Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Climb

The trail ends. Gravel rut peters out at ridge's feet. Wind gnaws at cigarette, blowing life into cherry-red tip. Finish it, suck away, let breath eat flame. Grind it into dust and dirt. Kill the myth.

Now breathe in the cold-dark; ice-eddies cutting nostrils and cracking lips. Peer up the mountain, between the pines, into the black. Witness the dim whirl of man-fire-man-fire, and maybe reflections of flame on something else. The rituals dance just out of reach.

Climb, mount that first ledge. Damp stone glimmers in places; reflects moon and star. Below and blind to the fire, hugging the dead rock, climbing. 

Hit the table-rock set high into the mountain, scrub and pine whipping in early dawn wind. 

Nestled in the trees, open to the sky. Light the last cig, inhale and think. 

No fire, but tinder and kindling. Build an ember-home, gather rocks and twigs and branches. Knife and knee do the trick.

Lay cigarette into needle-house. 

Behold a white-clad woman, far above and still ascending. The wind dies. The flame catches. 

She rises, even now to the summit. And on and on, she will haunt you forever.

Friday, March 4, 2016

War Forges Nations

Yemen is an absolute clusterfuck. The poorest of the Arab states (hell, even Sudan has a higher GDP per capita), drug-addled, home to AQ's Finest...good times.

So on the surface the Saudi-led intervention in the country seems like a really bad idea, and it is. That's not to say that the Saudis had better options, though--the Kingdom is in a precarious state, with Iran on the upswing across the region combined with bottomed-out oil prices and a senile king controlled by his headstrong son. KSA and the GCC needed a show of force, and Yemen was supposed to be it.

The Saudi military, for all the AmeriBux we've thrown at them over the past few decades, is hilariously ineffective at fighting the Yemeni rebels. There have been more Yemeni incursions into southern KSA than KSA incursions into Houthi territory. Ground advances on the coalition's side are led by UAE elements in Marib and Taiz, mercs (1,2) and remnants of the Yemeni Army. The majority of coalition fighting forces are khat-chewing peasants with AK-47s and require little mention, serving as law enforcement (taxmen/uniformed bandits) for territory retaken by Saudi and Emirati offensives.

The Houthis are a more cohesive militia drawn from the Zaidi Shia clans of the north. With minimal IRGC and Hezbollah support (and the loyalty of the country's elite-ish Republican Guard) they've swept the internationally-recognized Hadi government out of the fertile and populous west of the country. Open-source info on exactly how they defeated the government is scant, but reporting from late 2014-early 2015 indicates that government forces defected or abandoned their posts en masse. Parallels to ISIS's attacks on Mosul, Fallujah etc. are not unwarranted.

The intervention has only marginally shifted the tide in favor of Hadi. The government still primarily controls swathes of uninhabited desert wracked with an AQAP insurgency. ISIS has a growing presence in Sunni regions as well--the Caliphate leaves no instability unexploited.


From Wikipedia. Green: rebel, Salmon: government, White: AQAP
The only major population center in government hands, the port of Aden, is engulfed in absolute chaos (1, 2, 3). The municipal government--mostly Southern Resistance militia commanders handpicked and puppeteered by Emirati agents or Adeni bigwigs enjoying their voluntary exile in Dubai or Jeddah--has proven utterly incapable of restoring order or providing services within the city. Terror attacks occur daily. Two governors have been killed since November 2015. The few public works projects, including renovating the city's airport and restoring regional electrical infrastructure, are being conducted by Emirati engineering firms and paid for out of Abu Dhabi's dwindling sovereign wealth fund. And given recent developments, even the relatively capable Emiratis are finding it hard to keep their own interests and assets secure.

So Yemen's screwed, as is anybody involved. A major breakthrough into the mountains flanking Sanaa by coalition elements in western Marib may happen, but nobody has the capability or will needed to stamp out the entire insurgency. Yemen will boil forever.

The war is just an eternally-burning brush fire, lacking the Byzantine machinations of Libya or the photogenic nature of Syria that make those two conflicts so engaging. So what's so important about Yemen?

---

Gulf states have always lacked cohesive national identities. The Hejazi are nothing more than grudging subjects of the House of Saud. Those from Najd look upon the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques as little more than their tribal chief who happened into a Rolls-Royce and gave them Maseratis as consolation prizes. Eastern Province residents see Salman as Iblis with Alzheimer's. And so on. 

But the Yemeni war is changing things, at least in the UAE. Casualties become martyrs to the nation, their bodies greeted with throngs of wailing citizens. Citizens, not Paki construction workers bused in from the labor camps. It's happening to a lesser extent in Saudi, too. The first sense of collective self these people have felt outside of the tribe, witnessing the broken bodies of men who sacrificed themselves for something their countrymen never knew existed until now.

Now it could just be as simple as: "War is what forges nations." And that's not revelatory by any means. And it could be that this is all UAE propaganda, which some of it assuredly is. But this is the first time these states have really, truly gone to war, and it's fascinating to see what that does to a society. 

Dream (1)

Rocket soars up out of the ground; a Saturn V but on a fantastic scale. Vision tracks with it. Follows it up past an aluminum grain silo with Cyrillic markings into an impossibly blue sky. More than one moon. Look around and gold fields of wheat lay over hills that roll into infinity. Children--are they mine?--play with kites. The grain hides them but not the fiber-optics that stretch skyward. Shockwave sweeps the kids away but leaves the grain untouched. I weep for them and turn away and the air takes me. The rocket is a heron with red-tipped wings and eyes that shine like starlight. 

Friday, February 26, 2016

Stones

I heard the stones cry out over the horizon.


They wake me.

Keening air runs over half-buried shack; carcass that Nature's jackals picked clean. Gray-blue wind snakes in from outside and tugs the sheet off.


Cold then heat.


Hear the stones again. See a sunset half a world away. Sky's blood-fire cauterizes wound between earth and myself.


I become whole for an instant.


Soul-embers pierce skin and fiber and meat and bone, and then more. Drink in the honey-wine, Gods-blood running from hand outstretched from stone and stream and old millhouse in woods pockmarked with unmelted snow blanketed in Dawn's dying fog. Feels like sword in the gut as it goes down but the pain is ecstasy. Sweat and tears like sun-melted glacier and dirt under fingernails like flecks of gold.


Find myself under the skein, shack-carcass left behind. Fingers of juniper brush the horizon as sun comes up out of the butte and warmth intimates vitality and dog shifts against my head. Not died but something greater.


Born, alive, from dead womb in dead land.


dreaming of the Hebrides on the steppes of the Paiute 



November in Owyhee



Fire in the skies
Embers of souls dusting the black

Sun's pallid sister ascends her star-stair
Children of the night cry for their Mother

Mesquite flames before me
Book in hand, dog and gun to the side

Embers of souls
Scarring the November desert sky

memories, from too long ago

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

A Progressive Coup in South Africa(?)

This is a thing, at least according to the ANC.

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

Now, online discussions of a hypothetical South African coup typically involve Boer militias and racial fragmentation and such--but truth be told that's not a reasonable possibility. Mass white emigration and a general withdrawal from political life have crippled European racial activism beyond any hope of recovery. The most dynamic force in the country today is not the Broederbond but Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters. And given USG's tendency to look down upon white identity politics, an Afrikaner coup is right out. With the openly Pol Pot-esque rhetoric of the EFF, they're not much of an option either. If this coup is for real, USG will have to run it through the perfectly milquetoast Democratic Alliance, the last refuge of apartheid-era White liberals and the dwindling commercial and intellectual establishment of Cape Town. The DA's political platform and long history of activism practically cries out for State Department backing.

The State Department and their coreligionists in Europe regularly utilize NGOs, transnational advocacy/watchdog groups, and student programs to execute policy. Any clear-eyed assessment of US overseas capabilities accounts for this. Russia gets it. So this isn't completely improbable; the capability is there.

Think of it this way: the people most utterly terrified of the new face of South Africa aren't weird bitter internet racists (ahem) but heirs to the Washington-Brussels connection that brought majority rule to ZA in the first place. From the Right, ZA is just the state furthest along in eschatological experimentation, one of the first White polities to collapse in the face of dysgenic demography and foreign meddling. From the Left, ZA is an unspeakable horror, the absolute repudiation of global liberation theology. The Right understands ZA and avoids it; The Left fears ZA and, as it tends to do, seeks to fix it. And there's the motivation.

So the actor with the motivation and capability needed to launch a coup in South Africa is Foggy Bottom. Weird, though not necessarily bad. Anything that can break the back of the ANC is a good thing in my book.

Is the plot real? I don't know. But maybe it should be.

ADDED: Not sure if this is connected.

ADDED: Somebody anticipated this a while back, taking more of a look at potential economic motivations for a globalist coup in ZA.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Refuge


My forebears settled this place back when it was just frontier. Grandmother's side left Herefordshire on the banks of the Severn and came here to the banks of the Shenandoah. You wouldn't know it now but the trees of the Valley were old then; 'least those that weren't ashed by the natives. Now from the highway it's scrub and billboards; skin healing round debris from wounding blade.

Back then--the 1740s, if the family saga holds true--the Valley was still the Red Silk Road of the East, alternatively bringing Cherokee traders and Iroquois war parties from the Carolinas to the Susquehanna and back. It would bring my people through Pennsylvania, down the cow-paths to Staunton, then out to Chattanooga and North Georgia where they joined with Ulstermen and Flemings.

I used to go hunting and camping further down by Front Royal and Winchester as a kid, in the passes that opened Valley to Piedmont and Potomac. Riding east on 66 in the back of Dad's 4Runner among the duffel bags and bow cases and Tikkas, back to that Gray-and-Black that lies like scar tissue on Washington's periphery--those were times when I felt like I was going to die, like all my life I had been held underwater, drowning, and now thrust beneath the concrete waves again--like I could only breathe in early morning hills before Sun burned Mist. 

I have wondered what my ancestors thought when they came to this place, from cod-bewitched fishing villages on the Skaggerak and market towns in the Marches and daels among the Uplands. Was this an alien land to them or did they feel it too? I am inclined to say they did; every salt-caked path I have wandered in the Hebrides and every overlook I have set upon in Sognefjorden gave my brother and I that same shock, like our fathers back to Askr placed their hands on our shoulders and gazed out beside us. 

This is killing us. There will always be a place for cities, as cells to chain and harness Faust, batteries to propel us to the frontier. But we cannot live in the prison blocks; only fitfully sleep the night as we check our phones and glance at the CZ on the nightstand, waiting for what we all know is the end of this path

----



We left the apartment today at 0430, maybe two hours of sleep between passing out from drink and when we woke for showers. 

Jeans and boots and a wool sweater. 

Phone--front left 

Knife, chapstick, keys--front right

Wallet--back right

Copenhagen Wintergreen--back left

Water, granola, beer, and dog (the neighbor's) already in the hatch as I come down the steps. Normally we take my 4Runner--the battlewagon, I have them calling it--on trips, but today it's the roomie's ST, a storm-gray four-pot with a stick and summer tires so unsuited to the frost that it's almost a safety hazard.

Wind out of the hills into the valley, as we drive the other way. Early do the spirits flee their haunts, but we're there to witness them. The Ford's chassis keeps it planted in the left lane as the 18-wheelers fly back to our right. Soon we stop for gas and cigs, and I drive until we hit Skyline. 

Roomie takes the wheel again and propels us around apexes with windows down so fast that I want to howl at Luna alongside dog. Neighbor laughs when I tell her this and we jam to Hendrix. Get out at the overlooks every once in a while and piss and take cellphone pics of the vistas and maybe smoke. Decide to save the beer for home--as I write this.

We get to one point, maybe a little further than halfway, just walk for a while. Neighbor and dog go off and play fetch. She looks cute when she does, olive parka and riding boots and the whole shebang. Roomie says as much.

He and I cross Skyline and climb to the peak--more a worn knob--and dip Cope in a clearing beside the summit. I try to whittle something--anything--but don't know how. 

Here I want to erect great stones like those on Mull to remind our descendants that we knew, too, just as our forebears did for us. Ignore the sky-scrapers, here are those that scrape the soul. I say as much; Roomie nods and peers at Luna from under bare maple branches. He knows too. We don't speak for a while, just ride the nicotine rush.

Eventually the neighbor has to come and get us. We don't really want to leave and neither does dog now that it's found us, here in the trees under the moon set in the dawn sky. Nobody says much and we head back to the ST. Make it home without incident.

It's the first warm day of the year in Virginia. Maybe 55 degrees when we pull in. Neighbor hugs us and heads off to friends; Roomie and I crack some cervazas on the deck, chill and talk history and cars. He goes off and plays Xbox, I go off and write this.

I am sane again, maybe for the first time in months.