2020, twenty-four hours to go: I've got another bookshelf entry for you!

Happy New Year's Eve everyone, I hope you get the appropriate level of drunk to celebrate the end of this year from hell. I've got a couple rum and Cokes lined up to ring in the New Year right proper, before we all wake up and realize that 2020 won.

I'm not sorry for those puns, and I'd make them again. But to make up for them, I can announce a new bookshelf entry I just finished marking up. It's titled An Academic Journey to a New World, and it's one of two papers I discovered on my laptop from my undergrad days. In what's starting to look like a pattern, I once again dabble on the fringes of known history, weighing evidence for Phoenician and Carthaginian travel to the Americas. I was solidly in favor of this idea as an undergrad, then I swung against it as a graduate student, and now I'm not sure. All I can do is point you towards the evidence, be honest about where that evidence has been debunked in the intervening years, and offer my best guess.

If someone held a gun to my head and told me to guess, I'd say that this particular pre-Columbian contact probably happened. The Phoenicians were no less able seafarers than the Polynesians, who I briefly mention in the introduction almost certainly did make it to the Americas and back. The evidence is scattershot and circumstantial, but not without merit. Some peculiarities about the trade with the city of Ophir mentioned in the first book of Kings in the Bible weighs in its favor, as does some narcotics found in Egyptian mummies, and some shipwrecks off the Eastern seaboard. To learn more, you'll just have to check it out.

How to build a tinyhouse in a desert

I've gotten questions about my tinyhouse. I've left Nevada for the winter, so unfortunately I can only use pics and videos I've already taken to illustrate the process I used to make it, and what it looks like now. And as I look through the video I took, it didn't capture the stuff I thought it was pointing at. It's mostly just me talking and pictures of a cloudless blue sky, so we'll skip that bit. The parts that aren't blue sky have been GIF'd for your viewing pleasure to the left, and my narrative in the video isn't really necessary as I'm writing one here.

The first part was building the road to the property. I won't dwell on it too much except to mention it, because if you're trying to do what I'm doing, property access is always your first consideration. Many people who live near me built their roads through other people's property. For the most part, that's okay - so long as you get on with your neighbors. But the moment a feud starts, you don't have the legal right to drive to your own property on the road you built. So literally, don't cut corners here. It took me three months to even just get to my property, because I was pulling out sagebrush and levelling the dirt and digging swales. But it all went through public property, where the developers of my ghost town had once planned for a road to go before never building it.

More cartographyposting: The British Raj

This is India at the territorial height of the British Raj, give or take an Anglo-Afghan War or three. Another cartographic entry into the galleryposting, and like the last one, I made it for an eventual video I'll make for my Youtube history channel for apolitical normies.

The Gospel is revolutionary.

"Chains shall He break
For the slave is our brother;
And in His Name
All oppression shall cease."

I hope you're all having a very merry Christmas. I'm spending mine with my family, and enjoying their company this winter before I head back out to Nevada to get back to work in the spring. I set this up to autopost when I'll be waking up.

I don't have a whole lot of insight to offer you this morning other than a notion I'll be expanding on in a full-blown essay, maybe even a full-blown book: the Christian gospel is revolutionary. So is the Jewish Law, so is the Muslim sharia, so is the Buddhist Eightfold Path, so is just about any other original religious tradition you can think of. Religions are just metaphysical ideologies, and they spring out of the same conditions that create materialist ideologies like socialism or fascism. Fascism never lasts very long, and neither do fascist religions. Religions that spring from socialist roots outlast them, and religions that retain their socialist roots longer and stronger remain cherished in the heart of the working class all the more for it.

This isn't to say that nothing bad ever happens as a result of religion, or that you must be religious to be socialist, or that the particular metaphysical claims of any given religion must definitely be true. What it is to say is, that Whosoever breaks the chains of the slaves my brothers is my King, and any such Name that would end oppression will forever be upon my lips.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Christmas! I got you some old music and a new bookshelf entry.

Merry Christmas, to those of you who celebrate! (And Happy Holidays to those of you who do not!) I hope it's spent in relative happiness around friends and/or family, and that it's a season of spiritual renewal for you.

I was given an idea for a new essay last weekend, and have spent all week writing and then marking it up for the internet. It's ready to go, and it's about our modern music subcultures, and I call it Millions of Red Bops.

In the course of finding relevant videos to deck the essay with, I found this little gem of footage of me covering two old Christmas songs from the Middle Ages. I didn't have anything else ready to go for a blog post, so it's there to the side. Audio quality isn't great, it was recorded in the early 2010s, but I kinda dig it. I chose to cover "The Seven Rejoices of Mary" and "Veni Veni Emmanuel" because those songs have some real meaning behind them. They aren't materialistic Christmas songs from the Boomer era, but were written and sung by people who believed and hoped earnestly in the teachings of their faith. There's a richness of spirit, an organicness to them that you just don't get from modern capitalist carols.

Imma bout to drop some fresh cartography on ya

This is the Spanish Main, what pirates and the colonial empires they resisted called the Caribbean. It's period-specific to the colonial era, but only in broad terms; possession of the islands went back and forth between the various powers.

"Performative Axisship" is up on the bookshelf!

I just formatted and published another essay I wrote out in the field, Performative Axisship. It's an investigation of how dogwhistles, pacts with fashy idiots, and deliberately tweaking the pinkhairs are occasionally necessary to help communists advance our emancipatory goals. I expect to be so cancelled, you guys, but I also just don't care. Read up on it if you want to learn the contours of this theory. Although many communists have embraced this theory in practice in times past, I'm unaware of any communists explicitly writing theory about it before. Today, it's my humble contribution to the collective effort.

Upon the occasion of the electoral college electing Joseph Biden

My fellow Republicans:

One hundred and sixty years ago, we took up arms to defend a Republic by the people, for the people, and of the people. Our ancestors swore their oaths to the Constitution, to this people's Republic it set forth, and marched through the heart of the South for the liberation of an enchained race and the promulgation of this Constitution.

Today, the world lay in imperialist chains forged by liberal Democrats, and I understand the desire of many to deny them their victory, so barely won. But the only tool in our hands by which to shatter these chains is our own Constitution. By it, a rebellion against those chains, those liberals, those Democrats, can be blessed and sanctioned by all the force of our law. Without it, it is just unremitting war of the few on the many, one we the many are not prepared in any wise to win. We must uphold the Constitution, even when it works against our short term interests, because by allowing the workers of America to vote in a new government and to peacefully organize, it gives us a greater scope of action if properly used.

Another charcoal: the Maitreya Buddha, and that time I blackmailed a mafioso's kid

I drew this in the only college-level art class I ever took: Drawing 101 in Anne Arundel Community College, MD. It wasn't the first charcoal I'd ever done, nor the first charcoal I was really proud of, but it was the first that taught me the technique of using a different color of paper and adding white back in with white charcoal. This is on grey paper, and the assignment was simple. The instructor brought in a figurine of the Maitreya Buddha he had from home, and had us draw it from where we were sitting. I was a star pupil in that class and got done with the basic assignment fairly quickly, so he had me elaborate on the background a bit. I also signed my name in Japanese in the upper right corner; it's a language I speak badly, and my real name does not translate well at all to Japanese. But given that the Maitreya Buddha is a key figure in the Zen pantheon, and Zen is the main school of Buddhist thought in Japan, it seemed to fit.

So this particular piece of mine has an interesting history.

Saturday shitposting roundup, 12/12/2020

Aaaaaalmost forgot. But it's still Saturday in Nevada, so I'm not technically late. I kinda gave myself the week off because of a much more serious post and its emotionally draining subject matter, and spent the day playing Civ V. Maybe one day I'll write up a throwaway shitpost about my vidyagaem habits.

But until then, the public demands memes. Statistics tell me these posts perform exceptionally well, which is kinda depressing until I see that the bookshelf entries are also killing it. All is not lost for the effortposting side of things, and the bookshelf entries are the main reason this blog even blogs, so yay. In any case, without having to do any promotion whatsoever, a lot of you are just here for the Saturday shitposting. I know it, you know it, there's no sense denying it. So you know what that means...

You might as well jump!

A year and a day later: here in the precious blood I stand.

A year ago today, the neighbors came to my van to ask me to check up on their daughter. I drove down the dirt road towards Highway 93 figuring that I'd be changing a flat, or that her rusted-out hoopty had finally had enough and I'd be giving her a ride home. But for whatever reason, a dark thought crept into my head. What if it's real this time? It scared and disgusted me, and I went back to reimagining the steps to changing a flat in the dark. Find the jack, ratchet off some nuts, slide the tire off...

And then I saw the lights, a sickening cacophony of reds and blues filling up the desert and then receding, photonic harbingers of terror, and my internal world collapsed in on itself.

Probably the single coolest thing I've ever drawn: "Carta Caela," the map of the stars.

This is a map of the fifteen nearest lightyears to Earth, as understood to science in August 2016. The most recent discovery at that time was Proxima b, which is why Proxima Centauri has a planet denoted. The little dots are known planets.

Saturday shitposting roundup, 12/6/2020

It's that time again. What time? Why, the time for my lowest-effort post of the week! After formatting Ziusudra and the Conquest of HTML No Matter What, I've earned it. And I've got some real winners for you today! The shitposting forecast for this past week was partly repetitive with chance of liberalism, but the weekly edge was concentrated in a couple of them. Follow me after the jump:

New essay up on the bookshelf!

Ziusudra and the Conquering Refugee Nation is now live! This is an in-depth look into prehistory, looking at the post-Ice Age floods, whether the Biblical character Noah really reals and how, the fate of the Neanderthals, and the origins of settler-colonialism. And just for good measure, I threw in some original etymological analysis, as one does. It's the first historical work I've published on this blog, and it won't be the last. This puppy is over twice as long as the last bookshelf entry, How to Class Analyze Anything, and the HTML formatting alone took me six hours. The research and the writing of the article itself probably took a week out in the desert. It's a labor of love, so please read it and let me know what you think.

Trump fired Kissinger!

This broken clock named Trump has had the right time so often lately that I'm wondering if it isn't really ticking. He's the only American President in living memory to have no use for Henry Kissinger. Right before Thanksgiving, there was a purge of neoliberal ghouls from the Defense Policy Board, clearing the way for new appointments to carry out a new mission in the Department of Defense. These people are Trump loyalists, yes, but in this context that's a good thing. Their loyalty to Trump will preserve them from shitlib pressure to keep the forever wars going, and Trump's new Defense Department is bringing troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

To the surprise of literally nobody who knows who Henry Kissinger is, he was one of the key impediments to doing what Trump is doing right now abroad. In this Washington Post op-ed from 2011, he-like all good liberals-presents himself as being for something he's really against. He talks about wanting to withdraw from Afghanistan, but requiring four "tests" that must be met, which can never be met in these material conditions:

For negotiation to turn into a viable exit strategy, four conditions must be met: a cease-fire; withdrawal of all or most American and allied forces; the creation of a coalition government or division of territories among the contending parties (or both); and an enforcement mechanism.

Grr. Coding is hard.

I haven't been able to get a whole lot done on the blog in the past few days because I'm trying to resurrect an old webcomic I once had. Why? Because even though the original webcomic host went down three years ago, and even though the bare-cones backup I stuck the comic files on looked like trash and had literally no promotion or updates whatsoever for three years, its four hundred pages drew twenty thousand pageviews anyway.

People must just have liked the comic, and searched it out, and reread it. I've had the original files with me this whole time, and even though I stopped making more because I was too busy with a thesis I never finished, I've reread it once or twice too. It's a webcomic, but it's not a gag-a-day sorta thing. It's an involved story, the kind of thing where you totally could read 400 pages in a go if you have that kinda time.

Regenerative agriculture, food forests, and the ancient redwoods of Nevada

I'm starting an agricultural collective in desert land in Nevada to employ people as co-owners of a business that will grow a wide variety of food inside and outside of greenhouses using the principles of regenerative agriculture and dryland farming. We will get the water we need by saving 95% of it from escaping in the greenhouses, and rainfall on the greenhouses gets added to the total, so if the land we buy is half greenhouse, we've effectively doubled the rainfall on the other half.

With that extra water, and since the part of desert I've built my tinyhouse in is only desert because the water flows away too quickly and the water table is quite close to the surface, I will replant the redwood forests that flourished here before the uplift of the Sierra Nevadas 5 million years ago. The current sagebrush habitat will not be supplanted, but enriched, getting 25% more water due to the redwood forests preventing evaporation losses alone, and more diverse animals and plants creating better soils. Plenty of carbon will also be stored in the redwood forests themselves, which will be kept thin enough to allow every level of the forest to get sufficient light to bloom.

A Rising segment about the long-running realignment of the working class.

Rising is my favorite news show on YouTube, by far. Neither host is a Marxist-Leninist; one is a democratic socialist Bernie voter, and the other is a populist-conservative Trump voter. Of the two, I think I like the populist-conservative, Saagar Enjeti, better. He is reasonably left on economic terms, and his closer connection with the working class on cultural issues compared to the Bernie voter Krystal Ball means that his economic left agenda has a better chance of coming to pass. They react to the real news, as well as whatever the liberal media's up to that day. Rising is a great way to keep the pulse of the actual working class, in the way that Politico is a great way to keep the pulse of the actual bourgeoisie. These two are better weathervanes of socialism than all of Leftbook combined, because socialism won't be possible until the Krystals and Saagars of the world see and report that it is.

The clip above shares the straightforward polling, which is what I wanted everyone to see. Since 1980, there has been a steady realignment of the richest 100 counties and the most educated people (another proxy for class) from the Republicans to the Democrats. Anyone hoping to kick off the revolution in the party of the slaveowners is going to have to get over these notions. Leftists must retrain our mental habits and begin to regard the GOP as the lesser evil. I will make a longer post about this soon, possibly even a bookshelf entry (I have the article mostly written). But I also wanted to show off my favorite TV show, because Rising is such a valuable resource.

Some charcoals I did back in Florida

I've done a lot of art throughout the years. Though I went to college for history, I had several people strongly suggest I go to art school instead. One of them was my dad, in an inversion of the trope. "Son, you're an artist, I'm an artist, and it's time for you to go on to the family business." "But I wanna measure the preponderance of clay tobacco pipes in sediment to establish population figures in colonial Maryland instead, Daddy!" So I did. But I never stopped being good at art, and I've sold pieces for real cash over the years.

Not gonna lie, I'm kinda hoping to do the same on here. Some of my more intricate originals are fairly expensive, because I'm not parting with something that literally took me a month to draw for ten bucks. I doubt there's a huge market for art in that price range these days, but in those instances I'm perfectly willing to sell high-quality prints for closer to ten bucks (depends on what exact kind of print one would want; prints themselves can also get intricate these days). I guess it all depends on the demand I find out there; if I find a lot of you buying art from me, I'll come up with a more standardized price list.

Saturday shitposting roundup, 11/28/2020

One of the things I like most about social media is the shitposts. Trying to move my online presense onto this blog means that I'll see less of it. But that can be dealt with by moving that onto here. This are srs blog, so I don't want to clog it with dank memes, so keeping it to one thread is probably for the best. It'll also be an interesting little window into this moment in time, and if I do it every week, every week will have such a window so we can remember what was going through our collective heads and when. I'm gonna cheat a bit this week and add stuff from earlier, but next week I'll just add the best stuff of that week as I run across it.

Pile of maymays after the jump.

Pictures from Nevada, and the stories behind them

Sitting here in Omaha for the winter, the past year of my life almost seems like a dream when I think about it. I went and built a road and a house and had all manner of adventures and hardships in the desert. It was a surreal ordeal, but I survived and adapted and can now help others do the same.

Going through my files, I found a bunch that I hadn't organized in any real way. It's as good a place as any to start. And while I'm doing officekeeping on the subject, I think I'm gonna have a division of labor on subjects between weekdays and weekends. I'll keep the dense and wordy theoryposting and historyposting for the weekdays, and blog about the collective and my art on the weekends, to sort of put things in a lower gear for everyone. That said, let's get on with it!

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part IV: Molotov-Ribbentrippin'

One of the big things the ultraradicools like to throw in our faces about Stalin is that he signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler. It's absolutely true; this is a thing, and he did it. However, Stalin's adroit diplomatic maneuvering absolutely saved the world.

To begin with, in Mein Kampf, Hitler openly declared his intention to grab the Russian steppe as lebensraum for the German people. Stalin was not naive about Hitler's intentions. When Operation Barbarossa finally came, it came as a surprise not because Stalin didn't believe Hitler was incapable of duplicity, nor because Stalin was unaware of the contents of Mein Kampf. Barbarossa caught Stalin by surprise because he couldn't seriously believe that Hitler was actually stupid enough to open a front against Russia with Britain still fighting.

Knowing a Nazi invasion was imminent, Stalin first appealed to the liberal powers of Britain and France for an anti-Hitler alliance. He was rebuffed, as capitalist policymakers in the mid-30s entertained the thought of using Hitler against the Soviet Union. It was in this spirit of an unspoken liberal-fascist alliance that Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich and gave Hitler Czechoslovakia in exchange for sweet fuckall. The British weren't even actively rearming at this point (Robin Higham, A Guide to the Sources of British Military History, 453).

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part III: the Conquest of Robert

Why am I talking so much about Stalin in the first place, you may reasonably wonder? Who my favorite dead Soviet is and why seemingly has nothing to do with the struggle against capitalism in the here and now, right? The answer is that I am forced by capitalist lies against Stalin's character to defend Stalin, because once they get you to believe lies about Stalin, they can then generalize those lies to the entire rest of the Marxist-Leninist movement, and from there to the rest of the communist movement, and from there to the rest of the socialist movement. And if the capitalists learn they can get away with this trick with Stalin, they will use it against any leader we dare advance just as readily. Surely some of you Bern-feelers have already seen this in action.

So what is their biggest line of attack against Stalin? "Communisasim sounds good on paper, but in reality it kills eleventy billion people! Just look at what Stalin did! Here, I've got a history book that proves it!" It's a very neat lie, because people are predisposed to trust experts, especially experts that agree with one another. But it doesn't work on historians, who are taught to look for evidence, for primary documents, for attribution to facts and figures cited.

Announcing the Bookshelf!

If you look over on the sidebar, there's a new section called the Bookshelf. This is where all writings longer and/or more important to me than a standard blog post will go, whether essays or full-length books. I've written or partly written several of these while out in the field in Nevada, when ideas came to me in a cannabinoid haze and I had to write them down. In many cases I would drive to town with a burning question to look up that would absolutely not leave me alone until I did. This blog is here in large part because I came to the conclusion that self-publishing this work was the only way I could guarantee that it would ever see the light of day.

Those of you who know me in real life will know that the only thing of any value I own is my book collection. I couldn't have assembled it all with the meager wages I've earned, but I was lucky enough that my academic career caught the interest of the leftist professors in my undergraduate years the way it didn't catch the interest of my liberal professors in my graduate years. As they died or retired, they left me their professional history and political science collections, and on those subjects I have a tiny little library that outshines most. It is the most bourgeois thing I have owned or will ever own, but I've put it to the service of humanity. The books I didn't need or could find copies of online, I sold so that I could finance the agricultural collective in Nevada. But I couldn't part with most of it, and if I did, I know I could never replace it. This collection belongs to the working class; I am merely its custodian for now. But I consider myself lucky for all that; books have brought me delight my whole life, and continue to now.

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part II: crushing antisemitism

Well, I was going to just repost what I had posted on Facebook, but as it turns out the racist cretins running Facebook deleted it when they deleted the Marxist page that made it. So I'll do my best to explore the same issues that post did.

So let's start with the obvious: this is one of those charges that gets levelled at Stalin from time to time, in the same way and for the same reasons as it gets levelled at Palestinians who like living in their own houses, or people who get upset that the Palestinians can't. In the current material conditions of occupied Palestine, the Zionists have power, the Palestinians do not, and they justify their oppression by dismissing all criticism as antisemitic. The Holocaust was a great evil, and in remembrance of that great evil our society now justifies other great evils. This has gone so far as to try to tarnish the guy that ended the Holocaust with its taint. Because the people that have power in our society (capitalists) have a need to discredit the most successful guy who did not (Stalin) and this is an easy weapon at hand for the lazy bourgeoisie.

Censorship? In MY Facebook? It's more likely than you think.

Facebook is preventing me from posting links to this blog. They are calling it spam. It's literally existed for two days, I posted it on my wall and in a total of one group, but yup. Spam.

I'm sure I don't need to explain to anyone why this is happening, it should be obvious. I'm not even incredibly surprised that it's happening, just surprised that it's happening so fast. It is obviously not in the Zuckerbourgeoisie's interests to permit communists to organize online, but making the censorship too obvious would just lead to a massive exodus. Anyway, so long as we're posting our dank maymays on their site, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can still harvest data about us, still market ads to us, still have the power to censor us when we say something they just can't abide.

But if we move our posts off Facebook, as I just began to do, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can't do that anymore. If we move it to a site without Facebook logins and plugins, the Zuckerbourgeoisie can't even harvest our data about it. This makes Mark a very, very sad little creep. Which is why Facebook is deliberately confusing this site with spam, because it's a kernel of off-Facebook communist organization. Even just a kernel of that is impermissible, apparently. It's like anti-antifa, but for real. Antifa attempts to shut down any and all Nazi organizing, because it inevitably leads to genocide, which is clearly against most people's class interests. Facebook therefore attempts to shut down any and all communist organizing, because communist organizing leads to socialism, which is clearly against the Zuckerbourgeoisie's class interests.

Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how: Part I

One of the things I did on Facebook was write a series of posts on Stalin's life. With my historian's background, I've got a special insight on the man's life, having gone through the weeds and read extensively about him, also with the training to tell truth from fiction in the sources I read.

I figure it's important to dedicate so much effort to debunking capitalist myths about his life in the first place, because Stalin is the first and foremost line of defense for capitalists of all stripes. Whether they're making imperialism weak again or they're ridin' with Biden, all capitalists can agree that the one true Uncle Joe was a Very Bad Man and that "Stalinists" (protip: we call ourselves Marxist-Leninists, the word "Stalinist" is as meaningless to us as the concept of "cultural Marxism") must be barred from public life. So while I would definitely much rather be talking about how I'd like to improve this country (and all countries) by empowering the working class, I first must deal with the life and record of this glorious dead Georgian because I'll be made to answer for his "crimes" the moment I try to improve society anyway.

Bloglaunch Day!

Hello all! My name, for the various and sundry purposes presented here, is Kent Chamberlain. Let me tell you about my life.

I was born into the middle class, with Republican-voting parents. My teenage rebellion made me a libertarian, until online liberals and socialists persuaded me that the unregulated market was a utopian fantasy, so I became a liberal in college. There I quickly realized that the liberals are the embodiment of every libertarian dystopia in practice, an unaccountable elite with money, and around the time Bernie launched his first campaign, I became a democrat socialist. But then after his first loss, I realized that democrat socialism can't change anything, because it's structurally wedded to the same shitlib monstrosities up top that make the world terrible to begin with. While hanging out in the Green Party for lack of a better option, I got radicalized in the "real commie hours" by some "watermelon" comrades there for just that purpose. It made sense; I was writing my history thesis, and Marxism-Leninism helped me make sense of some otherwise inexplicable historical facts.

But then as I delved further into this red new world, as I learned about the history of our heroes and the various revisionists who tried to stop them, I noticed that the revisionists all arose from the middle class, and advanced shitlib arguments in different times and places in an attempt to turn us aside from the class war. I then turned around to the modern day, and found much of my comrades doing exactly the same thing for exactly the same class reason. I confronted middle class identity politics everywhere I found it, both in the fascist chans and the bad-faith bad-haircut halls of Leftbook. I pissed off a lot of gender studies majors and a lot of "why the South should've won the Civil War" history majors.

I also came to the conclusion that the revolution in America would, by necessity, have to look a whole lot different than it looked in the Soviet Union.