Today’s theme song is Split Enz “History Never Repeats”. Hat tip to the Aussie readers.
A thousand years ago on a planet far, far away, there was a shopping center in Houston called Westbury Square. In that center was a traditional confectioner who made rock candy on a stick, which I craved every time I went there.
Determined to learn how to make it, I spent a Saturday at the library and found a recipe for making supersaturated sugar water, and chilling sticks to form the seed or catalyst. From that point on, I was fascinated by crystals and how to make them. My 8th Grade science project was a ruby LASER, which won a blue ribbon (it was 1973, after all).
That process — boiling water and adding sugar until it absolutely can’t dissolve any more, then placing a chilled stick in the mixture — is exactly how the Bumbledicks manipulate society, just on a grander scale.
Create an irrational fear of “germs,” then introduce “Disease X,” and POOF! Instant pandemonium crystalizes around it. People will wear paper over their mouths, foam noodles on their heads, allow toxins to be pumped into their bodies, and leap out of their skin if anyone coughs within earshot.
Rock candy.
We are repeating 1968, though with a certain rhyme to it. RFK is running for president as an outsider. The worst Democrat disaster since LBJ is in power. Trump is the new Nixon, and Biden is the new LBJ. The Democrat National Convention is in Chicago. ANTIFA is the new Weather Underground. The new black male martyr (a la MLK) is Palestine. Campus protests are taking over buildings and being chased out by squads of conformity cops. The only thing missing on this anniversary of Kent State is mass murder of “students” by the government goons, but the day isn’t over yet.
Remember what Mark Twain said:
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
The way mass manipulation works is by crating an atmosphere of fear and anxiety without a focus point. We can think of this as boiling water. Social, economic and political agitation is used to work the masses into a frothing, seething boil of apprehension and expectation. Sugar is added, in the form of riots, protests, threats of war, political unrest, economic woes, natural and man-made disasters, health threats, national elections, and distrust of long-standing institutions. At the right moment, a catalyst — chilled stick — in introduced and the fear and loathing crystalizes on it in an instant.
It’s hard to say what the catalyst will be, but we will know it by what it does. An event or person will suddenly focus all the free-floating anxiety onto a single event or issue. Everything will come to a head, crystalize if you will, with a massive release of emotional energy. In our rhyming year, it was the dual assassinations of RFK and MLK, along with Vietnam/Ukraine and Yom Kippur/Gaza wars.
If the rhyming metaphor continues to hold up, we might see Joe Biden/LBJ withdraw from the DNC nominating process — perhaps a health issue or internal pressure? We could see Gavin Newsom become the Hubert Humphrey of 2024, thus propelling Trump/Nixon to victory. In a poetic counterpoint, we may well see the full emergence of a “conservative counterculture” that promotes tradition and cultural norms, rather than the denial of them in the 1960s counter-culture.
An analogy I frequently use for history and human affairs is the Slinky. If you stretch it out and look through one end, you see a helix spiralling into an infinity point. If you look at it from the side, it looks like a sine wave on a linear graph. The former is infinite around a “seed,” and the latter is range-bound between an upper and lower value.
In both views of the Slinky, some coordinates repeat as you move along, such as the starting point of the spiral, or the upper and lower limits of the wave. However, other coordinates are quite different, as the spring progresses from one end to the other. No matter how you look at it, there will be similarities and differences at every point along the spring to every other point. Thus, history presents us with rhymes and counter-points.
George Santayana famously stated:
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
The Universe is composed of cycles within cycles. To some extent, repetition is an innate feature of the world we inhabit. However, we humans tend to forget how we screwed up the last time, and so we make the same mistakes when presented with a similar set of variables. While this view has an element of resignation to it, it also contains an element of hope, in that we are not doomed to repeat our mistakes, but we must first admit them and avoid knee-jerk reactions.
In any case, I have a large piece of sugar cane from the garden, and a little rock candy is sounding rather appealing, as I remember that little wide-eyed kid at Westbury Square.
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We all want to live on that Big Rock Candy Mountain...
Why would anyone who knows what supersaturated sugar water is need a recipe to make it?