‘determined to ‘do her bit’
September 11, 2022 Leave a comment
We now turn from the worst to the worthy. From the spectacle of the worst speech ever given by the worst public figure ever and from one who does not care about the American people to remembering a public figure devoted to her people and worthy of respect. We turn from a figurehead of confusion, of conformity to confusion and of coercion to conformity to a figurehead of depth, of dignity, and of the “democracy of the dead” – Queen Elizabeth II.
When I think of Queen Elizabeth, I think history: the 96 years of her embodied history and of our mother country’s history. And while some today dismiss history for preferred dining guests, aka “end of history” narratives, the narrative of history should have a permanent place at the table.
A few years ago, I picked up a book about English history. I found it to be a fascinating dinner guest and fellow passenger on the train. Reading about the English characters described, I learned of their folly and foibles, of their wise choices and their foolish ways, of their mark on history which effects today. One paragraph that Chesterton’s words above later echoes is especially meaningful to my own conservative understanding.
The following is a quote from the somewhat cheeky English History made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable by Lacey Baldwin Smith.
[Tories] were the party of Edmund Burke, having a deep respect for the sanctity of history and believing that government was “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yest to be born.” . . . they preached Britain’s manifest destiny as the world’s greatest Empire, took up the paternalistic cause of the common man, and changed their name to the Conservative Party.
I returned to the book when I heard the news of the Queen’s passing. The book’s back cover states “The guiding principle of this book’s heretical approach is that “history is not everything that happened, but what is worth remembering about the past. . ..”. Thus, its chapters deal mainly with “Memorable History” in blocks of time over the centuries. The final chapter “The Royal Soap Opera,” recounts the achievements, personalities and idiocies of the royal family since the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066.
The final section in The Royal Soap Opera is titled Elizabeth II (1952–) begins . . . Elizabeth came to the throne in a “blaze of glorious technicolor.” Queen Elizabeth II was the first television queen. The world began to see the “historic grandeur of royal pageantry”. But, of course, when media gets involved, all of the royal family’s foibles, failures and fractures are laid bare for the world to see. Thru all of “The Royal Soap Opera” Queen Elizabeth II symbolized the good, the stalwart, the faithful. She remained the rock of Gibraltar and a reference point for the far afloat royal misfits. (Please let me know if you know any such female public figure today.)
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born on April 21st 1926, ascended to the throne on February 6th of 1952. Elizabeth was crowned on June 2nd 1953.
Today, we have ‘princesses’ who demand that government and others treat them royally. Princess Elizabeth, ‘determined to ‘do her bit’ was no such princess. She was “Princess auto-Mechanic” during WWII:
When the news broke that the Queen had passed, history became relevant again. Mini-histories have been presented in the media. Here’s one of the best historical perspectives:
Another reflection, regarding fame, slavery:
Give Tribute to Whom Tribute is Due
****
Scenes from the media coverage of the Queen’s passing brought back memories . . .
1977. The Queen’s Silver Jubilee was celebrated throughout the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Elizabeth ascended to the throne 25 years before.
Having ascended to the age of 25 and wanting to see the world, I traveled to England that summer with a long-time neighborhood friend. As I recall, my friend found us a travel package – airfare, transfers, hotel, tours, dinner playhouse tickets – for $750.00 each. The trip lasted ten days.
We landed at Heathrow. The tour bus drove us to a hotel in Kensington where we stayed. The things we noticed along the way: dreary weather, green everywhere, black cabs and red double-decker buses. London was decked out with Jubilee banners. The Queens’ picture was everywhere. Souvenir shops displayed all kinds of celebratory curios.
One of the first things planned for our tour group was a pub crawl in London. I remember drinking a lot of shandy and warm pints and playing darts. Our tour group would later visit Stonehenge, Bath, Stratford-on-Avon, and Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard. (The Queen, of course, was busy with Jubilee preparations, so, the two of us weren’t invited in.)
We gazed on Windsor Castle from a distance and got a closeup view of Winston Churchill’s gravesite. The tour guide had given the tour group a choice: visit Churchill’s gravesite or go to Oxford. I was the only one to raise my hand for Oxford. I figured Churchill wasn’t going anywhere soon.
We attended a West London show – The Mousetrap. Afterward, we were treated to a typical English dinner of roasted meat, mashed potatoes, vegetables, stuffing, Yorkshire puddings and gravy.
As mentioned, our hotel was in Kensington. On our time off, my friend and I rode the tubes and took in St. James Park, the Mall, Hyde Park Corner, parts of Soho, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus, Tower Bridge, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Parliament. We did it all and without Rick Steves.
A jolly good time.
****
Where are the serious people? Time to choose.
This . . .

Or This . . .

And this, the sorry individuals who are unable to contemplate anything but their navel:
Informed Dissent:
Wait! What? I thought the world is going to end anytime now!
1200 scientist and scholars say ‘There is no climate emergency.”
The World Climate Declaration warns that climate science “should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific.”
“Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures,” the declaration reads.
“We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models,” the WCD states.
O Canada:
O Illinois:
The Safe-T Act?
The so-called SAFE-T Act would end cash bail and includes 12 non-detainable offences, second-degree murder, aggravated battery and arson without bail, as well as drug-induced homicide, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, intimidation, aggravated DUI, aggravated fleeing and eluding, drug offences and threatening a public official.
Illinois law will release those charged with second-degree murder without bail – The Counter Signal
Orland Park’s mayor:
O Virginia:
“ . . . seventeen other states have previously tied their vehicle emission standards to emissions standards set by California. Now the press is playing that fact as if these states have a choice; that they must “decide” whether to follow California’s strict new rules. That is, all new cars must be electric by 2025.
But in many states, they really don’t have a choice. Because their state legislators have passed laws tying their own state emissions standards to whatever California does. It is very difficult to rescind existing law, and it may prove to be an impossibility. This is the case in Virginia, where I live. The Democratic Virginia legislature quietly tied the state’s emissions standards to California’s in 2021. Governor Youngkin is vowing to change this law, but rescinding a law is generally harder than actually passing one. This will require legislative involvement, in a state whereby the legislative body is essentially split between the two parties.”
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste (substack.com)
The WTF WEF:
1958 book explains the current destruction of America by Communism. For example:
Step 17: “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.”
Step 25: “Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.”
#284 – The naked Communist, by W. Cleon Skousen. – Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library
Jason Whitlock Tells it like it is, Kari Lake Joins
Manipulated to Follow the Course of This World
July 28, 2019 Leave a comment
There is a passage in C. S. Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength (published in 1945) that foreshadows the media manipulation going on today. I’ll begin with some background from my post Genealogies of Straw?
The narrator in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy novel That Hideous Strength tells us about one of the central characters Mark Studdock. He is a young academic, a sociologist, and a member of the Progressive Element at Bracton College. He is an ambitious, self-centered and shallow intellectual who has come into the service of the National Institute of Coordinated Sciences (NICE). He believes NICE will serve the best interest of humanity through progress at any cost. Once he stopped hemming and hawing about joining the organization he is welcomed into the inner circle. But he soon finds that he has committed himself to a hellish organization which plans to re-do humanity by force so that only the best humans (in NICE’s view) remain. He is made aware that the tentacles of the organization are growing.
Before the passage I quote below we learn that Mark is pressured to write newspaper articles that conceal what N.I.C.E. is up to. At one point he questions Miss Hardcastle, the sadistic leader of the N.I.C.E.’s corrupt police force, about which newspaper – “Left or Right” –is going to print the “rot” he is being asked to write. Miss Hardcastle answers.
“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and terrified of each other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us – to refute enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”
“That shows you are still in the nursery, lovey,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Haven’t you realized that it’s the other way around?”
“How do you mean?”
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in the Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
Mark, the academic sociologist, balks at such an inference. And Hardcastle responds “…Don’t you see that the educated reader can’t stop reading the high-brow weeklies whatever they do? He can’t. He’s been conditioned.”
Anyone who spends time reading and watching the media, and I presume a large portion of the population here in the U.S does., is susceptible to its manipulation. Is this news to anyone? TV commercials and internet popup adverts are created to manipulate the viewer and reader to go after what is being offered, or to at least carry a jingle and a phone number and an image around in their head. Subliminal manipulation is used constantly to sway thinking.
Similar manipulative influence is used by Progressive Element’s TV news/political opinion programs and on its news and opinion websites where news is swapped for narrative. The talking heads of these shows and websites hope to affix their narrative in the minds of the viewer and reader with an endless repetition of lies, innuendos, slander, and charged words: “Racist!” Sexist!” “Homophobe!” “Islamophobe!” “Nazi!”. These words are intended to produce hate for the ‘enemies’ of the Progressive Element’s agenda. It induces an effect on the viewer and reader not unlike those who take part in INGSOC’s Two Minutes Hate as described in George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949).
The Progressive Element’s desired outcome-based control of others using terror and ideological fiction is characteristic of totalitarianism. This manifestation of political evil is not new nor Progressive. It is characteristic of what came before as expressed by Hannah Arendt in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt, a German-born American political scientist and philosopher wrote about the horrific events of her own day: the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Stalinism and the rise of Nazi Germany that brought about the annihilation of millions. Referring to the citizenry who allowed such horrors, Arendt found a “mixture of gullibility and cynicism… is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements”. And, so was lying. Here are three quotes coming out of Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the forces at work during those times to de-legitimize truth and to de-humanize the hearer:
Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity.
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
The talking head’s mocking and sneering of the ‘enemy’ is echoed in social media by the viewers of Sixty Minutes Hate. Internalized totalitarianism, often disguised as a push for social justice, demands control of the conversation, of people’s thoughts, of people’s behavior and of people’s property. With terror-mongering (e.g., “The world will end in 12 years if we don’t do something about climate change”; “Democracy will end if we don’t wrest control of it from those in power”) and with endless repetition one’s understanding of reality is swapped for the socially constructed reality. Shadow banning on social media sites is meant to keep opinions opposed to the Progressive Element’s agenda out of sight and mind.
Societal manipulation done by academics and the elites of the ruling class is used by totalitarian regimes (North Korea most notably today) to produce servitude to its agenda:
“Apart from the massacres, deaths and famines for which communism was responsible, the worst thing about the system was the official lying: that is to say the lying in which everyone was forced to take part, by repetition, assent or failure to contradict. I came to the conclusion that the purpose of propaganda in communist countries was not to persuade, much less to inform, but to humiliate and emasculate.”
― Anthony Daniels, The Wilder Shores Of Marx: Journeys In A Vanishing World
Big tech uses societal manipulation. Machine Learning Fairness algorithms are used by Google to put Google’s thumb on the scale of searches in order to skew search outcomes toward the social justice their narrative demands. Enter “Men can” and “Women can” into the Google home page and see what immediately shows up. Men are portrayed negatively or neutral and even as being able to have babies. Women are shown as compassionate and as powerful corporate and civic leaders – positively. One can imagine what Google’s Machine Learning Fairness algorithm does to skew political and cultural (the LGBTQ in particular) searches.
No matter where you lie on the political spectrum you will want to listen to the video and read the research of Dr. Robert Epstein, Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat. Beyond newspapers, you and I are being manipulated by the princes of the power of the air – Big Tech. Dr. Epstein stated at the senate community hearing that Google’s manipulation affected a range of a minimum of 2.6 million to 10.4 million votes in favor of Hillary Clinton.
Liberal Professor Warns: Google Manipulating Voters ‘on a Massive Scale’
You can be sure that what comes out of Hollywood is societal manipulation. The entertainment you watch is manipulated. You are taking in pagan and Progressive notions of life meant to shape your world view. One example: 7 Moments That Made ‘Frozen’ the Most Progressive Disney Movie Ever
Because of the incessant and ubiquitous manipulation impelling one to follow the course of this world, because the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience (Eph. 2:1-3) to produce hatred, vindictiveness, greed and a lust for power, a follower of Christ must set their mind on things above (Col. 3:1-2) to gain their bearings in this world. One way to deal with the manipulative narrative is to do what Jesus did to Peter when Peter took Jesus aside and began to rebuke him. Jesus rebuked Peter: Get behind me Satan! You’re trying to trip me up! You’re not looking at things like God does! You’re looking at things like a mere mortal!” Jesus put his Father’s words in front of him and put man’s manipulative narrative – avoid pain, suffering and death – behind him.
The father of lies has been around since the Garden of Eden. He lies and he wants you to be a party to his lies. The Evil One is behind manipulative narratives as Jesus makes clear when he denounces the Judeans and their narrative, one of evoking their Abrahamic lineage as proof of the rightness of their narrative.
“You are from your father – the devil! And you’re eager to get on with what he wants. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he’s never remained in the truth, because there is no truth in him, because he is a liar – in fact, he’s the father of lies!” (Jn. 8:44)
The teachers of the law and the religious leaders in Jesus’ day wanted to control the narrative of what the law said, how it was to be applied, and of who had say-so with regard to the law. They clearly had expectations of a Messiah who would overthrow the Romans and of a man as not as repulsive as John the Baptist and of a man not as conciliatory as Jesus. Truth showed up one day in the marketplace and revealed their manipulative narrative (Matt. 11;15-17) regarding John the Baptist and of himself:
“If you’ve got ears, then listen!
“What picture shall I give you for this generation? Asked Jesus. “It’s like a bunch of children sitting in the town square, and singing songs to each other. This is how it goes:
‘You didn’t dance when we played the flute;
You didn’t cry when we sang the dirge!’
The narrative of the teachers of the law and the religious leaders clearly had its expectations. And when those expectations were not met the crowd would have Jesus crucified. The same deference to popularized and propagandized narratives with expectations based on ideological fiction is true now. And the same totalitarian impulse, like in Stalin’s and Hitler’s time and, today, within the Progressive Element, desires that you be in the thrall of their narrative, to dance to its music and to sing its songs. And in servitude to Big Brother’s narrative you will soon hear “‘You dance when we say dance! You sing when we say sing! Or, else! for totalitarianism and the evil behind it are never satisfied. Both seek to control outcomes with lies and manipulation and then with force.
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Filed under Culture, Economics, History, Liberalism, Political Commentary, Politics, Progressivism, social commentary, socialism Tagged with cultural Marxism, culture, Google, Machine Learning Fairness, media, progressivism, subliminal manipulation, totalitarianism, Two Minutes Hate