Roger's Blog
A collection of Roger's essays and articles
-
What’s Really Happening and What Do We Do about it? Part 2, by Roger Tucker
Part 1 is here
I was getting ready to write Part 2: What Do We Do about it? when this showed up yesterday. Mr. Kunstler stole my thunder. He is one of my favorite writers and really hit the nail on the head with this piece, which I made the first link on the Daily Posts. After you’ve read it, if you haven’t done so already, you could read the additional remarks that I’ve added below as a bit of gloss.
Many people have seen what’s coming, like the Preppers. Also, there are a number of local groups called Freedom Cells. You might want to find out if thereś one where you live. An interesting fact about them, aside from the fact that they are young, is that discussion of politics is not allowed on their Telegram channels. A wise precaution I think. They are not activists; they are forming communities.
There are those who reside in the Matrix, often called the Normies. And there are those of us who live outside the walls, in the Wilderness. The latter will be the ones who will be the first to do what has to be done, to adapt.
Humans are incredibly good at adapting. That’s how we got to be on the top of the food chain. It will be very difficult for those who live in cities, as those will effectively cease to function. Best to live in rural areas, or be ready to move there when the time comes.
I live in the rural, largely indigenous State of Michoacan, Mexico. The transition won’t be very difficult. Then again, since I’m 82, I may miss most of the exciting times. Aw, shucks..
Best of luck to everyone!
-
What’s Really Happening and What Do We Do about it? by Roger Tucker
This post continues with the same subject that I’ve been discussing on my blog, the Geopolitical Tectonic Shift (TGTS). I used the term myself (only privately), as did Putin and half a dozen or so commentators – each independently as far as I know. But that was about six months ago. I haven’t seen it since.
This is odd, because it’s hard to imagine a major tsunami rolling in and someone shouting the news to all the people nearby, who all shrug and go back to whatever they were doing. Paul Craig Roberts has a great word for that – insouciance, which refers to the most common response to the insane things that are happening. Kind of like saying “whatever” or that great mantra of Mad Magazine, “What, me worry?”
I have a friend who succumbed to clinical depression after Israel started the Gaza Genocide. This is a more human, more genuine response to that and so much else that’s going on, than insoucience – hundreds of millions of people choosing to stick their heads in the sand rather than face reality.
Everything that’s happening shares the same context, which is TGTS. It’s the underlying process and everything else is a plethora of symptoms, manifestations, consequences.. not to mention a mountain of outright silliness.
So what is TGTS? It refers to the final death throes of the 500 year old Western European Empire. The West is sinking. Meanwhile the East, the Rest of the World (RoW), the 85%, is rising, coalescing around the initiative originating in Russia and China, the BRICs+ – the multipolar world that is rapidly eclipsing the hegemony of the USraeli Empire, or whatever you want to call it.
The latter is also known as the Golden Billion, or the 15%. That world, which includes the Eurolemmings, appears to be committing suicide by drowning. When they can catch a breath one can hear them bleating America’s pathetic mantra, “Full Spectrum Dominance”. I think I just heard a voice saying something like “antisem..” or whatever. Glug, glug. Lots of luck with that.
I first became aware of all this in the early 70’s, the advent of post-modernism in the universities. Being a buddhist for some years already, I found it amusing. The nature of relative truth was a hot topic of discussion among Mahayana buddhists about 2,000 years ago. In the event, it was resolved that there were two kinds of truth, relative and absolute.
Of course, in the secular, materialistic, intellectual wilderness that currently prevails, the notion of absolute truth is rejected with contempt – sounds too ‘religious’. What the Mahayana buddhists mean by ‘absolute truth’ requires a bit of elucidation.
First of all, what is Relative Truth? What it boils down to is the distinction between This and That. Consider the origin of language. We can presume that the first grunts referred to danger vs ‘it’s OK,’ good to eat vs not good to eat, mommy as opposed to daddy and so forth. Eventually, full blown language evolved, a conceptual process we call ‘thinking.’ Along with that the cortex developed in order to keep up with the demand, so to speak.
The relative truth exists only in the realm of conceptual thought and it requires language. Its monument is Science. Science deals with that which is accessible to the senses, what can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched.
These various manifestations of the material world can then be analyzed, their constituent parts and forces identified and named. And, most importantly, everything gets measured – requiring the assistance of considerable mathematical legerdemain. The parts can then be reconfigured into whatever suits our fancy, the result of which is technology, which takes us Dog only knows where. I guess we’ll find out.
Life, though, consists of a great deal more than the aforementioned realm of science, which has very clear subject matter – in a word, ‘stuff.’ We speak of Body, Speech and Mind. Stuff, the domain of science, is Body. Speech refers to the realm of communication, emotions and relationship, while Mind refers to Space, which accommodates everything else.
As any lab student of behavioral psychology should be able to explain, any sort of stimulus will evoke a reaction, of which there are three primary types: attraction, aversion or disinterest. The colorful language of Tibetan (esoteric) buddhism uses the terms Passion, Aggression and Ignorance, the Three Poisons. This is the basis of ordinary, universal neurosis. The transformation of these emotional energies into the Three Wisdoms is the Path to Enlightenment, not to be undertaken lightly.
Having understood that an emotional reaction is prior to and gives rise to a thought (a process driven by habitual patterns) we can go back to what is prior to the emotional response. It’s referred to as ‘things as they are,’ aka the Absolute Truth.
Kant took a shot at it with his “Ding an Sich.” Being a philosopher, he managed to construct a whole intellectual edifice based on that thought, which, like all Western philosophy, is of interest only to other philosophers. The Glasperlenspiel and all that. Absolute truth, then, is reality as it is prior to the act of perception.
What the Path consists of is practice and study, undoing what is a necessary stage of individual development, the construction of the Ego, a process that is essentially completed around the age of seven. This allows us to develop a relationship with others and with the world, not to mention ourselves. Let’s call it the pupa stage.
It is a necessary illusion. The ego relies on a perception of ourselves as independent, autonomous, solid, continuous, permanent entities separate from everyone and everything else, as if we were encased in some sort of vacuum chamber, or perhaps like the daydream of the rich and powerful, which envisions – when the balloon goes up – taking off in a spaceship to the moon or Dog only knows where, an environment where there’s no longer anything actually life sustaining.
It is vital to point out that there is nothing that we can do to re-engineer TGTS, any more than we can prevent any large scale geological process like a volcano from exploding or two continental plates from rubbing against one another. What we actually can and, perforce, must do is the subject of Part 2, ‘What Do We Do about it?’ Coming right up..
-
The Geopolitical Tectonic Shift, Part 4 – Adverse Side Effects of TGTS
Lo and behold. I have returned from procrastinitis purgatory..
If you’re new to the blog, our subject is The Geopolitical Tectonic Shift (TGTS), as explained in the previous posts. Simply put, the West Is Sinking, the East is Rising, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. It marks the end of the 500 yr old European Empire.
A great deal has happened since my last post. The most important point I’d like to make about recent developments is that they are symptoms, manifestations, indicators of TGTS. Led by the neocons/neolibs of the Anglophone countries, blindly followed by the Eurolemmings, they can be regarded as WMDs, Weapons of Mass Distraction, serving to maintain the fantasy of “Full Spectrum Dominance.”
They take various forms, mostly derived from post-modernism, which is an anti-philosophical, nihilistic school of thought that rejects objective truth while replacing science with scientism (or, in effect, Science with $cience). The idea is that narrative trumps empirical analysis, that emotion triumphs over reason. It is a perversion of the Western Enlightenment into a fanatical individualism that deifies Ego. And, of course, the materialist worship of money. So it goes in what Putin aptly called the Empire of Lies.
To enumerate some of post-modernism’s progeny:
- Political Correctness
- DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity)
- Big Pharma vaccines Good, anything that actually works Bad
- Green Energy, Net Zero (Fossil fuels, CO2 Bad)
- White Supremacism (esp. White heterosexual males Bad)
- Critical Race Theory (CRT)
- Radical Feminism
- Censorship Good, Wrongthink Bad
- Pornography, Pedophilia Good .. Morality, Ethics Bad
- LBGTQalphabetsoup
- Wokism: Pronouns Good.. Common Sense Bad
- Identitarianism Good: Humanism, Universalism Bad
- Narrative Good, History Bad
- Antifa Good: Real Anti-fascism Bad
I could go on, but you get the idea. It reminds me of preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Foursquare Gospel Church about a hundred years ago. (Nowadays it’s bigger than ever.) She disappeared with a lover, as a nosy journalist discovered. After returning she came up with some cock and bull story to dispel the unflattering rumors. As she put it, “It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.” A true heroine of Clown World.
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley saw it coming..
All of these subjects and more are covered by the actual best and the brightest in the Daily Posts on this site – 36 links a day.
For those of you – old or new readers – who have any questions, criticisms or doubts, please make use of the Comments section. Critical thoughts and debate are encouraged.
Oct 11, 2023
Roger Tucker
El Gringo Loco de Lago Patzcuaro -
The Geopolitical Tectonic Shift, Part 3 – International Relations
This series of blog posts is written in broad strokes, absent granular analysis, sources or footnotes. That is what you get in the Daily Posts, the Home page of this site. The purpose of these posts is to emphasize the underlying cause of the multi-faceted madness now afflicting the Western world and the spillover everywhere else – the Geopolitical Tectonic Shift (GTS). Otherwise, it would make no sense at all.
Following WW2, except for the ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the superpower adversaries have been in a state of Cold War. For those ten years, USrael and its vassal states ruled supreme. From their point of view, it was truly the End of History, the Empire seemingly having re-established “full spectrum dominance.” But then the wind shifted.
From basking in an exuberant following wind, they suddenly found themselves confronted by a freshening headwind. The puffed up, arrogant West was being buffeted by the gathering force of multi-polarity, spear-headed by a newly revived Russia and a now confident China. The Rest of the World (RoW) was coalescing behind them. It was a slave revolt that would have enraptured Spartacus.
The Empire responded in its time-honored fashion. After all, their motto has always been ‘might makes right.’ And war makes money, lots of it. What’s power for, after all? That simple formula concisely describes imperialist Capitalism.
So it was war after war after war, as had been the case throughout most of American history, until they had to deal with being up against a peer adversary, two of them no less. The time-honored belligerence and arrogance, bolstered by truly breathtaking ignorance, would surely set things right.
This time it’s a proxy war, set in motion through yet another regime change coup. And it only cost $5B, as the new Wicked Witch of the West (Victoria Nudelman, replacing Hillary Killary) proudly crowed. That every war she has promoted, which is all of them, has been lost doesn’t seem to have bothered her or her neocon buddies (now joined at the hip by the neolibs) at all. That’s not what it’s about. What matters is profits for the Oligarchy, the Corporatocracy, the ZioNazis, the Deep State, the Ruling Class, or whatever one chooses to call the Powers That Be. They smugly, and absurdly, call their racket the “Rules Based Order.”
It takes a skilled helmsman to steer close to a headwind. But something ominous had happened. There was no one on board with the requisite skills and experience. The keen-eyed ruthlessness and moxie of former captains seemed to have disappeared after the assassination of JFK. Lyndon Johnson had what it takes but he was done in by Vietnam, the first clue that something was seriously amiss. Since then, it’s been a series of third rate psychopaths and sociopaths (except for Jimmy Carter, a good man but not up to swimming with the sharks), culminating in Sleepy Joe.
It’s an easy guess that Joe Biden will eventually be acknowledged as the worst President in American history. Well, it’s all about timing, as is often said. The Titanic had collided with the GTS and there’s nothing that anyone could do to save her. The only hope is that the US, the Eurolemmings and the other lapdogs will learn to adapt to the new reality. That is, as long as we can avoid being turned into radioactive toast.
Roger Tucker
July 18, 2023
-
The Geopolitical Tectonic Shift: Part Two, The Overview
It’s been a long time since my last blog post. Let’s just call it writer’s block and leave it at that..
Our subject remains the overarching and foundational process and context that allows us to make some sense of the ongoing chaos and insanity in the Western world, which seems to be accelerating. We are calling it the Geopolitical Tectonic Shift (hereinafter GTS). The term is gaining traction as can be seen by writers beginning to use the word “tectonic” loosely, usually without context.
To briefly review, we’re talking about the more and more obvious phenomenon of the West sinking and the East rising. The backstory is the 500 year old European Empire, starting with the Portuguese Captain Magellan rounding the Cape of Good Hope and then navigating the Strait of Malacca to wind up in the South China Sea. Meanwhile Spain – and Portugal in Brazil – were beginning to colonize what is now Latin America.
After the Pope followed up with a diplomatic division of the world between Spain and Portugal, the other Europeans got into the act, with the English, the French and the Dutch creating their own colonial empires, culminating in the Scramble for Africa in the latter part of the 19th Century.
Meanwhile, the maritime prowess and might of the Brits – and the establishment of the East India Company, backed by the wealth of The City of London – began to transcend the others, resulting in the British Empire. That empire in turn gave way to the primacy of the Americans following WWI, which proved that the UK was utterly dependent on its anglophone colonies – and the US – for its continued security. WWII sealed the deal and the world became divided between the US and the Soviet Union, enmeshed in what was called the Cold War.
It was all possible because of superior maritime as well as military technology, not to mention a lust for wealth and power. This naturally followed centuries of internecine European blood letting – war spurs technological advances. Another ingredient was the re-transmission of the ancient Greek and Roman texts back from the Muslims, who had safeguarded that knowledge.
Science, along with its application, technology, was aborning. This process reached its zenith in the 19th Century. Feudalism had given way to the Industrial Age, marked by the ascendancy of the Middle Class, to be followed by the Information Age, well underway by the latter half of the 20th Century, and the eventual rule by the Financial Class in a totalitarian, oligarchical dictatorship.
A financialized economy, aside from being a gigantic Ponzi scheme, is a chimera of data driven sleight of hand while AI is threatening to get out of human control < https://fredoneverything.org/artificial-intelligence-creeping-unreality-and-related-horrors/ >. Such an economy produces nothing real or useful and can only survive through unprecedented mind control (aka brainwashing), the only thing remaining that the US is really good at. But this is a doomed Empire. At this point it won’t take much of a breeze to blow the house of cards away.
As a side note, it´s interesting to observe that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. One could say that things are returning to their natural order. Another way to look at it is that the Empire of Lies (h/t Vladimir Putin) – consisting of USrael and its vassal states – is choking on its own vomit while the East is prioritizing truth, pragmatism, sanity and a sense of simple human decency. That’s the essence of the multipolar world being carefully and patiently constructed by Russia and China with the participation of the RoW (rest of the world, together amounting to 85%).
If the axiom is GTS, then we must begin to look at the corollaries, manifestations or symptoms. It’s quite a list. In the upcoming set of blog posts, I´m going to break these down into the main categories that you can see featured in the Daily Posts on this site. The four principal ones are geopolitics (especially the proxy war in Ukraine), US politics, the Covid Clusterfuck and the now hundred year old history of the colonization of Palestine.
I will also address the secondary themes of post-modernism and its perverse expressions – from political correctness to radical feminism, from the Woke Cult to the LBGTXYZ clusterfuck, from gender dysphoria to the Climate clusterfuck.
Finally, I plan to discuss the only way out of the mess, the spiritual awakening that must follow the end of the Dark Age – if the criminally insane Ruling Class doesn’t turn the biosphere into burnt radioactive toast first. Wish me luck and please feel free to disseminate these posts widely if you think it’s worth it.
It’s quite a lot, granted, but why mess around.
Roger Tucker, May 19, 2023
-
The Overview: An all-encompassing Axiom
I used to develop databases in Filemaker, an Apple software product – so easy that it was often the Administrative Assistant who created the organization’s database(s). Except for enormous transactional systems, like those handling the ATMs of large banks, Filemaker was a far better choice, for many reasons, than the clumsy, dysfunctional piece of junk called Oracle, for a tiny fraction of the cost. I bring this up because this is one of innumerable examples of the innate corruption of the Imperialist/Capitalist system, where profit predictably trumps common sense, not to mention simple human decency. Oracle, like Microsoft and many others, had only one kind of expertise – Sales and Marketing. They spent billions on paying top programmers to overcome the deficiencies of their initial products. Then they made many more billions after pretty much cornering the market.
In database theory, one starts with a root directory (aka a folder) and follows with a set of sub-directories. It’s a method that was pioneered in the 18th Century by Carl Linnaeus, also known as the “father of modern taxonomy”. The number of items in the lowest level sub-directories can be very large. It’s the content, aka the data.
Our mother website, ‘Situation Report: The World,’ like pretty much everything else in the digital world, is a database, or part of one. The content is the data, in this case a collection of items – writings, images, video and audio that each reflects a view, or views, of whatever the hell is going on in this crazy world, or some take on how we got here or where we’re going. Collectively, they are “A Chronicle of the Decline and Fall of the Western Empire.”
That sub-title is an adequate term but now I’d like to introduce a name for the root directory , “The Overview.” In this first proper blog entry, I’m going to elaborate on that a bit. Think of a good vantage point from which to see the whole field, like the most expensive seats from which to watch professional football. They’re high up and unobstructed. Or the top of a mountain, from where you can see all below. That’s what I mean by overview. Sorry if all this seems too simplistic – I’m just trying to make sure that everybody’s on board.
A couple of years ago I came up with a term to describe an overview of this time in history. I doubt very much that I was the first to do so. Recently, it has suddenly popped up all over the place. A couple of weeks ago, the redoubtable Vladimir Putin himself used it. It is “a geopolitical tectonic shift,” henceforth GpTS. A lovely simile – particularly apt is what’s occurring along the San Andreas Fault. The Eastern plate is encroaching on the Western one. Note that even among today’s crop of opportunistic $cientists, no one claims that there might be a technological solution. The West is sinking and the East is rising – it is an inexorable process.
Everything that has been happening for at least the last 75 years can only be fully understood in that context. Otherwise, how could we even begin to understand the criminal insanity, or the descent into fascism, of the flagship – the USA – or that of the Eurolemmings and the rest of the “rules-based order” crowd, who blindly and obediently follow the batshit crazy Pied Piper.
We can debate the beginning of the era that is now coming to an end. I opt for the sudden maritime explosion of the Europeans about 500 years ago, all around the world, where a sense of cultural, religious and racial superiority, along with the most advanced technology, made it possible for them to colonize most of it. Thus it has been for millennia. The upstart empire gets more and more arrogant and smug, with corruption and factional rivalry bleeding away their power, while those who were overrun start putting themselves back together and forming strong alliances. And so it goes..
In further posts I’m going to drill down to the sub-directories level, covering how that inexorable process, the GpTS, has been manifesting itself as the new multipolar world begins to take shape. In the meantime, stay tuned to the action via SitRepWorld. It’s something else, living in interesting times, ain’t it?..
(Please take the opportunity to write something, anything, via the Comments section at the bottom of the single page – we’re still testing the protocols. )
-
Introductory Blog Post
Welcome to Roger’s Blog. Here you will find both old (but updated) and new scribblings by yours truly. The blog section of the site is under construction so please bear with us in case there are any glitches.
The blog is now accessible from the main menu at the top of every page.
Those of you who have entered your email addresses will receive a notification whenever a new blog post has been published. Enjoy!