The Sardonic Cackle
Of Peace Hawks, Mice and Men
A few loose thoughts super-balling1 the walls of this cranium that hopefully will be useful in some way:
Two mornings ago we were eating our usual 1 pm breakfast in the screened in porch, listening to a subversive podcast, and midway through the first egg Krys noticed a red-shouldered hawk atop a post of our deck, just a few feet outside the porch door. He or she stayed there for at least a half our after we first noticed, as if intently following our conversations. Normally these kind of encounters are a breathtaking ingress of Nature into our quotidian lives. And indeed, those who find meaning in these things, know that hawks represent not only insight, but far-sightedness, taking the long, high view, a difficult thing when emotional barbs continually thrust at us from the dull knives of the omnivoracious media.
We have had interesting encounters before: once when pruning bushes about seven feet apart, a hawk flew right between us to grab a robin we didn’t even know was there, then finished its meal on the woodpile. This one eventually flew onto the ground, checked out a few vole tunnels, went back to the pole and flew off. Immediately the cardinals came out singing loudly as if they were the ones who had chased it off.
To tell a favorite tale of the inverse connection to Nature: we had a biodynamic farm 13 years ago that, before the arrival of at-first-feral kitten Genghiz, was overrun with mice. We were regaled with tales (second hand, of course) from ‘new-age’ friends, of those who simply connected with the deva of mice, and asked them to depart. Someone reported a long line of mice walking happily into the woods ne’er to return. So I went to the meditation corner of the bedroom, lit the appropriate incense, called on the overlighting deva of mousedom, etcetera, and asked very kindly, since they are field mice, that they try out an actual field. I came out of the meditation with a sense of hope that maybe a connection had been made. Opening my eyes I looked to the bed, where a neat pyramid of mouse poops sat in the center of my pillow.
“You have chosen death!” And since then there has been zero qualm over the hundreds of subsequently dispatched adorable-yet-destructive little fuckers.2
The Sardonic Cackle
O villain, villain, smiling damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.
—Hamlet I.5
One of our “favorite” tales emerging from the rubble of the psyop of 9/113 and the Bushian cry to “go shop” in the dead wake of it, has secretary of state (then national security advisor) Condoleezza Rice shopping at Bloomingdales in NYC several days after. (It is a legitimate question to ask how someone gets a 120,000 ton super-tanker named after her, but what happens in Kazakistan, stays in Kazakistan.) She was there purchasing yet another pair of her signature dominatrix boots. The NYC women there accosted her, saying, “Hey, shouldn’t you be, like, doing something?” Her reply was a smirk, the same smirk worn throughout her administration, especially by Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and most notoriously, Dick Cheney,4 whose sneer could fell a rhino at full charge.5
Unfortunately that same NYC moxie died during covid.
And the villainous smiles continue. Classically known as the sardonic smile or laughter, in Greek, sardonious gēlos.
Speaking of dominatrixes, did anyone else find it more than telling that many of the 93% of Kamala Harris’ staff that went skedaddling from her abusive veepiness, reported that they were not allowed to look her in her imperious eye? There are only two realms I know of that consider this overlording as normal behavior: royal households and BDSM arenas. All of her actions since being attorney general in CA smack of gleeful sadism. Shame on those who capitulated to her, and do not doubt she has the same smirking disdain for all of us.
Her sardonic cackle is not merely a defense mechanism in her face of lacking intelligence to answer a real question, it arises from her depths and has a chilling inhuman inappropriateness. She cannot even stop it when she is the only one laughing. And it rings back to the origins of the term.
The Alexandrian writers of the semi-apochryphal Book of Wisdom well understood the origins of Phoenician Canaanite religion which became Judaism and the Abrahamic lineage.
For truly the ancient inhabitants of your holy land, whom you hated for deeds most odious—works of sorcery and impious sacrifices; these merciless murders of children, devourers of human flesh, and initiates engaged in a blood ritual, and parents who took with their own hands defenseless lives . . .
—Book of Wisdom, 1st century BC, 12.1-6
The mainstream media of the day in ancient Rome ramped up public fervor by justifying the Punic Wars (264-146 BC) as an to end child sacrifice to Ba’al. Pliny the Elder two centuries later wrote glowingly of Rome’s role in eliminating the practice:
We cannot too highly appreciate the obligation that is due the Roman people, for having put an end to those monstrous rites, in accordance with which, to murder a man was to do an act of the greatest devoutness, and to eat his flesh was to secure the highest blessings of health.
—Pliny the Elder (24-79 AD), Natural History, 30.4.13
Phoenicians—who otherwise were outstanding sailors, traders, and exporters of literate civilization—at one point so normalized child sacrifice to their deities El, Yahweh and Ba’al, that a common word travels to our lexicon from it. Because they ruled Sardinia for some time, the term sardonic laughter (sardonious gēlos) means both the evil grin of the sacrificer, and the bizarre forming of the child’s mouth into a pained grimace when burning alive in the tophet.6 Thus sacrificer and victim unite in expression.
A less—but not much so—horrific version has the use a common herb of Sardinia, hemlock (either Ranunculus Sardous/Sardinian crowfoot or Oenanthe crocata/hemlock water dropwort), which causes the facial tightening, as attested to by Procopius (500-565 AD):
This island of Sardinia was formerly called Sardo. In that place there grows a certain herb that, if men eat it, a fatal convulsion immediately comes over them and they die not long afterward, giving the impression of laughing, as it were, because of the convulsion, and this laughter they call “Sardonic” from the name of that place.
—History of the Wars VIII. 24.397
This herb, famous for the sacrificial ridding of Athens of their wisest man, Socrates, in 399 BC, either killed one straight off, or allowed for easier dispensation of the meddlesome elderly, grinning in agreement as they were tossed off of a cliff.
Caligari, Museo Archeological Nazionale
The meaning of sardonic expands to include a knowing smile that evil will befall one’s opponent. The earliest use of sardonic comes from Homer’s Odyssey as Odysseus awaits the moment to enact his revenge on the suitors who have overrun his home while he was away.
With that, he [Ktêsippos] flung the foot of an ox with his powerful hand from out of a basket where it lay. Odysseus eluded it, quickly leaning his head to the side, and smiled a sardonic smile within his heart. (Odyssey 20.302)
“Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”
—Robert Zimmerman “All along the Watchtower”.
To tie this in a messy knot: the final stage of the revelation of the method has those who have been in control of this deception, this construct, openly do what they do without care of who or what knows. And they laugh and cackle at us as we scramble up and over assassination roofs looking for empty shells, for they are well on to what is next.
And by reading the flashing oracle of the democratic ticket, we have the cock-sure cackle of a sadistic unvoted-for presidential candidate, and a vp adjunct who enacted policies that would make Stalin blush, or more likely, grin. Snitch hotlines during covid, while his family vacationed and avoided his own mandates. More nursing home deaths than Cuomo. Driver’s licenses and college tuition for illegal border crossers (I think I finally paid off my student loans in my late 40s). Claiming Biden was three neurons short of full genius just two days before the Obama-Kamala coup. Famously, tampons for men’s rooms, because, well, I haven’t a friggin’ clue.
And most germane to our topic: 1. Signing legislation eliminating the requirement to save babies that survive an abortion.8 Planned Parenthood, besides being a money-laundering operation that regurgitates government handouts back to candidates giving them these handouts, is once again caught hubristically bragging about their stock of parts like Auto Zone. At least the worshippers of El and Yahweh fully burned the offering. Waltz’ legislation gives more product for Planned Parenthood to sell.9
2. Making Minnesota a sanctuary for underage children to be sacrificed to the pharmaceutical industry via “gender affirming” surgeries. Parents do not need to know what happens to their children, which is full sacrifice to the gods of pharmacy and multilation surgery. Waltz is no avuncular ‘neighborly’ statesman, he is the epitome of the quote from Hamlet above, while Harris personifies the murderous ambition of Lady Macbeth, just without the lady part.
I am sick of writing about child sacrifice, but not only is it not going away, it is in our face more and more, because the cackling crew think they have won. But as Greek and Elizabethan tragedy have shown us, there is always a fatal flaw, and it is hubris, overweening pride. Hubris legally meant sexual assault in Greece, and culturally meant claiming you were better than the gods. Marxists go further and deny deity at all, but really they worship the old gods, Yahweh, El, Baal, whom all sides of the Palestinian conflict work for, whose sacrificial maw has no sating.
May hawk-vision guide us.
1 Super balls were/are hard-pressed small rubber balls invented in 1964 and made of the friendly-sounding composite called Zektron. They bounced ridiculously high, and each landing brought about an intense spin reversal in the opposite direction. Hence it is an apt metaphor for political movements. Where I grew up, they were difficult to catch, and most ended up rolling into the NYC sewer system.
2 Please, please, make no connection between this and any border policy suggestion. Just talkin’ vermin here . . .
3 See this: https://steveandkryscrimi.substack.com/p/how-plato-took-down-the-twin-towers-2e7
4 See Cathy O’Brien’s Trance-Formation of America on Cheney.
5 Or in the case of his daughter, birth one.
6 Tophet is an open air cremation sanctuary, with a fireplace, often dedicated to Ba’al or Molech for immolating children, and later a Hebrew Hopefully this Mercury retrograde look backward name for hell. See Brian Felusko, “The Tophet and Child Sacrifice in the Ancient Mediterranean”. The existence of child sacrifice in the Levant remains argumentative, with some Christian and Jewish theologians holding to “we would never do that” positions, as the archeological evidence more and more aligns with the ancient writings.
7 Taken from: Quintius Curtius, “The Chilling Origins of the ‘Sardonic Laugh’”: https://qcurtius.com/2016/12/24/the-chilling-origins-of-the-sardonic-laugh/
8 Foe example: https://www.ncregister.com/news/tim-walz-born-alive-abortion
9 https://nypost.com/2024/08/08/us-news/undercover-video-allegedly-shows-planned-parenthood-scandal/