Friday, November 29, 2024

Er den ekte bestemorkringle-oppskrifta funnet? Eller plagierte bare bestemor Ingrid Espelid?

På 1970-tallet fikk vi barnebarna bestemorkringler og hjemmelaget sitron-lemonade i uknuselige grønne glass, av besteomr Nelly i Grythengen. Og disse glassene er virkelig uknuselige, da ikke et eneste av dem er knust på alle disse årene, mens plast-glassene våre bare sprekker.

green unbreakable glasses used by grandmother to serve homemade lemon juice to her grandchildren in the 1970s Stock-bilde | Adobe Stock

Da ser jeg i Totens blad i dag, eller rettere sagt kona så det, da jeg ikke leser denne korrupte blekka, som ikke vil skrive om vindkraft, men har side opp og side ned om nye makkverks-prosjekter for byggebransjen, med tilhørende annonser, at oppskrifta på bestemorkringler fremdeles finnes!

For noen år siden ba jeg far komme med oppskrifta på kringlene til bestemor Nelly, men dette var akkurat samme oppskrifta, som den som står i kokeboka til Ingrid Espelid, så den kastet vi. Nå får han prøve å få tak i den ekte oppskrifta!

Dette er jo ei oppskrift som jeg gjerne vil ha med oss til vår foto-filosofiske kafe i Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Dessuten kunne det vært hyggelig å spise ekte bestemorkringler her i Grythengen igjen også, før vi reiser nedover. Jentene er jo knallflinke til å bake, særlig når Elina er her, sist helg fikk jeg herlig gulrotkake. Nå har heldigvis Elina også sagt at hun blir med oss til Frankrike, så fremtiden for kafeen vår ser lovende ut. Hun er dessuten knallflink til å tegne, så blir hun med på kafe-driften, bør vi kanskje heller satse på en kunst-filosofisk kafe?

I dag lærte jeg forresten om den franske filosofen Bernard-Henri Lévy:


Han har skrevet ei bok som heter "Israel Alone", og dette gjelder da også for Grythengen, fordi det er kun vi som er glade i og ser verdien av kværnenga til herr Fossemøllen og jubelenga til Even Helmer.

Dessuten holder vi ikke ut antipietismen i Øverskreien, som er langt verre enn antisemittismen i Frankrike! Slik jeg har forstått det er Frankrike helt fritt for antipietisme, i alle fall har jeg ikke hørt om noen antipietistiske pogromer der nede. Kanskje vil det tom. vise seg at franskmennene er svært glade i den rokokko, nyromantiske seinpietismen? Særlig hvis de får den servert sammen med bestemorkringlene til Nelly! Hvis hun da ikke har stjålet oppskrifta fra Ingrid Espelid?

Nedenfor er noen gullkorn fra James Kalb, en tid fant jeg stor glede i å samle på sitater fra hans hånd. Særlig likte jeg følgende:

"Our rulers and betters don’t want any backtalk. They know everything, they’re doing a great job, and everybody ought to be grateful and get with the program. So we’re told that what we have now is utopia emerging from an intolerably bigoted past."

Dette er faktisk feil, da PermaLiv besitter en kreativ kraft, som slår det samlede norske statsapparat langt ned i støvlene!

Dessuten kan jeg aldri tilgi dem at de plasserte Norges fremste klyngetuns-entusiast i et lommehull voktet av universets ondeste Hamas-harpy-covert-høne-kjerring! Jeg kan heller ikke tilgi dem at de ødela verdens råeste lommetun, verdens kuleste skolekorps, og verdens herligste lommekroks-vennskap!

Jeg kan videre ikke tilgi dem at de, sammen med etterkrigs-generasjonen, har laget til et billig, suburbant ødeland i utkantene, med tilhørende svindyr og antipietistisk gjennomstrøms-teknologi, av Grythengen.

Men Djevelen er nok meget godt fornøyd med denne sataniske simulasjonen av et apparatlandskap, de har stelt i stand for oss😡
Such aspects of the current regime are exaggerated. A diverse technological society of 325 million that is increasingly integrated into a global political and economic order is not going to be run democratically or through broad-based public discussion. It’s going to be run by networks of full-time professionals and the institutions that employ them. These inevitably become conscious of their common interests and act together to promote policies and ideological perspectives that advance those interests and defuse or fend off conflicting popular concerns. - James Kalb
Det er rart å tenke på at selv USA, med 325 millioner innbyggere, enkelt og greit kunne avskaffet hele kostepineriet, gjennom lommedemokratiet til Terje Bongard, hvor vi kunne overtatt styringen selv.
To add to the problem, modern life dissolves history, heritage, and inherited ways. People get processed through an increasingly centralized and bureaucratized school system. They work for large bureaucratic organizations, or for smaller concerns that are increasingly integrated with global markets. They amuse themselves with commercial pop culture and connect through electronic communications networks that ignore geography. And they’ve been subjected for years to propaganda and social policies that weaken informal connections like family, religion, and common culture. - James Kalb
Det er ikke tilbake noenting, absolutt ingenting, og det er ikke noe tilbake av folk heller, de har gått i oppløsning alle sammen. Men de franske middelalder-landsbyene står nok støtt, så vi får finne oss en så historisk setting som mulig, og ta det derfra, med vår kunst-filosofiske kafe, hvis Elina blir med. Ellers blir det kun foto-filosofisk.

Flere sitater fra Kalb for de som ble fristet:
Beyond such economic corruptions, there are ideological temptations. Those with power habitually exaggerate their wisdom and virtue and the importance of what they do, so that the greater their power the more likely they are to feel themselves called upon to remake the world in the image of their own perhaps radically defective ideal. Our present global elites, for example, lead extraordinarily privileged lives, and they base the legitimacy of their position on claims of economic efficiency and neutral expertise. So why wouldn’t they try to put their legitimacy beyond question by claiming that such qualifications are the key to all good things, and attempt to establish a global technocracy that overrides all other sources of authority, including local community, cultural tradition, natural law, and the Church? - James Kalb

It seems then that the Church views ties and some degree of loyalty based on common descent, history, culture, and language as a good and necessary thing. But what do we do with that today? Inherited loyalties don’t help us when we work for an insurance company, get our food from McDonald’s or Whole Foods, surf the web, or send our kids to a school with children and staff from everywhere. More and more people think they just gum things up.

So they see more reason to reject than value them. Many British people were horrified when their compatriots voted for Brexit. Who wants to be shut up on an island with a bunch of racist xenophobes? Even the Jews, the gold standard for endurance as a people, now seem largely to be abandoning their traditions and intermarrying themselves out of existence.

But that’s a problem. An inherited culture is a system of cooperation developed through long experience living together. There’s no way to replace that as a way of building up a shared system of life that works tolerably well in all settings throughout the whole of life. But without such a system life gets worse: weak human connections, stunted human development, and wrecked lives. Indeed, that’s what we see around us. - James Kalb

And finally, bigotry has been promoted from a vice among other vices to the ultimate unforgivable sin. In the considered view of the centrist Democrat who was the consensus choice of all respectable opinion to become president of the United States, bigots are not only extremely numerous and thoroughly deplorable but “unredeemable.” They have no place in our society, or so it is thought, and respectable publications present them as legitimate targets of extra-legal violence. A woman who murders her child and never comes clean about it can find absolution among respectable people more easily than a woman provoked into saying the wrong word. And in Britain a three-year-old who uses the wrong expression (like “broccoli head”) can get reported to the police as a racist and the incident entered in his permanent record.

What is going on? When did opposition to bigotry become so bigoted, and “hate” lose its connection to hate? How did it happen that pretty much everyone who ever lived now counts as a bigot to be ashamed of? For that matter, when did ordinary Church teachingregarding sex and the sexes, or the value of recognizing and protecting national distinctiveness, become equivalent to crimes against humanity?

At first such views seemed extreme, but more and more they are becoming the conventional wisdom, taught in the schools, proclaimed by moral leaders, assumed as a matter of course in law and public policy, and re-enforced by high and low culture and even by penal sanctions. The transformation is barely noticed, and generally taken for granted as an obvious good thing.

Such a change must have something immensely powerful behind it. But what? It’s a complicated story, but at bottom it has to do with the emerging globalized, technological, and integrated social order in which we live, and the ideals that support that order and the position of those who run it. These ideals present an image of a world reconstituted in accordance with technocratic norms and understandings, a single economic and social network ordered by global markets, certified experts, transnational bureaucracies, electronic entertainment, and electronic communications that make everyone in the world equally present to everyone else.

In that world, the world of Facebook, Amazon, and global mobility of labor, specific inherited culture loses coherence and function. Men and women become interchangeable economic units. Family is replaced by day care, fast food, and welfare rights. Religion merges into politically correct progressivism. And common sense and the wisdom of the people—the secular equivalent of the Catholic sensus fidei fidelium—are replaced by spin, memes, propaganda, alleged expertise, and commercial pop culture. - James Kalb

The resulting outlook and way of life isn’t satisfying for many people. How can it be, when it provides no place for arrangements as basic to the normal life of ordinary people as inherited community and marriage understood as a natural, functional, and reliable union of man and woman? It bears especially hard on the less successful, who don’t have careers and therapists to keep them going. So people know there’s something wrong with it, and polls repeatedly show they believe the world is going the wrong way in the face of constant spin and propaganda to the contrary. - James Kalb

Our rulers and betters don’t want any backtalk. They know everything, they’re doing a great job, and everybody ought to be grateful and get with the program. So we’re told that what we have now is utopia emerging from an intolerably bigoted past. Apparent problems are only growing pains, or signs the project hasn’t been pushed far enough. Social disconnection must be seen as liberating, since cultural coherence is exclusionary, xenophobic, and racist. And family disintegration can’t be recognized as an issue, because any suggestion of traditional sexual distinctions, connections, and standards is understood as evil.

Hence the universal support from respectable people and institutions for current attitudes regarding hatred and bigotry. Distinctions that relate to areas of life like family or religion that elude the grasp of bureaucrats and billionaires must be seen as “hatred”—otherwise the legitimacy of their positions and actions becomes questionable. Those tempted to make such distinctions must therefore have something wrong with them. They need to be shut up and re-educated.

Nor do our rulers lack arguments for their view. It’s backed by accepted ways of thinking, which are basically technological, and don’t know how to deal with evolved organic arrangements like inherited culture and the family, and by the fears of an increasingly fragmented population, who lack reliable human connections and look to the state to protect them from people they mistrust (or are induced to mistrust, and from a world that seems increasingly chaotic and threatening. - James Kalb

Such tendencies are also supported by institutional and class self-interest. The EU, for example, is best understood as a union among ruling elites that helps them run things without serious regard for their constituents’ views. The same could be said about globalization in general. The powerful become more powerful, and the people are expected to do as they’re told and like it.

The upshot is that all established voices today favor cosmopolitanism and consider it a basic part of political sanity and moral decency. If you favor borders or “populism” you’re considered an idiot, an ignoramus, and probably a Nazi. Absorption of local societies into a global order, and their consequent radical transformation or even dissolution, have thus come to count as unquestionable goods. For proof, consider the horrified response to Brexit among respectable people in the UK.

All these tendencies nonetheless seem odd. However strong they are, there must be some limit on how far they will go, because cosmopolitanism has weaknesses as well as strengths. One is an inability to attract loyalty. That is why empires fall apart, although collapse may be deferred if they are thought to stand for noble principles—religious, as in the case of Byzantium, cultural, as in the case of China, or civic, as in the case of Rome. - James Kalb

Whether it’s the older or newer version, it’s easy to find serious problems with socialism. It’s inefficient and doesn’t deliver on its promises. When it fixes one thing it deranges others. Since government can’t know much about what’s going on at the individual level, it offers not “justice” but “equality” and thereby deprives people of responsibility for their situation. It also concentrates power, supplants autonomous institutions, like family and religion, and makes it impossible for important centers of thought and action independent of the state bureaucracy to exist.

The end result is a non-functional society with an arbitrary, corrupt, and ineffective government. When government controls everything, nothing controls government, and those who run it have free reign. And since socialism destroys personal feelings of responsibility—for how can they develop when people don’t depend on each other in daily life?—those in power lose any motive to sacrifice their personal advantage to the public good.

Even if those in charge manage for a time to run a principled and efficient government, socialism causes problems. The reason being that it gives all power to a false vision of the human good. - James Kalb

We have set ourselves adrift from God, history, and human nature. The world is awash in mindless distraction, the Internet is turning us into scatterbrains, and authoritative voices deny the objectivity of truth. Our highest ideal is nondiscrimination with respect to human connections other than money, certified expertise, and bureaucratic position. The effects of this ideal, which is commonly identified with the Gospel itself, are to entrench power and dissolve the patterns, standards, and communities that make the lives of ordinary people functional and give them meaning.

The result is a culture that doesn’t work. Family and local community fall apart. Religion disintegrates, so much so that even cults lose adherents. We no longer pick up a worthwhile way of life just by growing up and coming to admire what’s admired and hate what’s hated in the world around us. Why should anyone form himself on the model of commercial pop culture, social media fads, and what young people are told in today’s schools? - James Kalb

So what to do? I’ve noted that the signs of the times call for a renewed emphasis on the transcendent—that is, on divine realities. Without their presence to keep everything in order, the practical alternatives are distraction and dissipation on the one hand and this-worldly fanaticism on the other.

We have plenty of both today. To provide distraction we have career for the few and drink, drugs, social media, and degraded pop culture for the many. As for fanaticism, we have PC among our rulers and their hangers-on, and a variety of movements among rebellious young men which ignore the transcendent and therefore go nowhere.

We need something better. That thing is obviously Catholicism, but how do we give Catholicism a concrete presence in today’s world? Calling for better observance of Catholic moral teachings isn’t enough, because those teachings grow out of an understanding of God, man, and the world that must somehow be made more vividly present for the Catholic way of life to make sense. - James Kalb

Its beginnings are closely connected to the rise of modern natural science, which rejects the contemplative ideal of knowledge in favor of prediction and control. This approach, which stresses observation, measurement, and mathematical modeling, has led to modern technology and industry. So it’s been enormously successful.

Progressivism likewise rejects contemplation in favor of control, and its most effective forms have favored hard-edged analysis aimed at radical social transformation. Marx expressed the approach forcefully: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

The triumph of the will through objective investigation and rational organization thus becomes an accepted guide to life. That approach has been nearly as effective in the social as the physical world. It’s given us modern economics, modern bureaucratic management, modern representative democracy, modern concepts of freedom and equality, and modern methods of thought control. These ways of doing things are intended to get the people who use them whatever they want, and they’ve swept all before them. - James Kalb

- The Conundrum of Progressivism

In broad terms, a nation state is a state that represents a people that exist prepolitically. This means it represents a people that understand themselves as such because of historical and cultural ties that don’t depend on the state, so that they would continue to be a people even if the state were divided or absorbed by another state. Thus, Poland is a nation state, Austria-Hungary was not a nation state, the Kurds are a nation without a state, and the extent to which the United States has been a nation state is debatable and has varied over the years. - James Kalb

Modern ways of thinking lead people to moral views that are different from traditional ones, so it’s not surprising they consider themselves morally superior to people in the past. Whether current moral understandings are actually better is nonetheless dubious and deserves investigation. - James Kalb

But leaving out essentials leads to bad substitutes. When society is seen as a sort of machine, for example, people become careerists instead of social beings. Ties to particular people and communities aren’t taken seriously; only the economy and bureaucracy are taken seriously. So this is where people now put their efforts and the way they understand who they are. This is hardly a moral advance. - James Kalb

However, we can’t do without a larger scheme of meaning and reality. Since we no longer understand ourselves as part of a tradition, or the world as having a natural moral order, we create a moral and social order and force everything into it. This becomes the function of politics, which substitutes for religion and social tradition. The result is that the government’s involvement in human life becomes more pervasive while its understanding of human life becomes thinner. - James Kalb

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