Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday 30 April 2015

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2015

The Limits of Propaganda

John Breed

As Paul Craig Roberts has recently reported, the US government is in the process of launching an all-out war on truth. Those who express views contrary to the party line out of Washington will be labeled a threat. Eventually they may find themselves carted to one of the concentration camps which Halliberton (Dick Cheney's old company) has constructed for $385 million. But that may take a while. In the meantime, we can expect lots of other, less dramatic developments. Indeed, some of these are already happening. Here they are, listed in order of severity.

Notes from a Funeral

Today I received the following report from Club Orlov's special Kiev correspondent, Yu Shan:

Yesterday I was at a funeral. The crowd was well over 500, much more than I originally thought would be possible. It was a deeply emotional event. The man to whom everyone bid farewell was Oles' Buzina, a writer, historian, free thinker, wacky conversationalist, warm friend, a man who identified deeply with both the complex yet incomplete Ukrainian culture and with the multifaceted entity of eastern Slavic Orthodox Russian civilization, a man who would not take sides easily, and would adhere to his lone stand even when death threats started to arrive at his doorstep on a weekly basis.

For the many of you who have submitted proposals already, thank you! We are reviewing your work and will let you know of our decision once we make it. In the meantime, here is what you can expect as your manuscript sails in the general direction of turning into a published book.

When you agree to work with Club Orlov Press, and to use the site and the name as a platform for your book, you're also agreeing to follow our editing and review process. As stated in the initial announcement, "...it's in my interests—and yours—that your ideas find their way to the printed page as clearly, concisely and unassailably as possible." How does this happen?

Announcing Club Orlov Press

People who like to read books have a number of options these days: from dedicated e-readers to phones to whatever other electronic device you have handy, books can be enjoyed in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with paper.

Communities that Abide Revisited

My tropical wanderings have taken me to the exact same spot where I was last year, when I took the photograph that ended up on the cover of the bookCommunities that Abide [order link]:

I took a number of pictures of this tree, during different times of day, until I got the one I wanted: the tree is deserted, with the entire colony out foraging for fruit and insects, except for the everpresent sentinel. And then, one rainy morning a few days after I took this picture there was the roar of a chainsaw, and then a loud crash. I came out to look, and the dead tree was missing. Instead, there was a large number of Oropendola up in the sky, circling around the spot where their tree had stood in uncharacteristic silence. The object lesson of the Oropendola just became a bit more poignant: this is what collapse looks like.

License to Kill

Jakub Rozalski

The story is the same every time: some nation, due to a confluence of lucky circumstances, becomes powerful—much more powerful than the rest—and, for a time, is dominant. But the lucky circumstances, which often amount to no more than a few advantageous quirks of geology, be it Welsh coal or West Texas oil, in due course come to an end. In the meantime, the erstwhile superpower becomes corrupted by its own power.

Financial Feudalism

Once upon a time—and a fairly long time it was—most of the thickly settled parts of the world had something called feudalism. It was a way of organizing society hierarchically. Typically, at the very top there was a sovereign (king, prince, emperor, pharaoh, along with some high priests). Below the sovereign were several ranks of noblemen, with hereditary titles. Below the noblemen were commoners, who likewise inherited their stations in life, be it by being bound to a piece of land upon which they toiled, or by being granted the right to engage in a certain type of production or trade, in case of craftsmen and merchants. Everybody was locked into position through permanent relationships of allegiance, tribute and customary duties: tribute and customary duties flowed up through the ranks, while favors, privileges and protection flowed down.

The Rage of the Cultural Elites

Yoshitoshi Kanemaki

[По-русски]

A certain unhappy incident happened to my aunt in the summer of 1966. The Cultural Revolution—a political movement initiated by Mao Zedong—was beginning to engulf the country. That same year many American college students were protesting against the Vietnam War and Leonid Brezhnev was keeping his seat warm as the General Secretary of CPSU, having replaced the somewhat volatile Nikita Khrushchev two years earlier. My aunt was then a freshman studying literature at Fudan University in Shanghai.

A significant new development

The unspelled edition of King James Bible is now available:

No longer do you have to sputter and stall when when you encounter Biblical names such as Gittahhepher or Maalehhacrabim or Ramathaimzophim, but glide through them in style, like the best seminary graduate! They are being made available in two volumes because, given the constraints of print-on-demand technology, they didn't fit into one. But there is a positive side-effect: the New Testament is large type, just like all of the unspelled children's books.

For all those people who learn to read primarily in order to be able to read the Bible, this is a godsend. Why should they waste years memorizing ancient English spellings, like the difference between “prophesy” and “prophecy,” when they could be reading the Bible instead.

Chaos: Practice and Applications

Luciano Podcaminsky

[En español]

The term “chaos” has been popping up a lot lately in the increasingly collapse-prone world in which we find ourselves. Pepe Escobar has even published a book on it. Titled Empire of Chaos, it describes a scenario “where a[n American] plutocracy progressively projects its own internal disintegration upon the whole world.” Escobar's chaos is tailor-made; its purpose is “to prevent an economic integration of Eurasia that would leave the U.S. a non-hegemon, or worse still, an outsider.”