Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘stuff’ Category

Coyot: Love Myself on the Weekend

Posted in stuff on Sun Mar 24th 2019| 1 Comment »

Remarks:

This is currently #5 in Bulgaria, #6 in Greece, and #42 in Turkey according to Shazam. It may have already peaked in Turkey: Spotify says Coyot is more popular in Turkey than in his native Greece. Judging by the YouTube videos made for this song, it seems it came out in November 2018.

This song caught my attention because it did not sound like yet more pre-fab pop music. Coyot in fact does try to make his music sound both modern and Greek at the same time, even if it is sung in English.

See also:

Lyrics:

Monday makes me wanna cry
you should know by now i am
all about the weekend
for the weekend

Tuesday i just stay inside
that the hours pass by waiting
for the weekend
for the weekend

Wednesday come i watch it go
feeling like my life is in slow motion

Mmm yeah

Thursday evening fantasize
one more night and i can start
the weekend
Ohh the weekend

Fridays i am such a fuck up on Fridays,
but i love myself on Fridays
i am such a fuck up on Fridays,
but i love myself on the weekend.
yeah I love myself on the weekend
(yeah I do)
yeah I love myself on the weekend
yeah I love myself on the weekend
Fridays, Fridays, Fridays,
Fridays i love myself on the weekend.

Monday here we go again maybe
if i fake it will i like it, like you like it.

Tuesday i put on a face trying
to get by until the weekend,
For the weekend.

Wednesday come i watch it go
feeling like my life is in slow motion
ohh yeah

Thursday texting with a
Friend making plans
we are ready for the weekend
for the weekend

Fridays i am such a fuck up on Fridays,
but i love myself on Fridays
i am such a fuck up on Fridays,
but i love myself on the weekend
yeah I love myself on the weekend
(yeah I do)
yeah I love myself on the weekend
I love myself on the weekend

I love myself on the weekend
I love myself on the weekend

Source: Shazam.

Read Full Post »

The Book of Centuries

Posted in stuff on Fri Mar 22nd 2019| 8 Comments »

The Book of Centuries is my name for a book that has one chapter from each century. If it had 35 chapters of 10 pages each it would be 350 pages long and go back to the -1300s, the time of King Tut.

The idea is to get a complete sweep of history in the space of one book.

Each chapter would have some introductory paragraphs and then something written in that century. It should be something that gives a sense of the times, of its thought, feeling, everyday life, historical events, etc. Best would be excerpts from letters, diaries, travel accounts, newspapers, court cases, histories, even graffiti or bar tabs. A window onto each century.

Geography: Where would the writings come from? Some ideas:

  • Global – Have a demographic balance of the whole world, from as many different places as possible. You should get a sense of not just the West but also India, China, Africa, etc – of the whole world. This would give you a mosaic view of history.
  • Eurocentric – follow the Torch of Western History: Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, England, the US. Roughly the same path as the written script I am writing in now (each chapter could start with a picture of how writing looked in that century). This would give you a linear, Western view of history, the kind taught at schools in the West.
  • National – pick one country, like Egypt, Greece or China, one with a long, well-documented, past.
  • By library – take all the excerpts from books in a particular library, like from those of Timbuktu, Alexandria, Jefferson, Isidore, Augustine, or Thoreau.

Ones I would like to see: Egypt, Greece, Alexandria, Timbuktu. Also Manhattan but it does not go back far enough.

As an example, a book of centuries might go something like this, taking excerpts from the following:

  • -1400s: Battle of Megiddo
  • -1300s: Amarna letters
  • -1200s: Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani)
  • -1100s: The Will of Naunakht (an Egyptian woman of modest means)
  • -1000s: Late Ramesside Letters
  • -900s: Book of J (earliest known version of Genesis)
  • -800s: Homer: Iliad (but pick a passage not about historical events since the book is set in the -1100s)
  • -700s: Bible: Book of Isaiah
  • -600s: Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
  • -500s: Lao Tzu: Tao-te-Ching
  • -400s: Herodotus: History
  • -300s: Plato: Apology
  • -200s: Confucius: Analects
  • -100s: Bhagavad Gita
  • -000s: Caesar: Gallic Wars
  • +000s: Bible: Gospel of Matthew
  • +100s: Marcus Aurelilus: Meditations
  • +200s: Origen: Against Celsus
  • +300s: Letters found in Egypt
  • +400s: Diamond Sutra
  • +500s: Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy
  • +600s: Koran
  • +700s: Li Bai (one of the greatest Chinese poets)
  • +800s: Theophanes: Chronicle
  • +900s: Beowulf
  • 1000s: Murasaki Shikibu: Tale of Genji
  • 1100s: al-Idrisi: Tabula Rogeriana
  • 1200s: Marco Polo: Travels
  • 1300s: Ibn Batuta: Travels
  • 1400s: Mayan Madrid Codex
  • 1500s: Leonardo: Notebooks
  • 1600s: Shakespeare: The Tempest
  • 1700s: Olaudah Equiano: Interesting Narrative
  • 1800s: Sears Catalogue
  • 1900s: Anne Frank’s diary
  • 2000s: The Economist

That is just to give you an idea. I am not saying those are necessarily the best choices.

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

549

Read Full Post »

billionaire

Posted in stuff on Thu Mar 21st 2019| 16 Comments »

The view from Billionaires’ Row overlooking Central Park in New York (via MarketWatch).

A billionaire is someone whose wealth is equal to at least a billion pounds or dollars: $1,000,000,000.00. This post, written in 2019, will use current US dollars, worth 2.0 grams of silver.

There are currently 2,135 known, living billionaires according to Forbes magazine. New York has 103, Hong Kong 93, San Francisco 74, Moscow 69, and London 62. Only 14 are Black, Oprah Winfrey among them. Oxfam says the top 26 billionaires are as rich as the bottom half of humanity.

Isabella dos Santos of Angola, $2.3 billion.

Some famous billionaires (those in grey are dead, adjusted for inflation):

  • > $100 billion
    • 440 Mansa Musa (Mali Empire)
    • 374 John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil)
    • 350 Andrew Carnegie (Carnegie Steel)
    • 298 Nicholas II of Russia
    • 220 Henry Ford (Ford Motor)
    • 220 Muammar Gaddafi (Libyan dictator)
    • 200? Vladimir Putin (maybe only 70)
    • 199 Basil II of the Byzantine Empire
    • 199 Crassus of Rome – crushed the Spartacus slave uprising
    • 197 Cornelius Vanderbilt (NY & Harlem Railroad)
    • 182 Amenhotep III of Egypt, Nefertiti’s father-in-law
    • 168 Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare’s queen
    • 150 Sam Walton (Walmart)
    • 135 John Jacob Astor (American Fur Company, Times Square real estate)
    • 131 Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Washington Post) – before his divorce settlement with wife MacKenzie
    • 112 Cleopatra
    • 101 Koch brothers
    • 101 Richard B. Mellon (Gulf Oil)
  • > $10 billion
    • 97 Bill Gates (Microsoft)
    • 83 Warren Buffett
    • 79 Jay Gould (Union Pacific Railroad)
    • 78 Marshal Field
    • 76 Bernard Arnault & family (Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy, Christian Dior)
    • 64 Carlos Slim
    • 62 Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
    • 59 J. Paul Getty (Getty Oil)
    • 56 Michael Bloomberg
    • 53 Leland Stanford (Central Pacific Railroad, Transcontinental Railroad, Stanford University)
    • 51 Larry Page (Google)
    • 51 Howard Hughes Jr (TWA, Hughes Aircraft, etc)
    • 47 J. P. Morgan (General Electric, US Steel)
    • 35 Sheldon Adelson (Las Vegas Sands casino)
    • 21 Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)
    • 19 Rupert Murdoch & family (News Corp, 21st Century Fox, Fox News)
    • 13 Sackler family (OxyContin, opioid crisis)
    • 11 Aliko Dangote (Nigerian industrialist) – world’s richest living Black man
  • > $1 billion
    • 8.3 George Soros
    • 7.9 Steve Jobs (Apple)
    • 7.8 David Geffen (DreamWorks) – richest in Hollywood
    • 7.2 John Malone (TCI, cable television)
    • 5.4 George Lucas (Star Wars)
    • 4.6 Sumner Redstone (CBS, Viacom, BET, Paramount Pictures)
    • 4.1 Richard Branson (Virgin)
    • 3.7 Steven Spielberg
    • 3.7? Donald Trump (maybe more like 1.1)
    • 3.6 Oleg Deripaska (murky Russian oligarch)
    • 3.6 George Schultz (Starbucks)
    • 2.8 Oprah Winfrey – world’s richest Black woman
    • 2.3 Isabella dos Santos (Sonangol oil) – second richest Black woman
    • 2.2 Ted Turner (founded CNN, TBS)
    • 1.9 William Randolph Hearst (Citizen Kane)
    • 1.6 Tom Steyer (impeach Trump)
    • 1.1 Michael Jordan
    • 1.0 Kylie Jenner

Trump: Forbes puts Trump at $3.7 billion. But in 2005 it put him at $2.7 billion when Deutsche Bank said he was worth only $788 million.

Queen Elizabeth II is not a billionaire. Nor was any US president before Trump, even adjusting for inflation.

Bob Johnson became the first Black American billionaire in 2001 when he sold BET to Viacom.

What $1.5 billion looks like in $100 banknotes.

A billion US dollars in 2019 is equal to:

  • Half of the Empire State Building.
  • Three Boeing 777 jet airliners.
  • 77,500 talents of silver or two metric tons.
  • $70,000,000 or £14,400,000 in 1925 (when the dollar and pound were still on the gold standard).
  • The net worth of 7,000 ordinary White American households or 98,000 Black ones (based on median wealth in 2014, adjusted for inflation).

With a billion dollars you could buy three Boeing 777s.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

“I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health – is wrong.”

Fox News:

“Well, first of all, I mean, the fact is ringworm isn’t deadly …”

– Abagond, 2019.

Sources: mainly Forbes (2019); US Inflation Calculator (to adjust for inflation); “Outliers” (2008) by Malcolm Gladwell (for the dead billionaires); LA Times (1951) for Hearst; Business Insider (2018) for Putin; The Independent (2012) for Mansa Musa and Gaddafi.

See also:

623

Read Full Post »

Candace Owens

Posted in stuff on Tue Mar 19th 2019| 34 Comments »

Candace Owens in her MAGA hat, which makes her feel free.

Candace Owens (1989- ), also known as Red Pill Black, is a Black American YouTuber and former friend of Kanye West. She has appeared on right-wing outlets like Fox News, Infowars, and PragerU. Business Insider says she is “a prominent figure on the right and within conservative media.”

In 2016 Owens was a Bernie Sanders supporter who said Trump was stupid and “reckless”.

In 2019 she now says stuff like: “Donald Trump saved Western civilization.” She says she had a Red Pill Moment and achieved enlightenment, changing her political philosophy just months after Trump became president.

Follow the money: Owens is communications director of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a cringey attempt by the Koch brothers (pictured above) to make the right seem cool to Millennials. The Koch brothers are billionaire donors to the Republican Party.

What fans have said:

  • Kanye West: “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.”
  • Brenton Tarrant: “the person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens.”
  • Sean Hannity: “you are a force of light and a star.”

Owens tried to laugh off that Tarrant quote – Tarrant had shot up two mosques in New Zealand. But, strangely, she did not condemn his actions right away and has, in fact, been making White genocide arguments about Muslim immigration:

“If France wants to build an army to defend itself against anything, it ought to be the declining birth rate of its people. All signs indicate that it will be a Muslim majority country in just 40 years!

“Defend your culture first …”

Which sounds just like something from Tarrant’s manifesto.

#Blexit: Her big thing these days is Blexit: Blacks should leave the Democratic Party, “an ideological slave ship”. She says Black Liberals have been brainwashed by CNN and public schooling. She wants to free Black people from mental slavery:

The four truths:

  1. Racism: America is not a racist country. The left’s talk of racism is the politicking of fear.
  2. Abortion: “Abortion is murder … A hard-hitting truth is that the most unsafe place for a Black child is not on the streets, it’s not when they see a police officer, it’s in their mother’s womb. … we’ve lost 18 million Black babies since 1973.”
  3. The police: Racially motivated police brutality is a myth … but father absence is not.
  4. Democrats: care more about illegal immigrants than the millions of Black and Hispanic children living in poverty.

Not racist:

  • America;
  • President Trump;
  • Starbucks;
  • Republican Party, which freed the slaves and ended Jim Crow.

Racist:

  • White Democrats – who gave us slavery, the Klan, absent Black fathers, Black victimhood.

The Dixiecrat fallacy is the name for this, a wilfully obtuse misreading of political history.

Stereotypes: Listening to her you would think nearly all Black people are poor, live on government handouts, cannot think for themselves, and are imagining racism.

Flimflam: She poses as a brave truth-teller, but has no respect for facts, like for all the research done on racism. Or global warming. She even lied on Kanye. Be warned.

Owens:

“You can feel free to call me an Uncle Tom. It does not affect me. You know why? Because I actually read the book – Uncle Tom was the hero.”

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

568

Read Full Post »

Gloria Jones: Tainted Love

Posted in stuff on Sun Mar 17th 2019| 3 Comments »

Remarks:

Jones recorded this song in the US in 1964. It was a B-side that went nowhere. But, thanks to the musical time warp that White people live in, it later became a hit in dance clubs in northern England in the 1970s. The Wikipedia:

“The track’s Motown-influenced sound (featuring a fast tempo, horns, electric rhythm guitar and female backing vocals) fit in perfectly with the music favoured by those involved in the UK’s Northern Soul club scene of the early 1970s …”

By way of Northern soul it returned to the US in the 1980s as British synth pop – Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” (1981). That song went to #6 across the Anglosphere (weighted average), hitting #1 in Britain, Australia, and Canada.

Jones herself would go to England, becoming Marc Bolan’s girlfriend, he of the rock band T. Rex.

The video above is an out-take of the television show “Hollywood A Go Go” on January 1st 1966.

Thanks to those who helped me with this song. All mistakes are mine!

See also:

Lyrics:

Sometimes I feel I’ve got to
Run away I’ve got to
Get away
From the pain you drive into the heart of me
The love we share
Seems to go nowhere
And I’ve lost my light
For I toss and turn I can’t sleep at night

(chorus)
Once I ran to you (I ran)
Now I’ll run from you
The tainted love you’ve given
I give you all a girl can give you
Take my tears and that’s not nearly all
Oh…tainted love
Tainted love

Now I know I’ve got to
Run away I’ve got to
Get away
You don’t really want any more from me
To make things right
You need someone to hold you tight
And you think love is to pray
Well I’m sorry I don’t pray that way

(chorus…)
Don’t touch me please
I cannot stand the way you tease
I love you – I hurt me so
If I do not pack my things and go
Tainted love, tainted love (x2)
Touch me baby, tainted love (x2)
Tainted love (x3)

Read Full Post »

Brenton Tarrant

Posted in stuff on Sat Mar 16th 2019| 32 Comments »

Brenton Tarrant (1990?- ) is the White nationalist gunman who shot up two mosques in New Zealand during Friday prayers on March 15th 2019. He shot 205 times, killing 49 and injuring 47. He showed his mass shooting live on the Internet after uploading his 73-page manifesto and receiving the blessing of the Knights Templar. He says he acted alone.

Like Dylann Roof:

  • killed unarmed people at a place of worship.
  • left a manifesto.
  • knows the Fourteen Words that neo-Nazis love to quote (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”).
  • was trying to tip the US into a race war.
  • was taken alive by police.

Unlike Roof, the US press is freely calling him a terrorist.

Tarrant is from Australia, but picked New Zealand so that no one in the West would feel safe – not Muslims from terrorist attack, not Whites from White genocide.

White genocide is that thing where White women are not having enough babies, leading to White people being replaced in their own countries by Black and Brown immigrants, like those Tarrant killed.

Tarrant:

“When you discover a nest of vipers in your yard, do you spare the adolescents? Do you allow them to grow freely, openly, to one day bite you child as they play in their own yard? No. You burn the nest and kill the vipers, no matter their age.

“The enemies of our children are being born in our lands right now, even as you read this. These same children will one day become teens, then adults, voting against the wishes of our people, practicing the cultural and religious practices of the invaders, taking our peoples lands, work, houses and even attacking and killing our children.

“A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

US President Trump also calls them “invaders”.

Whites are in for a rude awakening:

  • When most of the Baby Boomers have died off between 2028 and 2038, the number of White people will drop by alarming amounts.
  • When Texas turns blue (Democratic), a pro-White US president will become all but impossible.

He wants all non-Whites out of Europe, even the Turks out of Constantinople:

“UNTIL THE HAGIA SOPHIA IS FREE OF THE MINARETS, THE MEN OF EUROPE ARE MEN IN NAME ONLY”

When the Turks took over Constantinople in 1453 they renamed it Istanbul and made its main church, the Hagia Sophia, into a mosque.

Capitalists and Marxists are a threat too: they have hollowed out Western culture, made democracy a joke, and are destroying the earth. He calls himself an eco-fascist – and a racist.

Candace Owens in a MAGA hat.

Candace Owens: Tarrant has been most influenced not by Donald Trump or Dylann Roof, but Candace Owens, a Black Republican whose thinking the New Kanye liked:

“Yes, the person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.”

– Abagond, 2019.

Sources: mainly his manifesto, “The Great Replacement” (2019).

See also:

557

Read Full Post »

Books I read in 2019

Posted in stuff on Thu Mar 14th 2019| 4 Comments »

Last update: March 14th 2019.

Hopefully by writing this post during the course of the year instead of at the end, my reading will become less random and more focused!

The book listed last is the main thing I am reading now.

Clive Cussler: Treasure (1988) – a beach novel about finding the lost books of the Library of Alexandria. You will never guess where they are found. An action film in book form – it has a plane crash, a car chase, a ship hijacking, a commando raid, even a good old Aztec human sacrifice. What more could you want? I have always wondered what it was like to read a Clive Cussler novel – they are all so uniformly thick! Now I know.

Martin Day: Doctor Who: Wooden Heart (2007) – I have seen all the episodes of “Doctor Who” with Martha Jones and wanted more, so I read this. It is just as good if not better than the television show. A book is equal to like three or four episodes. In this one Martha and the Doctor find a dead prison starship with a simulated peasant village.

Alistair Reynolds: Troika (2011) – I am a sucker for books about discovering a mysterious artefact from another world, like “Sphere” (1987) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), but each time I am let down. It seems like no one can write a good ending to these kind of books. Ugh.

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – Wow, what a tear-jerker! It uses the Victorian novel (the Netflix of the day) to put you in the shoes of slaves. The book turned public opinion in the northern US against slavery, leading to civil war. Rightfully so. The eye dialect seems overdone, but the notes (by Henry Louis Gates Jr and Hollis Robbins) say that is pretty much how Black people talked back then. I will almost certainly be doing a post on this one.

Timeline:

  • before 1950: 1
  • 1950s:
  • 1960s:
  • 1970s:
  • 1980s: 1
  • 1990s:
  • 2000s: 1
  • 2010s: 1

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

531

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: