Irony of the Year: you can get free speech, but in 2024, it’s only available in a banded pack offer with corruption and frustration

It’s the now familiar New-look Slog farrago of coping stuff, divinity, meditation and fifty shades of fun in today’s post, featuring Black Hawk depravity in North Carolina, everything from Netanyahu and Tehran imperialism to AI that 99 per cent of us don’t want, serial fraud Bob Woodward, the Kafka-Orwell blueprint, and the cost of ‘free’ speech in this 21st Century real life of No Liberty without Monumental SNAFU. It’s eclectic, it’s frenetic, hectic and at times splenetic, but guaranteed free from anything dialectic. Dive in and feel refreshed

To your left here is President Barrow of The Gambia. Much as The Gambia is by far the most peaceful and safe African country I’ve visited during twenty-five years of travel and safari, permanent residence on the Dark Continent is not for the faint-hearted. Too much of daily life is frustration with a capital F that also stands for, “Fuck it, I truly cannot believe this is happening/not happening/taking so long”. He isn’t the sharpest card in the pack.

The cause as of frustration isn’t always incomptence and corruption at government levels, but Barrow’s occupancy of the Presidential Palace doesn’t help.

Even without his dormant presence howevr, there is equally a level of almost parasitic mendacity the moment one wants to find a business partner, or make a charitable donation without being sucked into a vortex of increasingly selfish demands made against a background of cultural auto-dependency.

My favourite delightful double-think in this area arose from the need to get a document officially stamped some time ago. I asked the bureaucrat involved if there would be a charge for the stamping thing, and he replied, “Well, obviously I cannot take bribes, but if you wish to pay me I am allowed to accept your money”.

Here in the Gambia, nobody can obtain any of the following in the form of a plastic card at the moment: a residency card, a driving licence, an ID card or a proof of licence to sell alcohol. The problem is that the Barrow Government (President Barrow is our version of Joe Biden, but without the IQ) fell into dispute with the private outfit printing the cards, and abruptly fired them….before ensuring access to another source of supply.

This ability to act with firmness and zero allowance for the consequences is not, of course, restricted to Africa: the US State Department, NATO and Keir Starmer operate on the same principle pretty much all the time. It’s part of a truism going back to Mesopotamian times that observes, “The easiest generosity in the world is being bountiful with someone else’s money”.

But among African politicians, bureaucrats, distributors and professionals, lazy thinking and lousy ethics have been turned into something approaching a master class of chaotic inefficiency.

To the more or less global citizen experience in the 21^st century of dealing with arrogant banks, mad Wokeys, Big Pharma monopolism and myriad constructs prefixed by the word ‘World’, Africa adds surly service, incompetent artisanship, blame transference and remorseless dishonesty.

However, for a white man like me, it’s a vast improvement on living in the EU. Which is, let’s face it, an appalling verdict on This Great Project of Ours. And for me, Gambia has the potential to become of beacon of tolerant social interaction to perhaps one day set the standard that other Third World nations ought to aspire to.

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But the tooth-grinding nature of life as a member of Homo sapiens on Planet Earth is a more invasive irritant in 2024 than it was in [for example] 1492….when one lived a much briefer life, but could evade over 90% of any and all Government attempts to generally boss you around or put you into a spurious sin-bin.

The first author to really get to grips with the issue of above-the-law Government was Franz Kafka – who, by writing the novel The Trial during 1915 (the story of a man being prosecuted for crimes against the State but being denied the right to know what the crimes were) spawned the adjective kafkaesque to describe the Secret State. It is horribly ironic that Franz died before anyone would publish his novel, which didn’t appear until 1925….by which time, of course, Stalin was already starting work on the construction of his Gulag State and its eighteen million mysterious arrests.

In 1948 [the year of my birth, as it happens] George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty Four about a citizen – employed by a totalitarian State at the so-called Ministry of Truth – called Winston Smith. Smith’s job is to examine articles from the past, look for facts that prove the regime is lying in the present – and then process the piece to be ‘disappeared’ along with the author. This book in turn spawned the adjective orwellian. There is – alongside a tragic love story in the mix – the appearance in the novel of Room 101, where Smith is himself tortured and then ordered to see four fingers when only two are being displayed by his interrogator….for only when he submits to this lie “will he be cured”.

The two novels are seminal studies in torment. But as the first quartile of our century draws to close, two genuine Truths need to be taken on board:

1. We are all at the mercy of fabulously monied power-junkies who would regard the two novels not as a warning, but rather as a blueprint for the construction of irreversible dystopia.

2. Awareness of Kafka and Orwell is negligible, primarily as a result of politicised education that in and of itself peddles pc and wokeism as the only right answer.

Although my younger daughter studied modern literature at University, over a pizza lunch with her and several fellow students in her final year, it became clear that neither of the novels I’m describing here was ‘on the syllabus’.

A bright and University educated family relative I have by marriage rather than blood is fond of saying things like “You can’t say that sort of thing these days” or “I can’t believe you just said that”. This depresses me more than I can fully describe.

At a Party some twenty years ago, a voluble collection of Oxbridge students were giving forth on Britain’s “obsession with history”. “Ah but you see,” I ventured wickedly, “that’s the thing with history….it’s a thing of the past”.

I was feted for the remark – purely because they thought I was being serious. The wit went 40,000 feet over their heads.

A dark corner of me wanted to strangle them.

I plead guilty to being a Baby-Boomer. If such is a crime, I relish the guilt: but to complete the circle here – despite the downsides of African culture – I will probably die in The Gambia because here, life is still real: I am free to say what the fuck I like, and yet be pretty certain that no plonker is going to look horrified or slag me off as a Thought Criminal.

That above all is the saving grace of life here.

But as a white First World westerner, the way of life can evoke intense annoyance at times.

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The above is my segue into how I relish the good, and cope with the bad.

I’ve had quite a number of messages, emails and even phone calls about recent Slogposts referring to the style of meditation I use. Originally based on my experiences while undergoing Cognitive Behaviour Therapy [CBT] during the late 1980s, I’ve since developed it much further with “order of play” and metaphysical elements that suit me personally…although of course, this isn’t ‘one size fits all’ stuff: it remains another of those tantalising contradictions that – when it comes to being a Life-form of matter – we are all connected but also all unique.

That said, I think many people might well benefit from a step-by-step guide, so herewith…

You can do this anywhere once you get the hang of it, but at first [and for best results] the main requirements are a darkened room, minimal outside noise and a bed to lie on. Put your head between two pillows such that the fit feels snug and you are looking at the ceiling, and start with your eyes open. The first task is to establish for yourself what you’re about to do – some people do this via silent thought, and others use a whisper. I tend to do it out loud, saying:

“The point of this exercise is to declutter my mind and reach a state where I can ‘Be’ in the timeless reality of ‘Now’. I accept that the past has gone and cannot be regained, while the future is unknown and cannot be ordained. I have five senses to help me tune into Now, and I use these in this moment to in turn prove that I can see, hear, smell, taste and touch Now, ergo it is real”

Now close your eyes, but visualise the body-parts relaxation process as you think/whisper/speak:

“I begin the process of Letting Go with the top of my head, the nape of my neck, the temples on each side of my head, and the forehead, cheeks, jaw, mouth and chin that make up my face.

I relax the neck and my shoulders, the biceps down to the elbows, the forearms to the wrists followed by hands and fingers.

I let go of tension in the shoulder-blades, upper back, spine, buttocks, thighs, knees, calves, ankles feet and toes”.

You will feel thought-clutter popping into your mind from time to time; this is entirely normal and should not be treated as a source of irritation. Simply dismiss the thought and confirm to yourself that you have begun the process of focussing on Now.

Repeat the Letting Go process if you feel the need so to do.

At this point, let your breathing become conscious rather than autonomic. That I to say, inhale deeply through the nose and lengthen the inhalation as much as possible. Hold the breath for a few seconds, and then exhale through the mouth – visualising as you do so the breath bathing all the body parts you have been relaxing in a deeper form of tranquility…..picture the exhaled breath smoothing out any last remaining elements of tightness, tension and ‘grip’. At first you may need five or six inhale/exhale actions to achieve this, but with practice most people can achieve the desired effect with two or three breaths. You are Letting Go.

Continue trying to keep your mind devoid of anything beyond the What Is of Now. You will find that your sense of having an individual body begins to blur, and your limbs feel slightly anaesthetised, perhaps even weightless. Now say to yourself or out loud:

“All living matter is connected, and I am entering the Community of Souls. I have the feeling of floating, and I am happy with this. I am leaving my Mass of clutter behind and replacing it with something spiritual and eternal. The more I embrace this sense of physical anaesthesia and weightless spirituality, the more I feel able to simply Be as a welcome guest in Now”

Visualise all the millions of other beings on Earth and elsewhere joining in with your bold effort to become a fully paid up member of the Eternity Awareness Congregation. Feel yourself smiling internally with contentment.

If you feel the need to, employ more conscious breathing, with your mind fixed on being rather than calculating, guessing, judging, regretting, fearing and obsessing.

When you’re ready, reopen your eyes and take in your immediate space. You will probably do a cat-stretch almost involuntarily. It is the reaction of your psyche to being – at last – put back on an even keel.

Slowly rise from your bed and recognise that you just sprayed WD40 into the lock on eternity’s door. Such a realisation is the antithesis of being smug and blind. If you persevere, it can refresh your stoicism in every circumstance.

All my life, I have been plagued by self-esteem doubts, obsession, impatience and a tendency to wallow in frustration. Meditation hasn’t banished these features [actually, at times in life they can be central to achievement] but it has certainly made me a far more tolerable friend for people to be with, an infinitely better father, a more skilled musician and a bloke with the energy to keep going.

We are, all of us, hopelessly imperfect. It is in some ways our job in this life to rein in the Godless who are convinced of their own perfection. They are the demagogues with aspirations to become Demigods crushing our souls. We will never be rid of them, but we need to both spot them, and then reduce their access to power to a minimum.

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Such potential Hitlers come in all the sizes and all the colours

Establishment toleration of those migrants in the UK who somehow feel they have the right to behave as they do in the more disgustingly Mad Mullah parts of Iran are a case in point. Being an empiricist rather than a racist, ConWom’s Kathy Gyngell is often on the ball about this issue, and in her recent ‘week ahead’ piece she nails some appalling examples of depraved behaviour….for example, ‘an ’18-year-old man’ charged with stabbing a schoolboy to death with a ‘zombie knife’, charged with stabbing a schoolboy, and a ‘large group fight involving knives’ in south London leaving a man in his 20s dead and two others in hospital; and incredibly, ‘the quite horrible allegation that an unconscious woman, a mother of three, had been orally raped to death on a London park bench. On trial at the Old Bailey for rape and manslaughter is a homeless man, Mohamed Iidow’.

Don’t expect Keir Starmer to tell you about this kind of thing any time soon; if you presented him with the evidence, chances are he’d call you a Far Right Thug, and have his mates in the Met keep a watch on where you live.

White people do not on the whole wield Zombie knives, and Mohamed Iidow probably isn’t an atheist cockney sparrow either. One point Gyngell makes about ‘a photographic contrast between the freedom and modernity of women in Iran in the late 50s, 60s and 70s and today’ particularly resonated with me, because it remains quite common here in The Gambia to hear older Iranians insisting that they are Persian….which of course, they are.

And let’s be fully real here folks, the citizens there were roughly a million times happier than they are now.

The Iranian government regularly convicts and executes dissidents, political reformers, and peaceful protesters on charges of “enmity against God”. The constitution states citizens shall enjoy human, political, economic, and other rights, but – and it’s a big but – “only in conformity with Islamic criteria.” The penal code provides for hudud punishments (those mandated by sharia), including amputation, flogging, and stoning. It specifies the death penalty for proselytizing and attempts by non-Muslims to convert Muslims as well as for moharebeh (“enmity against God”) and sabb al-nabi (“insulting the Prophet or Islam”).

Islam needs to shed its bonkers wing and have a proper Reformation. As many of you already know, Islamics and Christians in Gambia inter-marry, share communes, work together and go to school together. None of the political Parties are defined by religion: this is an excellent idea, and it works.

The Middle East is often presented [by those who back proxy thuggery in the region] as “Israel versus the Arabs” but nothing could be further from the Truth. The real villains are Zionists, CIA destabilisers and the cruel theocrat Nazis in Tehran, Iran’s capital.

Iran is openly imperial, and seeks regional dominance, with the “annihilation” of Israel as a strategic ambition. The Tehran Tontos seek to dominate the Middle East as a whole, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) also in its sights. Syria and Iraq have already been destabilized and heavily influenced by Tehran. Iran’s strategy includes sponsoring terrorist organizations like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza.

Without the pernicious workings of Tehran, Netanyahu wouldn’t have a job. Without Washington’s sly interference via proxy, he wouldn’t have the money to do that job. And without Iran’s crazy plans for a new Caliphate of braindead cruelty, neither of them would have a reason in Hell to be following their selfish and hypocritical behaviour.

These realities matter, people: to reiterate here, there is no innocence in war….all are guilty of disguising motives or ignoring civil rights – and none of them were elected on the basis of their aims.

Most of the buggers weren’t elected, period.

[An AI bot just told me that ‘uploading failed – you are probably offline’. I’ve not uploaded anything, and I am blindingly obvious online. How close to absolute zero does your common sense have to be before you start spouting off about the wonders of AI?]

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The sub-stacker John Day from Texas is a daily go-to for me because his prolific output is balanced and genuinely informative; but mainly, my admiration for John [a medical practitioner] is based on his principled approach to the Covid “vaccine” scam, as a result of which he lost his right to heal people.

His effort of yesterday in particular was absolutely crackerjack, covering everything from Black Hawk helicopter wrecking tactics in North Carolina through to yet more Anglo-American NATO idiocies aimed to supply Zelenskyy with the means to potentially irradiate the entire European continent.

We have, I suspect, always had a slightly different view of the Middle Eastern permawar’s origins [see preceding section above] but there is no writer online right now who equals his ability to maintain my optimism about the long-term triumph of common sense, decency and civilised culture over New Normalist greed.

If you still like to think, John’s substack is a must.

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If there’s one thing more predictable than the non-stop acid-hose attack by the Anglosphere media on former UK President Donald Trump, it’s that sooner or later the greatest fraud of the last half-century Bob Woodward [left] will be there or thereabouts to supply a mendacious attack on conservative Americans.

Just to refresh memories here, I refer you to the Slogpost of May 2023 in which the Secret State perfidy of Woodward was pretty comprehensively nailed. Woodward was a highly-trained and very well connected Naval Intelligence officer who was foisted upon the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee with a view to destroying Richard Nixon* by associating him directly with the Watergate break-in engineered by serial assassin G Gordon Liddy.

Nixon had no motive whatsoever to hlp or fund a burglary of the Democratic HQ based in the Watergate complex: all the polls told him he was a certainty to win re-election to the White House, a prediction he duly confirmed in a 60% popular vote landslide. Liddy was already persona non grata at the White House, Ehrlichman and Haldeman having already dismissed the bloke as “a nut”.

Now the eternally flakey Woodward is trying to revitalise the Trump-Putin “traitor” rationale in a new book called War – a tome that is being lauded by the Washington Post to complement its unalloyed admiration for Biden, Harris and, um, its former employee Bob of Watergate heroism fame.

Now who’d have thought that, huh?

The book is being heavily promoted throughout state-sponsored media across the NATO nations.

As ever, Woodward’s prose never use identified sources…or uncolluded other sources to confirm the first unknown source of the first part. This latest Dump on Trump fiction is light on specific dates, heavy on hearsay and devoid of a single named human being willing to step forward and back up the author’s Black Propaganda.

Bob Woodward’s entire life is a classic case history of ideological fanaticism in the service of those who advocate the use of every means necessary to further The Good of the Cause.

Berthold Brecht, eat your heart out.

*Nixon confided in the FBI leadership that he knew who had organised the JFK assassination, and wanted their help in bringing those involved to justice. Most of Woodward’s sources throughout 1971-72 were FBI. Join the dots.

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Source: https://therealslog.com/2024/10/10/irony-of-the-year-you-can-get-free-speech-but-in-2024-its-only-available-in-a-banded-pack-offer-with-corruption-and-frustration/