Jan 182020
 
 January 18, 2020  Posted by at 10:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,


Esther Bubley Watching parade to recruit civilian defense volunteers, Washington DC 1943

 

Sanders Campaign Looks At Warren For Vice President AND Treasury Secretary (IC)
US Seeks To Determine If Yovanovitch Was Under Threat – Pompeo (R.)
Grave Tendings (Kunstler)
A Malicious Indictment (Buchanan)
New IMF Boss Says Global Economy Risks Return Of Great Depression (G.)
Battle of the Ages To Stop Eurasian Integration (Pepe Escobar)
China’s Growing Economic Collapse (WRB)
UK Cops Block Bid To Trace Prince Andrew’s Location 19 Years Ago (NYP)
Rich People Are Staying Healthy For Almost A Decade Longer Than Poor People (CNN)
Children, Young Adults Can’t Sue US Government Over Climate Change – Court (R.)

 

 

The fight didn’t poll well, methinks.

Sanders Campaign Looks At Warren For Vice President AND Treasury Secretary (IC)

The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders has researched the question of whether the same person can serve as both vice president and treasury secretary, according to three sources on the campaign. The person the Sanders campaign had in mind with the inquiry was Sen. Elizabeth Warren, his rival for the nomination and the bane of Wall Street over the last decade. The answer the lawyers came back with was yes: There is nothing in the Constitution that bars the vice president from also serving as treasury secretary. Sanders has made no final decisions on a potential running mate or cabinet officers, considering such questions premature and presumptuous, but the research into the question of Warren’s dual eligibility reflects the political affinity that has long existed between the two — an affinity that was dealt a setback over the past week, as the pair clashed over the contents of a year-old private conversation.


Warren and Sanders have been allies since at least 2008, before she came to Washington to chair a panel with oversight of the Wall Street bailout. An author of books on the struggles of the middle class and an expert on bankruptcy law, she was invited by Sanders to a Vermont town hall, where the two talked about their shared agenda. Sanders was a strong supporter of her effort to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the wake of the financial crisis and privately lobbied President Barack Obama to name her the head of the new agency. Ideologically, Sanders and Warren are largely aligned when it comes to Wall Street, though Warren has concentrated more attention on bankers, meaning the two different skill sets could complement each other in the same administration.

Read more …

Still no idea how Parnas went from very major Dem enemy to posing with Maddow in no time. Everyone just stopped thinking?

US Seeks To Determine If Yovanovitch Was Under Threat – Pompeo (R.)

The U.S. State Department will do everything necessary to determine whether former U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was under threat in Ukraine, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday. Documents released this week indicated Lev Parnas, a Ukraine-born U.S. citizen, helped U.S. President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani investigate U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. They also showed Parnas was involved in monitoring Yovanovitch’s movements before Trump removed her in May. Yovanovitch, a respected career diplomat, was a key witness in the U.S. House of Representatives’ investigation of Trump before he was impeached in December.

Late on Friday, a Democratic aide said House Democrats will be sending additional text messages, photographs and other documents provided by Parnas for the Senate impeachment trial that gets underway in earnest next week. Some of the documents appeared to show communications between Parnas and an aide to Representative Devin Nunes, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. In his first comments on the issue since the documents were released on Tuesday evening, Pompeo said he had never met nor communicated with Parnas, adding that he thought much of what had been reported on the issue would be proven wrong.

“We will do everything we need to do to evaluate whether there was something that took place there,” he told conservative radio host Tony Katz in an interview. “I suspect that much of what’s been reported will ultimately prove wrong, but our obligation, my obligation as secretary of state, is to make sure that we evaluate, investigate. Any time there is someone who posits that there may have been a risk to one of our officers, we’ll obviously do that,” he said. Yovanovitch testified she had received a late night call from Washington warning her that she needed to return to the United States urgently and that there were concerns about her safety.

Read more …

Jim is hurting some of his earlier fans.

Grave Tendings (Kunstler)

Wouldn’t you like to hear from the legendary “whistleblower,” since his actions provoked this chapter of the three-year orchestrated coup to oust Mr. Trump? If it’s a basic tenet of law that a defendant has a right to face his accuser, can there be any further excuse for concealing this person’s identity — whose supposed right to anonymity, by the way, has been one of the signal frauds of the whole episode. Would it not be instructive to seat his mentor and former boss, John Brennan, in the witness chair and give him another opportunity to perjure himself? We must also hear from Michael Atkinson, the “whistleblower’s” enabler and Lawfare warrior Mary McCord, Atkinson’s former boss at the DOJ national security desk, who apparently stage-managed the “whistleblower’s” doings through Adam Schiff’s House intel Committee. Mr. Schiff would be the ripest witness of all, of course, since he has left a trail of falsehoods and fabrications longer than the Pacific Trail — but it’s unclear just now whether the Senate rules will allow a manager to be called to testify.

There is also much to be unraveled about the American mischief in Ukraine — which includes, but goes far beyond — the arrant grift of Hunter Biden. For example, the relationships between between the George Soros-backed NGO Atlantic Council and Burisma, the NatGas company that put Hunter B on its board, and Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, board member of the Atlantic Council (and $25-million contributor to the Clinton Foundation), and Dmitri Alperovitch (also Atlantic Council) co-founder of Crowdstrike, the company that “examined” the supposedly “hacked” DNC servers, and Hillary Clinton herself, the self-dealing Secretary of State behind the international pay-for-play charity fraud she operated while in office. Also bring back former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to ‘splain the actions she took to conceal all these machinations, as well as her role in operating the 2016 Kiev Hillary campaign office.

What would soon be obvious is that the precipitating “whistleblower” caper was an effort to divert attention from a network of Americans that used a politically captive Ukraine — following the Maidan Revolution of 2014 — to protect an enormous racketeering operation threatened by the candidacy, and then the election, of Mr. Trump. Naturally, they are desperate to get him out of the way. So many of the facts are already publicly known and documented about these matters that the legal machinery has yet to catch up with it all. And when it does, the Democratic Party will have driven a wooden stake through its own depraved heart.

Read more …

Pat Buchanan doesn’t let up either.

A Malicious Indictment (Buchanan)

Assume Zelenskiy, without prodding, sent to the U.S., as a friendly act to ingratiate himself with Trump, the Burisma file on Hunter Biden. Would that have been a crime? Why is it then a crime if Trump asked for the file? The military aid Trump held up for 10 weeks — lethal aid Barack Obama denied to Kyiv — was sent. And Zelenskiy never held the press conference requested, never investigated Burisma, never sent the Biden file. There is a reason why no crime was charged in the impeachment of Donald Trump. There was no crime committed. Not political, said Pelosi. Why then did she hold up sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate for a month, after she said it was so urgent that Trump be impeached that Schiff and Nadler could not wait for their subpoenas to be ruled upon by the Supreme Court?

Pelosi is demanding that the Senate get the documents, subpoena and hear the witnesses, and do the investigative work Schiff and Nadler failed to do. Does that not constitute an admission that a convincing case was not made? Are not the articles voted by the House inherently deficient if the Senate has to have more evidence than the House prosecutors could produce to convict the president of “abuse of power”? Can we really have a fair trial in the Senate, when half of the jury, the Democratic caucus, is as reliably expected to vote to remove the president as Republicans are to acquit him? What kind of fair trial is it when we can predict the final vote before the court hears the evidence?

It is ridiculous to deny that this impeachment is partisan, political and personal. It reeks of politics, partisanship and Trump-hatred. As for patriotic, that depends on where you stand — or sit. But the forum to be entrusted with the decision of “should Trump go?” is not a deeply polarized Senate, but with those the Founding Fathers entrusted with such decisions — the American people.

Read more …

But the IMF will save us, I’m sure.

New IMF Boss Says Global Economy Risks Return Of Great Depression (G.)

The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned that the global economy risks a return of the Great Depression, driven by inequality and financial sector instability. Speaking at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington, Kristalina Georgieva said new IMF research, which compares the current economy to the “roaring 1920s” that culminated in the great market crash of 1929, revealed that a similar trend was already under way. While the inequality gap between countries had closed in the last two decades, it had increased within countries, she said, singling out the UK for particular criticism.


“In the UK, for example, the top 10% now control nearly as much wealth as the bottom 50%. This situation is mirrored across much of the OECD, where income and wealth inequality have reached, or are near, record highs.” She added: “In some ways, this troubling trend is reminiscent of the early part of the 20th century – when the twin forces of technology and integration led to the first gilded age, the roaring 20s, and, ultimately, financial disaster.” She warned that fresh issues such as the climate emergency and increased trade protectionism meant the next 10 years were likely to be characterised by social unrest and financial market volatility. “If I had to identify a theme at the outset of the new decade, it would be increasing uncertainty,” she said.

Read more …

Pepe’s starting to sound a bit like a broken record. We already know what he thinks about this. he should try a different angle.

Battle of the Ages To Stop Eurasian Integration (Pepe Escobar)

The Deep State and crucial sectors of the US ruling class are absolutely terrified that China is already outpacing the “indispensable nation” economically and that Russia has outpaced it militarily. The Pentagon officially designates the three Eurasian nodes as “threats.” Hybrid War techniques – carrying inbuilt 24/7 demonization – will proliferate with the aim of containing China’s “threat,” Russian “aggression” and Iran’s “sponsorship of terrorism.” The myth of the “free market” will continue to drown under the imposition of a barrage of illegal sanctions, euphemistically defined as new trade “rules.” Yet that will be hardly enough to derail the Russia-China strategic partnership. To unlock the deeper meaning of this partnership, we need to understand that Beijing defines it as rolling towards a “new era.”

That implies strategic long-term planning – with the key date being 2049, the centennial of New China. The horizon for the multiple projects of the Belt and Road Initiative – as in the China-driven New Silk Roads – is indeed the 2040s, when Beijing expects to have fully woven a new, multipolar paradigm of sovereign nations/partners across Eurasia and beyond, all connected by an interlocking maze of belts and roads. The Russian project – Greater Eurasia – somewhat mirrors Belt & Road and will be integrated with it. Belt & Road, the Eurasia Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank are all converging towards the same vision.

So this “new era”, as defined by the Chinese, relies heavily on close Russia-China coordination, in every sector. Made in China 2025 is encompassing a series of techno/scientific breakthroughs. At the same time, Russia has established itself as an unparalleled technological resource for weapons and systems that the Chinese still cannot match. At the latest BRICS summit in Brasilia, President Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin that “the current international situation with rising instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia to establish closer strategic coordination.” Putin’s response: “Under the current situation, the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication.”

Russia is showing China how the West respects realpolitik power in any form, and Beijing is finally starting to use theirs. The result is that after five centuries of Western domination – which, incidentally, led to the decline of the Ancient Silk Roads – the Heartland is back, with a bang, asserting its preeminence. On a personal note, my travels these past two years, from West Asia to Central Asia, and my conversations these past two months with analysts in Nur-Sultan, Moscow and Italy, have allowed me to get deeper into the intricacies of what sharp minds define as the Double Helix. We are all aware of the immense challenges ahead – while barely managing to track the stunning re-emergence of the Heartland in real-time.

Read more …

This would be a good angle for Pepe. How do countries integrate that are in serious trouble?

China’s Growing Economic Collapse (WRB)

China’s $40 Trillion banking system dwarfs the American system at double the size, with over 4,000 small, medium and massive, state-owned banks. The world’s four largest banks, including behemoth ICBC ($4TN), are all Chinese. The failure of just three banks was important enough that Chinese regulators submitted Chinese banks to a stress test and the results were shocking. China’s central bank admitted that China’s banking sector is “showing signs of strain.” The stress tests had revealed that over 13% of China’s 4,379 lenders were designated “high risk” by the central bank’s report. With this amounting to over 570 banks, and thus multiplied by the three existing examples of bank bail-out funding, with the Chinese economy following the world into recession, the financial numbers and likelihood of any future series of bail-outs are truly biblical. If not, fiscally impossible.


Separately, the PBOC also stress-tested 30 medium- and large-sized banks in the first half of 2019. In the base-case scenario, assuming GDP growth dropped to 5.3% – or well above where China’s real GDP is now – nine out of 30 major banks failed and saw their capital adequacy ratio drop to 13.47% from 14.43%. In the worst-case scenario, assuming GDP growth of 4.15%, or just 2% below the latest official Chinese GDP report, seventeen out of the thirty of these major banks failed the test. Separately, a liquidity stress test at 1,171 banks, representing nearly three-quarters of China’s banking sector by total assets, showed that ninety failed in the base-case and 159 in the worst-case scenario. The metrics of any collective bail-out indicates that China has upwards of an insurmountable $20 trillion problem rapidly approaching.

Read more …

I kid you not: for “national security” reasons. All they talk about is Big Ben bongs and blaming Meghan for being chased out of town by the paparazzi.

UK Cops Block Bid To Trace Prince Andrew’s Location 19 Years Ago (NYP)

British police have blocked a legal bid to trace Prince Andrew’s bodyguards’ movements on the night he allegedly first had sex with a Jeffrey Epstein accuser. The disgraced royal claims that he could not have had sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre in London in March 2001 — because he was grabbing pizza with his daughter at a chain restaurant in the small town of Woking. With no witnesses of the prince’s pie date, the Mirror Online submitted a Freedom of Information Act request hoping that his royal protection officers’ movements would help prove his whereabouts that day. But London’s Met police rejected the request, citing national security concerns — and sparking an immediate backlash, the UK news site said.


Graham Smith, of anti-monarchy group Republic, slammed the decision. “Revealing locations from 19 years ago cannot possibly reveal personal data, either directly or indirectly,” Smith told Mirror Online. “The police are tasked with protecting the royals from physical harm, not from legitimate inquiry, criminal investigation or embarrassment.” Giuffre — who claims to have had sex with Andrew three times after being trafficked by late pedophile Epstein — attacked the “lies after lies” that she claims protect the prince. “There could only be one reason the prince’s bodyguards would not to expose where the prince had been on March 10th 2001- the night in question, bc he wasn’t at Woking Pizza with his daughter B,” she tweeted, referring to Princess Beatrice.

Read more …

Health care, education etc. must be universal. Or you can aim for the majority to be sick and stupid.

Rich People Are Staying Healthy For Almost A Decade Longer Than Poor People (CNN)

Rich people live healthy, disability-free lives an average of nine years longer than less wealthy people, according to a major study that lays bare the troubling economic inequalities behind lifespans in the US and UK. Researchers analyzed data on more than 25,000 adults over 50, looking for factors that could predict how long they lived before they started suffering from age-related disabilities, like being unable to get out of bed or cook for themselves. The biggest socioeconomic factor in predicting when those problems began was wealth, the team discovered, with richer people enjoying almost an extra decade before experiencing difficulties.

From the age of 50, the wealthiest men analyzed could expect another 31 healthy years of life — compared with the least well-off, who could only expect another 22 to 23 healthy years. For women, the wealthiest were projected to enjoy 33 more years of good health, compared with 24 for the poorest. “While life expectancy is a useful indicator of health, the quality of life as we get older is also crucial,” lead author Paola Zaninotto, a public health specialist at University College London, said in a statement. “By measuring healthy life expectancy we can get an estimate of the number of years of life spent in favorable states of health or without disability.”

The study — the work of researchers from a team of universities in Europe and the US — is far from the first to pinpoint the importance wealth plays in how long people live, though most have focused on life expectancy rather than quality of life. Research in 2016 found that men in the top financial 1% in the US can expect to live until the age of 87.3, nearly 15 years longer than those in the bottom 1%. The gap for women was 10 years. And in the UK, a study in 2018 found that poor people die around a decade earlier than those who are better off. [..] In general, the global life expectancy at birth in 2016 — the latest year for which data is available — was 72 years, according to the World Health Organization. The global average life expectancy rose by 5.5 years between 2000 and 2016, the fastest increase since the 1960s, WHO said.

Read more …

They probably need to be much more specific. How do they intend to achieve their goal? And don’t say electric cars.

Children, Young Adults Can’t Sue US Government Over Climate Change – Court (R.)

A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday threw out a lawsuit by children and young adults who claimed they had a constitutional right to be protected from climate change, in a major setback to efforts to spur the U.S. government to address the issue. In a 2-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs, who were between the ages of 8 and 19 when the lawsuit began in 2015, lacked legal standing to sue the United States. Circuit Judge Andrew Hurwitz said the majority reached its conclusion “reluctantly,” given “compelling” evidence the government had long promoted fossil fuels despite knowing they could cause catastrophic climate change, and that failing to change policies could hasten an “environmental apocalypse.”

Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based non-profit behind the lawsuit, said in a statement that it would seek an 11-judge panel of the court to review the decision. The ruling had “catastrophic implications,” said Julia Olson, the group’s executive director. A Department of Justice spokesman said the government was pleased with the outcome. The 21 children and young adults had accused federal officials and oil industry executives of violating their due process right to a “climate system capable of sustaining human life,” by knowing for decades that carbon pollution poisons the environment but doing nothing about it. The government argued that neither U.S. law or history supported the young people’s claim of a fundamental right to a “livable climate.”

It also called the lawsuit an unconstitutional attempt to control the entire country’s climate and energy policy through a single court. Hurwitz said the case left “little basis for denying that climate change is occurring at an increasingly rapid pace,” but that addressing it required “complex policy decisions entrusted, for better or worse, to the wisdom and discretion” of the White House and Congress. “That the other branches may have abdicated their responsibility to remediate the problem does not confer on Article III courts, no matter how well-intentioned, the ability to step into their shoes,” he wrote.

Read more …

 

Ali would have turned 78 yesterday

 

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle January 18 2020

Viewing 14 posts - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)
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  • #52785

    Esther Bubley Watching parade to recruit civilian defense volunteers, Washington DC 1943   • Sanders Campaign Looks At Warren For Vice President
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 18 2020]

    #52786
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Ali; truly, one of the greatest Americans ever, in its entire history…

    #52787
    Dr. D
    Participant

    the top 10% now control nearly as much wealth as the bottom 50%.”

    There’s probably more to this than it seems at first. Because you can’t actually get rich fast enough by doing work, income disparity will be a consequence of financial speculation, a paper bubble. So by the time we see such levels of income disparity, we already have a bubble that is deep and wide. And bubbles pop, eventually. That’s why they make them. It’s not a financial secret. While millionaires go broke, billionaires consolidate.

    So cause-effect may not so much be that, people politically cause trouble, purchasing power shrinks, although true, but as Mises says, “There is no avoiding the final bust.”

    “ Battle of the Ages To Stop Eurasian Integration (Pepe Escobar) “

    MacKinder again, by the idiot Brits and Anglos. Defending this theory – which exists only in their mind, never tested – has probably killed more people than Genghis Khan. And here we go again. These are the same University wonks who told us “permanent plateau”, “subprime is contained”, “Manhattan will be underwater”, and P.S. Eugenics is both scientifically obvious and good. I don’t want to die in service of their dumb theories, how about you?

    “China’s $40 Trillion banking system dwarfs the American system at double the size, with over 4,000 small, medium and massive, state-owned banks.

    China is a great illustration of why bubbles pop, and why the Anglos, baiting them into it, can be sure no matter what happens, no matter how smart, no matter how authoritarian, China will still collapse and fail in an economic panic, like everybody else. However, at the moment, they have out-gamed the West, probably 12-20 years longer than we thought they could. Remember Asian panic, Congress demanding they re-set their currency, ‘cause we said so? Like that. Too bad suckers! China has their own ways and doesn’t live for you.

    UK Cops Block Bid To Trace Prince Andrew’s Location 19 Years Ago (NYP)”

    They refuse to provide evidence to totally exonerate him. That is not suspicious at all. And they seem to be losing Royals at quite a pace over there. Anyone wonder why? Maybe somebody knew Andrew all this time and was playing too? Maybe they all did? This goes way, way back.

    Health care, education etc. must be universal.”

    It is in a way. They’ll arrest you if you don’t go to school and aren’t vaccinated to do so. You can walk into any emergency room at any time. What we have are two TRACKS, as with everything: a doctor for the rich and for the poor, a financial system for the rich and for the poor, a legal system for the rich and for the poor. “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!” No sir, it’s a big club and you’re receiving it.

    (You know, after paying for it.)

    I think you’ll find all of these match the post-Soviet experience, per Orlov. Difference is, following the American way, we’re lying about it. It’s not white guys dropping fastest, they’re the firstest! And they control everything, even the inside of womens’ voters’ minds, just ask Hillary. And like Putin once they do that, they attack and kill themselves, shave 10 years off their life expectancy like the tricky people they are!

    Is there any thinking going on here in America? A: no. But you can’t think straight in the first place when – thanks to universal government education – every fact you’ve ever heard is a lie.

    When everything Americans believe is false, our misinformation campaign will be complete.” – CIA Director Casey, following the new Department of Education.

    “Children, Young Adults Can’t Sue US Government Over Climate Change – Court (R.)”

    This would be obvious legal nonsense. You could say, “I’m suing because you didn’t move my school, because my theory indicates a volcano will spring up under the gym.” You’re presuming what might have been in the past and what might possibly be in the future: an impossible legal standard. I could sue that you DIDN’T divorce me, since in the future the lack of divorce will cause my suicide, car wreck, alcoholism, etc. Nothing’s happened yet. We’re not smart enough to know it ever will. And although a lot of (bad) laws point in this direction, nothing like to this level of complete mental fabrication. “I thought it in my head, so it’s real.” as we see in Nonsense, Narcissism, and self-serving every day, in the media, but also whenever anyone speaks on the internet, whenever a sparrow falls to the ground.

    No, Virginia, there IS objective reality. We may not be able to know it, but it is real. To say otherwise is a road to madness, ruin, and despair. However, it is the essence of #AntiLogos, of ego’s rebellion against God, of the “Spirit of AntiChrist” which pops up in cycles from time to time, as predicted. But this is its root, and why all these otherwise different groups, approaches, causes, all cohere together: they all have this as their root, so they are psychological allies, the same world view. Unfortunately one that doesn’t work, and kills millions trying. The inside of your ego is not reality. Things do not exist because you thought them so once. Delusion and samsara.

    Ali is a paragon of how you resist. You just do. You don’t tell other people to do it, you don’t go punch gay Asians and flag-holding grandmothers. You just do the right and not the wrong. As Gandhi pointed out, they can’t MAKE you do the wrong. They need your consent. So don’t be the baddie. Don’t give it.

    #52788
    zerosum
    Participant

    “There is also much to be unraveled about the American mischief in Ukraine — which includes, but goes far beyond — the arrant grift of Hunter Biden. For example, ….”

    if everybody followed the directives set up by the enablers then ….
    There is no proof of wrong doing – Biden
    ———-
    • China’s Growing Economic Collapse (WRB)
    We should be asking …..
    Where are we going to buy what China produces if China goes bankrupt or if we destroy/go to war with China?
    Where are we going to sell our surplus product if China is not there to buy?
    ——-
    “It’s not a financial secret. While millionaires go broke, billionaires consolidate.”
    Trickle down economics
    Poor people die,
    middle class become poor
    Enablers become enforcers and sheriff
    ——
    Gandhi example – peaceful siege
    Warning to USA troops staying in Iraq: incoming phlegm, tracking dye, and paint balls

    #52789
    zerosum
    Participant

    Winter storms
    Its miserable
    Don’t panic
    Its normal
    Its worst somewhere else

    #52791
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Everyone just stopped thinking?”

    This assumes they started.
    ***
    If the USA can sue me for taxes that will, according to governmental theory, benefit me, I can sue them for damages that my theory says they caused. In my mind, at least, which is where 99% (to use a mathematical expression as a metaphor) of all this stuff happens.

    The real stuff happens “out there” in this thing called reality which, as Robin Williams said, is quite the concept.
    Tell Us About the Good Old Days, Gramps

    People have been killing and oppressing each other over conflicting definitions of objective reality since we discovered language. In a previous century, I wrote something about this. (Graphomania happens.) Extracting a relevant portion:

    I can’t help but imagine Genesis as recited by Ezra the Bum, a little, pudgy, middle-aged Jew from my youth in Chicago. “The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history”, Ezra liked to say.

    Jehovah, as portrayed in the Old Testament, was an unlikable old cuss and deserved no better than Ezra’s fate, that of a sad, overweight, social outcast on Chicago’s northside. The Jews, it should be mentioned, had adopted and refined the concept of the sacrificial scapegoat, so it’s quite possible they wrote Genesis in such a way as to make Yahweh take the heat for mankind’s proclivity to make drudgery where simple work would suffice…”And a Voice spake unto them from within a fiery cloud of broomdust, saying, ‘Move dem boxes over dere’…”.

    Much of the Judaic creational mythology was incorporated from the Sumerian codices, wherein a council of Gods cursed Man for his acquisition of Knowledge because “in time they may wax in wisdom and become even as We” (just a paraphrase). An exact quote from the King James bible says in Genesis 10:6-7, “And the Lord said, Behold, the people is(sic) one, and they have all one language; and this” (building the Tower of Babel) “they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us(sic) go down, and therefore confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

    There were some mighty hip philosophers in Sumeria. These were the guys who invented writing; when you say cuneiform, you’re saying Sumerian. They knew the power of recorded, temporally transcendent language; they knew they were creating a monster; they knew they were firing a shot across Nature’s bow. Until cuneiform, temporally endurant code possessing any depth of storage, any capacity for carrying significant complexities of data, was limited to DNA, handwritten scrolls, and those talking tribal libraries, the bards. With cuneiform, language (especially math!) was unleashed as an evolving, symbiotic, intellectual organism riding the hordes and herds of its cultural host and commingling with its variant siblings. In the myth of Babel, one sees a healthy respect for the power inherent in a linguistic species existing in an environment free of competitive species. One language, under God, indivisible… oops. O.K., divisible.

    People are the pollinator bees of language. So long as their cultural horde-host is sufficiently large, languages are in no danger of genetic stagnation via inbreeding, since languages create their own expanding gene pool. Each word is a unique individual as are you and I, specially defined by the globally consistent principles of human language, and racially defined by the specific vocabularies and grammars of its host culture.

    A self-pollinating metaspecies resident in the minds and automata of the overwhelmingly dominant world species, ours truly, is a mighty powerful beastie. I don’t know of any ancient, global ur-language that a god or council of gods might confound, fracture and disseminate variously among the Biblical peoples of the earth, but I do know the power of recorded language.

    The power of the Latin scribes of the Holy Roman Empire was upheld largely through the difficulty and expense of transcription. Cuneiformica (it’s a joke, son, I say, it’s a joke) was unwieldy (toting notepads of rock is equivalent to carrying scrolls of linoleum). Papyrus was light and fluent but provided no means of facsimile replication. The Chinese, I understand, had moveable type before the western world but were hampered by the semantic bulkiness of ideogrammatic language. Western literature has the benefit of a phonetic language which allows the semantic content of a written word to be mostly free from the constraints of its symbolic constituents: the word rules the alphabet as opposed to the ideogram ruling the word. This allows a nearly infinite degree of inflection and nuance along with a highly expandable plasticity. Alphabetic phoneticism is to language what polymer molecules are to plastic material fabrication. For example: antidisestablishmententarianism.

    When Western language applied the concept of the finitely numbered /infinitely combinatorial phonetic alphabet to the concept of molded typefaces, language made an evolutionary leap comparable to man’s acquisition of fire, the lever, and the wheel. Language acquired the ability to reproductively organize into complex organs, linking them into intricate and interactive bodies: text as we know it.

    A novel, for example, is an organism of thought. Its administrative center – its brain – is a thing called plot. Humans eat novels for their psychic nutrition and spread text seed the way birds shit fruit seeds. Complex entities of carefully constructed and dynamically self-referential thoughts such as stories, creeds, theories, philosophies, histories, etc., which were once confined to the recitations of bards, public forums as in Athens, or the painstaking awl/quill strokes of a scribe, were now free to clone themselves and wreak intellectual ferment across the land. Cloning of text was big enough but, once cloning had established its own developmental continuum, infecting thousands and millions of human minds across the world with viral reproductions of themselves (remember how viruses burrow into our cells and usurp our DNA code factories in order to mass produce a zillion copies of themselves), then texts were ready to interbreed just as words do. Works of literature, scientific treatises, religious histories: these entities could now go the rounds among each other and mutually mutate one another, all the while safely ensconced in the Mother Gene Pool of Language.

    And that’s just text. Pre-20th century tech. Now we’z in the 21st Century, and people walk around holding tiny movie theaters to distract them from that notorious concept we claim allegedly exists: reality. I, for one, want to believe in the existebnce of an objective reality. But, being entirely bound in subjective consciousness, I must take the existence of objective reality on faith. I find God as good a name as any for this theoretic construct.

    Here, have some subjective mediated reality with a good beat that’s easy to dance to:

    Melting Pot

    Imagine James Brown riffing on the phrase “May all beings benefit… UNH!!!!”

    #52792
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “You just do. You don’t tell other people to do it, you don’t go punch gay Asians and flag-holding grandmothers. You just do the right and not the wrong. ”

    I’ll amen to that. As soon as a crusade is large enough to be recognized as such, it’s an army of marching minions. We can’t save the planet from ourselves. As someone, I think iot was David Bohm, said, the mind that creates the problem cannot solve the problem. Ick. THat doesn’t say it. (googles deeper) Here:

    In the seminar, Bohm develops several interrelated themes. He points out that thought is the ubiquitous tool that is used to solve every kind of problem: personal, social, scientific, and so on. Yet thought, he maintains, is also inadvertently the source of many of those problems. He recognizes and acknowledges the irony of the situation: it is as if one gets sick by going to the doctor.[33][39]

    Bohm maintains that thought is a system, in the sense that it is an interconnected network of concepts, ideas and assumptions that pass seamlessly between individuals and throughout society. If there is a fault in the functioning of thought, therefore, it must be a systemic fault, which infects the entire network. The thought that is brought to bear to resolve any given problem, therefore, is susceptible to the same flaw that created the problem it is trying to solve.[33][39]

    Thought proceeds as if it is merely reporting objectively, but in fact, it is often coloring and distorting perception in unexpected ways. What is required in order to correct the distortions introduced by thought, according to Bohm, is a form of proprioception, or self-awareness. Neural receptors throughout the body inform us directly of our physical position and movement, but there is no corresponding awareness of the activity of thought. Such an awareness would represent psychological proprioception and would enable the possibility of perceiving and correcting the unintended consequences of the thinking process.[33][39]

    If one accepts this then, knowing that one cannot save oneself from one’s culture any more than one can save oneself from eventual death, the only remaining salvation is opf that allegedly theoretical construct: the soul.

    But if there is no soul, what is there? INtelligence is not awareness. My computer is highly intelligent but shows no sign of sentience. It’s just information dancing with entropy. Something experiences one’s personal reality. Science has not a single(sic) clue about what that something is. As another scientifically famous David says:

    The Hard Problem

    Whether or not this something endures after death is currently unverifiable, so I will not urge anyone here to think in terms of saving their soul in some after-life (altho I do and tend to believe that almost everyone else does too when push comes to shove). Instead, I will urge us no9t to lose our souls before our body dies.

    Sometimes, quite often in fact, we homo saps make pretty good art messing around with these concepts:

    Azure Salver

    Your mileage may vary.

    #52793
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Eugenics is both scientifically obvious and good.”

    But eugenics are obvious and good. It’s in the name itself: good genetics.

    As applied by human thought, however…. but this is also true of masonry, nuclear physics, literacy, religion, political science… if eugenics were unsound, then marrying nothing but first cousins 20 generations in a row would be just swell.

    We forever confuse the currently prevailing label with the thing the label has been attached to.

    Science, God, and Man Agree…

    A billion burning suns
    Calmly do
    As they did before
    Like me and you

    Sitting in their place
    Bound, but years apart
    Stubborn as we are
    With matters of the heart

    Science, God and you
    All agree
    We’ve become something
    We weren’t meant to be

    Paths run parallel
    Here and up above
    Distance held by hearts
    Afraid to open up

    Yet even though
    Our love burns slow
    It warms me
    And all around
    Sight and sound
    Inform me

    That we have found
    A common ground
    Like the stars
    Why must we be
    Eternally
    Alone?

    A finely diamond sky
    Jewels in everglow
    Illuminates the distance
    Between the us below

    Me here
    You there
    And in the middle
    The frozenness of fear

    Yet still we’ve found
    A common ground
    Like the stars
    Why must we be
    Eternally
    Alone?

    #52794
    PlanetaryCitizen
    Participant

    12. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12 King James Version

    “Reality,” as we know it, is an extrapolation or logical conclusion/assumption based upon perceptions via the biological 5 senses and the analytical capabilities inherent to conceptualization and its cohort, the symbology of language. The vast majority of humans experience themselves/existence in exactly this same way. Otherwise known as an “Ego construct.” They “believe” in their reality and define themselves based upon their experience of their internal world. Body/mind. Also known as Narcissism.

    Religion postulates that the human state of being sees but “through a glass, darkly. Is there Being-ness apart from an ego construct? Do we “exist” in actual reality? What are the capabilities of perception in a state of Being that transcends identification with the ego state? For behold, the kingdom of heaven is within you. Luke 17:21 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. John 3:3

    Would one say that the Kingdom of God is a state of Reality? Or Logos, if you will. If one can actually allow the ego state of identification to “die” and be reborn will the Being state emerge with its own inherent capabilities? The capability of being able to see face to face, and the capability of real knowing even as they are known (unto themselves)?

    Also, the law is entirely based on the presumption of past events and future harm. Say, a wrongful death civil law suit “attempts” to prove a harm and culpability, and the remedy in part, is to calculate the future value of the loss both interpersonally and monetarily and ascribes a monetary value to both.

    #52795
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Yes, you can come face to face with actual reality, outside dark glass of thought-words, but ego has to vanish, and likewise will not be able bring that reality back into thought-words. It will be yours alone. And who sees this and knows? Thought-words will not tell you.

    This may be nothing, but: drones scouring all the Colorado West. GPS is being intentionally shut off through the South East. All night vision goggles of any merit are reportedly stolen by the FBI, in a enormous hurry. And on the first day of an impeachment, with a 2A little meet-n-greet happening next door in Alexandria.
    https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-01-17-military-to-jam-gps-signals-fbi-asserting-imminent-domain-seize-night-vision.html

    Do not want.

    #52796
    zerosum
    Participant

    “It will be yours alone.”
    Therefore, since I cannot prove it, I can say,”Reality is a figment/creation of my imagination.”

    #52797
    zerosum
    Participant

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/944-trillion-reasons-why-fed-quietly-bailing-out-hedge-funds#comment_stream

    I get it now, It easy ……
    If you can get free money from the fed. then if you put it into the stock market casino you will make +30%.
    At the same time my pension fund get saved until I kick the bucket.

    #52798
    WES
    Participant

    Nice picture of real people!

    Reality is being in a Tesla, on auto pilot, as it races to bang the rear of a sexy parked red fire truck!

    #52799
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    Same parade day as above. A child of 13 in the crowd would be 90 this year.

    null
    Washington, D.C. Waiting for the parade to recruit civilian defense volunteers
    Esther Bubley, July 1943

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