Chestnut Tree Radio

As children we are taught to “use our words not our fists” this of course assumes that the words you use will not be insults and lies. One of the fundamental lessons of growing up is to replace the use of what are essentially violent strategies with communication, understanding and reason. Much like the use of language itself, strategies of reason are useless unless those around you are committed to the same methods. In their essense and intent insults and lies are closer to violence than reason. They belong to a category that lies somewhere in between violence and reason and in their essence and intent, they are closer to the former than the latter. Typically slogans also belong to this in between category. There are some exceptions, for example the slogan “freedom of speech”. But even this slogan can be used in an unreasonable way. If one were to attempt to defend or excuse an insult or a lie in the name of “freedom of speech” one is not behaving reasonably. Perhaps it is ...

Bertrand Russell and George Orwell review of russell’s  power: a new social analysis George Orwell,  with an Introduction by  Peter Stone First published in 1938,  Power: A New Social Analysis  is one of the few books by Russell dealing with political affairs that did not focus on questions of war and peace. Alongside a handful of other works – notably  Human Society in Ethics and Politics  (1954) – it also represents one of his few attempts to talk about politics in a systematic and theoretical way. And like  Human Society ,  Power  is generally not judged a success in terms of its theoretical ambitions. “In the course of this book,” Russell writes in the first chapter of  Power , “I shall be concerned to prove that the fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.” Few would say that Russell fulfilled this ambition. He was always more successfu...

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH... JAMES COMEY Dem Rep On Comey: Yes, I Wanted Him Fired Over Handling Of Clinton Investigation, But That Was Last Year Matt Vespa |Posted: May 11, 2017 3:00 PM Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was for firing James Comey before he was against it. That point was made explicitly clear when CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed him yesterday. In November of 2016, he called for Mr. Comey’s firing saying, “What Jim Comey did was so highly improper and wrong. From the very beginning in July, he was putting his thumb on the scales right then. And it's unforgivable for a police agency to opine, frankly, publicly about legal conduct. The president ought to fire Comey immediately, and he ought to initiate an investigation.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhQMuZgD4sM Keilar followed up by asking why he's troubled by this decision now, when he wanted him out then? Nadler pretty much said it’s different because what he said was from last ye...

REPRINT:  Back on the road to Wigan Pier -- 80 years after George Orwell’s classic  by Dean Kirby  March 10, 2017 Caption:  George Orwell's son Richard Blair at Wigan Pier.   It is Friday morning in Wigan and the last surviving tripe stall in the former coal town’s red-brick market hall is already busy with customers. Stallholder Denise Webster is the only seller of this old Lancashire delicacy – the stomach lining of animals – for many miles around. “We used to sell pig belly and cowheal as well, but it’s too expensive now,” she says, “Tripe has gone up to £3.20 a pound, but it’s still very popular. We sell 50 kilos of it every week. It’s very good for you.” The bustle around the market stall is something George Orwell might have recognised when he travelled here in the 1930s while writing The Road to Wigan Pier – the classic account of social conditions in Northern England during the Depression. He stayed just a few hundred yards from the market in a ...

CLOWNS ARE CREEPY THE HUFFINGTON POST IS A CONDUIT OF ANTI-RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA In a sign of the times, we see the undisputed fact that journalists again whip up the flames of anti-Russian hatred in order to advance a domestic political cause. One Ryan Clayton, the president of something called Americans Take Action, admits that he, as a Huffington Post journalist, attended the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference of 2017, distributed Russian flags with the legend TRUMP on them, in order that Clayton himself could publish a false news social media posts to the effect that CPAC attendees, and by extension the Trump Administration, are Russian enthusiasts.  Here is one those flags: While Clayton makes the pious assertion that he was "making a point", of course he does nothing of the kind.  What his prank is a classic act of propagandistic "agiprop distraction".  His actions deftly changes the subject from whether "the Russians hacked the e...

BOOK REVIEW:  2024: A Graphic Novel by Ted Rall (2001 NBM Publishing) CAPTION:  (Left) Frederick Theodore "Ted" Rall (b. 1963), (Right) the graphic novel 2024. [This is an old book review of mine published in a terrible college newspaper. I happen, however, to like this book and my exposition of it.] 2024: A Graphic Novel by Ted Rall (2001 NBM Publishing) Five Full Stars of Insight into Orwell and Our Times This outstanding book brings out a forgotten side of the Orwellian nightmare, that is how it is not so much state terror or surveillance that gives us irratio nal and vicious governments as the unthinking and narrow time horizon of the captives. At bottom the citizens of idiotic systems allow the rulers to rule. The Orwellian slogans of this book are: ASSUMPTIONS PERMIT IMAGINATION ,  KNOWLEDGE IS IMPOSSIBLE ,  and  EXPLOITATION IS BENEVOLENCE .  These mind-killing notions all flow from Nineteen Eighty-Four 's theme of "2+...

Money Ruins Everything     In the formation of the Chestnut Tree enterprise, my co-blogger and fellow Thoughtcriminal, Winston, maintained that any attempt to monetize by advertising would kill independent thinking in the crib.  I am still not sure that advertising per se is the problem, I see now that platforms for strong and clear voices online are under attack by the providing systems of Facebook, Twitter, and even Youtube.  To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world: Podcasters are losing, willy nilly, advertising money: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=QY4sCU-0Pto and more ominously, Twitter is openly censoring political journalism: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/05/07/the-day-of-the-censors/ The economics of all this must be addressed in these blog pages;  the alarm must be sounded--powerful folks are out to prevent average folks from spreading news and expressing opinions. Most of my life I have marveled at the transpar...

Smoking Cobalt Cigarettes:  Why I Blog May 8, 2017     In Chapter I of Part One of Nineteen Eighty-Four , protagonist Winston Smith crossed the line into Thoughtcrime.  "Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference.  Whether he went on with his diary, or whether he did not go on with it, it made no difference.  The Thought Police would get him just the same."  Reflecting on this leap into death, "Thoughtcrime is death", I see that futility is liberating.  To be a true rebel is to completely show contempt for the ruling power and to feel unafraid of the inevitable punishment.      Another great unsung joy that comes from dystopian fiction is the sense that somehow one's words can become pure by addressing them some unknown future man, once not corrupted by the petty struggles and likes and dislikes of one's time.  Writing history, in this way, becomes a clear sta...

The very first line of nineteen eighty four is "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." The book begins on this absurd note. Clocks do not strike thirteen anymore than ,well, two plus two equals five. True there is military time but I don't think that was what Orwell was trying to convey. His intention was something more poetic. He is suggesting that something is wrong, something absurd about the world we are entering. I don't think "the clock striking thirteen" is common enough to be considered an idiom.  In addition to "Nineteen eighty four" shows up in only a few other places notably in A.P. Herbert's "Uncommon Law", a collection of fictional legal cases which were original published in the British satirical magazine “Punch”. The fictious case in question is “Rex vs. Haddock” subtitled “Is it a Free Country?” the full text of which can be found here. https://www.scribd.com/document/12...

"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”