Logic Storms Darwin's Gates

Few evolutionists would agree, but by my reckoning, there are now two strikes on Darwinism. Whoa! Here comes a Nolan Ryan fastball!

The problem of half organs

In a popular evolutionary explanation, here's how reptiles evolved into birds: They wanted to eat flying insects that were out of reach. So the rep­ tiles began leaping, and flapping their arms to get higher. Over millions of years, their limbs transformed into wings by increments.l In another model, the reptiles were tree-dwellers who leaped. Those who glided well survived and eventually developed wings, but those who glided poorly went ker­ plunk and were wiped out. In these scenarios, the reptiles' scales sprouted feathers over time, and finally, they became birds. 

One problem is that, anatomically, reptilian scales and bird feathers are completely dissimilar. Scales are a tough, thin plate. Feathers are soft and delicate; like hair, they arise from small holes in the skin called follicles; they are held together by a network of little hooks invisible to the naked eye-one eagle feather has over 250,000 of them.

In Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, Barbara J. Stahl noted: "It is not difficult to imagine how feathers, once evolved, assumed additional functions, but how they rose initially, presumably from reptilian scales, defies analysis."2

The theory suffers from an illogical premise that pervades Darwinism. According to natural selection, a physical trait is acquired because it enhances survival. Obviously, flight is beneficial, and one can certainly see how flying animals might survive better than those who couldn't, and thus natural selection would preserve them.

The problem is, wings would have no survival value until they reached the point of flight. Birds' wings and feathers are perfectly designed instru­ments. Those with crippled or clipped wings cannot fly, and are bad candi­dates for survival. Likewise, the intermediate creature whose limb was half leg, half wing, would fare poorly-it couldn't fly, nor walk well. Natural selection would eliminate it without a second thought.

The same would hold true for the limbs that Darwinism's fish supposedly developed, or for any body part. Until the organ is operative, it offers no advantage, and natural selection has no reason to favor it. As Stephen Jay Gould asked: "Of what possible use are the imperfect incipient stages of useful structures? What good is half a jaw or half a wing?"3 Evolutionists, including Gould, generally try to explain organs' develop­ ment by hypothesizing that, en route to becoming functional, they must have served some other useful purpose, now unknown to us, and thus sur­vived under natural selection. But this is merely a rationalization based on no evidence. 

A classic example of an organ that could not have evolved is the human eye, whose superlative design was not really appreciated until the invention of cameras and other optical instruments dependent on the same principles.

For sight to occur, light must pass through the pupil, which automatically adjusts, by widening or contracting, to permit a proper amount of light to enter the eye. It then passes through the lens, which focuses the image on the retina, the light-sensitive area in back of the eye. The retina contains more than 120 million photosensitive cells called rods and cones, which translate light into nerve impulses that reach the brain via the optic nerve.

Vision requires that all of these be working. How then did natural selec­tion make them? Did the lens precede the retina? Did the optic nerve come first? By themselves, none of these constitute vision; they possess no inher­ent survival value that would cause natural selection to prefer them. To accept evolution, we must believe that chance mutations simultaneously developed each, until one day, by sheer coincidence, all were complete and harmoniously arranged, and vision occurred. The situation troubled Darwin himself, who noted:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjust­ing the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.4

Most evolutionary texts avoid discussing eye evolution. One that tried­ Gavin de Beer's Atlas of Evolution-followed Darwin's own attempted explanation by showing a sequence of eyes of different organisms, starting with the most primitive. But as one observer pointed out, "This mere listing of eyes from various animals, which he neglects (or is unable) to show to be related can carry no conviction for the case for evolution. It would be equally stupid to place a candle, a torch and a searchlight side by side and proceed to advance to a genealogical relationship."5

What about color vision? Michael Pitman wrote:

It is found in several bony fishes, reptiles, birds, bees and primates. Among mammals only primates see in color. Dogs, cats, horses and bulls do not. Fish supposedly evolved the necessary retinal cones to give them color vision, but then lost them. "Re-evolved" by certain unrelated birds and reptiles, they were lost by mammals, but by luck "re-surfaced" in pri­mates. An odd story indeed.6

Science has proven the eye far more complicated than was known in Darwin's time. Any organ, of course, may be reduced to its molecular struc­ ture. In Darwin 's Black Box, biochemist Michael Behe describes vision's microscopic physiology. The following material is full of technical words, but this underscores the complexity:

When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called II-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a sin­gle human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein's metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin . . . .

GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phos­ phodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to "cut" a molecule called cGMP . . . . When the amount of cGMP is reduced because of cleavage by the phos­ phodiesterase, the ion channel closes, causing the cellular concentration of positively charged ions to be reduced. This causes an imbalance of charge across the cell membrane that, finally, causes a current to be transmitted down the optic nerve to the brain. The result, when interpreted by the brain, is vision.7

So mutations had to engineer, simultaneously, not only the gross anatom­ical structures of the eye, but its elaborate molecular interactions.

Irreducible complexity

As the complexity of anything increases, the probability of chance creating it decreases. The main point of Behe's book is that biochemistry has proven a number of bodily systems to be irreducibly complex. He says that "design [intelligent creation] is evident when a number of separate, interacting com­ponents are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components."8 Gradual change, as Darwin proposed, cannot pro­duce such systems because "any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."9

on an enzyme to activate it. So which evolved first-the protein or enzyme? Not the protein; it cannot function without the enzyme to switch it on. But why would the enzyme have come first?-without the protein, it serves no purpose. The system is irreducibly complex.

If a person lacks just one clotting factor, as in hemophilia (a mutational disorder), he risks severe bleeding. Furthermore, after a clot forms, the pro­teins which produced it must be inactivated by other substances-otherwise the rest of the person's blood would start to coagulate. Step-by-step evolu­tion of clotting is inconceivable: in the trial and error stage, organisms would have either bled to death or clotted to death.

Another example Behe gives: the immune system. In infections, it must distinguish the invading bacterial cells from the body's own cells-other­ wise the latter will be attacked (which is the case in "autoimmune" diseases). An antibody identifies the bacterium by attaching to it. In a complex bio­ chemical process, a variety of white blood cells-"killer cells" such as lym­ phocytes and macrophages-are notified of the bacterium's presence. These travel to the site, and, using the identifying antibody, attack the enemy.

Like blood clotting, this system is irreducibly complex. What evolved first? The killer cells? Without the identifying antibody, they wouldn't know where to attack. But why would the identifier develop first, without any­ thing to notify? If the network evolved gradually, disease would kill the individual before it was perfected.

Behe notes the paucity of articles and books on how such biochemical entities evolved. He says that "if you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines-the basis of life-developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it. . . .10 In his research, he found only two very short, highly speculative papers attempting to explain the immune system's evolution on a molecular level." Biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago agrees:

There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fun­damental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful specu­lations. It is remarkable that Darwinism is accepted as a satisfactory expla­nation for such a vast subject-evolution-with so little rigorous examination of how well its basic theses work in illuminating specific instances of biological adaptation or diversity. 12

The human body, as a total system, is also irreducibly complex. It is dif­ficult to change one part without influencing others. Take the liver: it man­ufactures bile; detoxifies poisons and wastes; regulates storage and use of glucose, proteins, fats and vitamins; synthesizes blood clotting and immune system factors; and processes breakdown products of old blood cells. Or take the kidneys: they remove wastes through urine production; regulate the body's water content and electrolytes (sodium, calcium, etc.); and support the adrenal glands, which secrete hormones such as adrenaline.

Evolution says every organ developed through chance mutations. But structures like the liver or kidneys cannot change without drastically affect­ing the rest of the body, with which they maintain a delicate balance. We must assume that by lucky happenstance, each time these organs mutated, other body parts also mutated in harmonious cooperation. The noted writer Arthur Koestler commented:

You cannot have a mutation A occurring alone, preserve it by natural selection, and then wait a few thousand or million years until mutation B joins it, and so on, to C and D. Each mutation occurring alone would be wiped out before it could be combined with the others. They are all inter­dependent. The doctrine that their coming together was due to a series of blind coincidences is an affront not only to common sense but to the basic principles of scientific explanation 13

And what of the human brain? W. H. Yokel wrote in a promotional letter for Scientific American in 1979:

The deep new knowledge about the brain, gathered at an accelerated rate in recent years, shows this organ to be marvelously designed and capacitated beyond the wonders with which it was invested by ignorant imagination.

Microelectronics can pack about a million circuits in a cubic foot, whereas the brain has been estimated to pack a million million circuits per cubic foot. Computer switches interact with not more than two other switches at a time, whereas a brain cell may be wired to 1,000 other cells on both its input and output sides . .. . 14

Yokel called the brain "designed." It has about ten billion neurons (nerve cells) with a thousand trillion connections. 15 Each neuron contains around one trillion atoms. The brain can do the work of hundreds of supercomput­ers. Building a computer requires great intelligence. Who believes even a simple one could arise by chance? Indeed, the brain is more than a com­puter-"It is a video camera and library, a computer and communications center, all in one." 16 Yokel added: 

Perhaps the most elusive questions surround the brain functions that make us human-the capacities of memory and learning. Transcending what might be called the hardware of the brain, there comes a software capacity that eludes hypothesis. The number that expresses this capacity in digital information bits exceeds the largest number to which any physical meaning can be attached. 17

How about our thoughts? Did chance evolve them, too? Darwin critic Phillip Johnson asks: 

Are our thoughts "nothing but" the products of chemical reactions in the brain, and did our thinking abilities originate for no reason other than their utility in allowing our DNA to reproduce itself? Even scientific materialists have a hard time believing that. For one thing, materialism applied to the mind undermines the validity of all reasoning, including one's own. If our theories are the products of chemical reactions, how can we know whether our theories are true? Perhaps [evolutionist] Richard Dawkins believes in Darwinism only because he has a certain chemical in his brain, and his belief could be changed by somehow inserting a differ­ ent chemical.18

The animal kingdom also illustrates features too complex for evolution to explain. Time magazine, in an article critical of creationism, described the remarkable bombardier beetle:

Its defense system is extraordinarily intricate, a cross between tear gas and a tommy gun. When the beetle senses danger, it internally mixes enzymes contained in one body chamber with concentrated solutions of some rather harmless compounds, hydrogen peroxide and hydro­ quinones, confined to a second chamber. This generates a noxious spray of caustic benzoquinones, which explode from its body at a boiling 212 F. What is more, the fluid is pumped through twin rear nozzles, which can be  rotated, like a B- l 7's gun turret, to hit a hungry ant or frog with bull's-eye accuracy. 37

Since the chemicals and enzymes are explosive when mixed in a small space, how could chance have evolved this defense system without blowing the beetle to smithereens?

Or how could natural selection produce the monarch butterfly, which transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly with two compound eyes, each with 6,000 lenses, and a brain that can decipher 72,000 nerve impulses from the eyes?20 Extinct creatures make the problem even more perplexing. Cambrian rocks, dated at over 500 million years, contain fossils of many of the oldest invertebrates known. Among them: the trilobite. It was an arthropod (the broad category of joint-legged animal that includes lobsters and spiders).

According to evolution, Cambrian rocks should contain only "primitive" organisms. The trilobite was anything but. It had a segmented body, legs, gills, antennae, and a complex nervous system. Moreover, 

Blood clotting swings into action when we get a cut. Its multi-step process utilizes  proteins, many with no other function besides clotting. Each protein depends according to Sci­ence News, trilobites had "the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature."21

Riccardo Levi-Setti of the University of Chicago writes in his book Trilobites:

In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery­ that the refracting interface between the two lens elements in a trilobite's eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century-borders on sheer science fiction . . . . The design of the trilobite's eye lens could well qual­ify for a patent disclosure.22

Like other animals, trilobites lack fossil ancestors showing how they evolved.

TORNADO IN A  JUNKYARD THE RELENTLESS MYTH OF DARWINISM
James Perloff

If–

If you can keep your head when all about you  
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,  
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;  
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;  
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;  
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;  
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,  
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,  
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling

One of the worst cases of scientific fraud or

The law that wasn't

When I went to school in the sixties, our biology textbooks showed a picture of a human embryo next to various animal embryos. The human looked almost indistinguishable from the animals. We were told this demonstrated the common ancestry we share with them.

It was further stated that embryonic development proved Darwinism, because the embryo went through various stages mimicking its evolutionary history. The fetus began as a single cell-just as life had billions of years ago. It then would undergo a tadpole stage, fish stage, amphibian stage, and so forth, en route to becoming human.

This theory was known as "embryonic recapitulation" as well as "the bio­genetic law." Although the concept preceded Darwin (he discussed it in The Origin of Species), it was popularized by Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel, as we have mentioned, published baseless drawings of ape-men and "sponta­ neously generated" bacteria. He also created those famous pictures of iden­tical-looking human and animal embryos. Haeckel explained:

When we see that, at a certain stage, the embryos of man and the ape, the dog and the rabbit, the pig and the sheep, though recognizable as higher vertebrates, cannot be distinguished from each other, the fact can only be elucidated by assuming a common parentage . . . . I have illustrated this significant fact by ajuxtaposition of corresponding stages in the devel­ opment of a number of different vertebrates in my Natural History of Cre­ation and in my Anthropogeny.¹

But shamefully, Haeckel grossly altered the appearance of embryos to make his case. As Francis Hitching explained:

But as a matter of biological fact, the embryos of men, apes, dogs, and rabbits are not at all the same, and can easily be distinguished by any com­petent embryologist. They only looked the same, in Haeckel's books, because he had chopped off bits here and there, and added bits elsewhere, to make them seem identical.

Another example was his illustration of the "worm-like" stage through which all vertebrates were supposed to have passed. He published three identical drawings captioned respectively a dog, a chicken, and a tor­toise. In 1886, a Swiss professor of zoology and comparative anatomy complained that Haeckel had simply used the same woodcut (of a dog embryo) three times.
Over the years various other forgeries were exposed. To illustrate the "embryo of a Gibbon in the fish-stage," Haeckel used the embryo of a dif­ferent kind of monkey altogether, and then sliced off those parts of the anatomy inconvenient to his theory, such as arms, legs, heart, navel and other non-fishy appendages.² 

At Jena, the university where he taught, Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court.³ His deceit was thor­oughly exposed in Haeckel's Frauds and Forgeries ( 1915), a book by J. Assmuth and Ernest J. Hull. They quoted nineteen leading authorities of the day. F. Keibel, professor of anatomy at Freiburg University, said that "it clearly appears that Haeckel has in many cases freely invented embryos, or reproduced the illustrations given by others in a substantially changed form."⁴ L. Riitimeyer, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Basle University, called his distorted drawings "a sin against scientific truth­fulness deeply compromising to the public credit of a scholar."⁵

Julius Weisner, professor of plant physiology at the University of Vienna, called Haeckel "one who in his most recent writings exhibits himself as a fanatical misleader of the people; one who, with delusive assurance, puts forth what have long been recognized as errors and mistakes as if they were verities."⁶ J. Reinke, professor of botany at the University of Kiel, wrote that "wherever biology comes in, Haeckel uncritically jumbles together proved and unproved matter, and thus creates a chaos in the mind of his readers. It is the opinion of not a few that, on account of his lack of critical disposition, Haeckel forfeits all place in the ranks of serious naturalists."⁷

Such exposure did not prevent Haeckel's "biogenetic law" and fraudulent drawings from being spread in biology classrooms throughout the world.

For decades to come, students were taught that the human embryo mani­fested reminders of man's past, such as "gill slits" from the fish stage of evolution. Actually, the "gill slits" evolutionists thought they saw were simply clefts and pouches which, as the embryo grows, develop principally into structures of the ear, jaw and neck.⁸

Many scientists knew Haeckel's theory was completely false. The human fetus is fully human at every stage. Keith Thomson, president of the Acad­emy of Natural Sciences, wrote in American Scientist: "Surely the bio­genetic law is as dead as a doornail. . . . As a topic of serious theoretical inquiry it was extinct in the twenties."⁹ Dr. Sabine Schwabenthan wrote:

Fetoscopy makes it possible to observe directly the unborn child through a tiny telescope inserted through the uterine wall. : . . The devel­opment of the child-from the union of the partners' cells to birth-has been studied exhaustively. As a result, long-held beliefs have been put to rest. We now know, for instance, that man, in his prenatal stages, does not go through the complete evolution of life-from a primitive single cell to a fish-like water creature to man. Today it is known that every step in the fetal developmental process is specifically human.¹⁰

Michael Richardson, an embryologist at St. George's Medical School, London, found there was no record that anyone ever actually checked Haeckel s claims by systematically comparing human and other fetuses dur­ing development. He assembled a scientific team that did just that - pho­tographing the growing embryos of 39 different species. In a 1997 interview in London's The Times, Dr. Richardson stated:

This is one of the worst cases of scientific fraud. It's shocking to find that somebody one thought was a great scientist was deliberately mislead­ing. It makes me angry . . . . What he [Haeckel] did was to take a human embryo and copy it, pretending that the salamander and the pig and all the others looked the same at the same stage of development. They don't. . . . These are fakes. In the paper we call them "misleading and inaccurate," but that is just polite scientific language)¹¹

Unfortunately, embryonic recapitulation's disproof is still not popularly known, and Haeckel's drawings continue to hold sway in the public mind.

What Columbia University biologist Walter J. Bock noted in 1969 still seems true today: "[T]he biogenetic law has become so deeply rooted in bio­logical thought that it cannot be weeded out in spite of its having been demonstrated to be wrong by numerous subsequent scholars." ¹² It seems the height of pretense that a theory - a fraudulent one, at that­ was designated a "law," as if it had been established with the certainty of gravity. But this is symptomatic of Darwinism, where speculative opinions routinely masquerade as facts.

Tornado in a Junkyard by James Perloff

1984 Revisited

 

George Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949, portrayed a totalitarian world of the future. According to former MI6 officer John Coleman, Orwell was attached to MI6 and was simply fictionalizing what he knew was to come.

When the actual year 1984 rolled around, the world didn’t look just the way Orwell’s book envisioned; therefore some criticized the book as a failed prophecy. However, events have increasingly vindicated Orwell and silenced his critics. For those who will complain he missed on the year, we point out that (A) the vigilance of freedom-loving people has forced the Establishment to reset its timetable more than once; and (B) if you read Orwell’s novel carefully, it’s not even certain that the year is 1984 – that was simply what the people were told by the government, which controlled all information.

Let’s explore ways 1984 has been fulfilled:

• In 1984, citizens are under constant electronic surveillance by the Thought Police, not only in the city streets, but through their home televisions, which cannot be turned off. To quote the book:

With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police . . . .252

Today, through computers connected to the Internet, and through cell phone traffic, the government can keep the bulk of the population under surveillance, in the name of “security” under the Patriot Act. This may even be happening through televisions. Years ago, I thought: “Orwell got it wrong. TVs receive, but they don’t transmit!” Certainly the TVs of the 1950s didn’t transmit, but with the enforced upgrading to digital television, it is increasingly apparent that televisions will probably transmit soon, if they are not doing so already. See, for example, “Is Your TV Spying on You?” at http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427405/is-your-tv-spying-on-you/. Orwell was well ahead of the game.

• In 1984, all people of the world fall under three regional governments – Oceania (where the book’s protagonist, Winston Smith, lives), Eurasia and Eastasia. This is reminiscent of the regional approach to world government (European Union, North American Union) now unfolding.

• Just as we have described, power is in a pyramidal structure. At the top of the pyramid is an Antichrist-like figure, Big Brother.

At the apex of the pyramid is Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.253• Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where newspapers, periodicals, books, and other literature forms are continuously changed according to the government’s wishes. For example, if the Times reported Big Brother had made a speech predicting something, which later did not happen, the Times would be subsequently corrected so that it appeared Big Brother had made the correct prediction.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.254While current society has not advanced to this extreme, history has been altered, changing the true nature and records of wars, revolutions, the United Nations, trade treaties, the Federal Reserve, and even the effectiveness of vaccines.

Furthermore, electronic data is increasingly replacing hard copy information. In the Internet age, newspapers and magazines are struggling to stay in print. Newsweek is no longer published in hard copy. If all information eventually becomes electronic, it will be very easy for bureaucrats to change what back copies of newspapers and magazines say – exactly as in Orwell’s novel.

• Although everything in Oceania is in short supply (except that reserved for the elite “Inner Party” members), the government’s economics ministry is termed “The Ministry of Plenty.” This reminds one of the “Security and Prosperity Partnership” borne out of NAFTA, which claims we are enjoying “prosperity” while millions of jobs are slashed and we drown in inflation. In 1984, the Ministry of Plenty spews out falsified statistics:

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture . . . . 255

Even today, the U.S. government fudges statistics to make the realities look brighter. For example, the June 23, 2008 The New American exposed how the government has continuously altered methods of determining the Consumer Price Index, inflation’s main barometer. For example, under Richard Nixon, food and energy costs were simply eliminated from the “core CPI.” Later:

In 1983, the Reagan administration decided that rising real estate costs were causing the CPI to be overstated, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) substituted an “Owner Equivalent” measurement, basing housing costs on what homeowners might get if they were renting their houses. Homes were labeled an investment, and the cost of buying a home (like other investments) was no longer included in the CPI.

The Bush, Sr., Clinton, and Bush, Jr. presidencies each further modified how CPI is determined, each change serving to lower it. The end result of all these tweaks is that the U.S. now reports an annual inflation rate of some two percent, whereas true inflation is closer to ten percent. This enables the government to cheat senior citizens out of their Social Security, making payment increases based on the distorted CPI, rather than the actual rising costs the elderly face.

• In the culture of 1984, the truth is reversed. Two of the government’s main slogans are “WAR IS PEACE” and “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.” Today, many of yesterday’s truisms have also been reversed. For example, homosexuality, once understood as perverted, is now construed as “normal”; abortion, previously a crime, is today a “right”; advocates of traditional family values, once mainstream, are now “extremists.”

• 1984 says:

It was always at night – the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.256

Many film fans are familiar with the 1995 Sandra Bullock thriller The Net, about a woman who no longer “exists” after her identity is destroyed by the cyber-manipulations of the movie’s villains. And today, many have been victims of real-world identify theft. Like money and information, the more your identity becomes electronic, the more it becomes erasable. Orwell warns us that someday identity loss may become a function of government.

• We have mentioned that the Establishment has created much of the “popular” music and literature via the Tavistock Institute. In 1984, Winston hears a woman singing a song as she hangs clothes on a line:

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless songs published for the benefit of the proles [the poor] by a sub-section of the Music Department [at the Ministry of Truth].257

• Winston’s secret lover, Julia, also works in the Ministry of Truth, where she had

been picked out to work in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girl’s School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.258• Oceania was continually at war, the wars never being actually won (sound familiar, Americans?). Bombs would sometimes drop on London (where Winston lived), rousing the people to patriotism. But the bombs “were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself.” 259 Shades of 9-11?

• The war ministry (called the Ministry of Peace) was working on means of “producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves.” 260• Oceania had a language called Newspeak. It restricted vocabulary to very few words. Each successive Newspeak dictionary deleted more words. The eventual result was to eliminate ideas unacceptable to the state, since words for those ideas no longer existed. Orwell pointed out that ultimately an older document, such as the American Declaration of Independence, would become unreadable gibberish. Is this unlike today, when “dumbing down” has left American public school students less and less able to read books of the past?

• In the novel, Winston is exposed as a thought criminal and imprisoned by the Ministry of Love (the secret police). In view of the concentration camps FEMA is now reportedly preparing, certain aspects of Winston’s torture are worth mentioning.

The following exchange occurs between Winston and his torturer, O’Brien:

[O’Brien:]“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?”

“To make them confess.”

“No, that is not the reason. Try again.”

“To punish them.”

“No!” exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. “No! Not merely to extract your confession, nor to punish you. Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured?”

O’Brien continues:

“You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle ages there was the Inquisition. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant; in fact it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And, above all, we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you: not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.”

After many tortures, Winston still retains a shred of independent thinking. To finish breaking him, the Thought Police bring him to the place every prisoner dreads – Room 101. Room 101 is different for every person. It contains their greatest horror. In Winston’s case, he has a primal fear of rats. His head is placed in a two-compartment cage. The furthest compartment is filled with hungry sewer rats. If the connecting door dropped, the rats would devour Winston’s face. At this point, Winston completely loses it – he is broken.

How did the Thought Police know Winston’s darkest fear was rats? Because they had monitored his conversations. Likewise, the government today could know a person’s greatest fear, by simply monitoring his emails and phone calls. Compiling a profile of nearly every person would be easy.

At the book’s end, the Thought Police have turned Winston free – because he no longer constitutes any threat. He believes every bit of propaganda coming from the telescreen. He gazes at Big Brother’s image. And the book closes with these words: “He loved Big Brother.” If I may freely translate, he worshiped the Antichrist.

James Perloff

Truth Is a Lonely Warrior: ...

Passions come like a smallpox and disfigure this original beauty

Selected thoughts of Joseph Joubert (from Paul Auster book)

"1783(?)
Do you want to know how thought functions, to know its effects? Read the poets. Do you want to know about morality, about politics? Read the poets. What pleases you in them, deepen: it is the truth.

In order to write perfectly, one must write and think in the same way a perfect man would write and think at the moment when all the faculties of his being were in perfect harmony. This situation would be possible in some state of soul in which all the passions were developed in all their force and to their full extent and combined in perfect equilibrium.

What makes the waters consoling is their movement and their limpidity . . . .

When a nation gives birth to an individual capable of producing a great thought, another is born who is capable of understanding and admiring it.

If I die and leave several scattered thoughts on important things, I beg in the name of humanity that those who see what has been left suppress nothing that seems at odds with accepted ideas. During my life I loved only the truth. I feel I have seen it in many great things. Perhaps one of these [words?] that I have dashed off in haste . . .

1784
If the earth must perish, then astronomy is our only consolation.

1785
I imitate the dove, and often I throw a blade of grass to the drowning ant.

1786
If there is one sad thing in the world, it is the poplar on the mountains . . . .

Every sound in music must have an echo; every figure must have a sky in painting; and we who sing with thoughts and paint with words, every sentence and each word in our writings must also have its horizon and its echo.

Thoughts form in the soul in the same way clouds form in the air.

1787
A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

Sad harvests . . .

The essential thing is not that there be many truths in a work, but that no truth be abused.

1789
It is not facts, but rumors that cause emotions among the people. What is believed creates everything.
Extension is the body of God, as Newton would readily say.

Mixture of dry and wet. Water swells before boiling.

1791
Are you listening to the ones who keep quiet?

A winter without cold and without fire.

The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic.

. . . where the accusers are almost always the guilty ones.

The reading of Plato is like mountain air. It does not nourish, but it sharpens our faculties and gives us a taste for fine food.

Through memory we travel against time, through forgetfulness we follow its course.

In these times of trouble, one commits and suffers great evil.

We are in the world as words are in a book. Each generation is like a line, a phrase.

Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking.

1793
Wisdom is the strength of the weak.

His ink has the colors of the rainbow.

Let heaven forgive the wicked, after they have been punished.

In order to live, we need little life. In order to love, we need much.

It is necessary that something be sacred.

The good is worth more than the best.

What makes civil wars more murderous than other wars is that we can more easily accept having a stranger for an enemy than a neighbor; we do not want to keep the possibility of vengeance so near.

1794
Here is the desert. In this silence everything speaks to me: and in your noise everything falls silent.

***My son was born during the night of the 8th and 9th, at two and quarter hours past midnight.
That he one day remember the pains of his mother!

Big words. Claim too much attention.

All truths are double or doubled, or they all have a front and a back.

1795
These coups d’etat are necessary, you tell me. I answer you, what is sinister and criminal is never necessary at any time.

Children always want to look behind mirrors.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

1796
The ancients knew about anatomy only through war. It was on the battlefields that they learned all they knew about it.

Passions come like a smallpox and disfigure this original beauty.

He must confess his darkness.

Give me a morality that equally suits the healthy and the sick, men and women, children, adults, and old people.

Everything that cannot grow diminishes, even the qualities that are passed on. Is this true?

The first part and last part of human life are what is best about it, or at least what is most respectable. The one is the age of innocence, the other is the age of reason. You must write for these two ages and banish from your mind and your books that which does not suit one or the other.

I love to see two truths at the same time. Every good comparison gives the mind this advantage.

… His necessity invincibly proves his existence.

Illusion is in sensations. Error is in judgments. We can know truth and at the same time take pleasure in illusion.

One loves to say what he knows, and the other to say what he thinks.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

The imagination is the eye of the soul.

There are truths that cannot be apprehended in conversation.

What comes through war is given back through war. All spoils will be retaken, all plunder will be dispersed. All victors will be defeated and every city filled with prey will be sacked in its turn.

Plato. He is an author whose ideas cannot be understood until they have become our own.

Take us back to the time when wine was invented . . .

The penchant for destruction is one of the ways used for conserving the world.

When a thought gives birth to obscurity, it must be rejected, renounced, abandoned.

1797
In order to be known, he would have to make us immortal and give us another life.

To compensate absence with memory.

A flower that cannot bloom, a bud that cannot open.

To seek wisdom rather than truth. It is more within our grasp.

Lovers. Whoever does not have their weaknesses cannot have their strenghts.

Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries.

We do not write our books in advance, we do them as we write them. What is best about our works is hidden by scaffoldings: our texts are filled with what must be kept and what must be left behind.

In metaphysics, the art of writing consists of making sensible and palpable what is abstract. To make abstract what is palpable is its vice and fault. It is the fault of those we have so mistakenly called metaphysicians in this century.

The imagination has made more discoveries than the eye.

Psalms. Read them with the intention of praying and you will find them beautiful. Eh! Doesn’t every reading demand a readiness of mind that is special and appropriate to it?

When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.

God made life to be lived (the world to be inhabited) and not to be known.

The thoughts about which we can say: “There is rest in this thought.” This image is encouraging.

The dying inherit the dead.

All these philosophers are no more than surgeons.

Resignation is a hundred times easier than courage, for it has a motive outside of us and courage does not. If both diminish evil, let us the one that diminishes it the most. (Outside us, that is to say beyond our will.)

Remember to let your ink grow ripe.

Around every flame there must be a void, so there can be light. Without space, no light.

1798
The sign then makes us forget the thing signified.

What good is modesty? – It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.

Beauties that leave nothing to the imagination.

The only good in man is his young feelings and his old thoughts.

Stars more beautiful to the eye than to the telescope that robs them of their illusions.

In the same way that man was made in the image of God, the earth was made in the image of heaven.

. . . Pleasure of being seen from afar.

A century in which the body has become

subtle, in which the mind has become coarse.

Among the trhee extensions, we must include time, space, and silence. Space is in time, silence is in space.

To be in one’s place, to be at one’s post, to be part of the order, to be content. Not to murmur of suffering, to be incapable of being unhappy.

Too much talk (they say). Nota bene: too much writing.

It is impossible to love the same person twice.

1799
Like Daedalus, I am forging myself wings. I construct them little by little, adding one feather each day.

Illusion or play. Everything agreeable is in them.

When you want transparency, the finite, the smooth and the beautiful, you must polish for a long time.

Lions, bulls; images of strength are everywhere, whereas images of wisdom are nowhere.

We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, put them in accord, give harmony to the middle, the end, and the beginning. In order to do this we must make many erasures.

Dreams of love. Those of ambition. The dreams of piety.

Arrival of Bonaparte.

Old men, when neglected, have no more wisdom.

1800
Each man thinks not what he has been told but what he understands.

The word, in fact, is disembodied thought.

Antiquity. I prefer ruins to reconstructions.

It would be difficult to be scorned and to live virtuously. We have need of support.

All ardent people have something mad about them, and all cold people have something stupid.

Analysis: in morality, in cooking.

Descartes’s noises. His physics has too much commotion. Newton’s offers a more silent world, but too naked, too lifeless.

He who has the abstract idea of a thing understands it; but only he who can make it understood is able to make it imaginable. Yes.

There are truths that instruct, perhaps, but they do not illuminate. In this class are all the truths of reasoning.

The old age of men resembles their childhood. Without exception.

We are worth more when someone looks at us. And, because of this, an eye is always watching us.

Let us remember this. – What? – That it is not the sun in the sky that we see, but the sun at the back of our retina.

To know: it is to see inside oneself.

Everyone makes and has need of making a world other than the one he sees.

Leibnitz and Spinoza. – The realm of abstractions. The first offers its perfection, the second nothing but its flaws.

To analyze, to deconstruct. – What they so emphatically call analysis is what we would call division when speaking simply.

If prayer does not change our destiny, it changes our feelings – which is no less useful.

How admiration contributes to the peace of the human mind and is necessary to it.

Every house: temple, empire, school.

In our writings thought seems to move like a man who is walking straight ahead. On the other hand, in the writings of the ancients, thought seems to move like a bird that glides and advances by turning round and round.

Everything seems naked to eyes that have never seen without veils. Nothing can please them for very long.

1801

History, like perspective, has need of distance.

Close your eyes and you will see.

Vision is made by the joining of two lights. – Add. March 19: And if objects shine toward us, we shine toward objects.

Christianity. We cannot speak against it without anger, nor speak for it without love.

It is the bell that moves, but you who ring. It is the sun that shines, but you who see. The nourishment is in the meat, but the taste is in you. Fire gives or creates warmth, but it is you who feel it.
Harmony is in the one who listens: yes, as effect; but not as cause.

I like Leibnitz’s expression the soul carries the body. And observe that everywhere and in everything, what is subtle carries what is compact; and what is light holds in suspension all that is heavy. Admit it, at least in the sense of – and as the most beautiful conception of the human mind.

This stone in my hand, it demands glory.

A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.

Too seek the truth. But, as you are seeking and as you are waiting, what will you do, what will you think, what will you practice, what rules must you follow?

The spectacle has changed, but our eyes are the same.

Everything beautiful is indeterminate.

Beautiful works. Genius begins them, but labor alone finishes them.

Of the unfortunate need to please oneself.

Newton. How ripe his apple was.

It seems more difficult to me to be a modern than to be an ancient.

1802
Floods of passions. It would nevertheless be better to raise the dikes for them.

From this day forward, to give up Locke, and to agree never to read another word he has written.

The only thing Newton invented was the how much.

The things we believe are difficult to conceive of because it is difficult to talk about them.

In fact everything (according to Descartes) happens through figure and movement. That is the fixed point from which his mind proceeded to all its operations, the result of his explanations. That is his doctrine, summed up in a few words. Goodbye, Descartes!

You say that books are soon read, but they are not soon understood. To digest them, etc. To understand a beautiful or great thought perhaps requires the same amount of time it takes to have it, to conceive of it. To penetrate a thought and to produce a thought are almost the same action.
Piety is a cure.

Imagined harmonies. If they are not a physical fact, they are at least a human fact, and because of that, a reality.

If superior intelligence wanted to give an account of human things to the inhabitants of heaven and to give an exact idea of them, he would express himself like Homer.

I pass my life chasing after butterflies – considering the ideas that conform to generally held ideas as good, and the others simply as mine.

That is true, a king without a religion always seems a tyrant.

The revolution chased my mind from the real world by making the world too horrible for me.

It is even easier to be wrong about truth than about beauty.

It seems that Plato has too much and that there is too little in Aristotle. From which, in the first, an abundance carried to superfluity, and in the other a precision or brevity that leads to obscurity.

Speak more softly to be better heard by a deaf public.

To call everything by its name.

Illusion based on reality, that is the secret of the fine arts – in fact, all of art.

We speak to ourselves in metaphors. We are naturally led to it as a method of better understanding ourselves and of retaining our thoughts more easily – which we then label in a kind of container.
“In a container of light.” Y.

There are only two kinds of beautiful writing, that which has a great fullness of sound, meaning, soul, warmth, and life, and that which has a great transparency.

We have it in our soul, but we hardly ever put into our life what we put into our writings.

In every piece of music, not everything is music, and in every poem not everything is poetry.

The first act of a man who finds God displeasing is to say to himself: I must arrange the world without him.

Imagining is good, provided you do not believe you see what can only be imagined.

Lost spirit. Judges without justice, priests without religion.

Sensibility that comes from the nerves. Opinions have a great influence on it and can led to cruelty. Examples in the revolution.

(At the baths.) Piety defends us from ourselves; modesty defends us from others.

(5 in the morning. Insomnia.) Everything must have its sky. To be put everywhere.

All beautiful words are susceptible to more than one meaning (or signification).

The phrase: “One dies because one has lived.”

Sad science that teaches blind men to speak of light and colors and that persuades them they can even make judgments about these things.

1803
Nothing is more difficult for children than reflection. That is because the last and essential destination of the soul is seeing, is knowing, and not reflecting. Reflection is one of the labors of life, a means of getting somewhere, a path, a passage, and not a center. Everything always tends towards its final destination. To know and be known, these are the two points of rest. This will be the happiness of souls.

. . . but in the end a year comes when you find that you are getting old.

To know how to walk in the night, to have a goal, to reach it in the darkness, the shadows.

Everything is made through images. They enter us through all the other senses, as through the eye. An echo (they say) is an image of the voice. All our affections are produced by images of touching. Our whole body is a mirror.

Someone said of an asthmatic who was being very sweet and patient in his suffering. “One would like to breathe for him.”

Everything must be precise in it and yet nothing should be too tight.

. . . because, what must be put in the work and what must be left out is infinite.

The thoughts that come to us are worth more than the ones we seek.

To know what one must forbid oneself.

Chateaubriand. We inhabit the same regions but we do not bring back the same curiosities.

What we write with difficulty is written with more care, engraves itself more deeply.

All nightingales do not sing equally well, nor do all roses smell the same.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes.

It is difficult for me to leave Paris because I must separate myself from my friends; and difficult for me to leave the country because I must separate myself from myself.

The silence of the pen and its advantages. Force builds up in it. Precision must flow out of it. A chatterer fallen quiet. When silence comes from force, it should make itself felt in discourse. What is hasty would be bad upon reflection. – To know how to write – to be capable of not writing.

Everything has its poetry.

To write, not only with few words, but with few thoughts.

Two sorts of truths. I. what must be thought, II: what must be done.

They speak to the ear, I want to speak to the memory.

Attention is sustained (in poetry) by the amusement of the ear. Prose does not have this advantage. Might it have? I try. But I think not.

1804
Then there comes into languages a facility and an overabundance that, if you want to become a great writer, you must oppose with difficulties, with a sure taste, a meditated choice. When you find a torrent, obstacles must be places in it.

Strength in organization and weakness in carrying out the material. Like an automaton whose elasticity would be exquisite if the wood were not too thin or too fragile.
There I am: a flattering self-portrait

To survive one’s passions and not one’s strengths. Happy.

It is beautiful enough to be seen, but not to be dreamed.

God. There are many things that should be left in life and not put into books.

It is a key; what difference if it is golden or iron? It can open things.

When the author speaks to himself instead of speaking to the reader.

These thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.

I wanted to bypass words, I disdained them: words have had their revenge – through difficulty, etc.

To the question: is he guilty? must be added another question: is he incorrigible?

The time I once lost in pleasure I now lose in suffering.

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

1805
Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours.

For simple light is perhaps still more beautiful than colors.

Glory. Lovelier to desire than to possess.

All things that are easy to say have already been perfectly said.

To judge things of taste, we must give ourselves time to taste them.

The soul speaks to itself in parables.

All grace (decor) comes from patience. And, consequently, from some force exerted on itself.

We are afraid of having and showing a small mind and we are not afraid of having and showing a small heart.

One ruins the mind with too much writing. – One rusts it by not writing at all.

One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them. One must know how to leave one’s own ideas and how to come back to them.

In everything mathematical there is something imperishable, because there is nothing living.

A drop of light is worth more than an ocean of darkness: is worth more, I say, be it given or received.

What man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

Terrestrial by birth, celestial by origin, only our body is of this world.

1806
I don’t like to write anything down on paper that I would not say to myself.

The important business of man is life, and the important business of life is death.

To descend into ourselves, we must first lift ourselves up.

Illusions come from heaven and mistakes come from us.

Tacitus. And all those words that are obscure only once.

– in these times when, to express ourselves well, we must speak in a way the others do not.

. . . burdened with the unbearable weight of ourselves.

Facility is the enemy of great things.

Undoubtedly, philosophy caused the Revolution. But what caused philosophy? Theological arrogance.

Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth.

There must be several voices together in one voice for it to be beautiful. And several meanings in one word for it to be beautiful.

It is through the flesh that we judge what is hard and what is soft.

I stop when I see no more light; it is impossible for me to write by feeling my way.

– for wine is a wet fire.

1807
. . . all the pleasures it does not bless (religion).

Why in language and in the course of all violent passions there is always something familiar and naive.

Beauty is something animal, the beautiful is something celestial.

Little people have few passions, they hardly have anything but needs.

Speak for the ear and write for the memory.

Great minds are those that disguise their limits, that mask their mediocrity.

The first poets or writers made madmen wise. The last seek to make wise men mad.

When the last word is always the one that offers itself first, the work becomes difficult.

Heaven gave strength to my mind only for a time – and this time has passed.

Those for whom the world is not enough: saints, conquerors, poets, and all lovers of books.

A nail, to hang his thoughts on.

1808
I am like Montaigne: “unsuited to continuous discourse.”

Wicked people have nothing human about them except passions: they are almost their virtues.

To be tragic, misfortunes must be rare.

– maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.

To finish! What a word. We finish nothing when we stop, when we say we have come to the end.

What makes us look for a long time is that we do not look where we should or that we look where we should not. But how to look where we should when we do not even know what we are looking for? And this is what always happens when we compose and when we create. Fortunately, by straying in this fashion, we make more than one discovery, we have good encounters, and often are repaid for what we have looked for without finding by what we have found without looking for.

Here I am outside civil things, in the pure region of Art.

Necessity can make a doubtful action innocent, but it cannot make it commendable.

-and the pernicious habit of accepting pleasures without gratitude.

To be the soul of a body, but not the head, that is a noble ambition.

Sloth waiting for inspiration.

The breadth of the mind is attention.

The paper is patient, but the reader is not.

Animals love the people who talk to them.

The republic of ants and the monarchy of bees.

If we exclude the idea of God, it is impossible to have an exact idea of virtue.

Voltaire had the soul of a monkey and the mind of an angel.

Freedom. The freedom to do something well. There is no need of any other kind.
Truths. The truths that teach us to act well and to live well. There is no need of any other kind.

Abuse of words, foundation of ideology.

The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them forever.

Tenderness is the repose of passion.

1809
– because the sublime gives a useful pleasure.

Whoever consults the light within himself (it is in everyone) excels at judging the objects this light illuminates.

The ellipsis, favorable to brevity, saves time and space.

A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

He must not only cultivate his friends, but cultivate his friendships within himself. They must be kept, cared for, watered.

1810
All cries and all complaints exhale a vapor, and from this vapor a cloud is formed, and from these heaped-up clouds come thunder, storms, the inclemencies that destroy everything.

Let’s go; and follow your mistake.

Anger, which purges resentment.

1812
To let the reader sometimes complete the symmetry between words and to do no more than suggest it.

Ash Wednesday.
The face. After the face, action. Between the two, attitudes. But before everything, the idea.

Having found nothing worth more than emptiness, he leaves space vacant.

When I had the strength, I did not have the patience. I have the patience today and I no longer have the power.

– and to destroy my memory by my presence.

Poetry made with little matter: with leaves, with grains of sand, with air, with nothings, etc.

Of those who have a muse and those who have only their soul.

1813
Silence. – Joys of silence. – Thoughts must be born from the soul and words from silence. – An attentive silence.

In political institutions, almost everything we call an abuse was once a remedy.

“Leave behind endless hope and vast thoughts,” says the poet. I no longer have vast thoughts.

In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks nothing of himself knows nothing.

There are, following Plato’s idea, souls that not only do not have wings but do not even have feet (for progress or consistency) or hands (for work).

Egregie fallitur. He is wrong, but nobly, intelligently, with grace, with spirit, with wisdom and much beauty.

There is a residue of wisdom (as there is a residue of madness); and in human wisdom this residue purified by old age is perhaps the best thing we have.

A frightening thing, which is perhaps true: “oldmen want to survive.”

People that have overthrown geography ( like winds, storms, and torrents).

I can do something well only slowly and with great effort.
Our moments of light are all moments of happiness.
When it is bright in our mind, the weather is good.

1814
Nothing is better than a justified enthusiasm.

What leads us astray in morality is an excessive love of pleasure; and what stops us or holds us back in metaphysics is a love of certainty.

More than once I have brought the cup of abundance to my lips; but it is a water that has always escaped me, (Another version: I have often brought to my lips the cup that holds abundance; it is a water that has always escaped me.)

Almost all men prefer danger to fear. Some prefer death to danger and to pain. This is because fear, danger, and pain disturb reason. The horse throws himself into the precipice to escape the spur.

In literature, beauty must not be fabricated.

Let us look for our lights in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities.

Fire, ignition, and brightness; the body, its shadow and penumbra; sound, echo, and half-echo: everything has some shadow, some glow or reverberation. (Reflection.)

Neither in the arts, nor in logic, nor in life should an idea in any way be treated as a thing.

There is nothing perfectly true for man; I mean in human opinions. Just as there is nothing perfectly round.

Our life is of woven wind.

To speak to God of everything; to dare to question him and to be attentive to what he says about everything. But sometimes we take our own voice for that of God.

Retreat often into your sphere, rest yourself in your center, plunge yourself into your element: good advice, which must be remembered.

Of the sincerity of things. To see it. Truth consists of this.

1815
I confess that I am like an aeolian harp – which gives off some pretty sounds but can play no songs.

Too much harmony. Prose can have too much of it; also too much sweetness. And this is a very seductive fault, at first very agreeable, but unbearable and ridiculous over the long term.
Varnish (in style) makes a glaze (for the reader).

Tormented by the cursed ambition always to put a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word. I am speaking of myself.

You go to truth by way of poetry and I come to poetry by way of truth.

What is pleasing always has something chanced about it.

Without fixed ideas, no fixed feelings.

When we find what we have been looking for, we don’t have time to say it. We must die.

All foods are in fact good for someone who is hungry, but not for someone who has no appetite.

Leave dreams of the imagination time to evaporate.

France destroyed by its philosophers.

It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes: it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light.

Of what must be said and what must not be said. The importance of knowing.

Old age and its mask.

When you no longer love what is beautiful, you can no longer write.

1816
Plato. The poetic spirit that gives life to the languors of his dialectic. He is lost in the void; but we can see his wings beating, we can hear their noise. His imitators lack these wings.

1818
You want to talk to someone: first open your ears.

I am an aeolian harp. No wind has passed through me.

Then, God withdrew his forces into himself, and we grew old.

If you want to think well, to write well, to act well, first make a “place” for yourself, a “true place”. Because we lack true places, we put our thoughts outside the true light and our conduct outside order.

1819
Happy is the man who can do only one thing: in doing it, he fulfills his destiny.

Don Quixote going to Tobosa and talking to Sancho as Socrates did to his disciples; and this is not ridiculous and does not even seem out of place.

Because they know all the words, they think they know all the truths.

There are things we can speak of only in writing, that we cannot know except when thinking of writing them down, and that we cannot, however, think of writing except when we know them in advance.

1823
And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: – Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.

Spaces . . . I would almost say . . . imaginary, existence is so much in them, etc.

1824
Nota. – The true – the beautiful = the just – the holy

Source

https://withagreenscarf.wordpress.com/2024/03/31/the-notebooks-of-joseph-joubert-with-an-introduction-by-paul-auster/

Mike Stone - Young Girls Now Must Defend Themselves

When are white men going to protect white girls?

A fourteen-year-old Scottish girl identified as Mayah Sommers was forced to defend herself and her little sister from a migrant rapist last week. When the would-be-rapist refused to leave the girls alone and threatened Mayah's twelve-year-old sister, the protective older sibling pulled out a knife and a hatchet.

The common people of Scotland praised Mayah for her actions and dubbed her the "Young Queen of Scots." Local media and local government took the opposite approach. They painted the migrant man who threatened the two girls as a "victim," and the police arrested the teenage heroine.

It's important to note that this is not an isolated incident. It just happens to be one that was caught on video and beamed across the world.

Non-White migrants threaten, assault, and rape girls every day. You just don't hear about it.

It's no different than black-on-White violence. You hear about seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf being stabbed to death by a black at a high school track meet; little one-year-old Clay Weeks being pummelled and beaten by a black woman at a daycare center, and that couple in Cincinnati that was viciously beaten and almost killed by a mob of blacks.

But you don't hear about the hundreds of other attacks, beatings, carjackings, burglaries, rapes, and murders that blacks commit against Whites every day in the United States.

The same thing is happening in Europe. That fourteen-year-old Mayah was carrying a knife and a hatchet to begin with tells you that she and her sister were routinely harrassed and threatened by migrant rapists.

All of this raises the question: Where are the men?

Well, the men see what's happening, but they refuse to do anything about it.

That's not surprising when you look at how the men of the world responded to the recent virus hoax. They did nothing.

Men who refused to fight during the recent fake pandemic - and by fight I mean refused to wear a face diaper, refused to take the clot shot, and refused to let anyone promoting the clot shot near their children, while simultaneously boycotting every person, place, and organization that helped promote the entire pandemic - are not  going to lift a finger to help defend their women, even when teen and preteen girls are being attacked and raped by foreign invaders.

Crisis reveals character, and the phony pandemic showed us exactly who everyone around us really was. How you acted during "covid" is exactly who you are.

Make no mistake, black-on-White violence, migrant rapes of White girls, and every other form of violence and crime against White people is only going to increase. White people who defend themselves will be arrested - just like young Mayah. White men and White women watching on the sideline will continue to do nothing.  

We can blame the media, the government, the Jews, the Illuminati, and everyone else we can think of, but until we ourselves say, "Enough is enough," and do something about it, nothing is going to change.
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Mike Stone is the author of the new book REAL or FAKE: The Donald Trump Assassination Attempt and Teen Boy's Success Book: the Ultimate Self-Help Book for Boys; Everything You Need to Know to Become a Man

Related- Scottish Girl Arrested For Using Knife And Axe To Ward Off Migrant Stalker

Just this week an American man visiting Dresden, Germany was stabbed in the face while bravely preventing two migrants from assaulting a pair of women on a tram.  One of the man's attackers, a Syrian refugee, was arrested by police and then immediately released by prosecutors back onto the streets.

https://www.renegadetribune.com/scottish-girl-arrested-for-using-knife-and-axe-to-ward-off-migrant-stalker/

"The systematic and engineered destruction of Europe through "multicultural" invasion is heartbreaking to watch.  It is clear, beyond any doubt, that this program spearheaded by progressive politicians (and fake conservative politicians) is designed to crush the spirits of predominantly white, native born citizens still retaining a sense of national pride and cultural heritage.  That is to say, they have become the targets of a government funded terror campaign to subjugate the west.

Starting around 2014, millions of third world migrants have been allowed to flood into Europe's borders, often encouraged by globalist NGOs, the UN and leftist political leaders within the host countries.  The effects of this decade long campaign have been devastating.

Violent crime has skyrocketed and migrant "grooming gangs" have spread, targeting underage girls for sexual exploitation.  Rape has become a common problem, which local governments have chosen to ignore.

https://henrymakow.com/2025/08/mike-stone---young-girls-now-m.html

Banking System is Responsible for Our Enslavement

 

We already have a digital currency. “Money” is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Occasionally they will produce coupons i.e. currency, to make it all seem real.

Chinese-style social credit is planned. They will control us by controlling our money.

The covid scam and deadly “vaccines” have told us that politicians and cops don’t work for us, but for the central banking cartel that wishes to lock down humanity permanently.

The same applies to the mass media and most professions. Everyone dances to the money tune, and Rothschild is the Pied Piper.

BLOOD POISONING

We suffer from blood poisoning. “Money” is the blood supply of society. This “medium of exchange” circulates like blood in a human body. With it, everyone is sanguine; without it, you have a corpse.

Unfortunately, our feckless ancestors gave control over the money supply to Cabalist Jews and Freemasons who find excuses (wars, scamdemics) to produce it in the form of a debt to themselves.

They profit at both ends. They charge interest on debt they create out of thin air; and their shares in “defence” and pharmaceutical corporations also increase, due to the phoney wars and pandemics they start.

Their goal is to expand their monopoly over money creation into a monopoly over literally everything, (e.g. thought, “wokeness”) inducting humanity into their satanist sex-and-death cult. They weaponized the common cold as a pretext to decimate and enslave humanity.

MONEY IS A MIND GAME

In March 2022, a half dozen US regional banks went bankrupt losing $500 billion in deposits.

It’s all black magic. Money is just digits on a ledger kept by the Rothschilds.

Did these depositors lose their money? No. The Fed just created another $500 billion out of thin air. These Satanists finagled the US national credit card and are maxing it out until the USD collapses.

In the last few years, banks have become increasingly active in pushing the globalist agenda. For example, my bank is all for “diversity” — homosexuality and migration. (It’s rare to find a white male teller at a Canadian bank who is not a homosexual.)

Similarly, most corporations sing from the same globalist hymn book.

Banks are all franchises of the Rothschild world central banking system, much like some MacDonald’s stores are independently owned. But banks all depend on the central bank for “money.” That’s why banks and the corporations dependent on them promote bizarre agendas like gender dysfunction, family breakdown, gun control, sodomy, miscegenation and minority status for Caucasians.

WHAT DOES ‘MONEY? LOOK LIKE? (When it’s not currency)

When I write a cheque to the gas company, an armored car does not pull up to my bank, collect the cash from my account and deliver it to the gas company’s bank. All that REALLY happens is some digits change at the two banks.

My bank account is not a little letterbox with cash sitting in it. My account is just a number in their books signifying what they owe me should, God forbid, I decide to withdraw the cash.

When we use our credit cards or when we buy a stock, the only thing that happens is that accounts are adjusted.

We are really banking with the Rothschilds. Our little nest egg is actually their magical “credit,” a slice of the national “debt” owed to them, “money” which they created from nothing and “loaned” to the government. It is a reflection of the government’s ability to repay, although it never will.

The banking system is a vast system of accounts. Money doesn’t actually exist except for a small amount in paper coupons (currency). “Money” is an abstract concept denoting value.

MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE

Money is a medium of exchange. Think of it as electrical current instead of currency. It is basically a virtual credit system that is the lifeblood of every economy.

Who owns this franchise? This system of accounts? Who adds or subtracts credit?

Who decides who gets to play?

A syndicate of mostly cabalist (Masonic) Jewish banking families led by the Rothschilds.

Unfortunately, these Cabalists are Satanists. They are determined to protect and extend this banking monopoly to a monopoly over everything — real wealth, political power, knowledge, media, education, culture, religion, law etc.

They want to own us and our children as well. (We are collateral on the national debt.) This is the essence of Communism and New World Order which is largely in place. The goal is to gradually enslave humanity. When they finally get rid of cash, they can cut off our “credit” at a moment’s notice.

How do they maintain control? They control the corporate cartels who are all dependent on banks. These corporations fund the politicians who follow bankers’ orders.

Many of these politicians are Freemasons. Organized Jewry and Freemasonry are accomplices in the banking racket. In general, complicity in the banking fraud is the price of success today.

Why is it a fraud? Because sovereign governments could “generate their own electricity” interest-and-debt-free. We wouldn’t need to sell our soul and our children’s Birthright.

THE DEEP STATE

The “Deep State” is the secret network dedicated to protecting the fraudulent banking system and advancing its satanic agenda. Most of the players belong to Freemasonry or Organized Jewry. Intelligence agencies like the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6, the police and the army are the bankers’ enforcers. Mass surveillance (the NSA etc.) ensures that nobody gets any ideas.

Mankind is doomed unless the central bank is nationalized, “debt” is disowned and money is created debt-and-interest free.

It’s a question of whether mankind will be dedicated to making satanist trillionaires even richer, or lifting everybody up to where they can begin to fulfill their Divine potential.

ILLUMINATI 4 Genocide & War

Henry Makow Ph.D