s a great speech, including all the warmth and humorous banter for which JFK was legendary, while also addressing some pointed truths.

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Why “canceling” Bud Light is not hypocritical

I’m sure you’re well aware that the beer cooler at your neighborhood corner store is now the latest front in the omnipresent culture wars, after Bud Light featured trans-influencer Dylan Mulvaney on some of its cans in a recent marketing ploy to appeal to their grown-men-who-cosplay-as-6-year-old-girls customer base. That marketing campaign crashed and burned like the Challenger space shuttle. Budweiser’s sales and stock price plummeted.

At first glance, maybe it seems hypocritical of the Right to try to “cancel” Bud Light over a political disagreement, but I disagree. There are generally two types of cancelation cases in the culture wars:

1. A person who is famous for something unrelated to their political beliefs makes a statement that offends a very small, very aggressive, and very vocal minority that has based its entire group identity around its quasi-religious ideology; and because this group labels any good-faith disagreement with the tenets of its ideology as an attack on the identity of its members, they decry the offending remark as “hate speech” and “literal violence” that threatens the very existence of the group’s members, and so the group tries to get the offending speaker banished from the culture and made unemployable and unmentionable (except as an object of contempt and condemnation); and

2. A large company or organization sponsors a person who is famous only (or primarily) for being part of one of these ideologically-driven groups, and the sponsorship is made with a sloganeering message of some sort paying homage to the ideology; so people who disagree with that ideology refuse to support the company or organization, as doing so now amounts to making a tacit endorsement of such ideology.

These two types of cases are clearly distinguishable, and the case of Bud Light is clearly of the second type. If Dylan Mulvaney wasn’t a tranny at the precise historical moment that the regime is trying to push transgenderism as hard and as fast as it possibly can, you probably wouldn’t even know who he is. There is no talent or achievement that led Budweiser to slap his maniacal face on its cans; it was purely done to signal support of the transgenderist ideology. But as always, the dishonest and dictatorial Left wants to blur these legitimate distinctions and pigeonhole everything into their favorite hardline, black-and-white categories, upon which they can easily heap their usual Pharisaic judgment and demand that everyone turn off their minds and play along. Well, fuck them, and fuck Budweiser.

What’s happening on Substack

As I’m sure many of you are well aware, Substack recently rolled out its Notes feature. It is very much like Twitter, only the folks on Notes are generally much higher-quality thinkers than Twitter’s users. No surprise there. But in case any of you were missing some of the funny parody accounts on Twitter, you’re in luck. There is one hilarious parody account that goes by the name Chandra Hardy, and she is to Substack Notes what Titania McGrath is to Twitter! She is a brilliant caricature of all the looniest left-wing talking points:

I mean, if I was to try to create a parody of Marxcissist insanity, I couldn’t do any better than Chandra Hardy’s account.

1. Anyone can comment . . . anyone, that is, except for one C.W. Spangle, a nazi (not using the term metaphorically) spambot who seems to spend his days trolling substacks for comment sections in which to drop, completely out of context, cut-and-pasted gibberish with links to his own site. Perhaps you’ve seen him, and banned him, from your own substack after he spammed it up worse than the singing vikings in a Monty Python sketch. I’ll allow pretty much anyone in my comment section to have a good-faith conversation, but I will ban spambot trolls who show up to derail conversations, with their virtual fingers jammed into their own virtual ears while they shout their ideological bullet points at everyone, without even bothering to discuss the actual subject of the post they’re commenting on. In that, I think I am consistent with the rationale articulated in Supreme Court cases on the First Amendment, in which the Court distinguishes between (1) restrictions on the content of speech and (2) content-neutral restrictions on the time, place, and manner of speech.

2. Here’s an audio track, Husbands and Wives and Lovers, from Myron Cohen’s Everybody Gotta Be Someplace album, set to start at the story he tells where he drops the famous line:

3. Unlike so many on the Left, who pay lip-service to the ideal of “speaking Truth to Power,” but who, in practice, only ever speak Power to Truth — today’s Left is to the marketplace of ideas what the mafia used to be to free-enterprise, in that they are always ready to make would-be Truth-tellers a “deal you can’t refuse” to give themselves control of everything.

4. Woody Allen once jokingly remarked that he believed the Warren Commission was behind the assassination of JFK. Allen may have been more correct than he realized. With many believing the CIA probably had something to do with the assassination, it’s interesting to note that the CIA had its people on the Warren Commission, and those agents appear to have done their best to keep the official investigation from pursuing certain leads or addressing certain anomalies in the official narrative.

5. For more pointed truths and an excellent big-picture analysis of the power-structure underlying our society, I cannot recommend highly enough

Mark Bisone

's recent essay on the "rise of the puppet empire:"

Strings Attached