Learning the lessons of the future

Did he foresee his death on the Titanic's voyage?

Of all psychic phenomena, precognition is the hardest to get my head around. Telepathy and clairvoyance, well, they're strange, but at least they don't involve time paradoxes. Mediumship — okay, if you accept that people continue on the Other Side after they pass out of this life, there doesn't seem to be any inherent reason why some psychically gifted individuals can't tune in to them.

How can anyone intuitively sense what hasn't happened yet? Is time simply an illusion, the future fixed, like a road continuing even though we can't see around a bend? What, then, of free will? (I once talked determinism versus free will with a fellow writer. I told him, "I am determined to make you see the truth of free will." He replied, "Of my own free will, I accept your argument for determinism.")

But high-flying philosophical rationalization purporting to show that the future is predetermined is a lot of my eye. Of course we bloody have free will and we all know it. There is no doubt in my mind I could have, if I had chosen to, written this posting about the wisdom of the Federal Reserve System. (It would have been short.) Instead I was determined … I mean, I decided to write about precognition, a subject I had not foreseen when I woke up this morning.

Even the mainstream media, as a rule remarkably uninterested in the nature of reality behind appearances, occasionally takes notice of premonitions, as the Daily Mail does here. (Tip o' the chapeau to Running 'Cause I Can't Fly.)

In the psychical research literature, most (though not all) descriptions of premonitions involve upcoming disaster or danger. Their emotional punch seems to enable them to break through a mental sheath that normally keeps us from being constantly bombarded with psychic imagery. The Daily Mail piece understandably, for today's readers, emphasizes visions of the 9/11 attacks. It also briefly touches on premonitions about the Titanic's epic calamity in 1912. That is in some ways an even more striking case. 

Here is an account of apparent precognitions involving the loss of the Titanic.

From a psychical research standpoint, William T. Stead's story is particularly fascinating. He was a crusading journalist in London, as well as a spiritualist with clairvoyant powers. His daughter's biography of him says that his motto was the beautiful, "The union of all who love in the service of all who suffer." Professionally, he seems to have been talented but something of a square peg, as many people with psychic abilities (even if they don't know they have them) tend to be.

According to this account:

In one of his many stories, From the Old World to the New, a novel published in 1892, Stead described the sinking of a ship called the Majestic in the North Atlantic from hitting an iceberg. The name of the ship’s captain was Edward J. Smith, the same name of the captain of the Titanic. In an 1886 story for The Pall Mall Gazette, Stead wrote about the sinking of an ocean liner and how lives were lost because there were too few lifeboats. Whether these two separate stories were precognition on Stead’s part or merely coincidence is not known, but Stead apparently did not foresee the tragedy when he booked passage on the Titanic.

Stead did not survive the ship's sinking — on the physical plane. It appears that he was able to communicate post mortem from the astral plane.

According to Rev. Charles L. Tweedale, the Church of England vicar of Weston, Stead appeared at a sitting given by Etta Wriedt in New York on April 17. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the physician who created Sherlock Holmes, called Wriedt the best direct-voice medium in the world, and the plan was for Stead to accompany Wriedt back to England on his return voyage so that she could demonstrate her gift there. Wriedt made the trip without Stead and gave a sitting on May 6 in Wimbledon. In attendance were Vice-Admiral W. Usborne Moore and Estelle Stead, Stead’s daughter. Moore reported that Stead talked with his daughter for at least 40 minutes. He described it as the most painful but most realistic and convincing conversation he had heard during his investigations of mediumship.

General Sir Alfred E. Turner reported that he held a small and private sitting at his home with Mrs. Wriedt. “We had hardly commenced when a voice, which apparently came from behind my right shoulder, exclaimed: ‘I am so happy to be with you again,’ Turner reported. “The voice was unmistakably that of Stead, who immediately began to tell us the events of the dire moments when the leviathan settled down. There was a short, sharp struggle to gain his breath and immediately afterwards he came to his senses in another stage of existence.” At a later sitting with Wriedt, Turner saw Stead materialize, wearing his usual attire. 

Even if we believe every word of this, it doesn't help us solve the riddle of how the future can be known, or whether our hash has been settled long before we started our path through life. I have read some psychics who suggest something like Hamlet does: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends/Rough-hew them how we will." That is, we have limited free will, we can choose one course or another in the present but ultimately our karma will meet us. We have an appointment in Samarra.

Other psychics support free will more strongly, though. They claim that we can under some circumstances glimpse the forces at work that are leading us to a future event, but that by altering our conduct, we can change the outcome. And indeed, there are cases on record in the annals of the Society for Psychical Research and elsewhere that seem to bear this out. In one case I recall, well witnessed at the time, a woman had a vision that her child was playing on railroad tracks and was crushed by an oncoming engine. She ran out of the house, found her child playing on the tracks, and rescued him as the engine was roaring toward him.

Maybe it is destiny or karma or forces set in motion in the womb of time that rough-hew our ends, but we can shape them, especially if we listen to our intuition.

The mainstream media's love affair with Islam in America

So help me, I'm tired of writing about Islam. Plenty of other worthwhile subjects come to mind (usually). Yet when I tell myself it's time to give it a rest, further evidence comes to light that Islam in the United States is on the way to making the same kind of inroads it has made in England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium ... and our mainstream media are doing all they can to help. 

Maybe they honestly don't realize what they're doing. Maybe they're run by '60s retards who absorbed the politics of that era to the point that they can't help fitting the story into a "civil rights" narrative. Or the media are owned by what Angelo Codevilla describes so well as America's Ruling Class (and if you haven't read his brilliant essay, waste no time in doing so). As he puts it: "[The Ruling Class's] first tenet is that 'we' are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained."

You think the ink-stained wretches out in Montana, in the country's rugged West, are holdouts against this blatant propagandizing? Hah. 

While Montana is far from the headlines about the so-called "ground zero mosque" or a pastor's plan to burn the Quran, it's not immune from America's anxiety over Islam.

For many Montanans, Islamic culture is defined more by what they see on TV, the movies or the news, and less by personal relationships with Muslim people.

Nationwide, a recent Gallup poll found 43 percent of Americans admitted to feeling at least "a little" prejudice against Muslims. And just this month, another study found Americans have increasingly negative views of a woman wearing a hijab, a traditional Muslim headscarf.

 It would be hard to pack more bias into three short paragraphs.

The "so-called" ground zero mosque? If not that, what is it, a department store? Only cave dwelling  Cro-Magnons could have any objection to a mosque at the site of an attack on America launched on behalf of Allah. 

Next, any opposition to the Ground Zero mosque is of the same order of a publicity hound pastor's announced Koran burning (notice how the story spells it Quran, the Arabic way). 

Montana isn't "immune" (a word used in connection with diseases) from America's "anxiety" over Islam. Right, people look at a politico-religious ideology that has been at war with the West for 1400 years and twice came within shouting distance of conquering Europe by force, but their "anxiety" just shows what dopes they are.

"For many Montanans, Islamic culture is defined more by what they see on TV, the movies or the news, and less by personal relationships with Muslim people." Some skepticism about what you see or read in the media is healthy, but is this fool Amanda Ricker trying to tell us that we should ignore history, assume everything broadcast or written about Islam is irrelevant, and rely only on "personal relationships" with Muslims? 

Individually, Muslims can be pleasant and likable -- or strident and aggressive in their belief system -- but in neither case does it matter. This isn't a high school popularity contest. It's about an ideology that divides the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, the latter being the part of the world that does not yet follow their Prophet. Does Ricker actually know anything about Islam, or did she just get an assignment from her editor to go interview some Muslims and obediently write what they tell her?

I don't know what Gallup poll she refers to, but reliable polls are supposed to use neutral language so as not to influence responses. It's hard for me to believe that Gallup, unless the company has gone over to the Dark Side, asked people if they were "prejudiced against Muslims." 

"And just this month, another study found Americans have increasingly negative views of a woman wearing a hijab, a traditional Muslim headscarf." What swine we are! Imagine having negative views about a Muslim tradition! All traditions are wonderful, except American traditions, to people like Ricker. 

It is probably beyond her to grasp the idea that the hijab has a symbolic meaning, that Americans are uneasy not about a piece of cloth (only a couple of generations ago most American women wore scarves), but about what it represents: a value system that is incompatible with ours.

Muslim Americans are largely assimilated, happy with their lives and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world. The estimated 2.4 million Muslims living in America are "solidly middle class and mainstream, with incomes and education levels mirroring the general public," the Christian Science Monitor reported in September, citing a Pew Research Center survey.

I would like to hear her defend that first sentence with anything beyond what a few local Muslims told her. The following sentence is invalid as evidence: first, because the Christian Science Monitor is in the same league with the New York Times and Washington Post as a Voice of Islam; second, because it's a non sequitur. It is possible to be middle class and mainstream (whatever "mainstream" might mean in this context), to have a good income, and still have jihad in the heart.

But Ricker no doubt imagines that only poverty and failure to assimilate can account for any problems with Islam, problems caused by those mean nativists who make Muslims wash their feet in separate drinking fountains.

I hear fishing is popular in Montana. Maybe she's angling for a job on the New York Times.

UPDATE 10/18

Even the left-wing British journalist Robert Fisk and the left-wing Guardian are capable of being more honest than our media about one reason some Americans feel "anxiety" about bringing Muslim culture to the United States.

Geert Wilders: Free at last?

I am sorry to have neglected commenting earlier about Wilders, put on trial for speaking his mind about Islam and the Islamization of Europe. It is a welcome, and rather surprising, development that he has been cleared of two charges. But a couple of reports, including this one, suggest that even the Dutch prosecutors thought it was a dodgy case and only pursued it because they were ordered to by a judge. (Judges in Europe have more authority than their U.S. counterparts; in France, for instance, a branch of the judiciary is in charge of criminal investigations.)

It is unclear whether the whole prosecution is null and void — sorry, there I go, sounding like a lawyer — or charges remain. According to another article, "Argument continued on Friday on whether Wilders should be convicted, with three charges now remaining for inciting discrimination against Muslims and hatred and discrimination against people of non-Western immigrant origin."

The same article says:

Dutch prosecutors sought the acquittal Friday of anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders on a charge of inciting hatred against Muslims, saying it was not a crime to criticise religion.

"Criticism (of religion) is allowed as long as it does not lead to incitement of hatred against people," prosecutor Birgit van Roessel told the Amsterdam district court.

This makes it sound like Wilders was banging on religion in general, but he has left no doubt he had Islam in mind. If this is in fact the basis for the prosecutors' request for acquittal (on some charges?), it is a cop-out that avoids the central issue (and leaves the whole "hatred" argument up in the air?).

We are also told:

Public prosecutors Birgit van Roessel and Paul Velleman now say his comments on the Qur’an referred to Islam and its holy book, and not to Muslim people.

In explaining their call for acquittal on the defamation charges, the prosecutors also explained that statements contained in the MP’s film, Fitna, referred to Islam as a religion and not to its followers. Even though the statements could hurt the feelings of Muslims, that was not the same as defamation of the group.

This also seems like evasion. Few Muslims would make a distinction between themselves as people and the Koran, or between the religion and its followers. The Koran is central to Muslims' identity, and while the prosecutors' argument might satisfy the Western mind's ability to split legal hairs, it is not likely to firmly establish in the Netherlands the principle of free speech about Islam.

I'd guess politics has helped turn Wilders's trial, since his PVV Party won more seats in the last election and swings weight in the coalition government. The prosecutors may have received a few firmly worded phone calls from highly placed individuals in the parliament — members of the other parties who need PVV's support.

Too bad if the case against Wilders is dismissed on a technicality rather than a ringing declaration that the law is not there to support religious grudges. But if that was the only politically feasible way to drop the charges that should never have been issued, so be it. The news could have been a lot worse.

The Ministry of Cowardice

The Scotsman has a piece about women who are "hidden victims" of forced marriage. But out of fear of legal trouble or perhaps violence, the paper won't even mention the M word. It describes them only as part of the "ethnic minority community." A community that forces its daughters into a life with someone they didn't choose. 

The director of the Edinburgh and Lothians Racial Equality Council, Nina Giles, said the survey identified teachers and doctors as professionals who could help prevent forced marriages from taking place.

She says they need to be trained to recognise warning signs such as long, unexplained holidays or signs of abuse, but admits it may be difficult for some to decide when it is appropriate to intervene.

"They need to seek advice so if they're approached by a minority ethnic child, for example, then they know what to do," she said.

How barking crazy the U.K. has become. An organization with the Orwellian name of Racial Equality Council can't pronounce "Muslim," but wants teachers and doctors — in addition to whatever teaching and doctoring they can fit in — to keep a sharp eye out for unexplained holidays. Not about Muslims, perish the idea. They're snooping for ... uh ... dole recipients and public servants swanning about in Spain, that's it.

The forced partnerships are often used so family members can be granted access to UK visas, while others use it to preserve their cultural identity.

Chief Superintendent Gill Imery said one problem was building trust in the victims, many of whom consider approaching police as bringing shame on the family. "Here in Lothian and Borders we've had 31 incidents of honour-based violence in the past two years, but the nature of the incidents means it's (difficult to prosecute] and we've only had nine arrests," she said.

But why should the victims trust the police, or for that matter, their multi-cultural country? British politicians have signaled, by allowing Muslim immigration on a grand scale, that they are willing to wink at a "cultural identity" that believes violence against women is a matter of honor.

The Muslims are being Muslims. Not all Muslims who are in a position to behave that way do, of course. They are a minority, but not so small as to be dismissed as the irreducible minimum of criminality you find anywhere and any time. Rather, enough to be an outrage.

The heaviest responsibility lies with non-Muslim British who tolerate it by going with the flow of social Marxism, refusing to recognize reality because that would be "racist." A Western society with an honor code of its own would refuse to usher in such an "ethnic minority community" and be intimidated by it. Are oppressed women supposed to look to the Ministry of Cowardice for protection?

NHS Lothian's adviser on gender-based violence, Lesley Johnston, said: "We are currently training mental health and midwifery staff to carry out a routine inquiry process."

A Scottish Government spokesman said it would look at providing more support when the bill was implemented. "We will ensure that education materials are made available nationally," he said.

Simply pathetic: Scotland is so abject that it can only deal with forced marriages and wife beatings by calling on teachers, doctors, midwives (midwives!), and social workers — "adviser[s] on gender-based violence" — and making more educational materials available. The Muslims described in the article are following their traditions; the British are trashing theirs.

The elitism follies

Elite, elitism, elitist. Once complimentary words, now a snarl. Hurled back and forth between left and right to where they are almost as common a bit of invective as "racism," and almost equally meaningless.

However, Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post thinks we have a new elite — an "ordinary" elite — of, you guessed it, women and minorities. But, says Applebaum, they are resented by people who are even more ordinary than the ordinary elite.

The result of that expansion is now with us: Barack Obama, brought up by a single mother, graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School, is president. Michelle Obama, daughter of a black municipal employee, graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, is first lady. They brought with them to Washington dozens more people, also from modest backgrounds, mostly not with inherited wealth, who have entered high government office thanks in part to their education. Not that Washington wasn't stuffed with such people already: Think of Clarence Thomas, son of a domestic servant and a farm worker, graduate of Yale Law School, Supreme Court justice. 

You are not to imagine racial politics had anything to do with all these ordinary elite folks in the corridors of power. Don't imagine for a second we have an affirmative action government. All those minorities and ethnics in every motor vehicles department, with the odd token white, that's because they're nature's own elite. And it's not surprising they have been promoted to running the federal government.

The backlash against graduates of "elite" universities seems particularly odd given that the most elite American universities have in the past two decades made the greatest effort to broaden their student bodies.

Because they can offer full scholarships, the wealthier Ivy League schools in particular are far more diverse, racially and economically, than they were a few decades ago. Once upon a time, you got into Harvard or Yale solely because of your alumnus grandfather. Nowadays, your alumnus grandfather still helps, but only as long as you did well on the SAT, captained your ice hockey team and, in your senior year, raised a million dollars for charity (the last was not a requirement when I got into Yale, but it seems to be now). If you did all that and come from a broken home in Nevada, so much the better. 

Yes, and if you did all that and come from a broken home in Nevada and belong to a Certified Victim Group, better still. It could just be that the "backlash" against "ordinary elite" students majoring in victimology and being selected for prestigious positions after graduation to advertise an organization's diversity rubs ordinary "ordinary" people the wrong way.

 

Applebaum says that "in 1972, the American sociologist Daniel Bell … predicted, with amazing prescience, the rise of an anti-elite-education populism. Bell got one thing wrong, however: He thought the coming attack on universities would take the form of enforced quotas and lowered standards. In fact, American universities staved off that particular populist wave in the 1970s by expanding their admissions to include women and minorities, while keeping standards high."

Anne, you surely must be joking — no, you're writing for the Washington Post, so you mean us to take you seriously. But you are dead wrong, and all those "populists" or elitists without portfolio or whatever — the unwomen and unminorities — are right. Enforced quotas and lowered standards are exactly the state of play in our universities, and have been since diversity enforcement began in the 1970s. Academic standards in most fields have never been lower.

The debasement of higher education isn't only among the minority and womyn students universities have so actively hoovered up to enhance their standing in the diversity league. When affirmative action admissions rule, standards must be lowered for everyone, lest too many minority students flunk out.

So today we have institutions of higher "learning" full of both students and faculty members who have been educated beyond their brainpower. Particularly in the corrupted humanities and social sciences, they have little actual knowledge and no reasoning ability; their time in academia has served only to give them a sense of the currently fashionable buzzwords and the approved jargon for writing about their field.

The culture of important-sounding, childish nonsense infects practically everything associated with academe. Here's one more or less random example, from a brochure of events taking place this season at ... [pause for deep breath] ... the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer [New York] Polytechnic Institute. It's about an exhibition called Uncertain Spectator (Nov. 18–Jan. 29):

An exhibition confronting anxiety in contemporary art, Uncertain Spectator asks individuals to cross a threshold — place themselves in situations riddled with tension, confront deeply charged emotional content, and grapple with feelings of apprehension.

Shoot, I do that every time I open my credit card statements.

The works presented deal with a general mood of uneasiness arising from recent political and economic events that seems to frame a future rife with imminent threats. Uncertain Spectator not only responds to these unsettling situations, but also creates them by challenging individuals to step outside a place of comfort both physically and emotionally.

Uncertain, uneasy, unsettling. The un-examined life.

I understand the idea of stepping outside a "place of comfort" emotionally … but physically? Does this mean someone visiting the exhibition could be mugged? Kidnapped?

The description continues. As we read, let's note the academic-babble clichés:

The exhibition incorporates media works in the broader context of the contemporary art landscape, through the work of ten artists spanning the genres of video, installation, sculpture, and interactive media. Uncertain Spectator will be contextualized by a catalog and series of events that will consider the role anxiety has played in philosophical discussions of existentialism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and ethics.

 "In conjunction with Uncertain Spectator opening," there will be a screening of Dancer in the Dark, "Lars Von Trier's only work in musical theater … an assault against escapism in film." (No place of comfort here either!) "The film stars Björk as a single immigrant mother working in a factory in rural America who begins to lose her eyesight due to a degenerative disease. The film's narrative is punctuated with sequences of song and dance, which were filmed simultaneously using one hundred separate cameras."

Von Trier, we are told, "became the figurehead of the Dogme 95 collective, which called for a return to plausible stories in filmmaking and a move away from artifice."

The critic John Simon observed that there have been ages of intellectualism, and ages of anti-intellectualism, but we live today in a climate that is something new: of pseudo-intellectualism. An encapsulated world created by and for ordinary, but not ordinary enough, elitists.

As middle American as gang bangers

South Central Los Angeles? No, Tennessee.

It's like a chemistry experiment to demonstrate how you make explosives. The teacher is the Liberal Establishment, determined to make the United States "diverse" if it kills us, which it just might if you wander mistakenly into an especially vibrant part of town. Take one beaker of Mexican Invasion; mix with a dysfunctional black underclass; shake with rap. Bang.

Maybe you've consoled yourself with the thought that the turf wars, with their graffiti, robberies, and homicides are just southern California local color. You are too wrong. Your government's campaign for population replacement is bringing aliens to your city, or maybe even town.

Nashville: Grand Old Opry, country music capital, pillared mansions, even a replica of the Parthenon. And gang bangers galore. 

The Nashville Tennessean does the usual mainstream media shuffle. Gangs, what a shame, remember the good old days when if was safe to etc. It writes as if the issue is a vandalism problem. But the paper deserves a pinch of credit for at least acknowledging that it is mostly Mexicans and blacks that have turned parts of the city into an all too typical war zone.

Within and along streets around the park, the graffiti mostly consists of the characters "7OP" and variations of the number 13. Howey said he believes the group is affiliated with Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), a Hispanic group that is an organized gang affiliated with known crimes such as homicide, aggravated assault, drugs, weapons violations and vandalism. Howey said the 7OP group appears to consist of people who have splintered off to form their own territorial faction of MS-13.

The piece also notes: "Nearly 800,000 gang members and 27,000 gangs operate across the 50 states, a Justice Department survey shows. Some estimates have the figure at 2 million gang members. Police have identified 5,000 gang members in Davidson County."

Nashville homeboys. The joke's on you, Nashville.

What is this death wish that our rulers in New York and Washington have for the United States of America? Obviously, they believe white Americans are so bad that anything is better. Even the dregs of Third World, narco-gang ruled Mexico.

If any relief is to be had, it will come from places like Nashville, not from New York or (above all) ultra-leftist, America-hating Washington. As Washington's grip on the states breaks up, they will take back their cities and towns.

Perhaps they will send these folks to Washington, as Washington has sent them to "middle Tennessee" and the heart of America. It would be poetic justice.