boscohorowitz
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“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.
A billion burning suns
Calmly do
As they did before
Like me and youSitting in their place
Bound, but years apart
Stubborn as we are
With matters of the heartScience, God and you
All agree
We’ve become something
We weren’t meant to bePaths run parallel
Here and up above
Distance held by hearts
Afraid to open upYet even though
Our love burns slow
It warms me
And all around
Sight and sound
Inform meThat 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 belowMe here
You there
And in the middle
The frozenness of fearYet still we’ve found
A common ground
Like the stars
Why must we be
Eternally
Alone?“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:
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:
Your mileage may vary.
“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, GrampsPeople 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:
Imagine James Brown riffing on the phrase “May all beings benefit… UNH!!!!”
How about a nice plate of warm cookies and a glass of fresh cold milk? It’s the weekend, after all:
The 3 Dog Night version was, imo, justifiably a much bigger hit than the original by B.W. Stevenson (it was written by one Daniel Moore), but this live version by Toby Keith (who is usually not my cup of java) surpasses the earlier two, I feel.
Dr.D:
I was referring to women in USA Westerndom, specifically during WWII, since that was what was initially referenced. I was not touting the Guardian as an impeccable source, just citing an article it printed. I’m aware that sexual politics are dynamic and have shifted considerably by time and locale.
And yes, women have sex, often just as foolishly and irresponsibly as the males they have sex with.
That was an awful lot of straw men you threw around the barn.
Plus, how nice it is that it required the USA joining into a war it largely helped create, and sending millions of male workers overseas, to give women a chance to show that they too had the intelligence to be a factory gimp and make money.
““Mrs. Marcella Hart” But I thought women were barefoot, unemployed slaves to men until the ‘60s! That’s what they taught me in school.”
That woman was not able to have a banking/checking account in her own name if she was married back then. This didn’t change signficantly until the 60s.
Diogenes is, after all, the man.
I hold Diogenes in my right hand to confront the raw facts, and Jesus in my left for the magical thinking I need to live with those facts.
Magical thinking is great stuff so long as you don’t confuse it with rational critical thinking.
Nerdy granddad rock cognoscenti will notice how deftly the guitarist channels dear old dead Paul Kossoff.
The bassplayer reminds us again why this joke is funny:
at evening twilight on the 3rd day of the safari, the drums began. They came from everywhere.
Stella was scared.
“Oh Paul! I’m scared!”
A porter comforted her.
“Not to worry, Missy Sahib. Is only the people talking about the day using drum language.
She thanked him.
The drums stopped.
The porter returned, looking scared.
“What is it?” asked Stella.
“Very bad, missy. When drums stop, bass solo begins.”
Dedicated to the average asshole in charge of whatever for no good reason:
I stumbled on this last night and was surprised by how it floored me. But sometimes, when a simple truth has been the single most defining aspect of one’s life, it becomes so obvious it turns invisible.
Reading it last night, I decided that there wasn’t a bit of exaggeration in it. Having grown up a straight-A golden child to the extent that other parents regularly praised — in my presence — my parents for having such a wonderful child, I stepped off the prescribed path and have been an exile ever since. It is indeed an unpardonable sin… unlerss it makes you a billionaire, preferably a closet pedophile.
Life’s weird like that.
Because I was trapped in an automobile dealer’s service lobby under a tv, I saw the commencement of the impeachment proceedings, complete with a map showing the ACTUAL PATH THE LAWMAKERS TROD GOING THROUGH THE BUILDING TO THE, ER, Impeachment Chamber. I did!
Later came The View, and some hyper-coiffed person gushingly revealed that the GAO claimed Trump’s actions regarding certain foreign aid to Ukraine (foreign aid, that unique blend of blackmail and bribery) was — gasp — illegal. This, said the hyper-haired gusher, meant it was wrong, bad, and even, er, impeachable. Or something. Trump had violated an act of Congress. Apparently, I’m supposed to believe the charge must stick because, I guess, this is an act of Congress that Congress for once didn’t itself violate?
Not sure.
I do know that the show between the Impeachment March and The View had some woman with fantastically layered, abundant, auburn hair that looked like it was a wig made from the stem cells derived from clippings of Trump’s big tent combover.
Also, during The View, Whoopi did this great impersonation of Bernie Sanders. It made me notice that, if you shrunk her skinny and ancient, died her skin pasty white and turned her impressive dreadlocks into nebulous silver wisps, she could pass for Bernie’s sister.
Also, this just in: apparently, fake potted plants with phony dead spots to make them look “real” is now a thing.
Another thing. Not everything is going to shit. The free coffee from the magic coffee dispenser, featuring Seattle’s Best Coffee, is as good as any coffee I’ve had from vintage pre-Starbucks espresso joints. Kind of coffee what reknits your bones and makes you jitter after 3 cups. Which probably in part explains this post.
Which somehow reminds me:
Is Impersonating an Officer an Impeachable Offense?
I suspect only the data rats at google/nsa/et al know just how many quasi-literate humans terxting (is 2 a wurd!) about current events have written ‘impeccable’ for ‘impeachable’.
It’s early enough I can still put down my marker on year 2020 bets, right? I got $23 trillion in national debt that says this is the year the Big Tumble will commence.
“Manipulative rituals are totally in character for a group of Luciferian occultists/pseudoZioIlluminatists.”
I like that sentence. It captures a big chunk of the weirdness of our times.
I find it interesting that we expect our leaders to be honest and moral. We are THE apex predator of the planet. Along with speed and power, predation is based on stealth, cunning, deception, and camouflage. It is only natural that, having cleared a space for humanity to exist without fear of lions, tigers, and bears, we should then prey on each other, with some of us dominating the field of prey.
As for sexual predation: today we call it Pedophile Island. Just 500 years ago it was called a harem, and was a respected part of most political ruling structures.
As for politicis in general: we’re social animals, and we believe that unless the group endorses and empowers it, it is meaningless. So we will only vote for someone who “can win”. We won’t go it alone because we will be exiled.
Thinking independenttly and acting in concert aren’t absolutely mutually exclusive, but they are at best antagonistic toward each other, while at worst (and as usual), impossible.
I want a movement that holds signs saying, WE WILL FOLLOW BOSCO FOR HE THINKS FOR HIMSELF. ALL HAIL BOSCO! MAKE HOROWITZ GREAT AGAIN!
Because it has no apparent connection to whatever it is we’re discussing today, I share here an obscure and groovy little tune from the WWII Era time capsule:
Dem congress-critter Matt Gaetz looks like he as cloned in a secret underground gubmint laboratory run by DEVO. Initially intended as a hologram for the much anticipated Lil Abner CGI remake. You can’t make up shit like this. Ipso facto proof of God, although I couldn’t necessarily speak for God’s sanity under such terms.
As for the Donald phenom, I will be generous and say that maybe he has had greatness thrust upon him. I’m pretty sure he didn’t want to win the election. But once he did what I believe was his aim — to show them uppity Wall Street Beltwayers that he could win if he wanted to, that he was better than them despite being blacklisted by the USA BIG Boys Clubs and forced to seek foreign (even russian) funding to sustain his weird half-assed financial goat rodeo — once he did that, others took notice and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse (see: What Epstein Knows, for starters). So he shut up long enough (a week or three, as I recall) to win the election, bowing to the teleprompters (which had to be pure hell for him, I imagine).
And then, and then, and then he found out what a buncha incompetent weasel-dweebs run the USA government, and steadily Trumpified How Things Are Done, giving everyone just enough of what they want for him to squeak through something that he could, after some polishing and lens correction, call his Own Personal Agenda.
Does the above hypothesis make any sense? Beats me. But it fits my intuitive sense of Whatthefuckery?
One thing about Trump that is deeply satisfying is that, for all the attempts to make him out as being much more schmuckier than his mainstream counterparts, the only way you can actually distinguish him from the evil cretins calling him even more evil and cretinous, is by how he does, indeed, manage to get more things done than they can or did. Some of these things seem good to me, some seem awful, but he gets them done, mostly on his own, because no one will give him a rubber-stamp.
They, his opponent counterparts, have to huddle together and blow large communal campaign bubbles to do anything: war on Terror, one-size-fits-all identity politics, whatever brand label they’re selling now. Trump, being an inherently loose and hyperactive cannon, goes about doing as he will and they can’t stop him.
Me, I can’t help but think that part of his success is that he may be the only major USA politician who actually listens to Putin and considers his advice seriously. After all, the guy’s the boss of one of the world’s older and larger empires. (After all, the 20th century was just as much the Soviet Century as the American Century.)
Raul has asked numerously in this edition, Who Gets What They Want? Only person I see getting that in any consistent manner is Vladimir Putin.
My long-term prediction: after USA has been whittled down to size, Russia will have to take on China cuz Godawmighty, they’re at least as stupid as the USA. I’ll guess that over time, a India/Iran duopoly will be the tropical counterweight to Russia’s arctic stronghold.
Lord knows what Latin America will become. Never know what them crazy indigenes will get up to.
Meanwhile, this intrigues me:
“Israel is part Russophone and considered to be the world’s only part Russophone country outside the former Soviet Union. Russian is the third most widely spoken first language in Israel, after Hebrew and Arabic, and has the third largest number of Russian speakers outside former Soviet countries, and the highest as a proportion of the total population.[2]”
“In 2011, Putin said: “Israel is, in fact, a special state to us. It is practically a Russian-speaking country. Israel is one of the few foreign countries that can be called Russian-speaking. It’s apparent that more than half of the population speaks Russian”.[26] Putin additionally claimed that Israel could be considered part of the Russian cultural world, and contended that “songs which are considered to be national Israeli songs in Israel are in fact Russian national songs”. He further stated that he regarded Russian-speaking Israeli citizens as his compatriots and part of the ‘Russian world’.[27]”
“In April 2014, Israel took a neutral stance on the Russian annexation of Crimea at the United Nations, angering U.S. State Department and White House officials.[28]”
There isn’t a single thing on America’s plate that I don’t see Russia easily stealing when the time is right.
Cash isn’t capital. Cash is cash. It cash were capital, our mint presses/digital ledgers would be printing real forests, mines, livestock, labor, etc.
Cash is cash, and cash is almost always trash over the long haul.
Saving enough cash to purchase useful capital can be, if used shrewdly, a way to get rich.
Saving cash alone has always been a way to lose the value of cash to inflation.
***
I don’t think that demanding that politicians fight in the wars they declare will end foolish war. Didn’t stop Alexander the great, to cite one enormous example. Lots of sociopaths like danger. THey typically join the military or police force. Other socios are all about manipulation and privilege, and they typically go into politics or get an MBA.
The way you stop military action as an individual is to shoot every politician who promotes war. I mean, that’s how wars are actually fought and won — through purpose-directed specific violence to either coerce or destroy. If one is to stop wars being waged by one’s own government, that’s the only way. The rest is a feel-good farce whereby we prove to each other that we’re morally superior to those beings we allow to control us as we stage protests and take exquisite cellcam footage of cops brutalizing innocent people.
One doesn’t stop war with mere politics. Politics are an extension of war. Sorry, Clausewitz. You’re wrong.) One stops war by nullifying aggressors. Politics, to quote Frank Zappa, is the entertainment division of the milindustrial complex. Politics is a pretense whereby the law (fight or flee, kill or be killed, the only law in group human conflict) is taken from one’s hands and replaced with a lousy vote stub. Everyone knows you can’t fight City Hall. Everyone knows you can’t take the law into your own hands. Everyone knows that no one can escape the long arm of the law.
Everyone knows that Donald Trump was the last person the American plebiscite wanted as president, but, seeing as how he was the only genuine person to choose from, and having been previously blinded by an endless parade of insincere phonies since we first started having elections, seeing a genuine person inclined folks to vote for him even if they couldn’t stand him or believe a word he said. Apparently, we still prefer sincerely demented deceitful human assholes to insincere robotic ass-shark humanoid remoras.
Human beings have, since 10,000 or so years ago, moved increasingly from small tribes where everyone knew who everyone was, to vast empires where no one knows anyone but everyone knows What It Means To Be An American or some shit like that. Politics is some ritual we endure to justify the gods placing incompetent deviant sheep-rapers in charge of our land, our laws, and often even our lives.
“Soleimani was lured to his death for….wait…being a peacemaker.
“Wow….lured to peace talks in order to be murdered.
“Has anyone noticed this? Apparently Soleimani was to meet the Iraqi PM the day after he was murdered.. as an envoy with a letter responding a certain Saudi peace offer!?!”Reminds me of when this guy — Ahmad Shah Massoud — was taken out two days before 911.
Meanwhile, in the twilight golden days of Atlantis, the more prosperous perform amazing art:
Record heat wave in Moscow right now. While it snows in Thailand. Only losers argue against global climate disruption. Like, you know, most of humanity being caught up in time-wasting contention, using logic almost always void of data citations except from their favorite cherry basket.
As the other megafauna perish, so does humanity. They came for the others first but I didn’t get involved. Now they come for me. Wait, I know. Let’s destroy the ecosystem entirely so we can depend on government/corporations to provide all our food/water needs. That’s the answer!
I dropped out of high school when I was a teenager too, like Greta. Going to school is not my fucking job, it’s just the oppressive bullshit law in our authoritarian society. (I got a GED later on, as I’m sure she will too.
Waiter, more Prozac!
The reason Trump distresses so many people is not that he’s so bad, or so good, but that he won’t speak in accepted status quo terms.
On the left, people sigh wistfully for the days when our President could speak in complete coherent comprehensive sentences. Never mind that he typically defaced every remark he made by doing the opposite of what those sentences meant, or worse, doing just a tiny bit of what they meant while ignoring or defying the rest of their meaning.
On the right, I often hear yearning for good ol’ Ronnie the Reagan (I don’t think anyone really misses Dubya), a public spokesperson who knew how to project solid wholesome snack food sound bites of a texture and flavor so many Americans know and love. Never mind that the same thing criticism I applied to Obama also applies to Reagan. How aware Ronnie was of his lies is somewhat obscured by the fact of his senility. Obama has no excuse that I can perceive. He knows on which side his bread is buttered and that seems to be good enough for him.
Donald does Donald. He is a sincere phony who means what he says whether he means it or not. It works for him for the moment, and that’s what matters to someone as severely mentally ill as poor Donald. This distresses people all around because they like their liars to lie consistently. Truth is not what most people are used to hearing from politicians, but they have certain standards defining lying that is “respectable” and lying that isn’t, the types being preferred generally being mostly defined by what politically/ideologically labeled camp they identify or associate with.
The fact that all previous presidents have steadily moved our nation closer to the Sunken Evil Empire sinkhole doesn’t seem to bother most people as much as a president who doesn’t pretend to be trying to improve things via a manner of lying to which they are accustomed to prefer and, apparently, at least sometimes, believe.
Why we expend energy discussing such matters is, imo, because we’re primate hominids, and primates love to gather at territorial boundaries and hoot at the other territory’s members as those members in turn hoot at them. It takes our minds off our problems which we are unlikely to fix without miraculous intervention of some sort.
Whatever Jeffersonian democracy was about, it included owning human chattel, even if old Jeff allegedly took pretty god care of his. And slavery has always been a silly way to live, both for owners and slaves.
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is not democracy.”
Only democracy I’ve read about was either very small and tribal, or else based on owning slaves. And typically when a small democratic tribe bumped boundaries with another small democratic tribe, they killed the others, married-by-rape some more, and turned the remainders into slaves to the extent that they were capable.
Democracy is based on the foolish notion that “humanity” knows what the fuck it is doing. I find the popular faith in the Common Man emotionally heartening but logically impotent. Oh, I’m sure there were small democratic tribes whose culture and genetic strains prevented malignant narcissists and amoral sociopaths from commandeering the group, but they generally get wiped out by tribes run by the traditional sociopathic narcissist.
I had a magical night in July 1979 on Juneway Terrace beach on Lake Michigan along the north side of Chicago. Somehow a bunch of us, 6 or 7, drank/smoked our way intop a small group that spend the night under an old humongous plane tree right through dawn. We all knew we were into something special. A brief evanescent quasi-hippy tribe.
Then some big burly dude came in and started acting all tough and shit, ruining the vibe. Being compliant little school-raised adult children of the middle class, we didn’t fight but instead started making our exit moves… when of a sudden, Norman, dear Jamaican Norman, came up from a kneeling position (we were all asprawl one way or another) and drove his fist pert near through the back of this sociopathic dickhair’s face.
“Don’t fuck wit mah haigh, mon!” he said as he kneeled on the guy’s chest and growled.
Guy left quietly once Norman let him.
There are too many sociopaths and too few Normans.
Being a Norman and a devotee of responsible claims, I’m gonna ask again: why should I even consider the idea that Trump was placed into power by some cabal of USA generals? If I don’t receive an answer this time, I’ll take it as proof that there is no proof nor even plausible suggestive evidence.
I like honest substantiated info. Please don’t fuck wid my high, mon.
Most people aren’t sociopathic. Yet most human beings adhere to politico-economic structures dominated by sociopaths.
How does this happen? My guess is: language. Language lets us cooperate in greater numbers than line of sight/hearing and few proto-linguisms such as many animals, some not so bright, possess. Language, particularly nonverbal symbolic/textual language, let orders, rules, decrees be shared among many thousands. Add automated replication a la Gutenberg, and then modern electronic transmission/facsimile tech, and we can follow leaders in the millions and now (new and improved!), billions.
This allows us to abstract our Knowledge of Good and Evil into structures much larger than the individual. Used to be, you had to hang around the campfire night after night (wasn’t much else to do beside fucking and star-gazing once the sun went down) in order to share knowledge into systems of beliefs, rules, ethics, protocols, etc…
Now we spend 13-plus years being conditioned by mostly standardized indoctrination centers called ‘schools’. When not in school, phonography/TV/vid games/internet tend to occupy our time (we’re instinctively mesmerized by objects that move or emit light). Now, since Herr Jobs, the deceased King of Apple (I find the apple correspondence with Edenic Fall mythology intriguing), we carry the phonography/TV/games/internet down the street with us.
The result is millions of people sharing the same indoctrinated concept of reality, and acting upon same in vast numbers like herds shepherded by ghosts.
To me, the moral of the Tower of Babel story is obviously not the size of the ziggurat, but this:
“According to the story, a united human race in the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating westward, comes to the land of Shinar (שִׁנְעָר). There they agree to build a city and a tower tall enough to reach heaven. God, observing their city and tower, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other, and scatters them around the world.”
as stated verbatim here:
“6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”When the internet spawned Unix, we started building a new ziggurat as wide as the world and as tall as orbital outer space. At a time when we also invented weapons able to kill off most if not all of humanity if used in proper unison, and certainly capable of turning Hiroshima&Nagasaki into the modern equivalent of Sodom& Gomorrah.
Every remaining Neolithic tribe we encounter, we destroy one way or another in our quest to create One Humanity uber alles. The problem with modern politics is not this or that political philosophy, it is politics themselves. We simply aren’t evolved enough to handle group responsibility larger than small tribes. Our technology is far smarter and larger than we are despite being insentient and of our own design. It creates structures that simply can’t be handled by ye olde concept of ‘The Chief’, which is still the central concept and sine qua non of politics.
But mental illness is certainly natural. Random variation and natural selection create anomalies in our already anomalous brains that sometimes find a persistent niche for the survival of those selfish genes carrying the codes for said brain anomalies.
That said, mental illness CAN be induced and is obviously being inflicted, wittingly and unwittingly, on humanity at large, with Japan and USA (imo) vying for Who’s Fucking Craziest, jah?
As for the traditionalist living in harmony with nature: technology ruins that as soon as it arrives. The Laplanders are now capitalist resource mega-squanderers since snowmobiles and cellphones let them herd much larger herds of caribou, and with much less human power, even if they may still use their teeth to castrate male caribou in the traditional manner.
“You can’t stop progress”
The problem boils down to us: we are the problem, and problems generally don’t fix themselves. It’s not in their nature. We have no clue how to collectively stop this juggernaut heading for cliff’s edge at a population gain of… “How fast is the world’s population growing? In terms of net gain (births minus deaths), we are adding over 220,000 people to this planet every day, or over 150 people every minute. That equals over 80 million more people every year, about the same as the combined populations of California and Canada.”
We waste our time debating whether the earth is warming or cooling, and whether we’re causing any such disturbance, but debate/do virtually nothing towards what to do with the primary problem: there’s way too fucking many of us, and the last thing we’re gonna do is sacrifice our lives for that of our fellows.
There is no such thing as humanity. That’s a statistical concept. There is a species called homo sapiens, and a vast sense shared by most members of that species that homo saps own the planet and can do as they wish. Delusion of that grand a scale is pert nigh incurable and obviously doomed. Even God gave up on us, and settled for a salvage plan whereby our sense of identity as individuals could be preserved in some kind of afterlife,. You know: let Jeebus save you. With or without reincarnation. You know, let Vishnu save you. Or something like that. Being raised in Xtiandom, and finding the Bible more useful overall for understanding how we manage to fuck up everything we touch by making it “better”, I camp with the Jeebusites. But that’s just my personal metaphysics.
“No idea if this is true. • Ghislaine Maxwell Planning TV Tell-All About Epstein Scandal (NYPost)”
It fits in with the tactical scenario. Keep worrying about his reputation after death, and cause of death. This assures that most people believe Epstein is dead. Those busy busy wily Israelis.
“Tulsi has not explained why she won’t be in the debate.”
It is possible that she has decided that using the DNC machine has gotten her as much press as it’s worth, and now she will go around them, probably straight through the internet. As tired and mentally inactive as most Americans are, they’re even more tired and brain-weary of duopoly electoral facades.
I’m not selling hope, just examining logical ramifications of her career as I know it to date. If she mans the Twitter et al guns properly, she could be surprisingly effective. To be honest, I am not for the prospect. It’s too much like putting a cherry on top of a ratshit sundae. America obviously needs tp be deeply humiliated to learn the first thing about being a nation among peers. Trump’s doing a swell job of maintaining and expanding our increasingly poor global reputation.
As for the Ukraine: always a popular spot for starting odd-numbered world wars.
Why do I love having Trump in office, moral hemorrhoids and all? (Well, at this point, I do.) Here’s why: he’s batshit nuts, not stupid; and even batshit nuts knows that starting a nuclear-edged conflict is just plain stupid and bad, bad, bad.
So I hope this impeachment jive show gives the Dems what they want: political cover and time to hopefully avoid being at least publicly humiliated or even incarcerated (it happens now and then). They obviously lost interest in winning presidential elections after Obama, and even then, they only let him win grudgingly.
Their corrupt incompetence will leave Trump in orifice for another term. I don’t think he can stop military mayhem of one sort or another, but maybe he can confine it to the standard shit-zones like Saudi Arabia, a place unlikely to incite nuclear conflict.
I’m looking forward to seeing Lindsay Graham and Nancy Pelosi on Dancing with the Stars. Graham in a tutu and Nancy in lederhosen.
“I think Hong Kong is a lot more than a “financial window”. It feels like China would be blind without it.
***
“China Risks Losing Its Financial Window On The World (G.)”China fooled itself thinking it could use markets, which work, and graft Western-style central banking (i.e. fiat fiscal fantasy) on one side and central command economy capitalism (i.e. fascism) on the other. But then, China has been a copycat nation for several centuries after exhausting itself on history’s longest and most exhilarating run among the race of civilizations.
I suspect that, just about the time China is set to become the new global dominatrix, it will collapse into internal squabbling yet again, leaving Russia and whomever to take over management of things like the Silk Road to some extent while China beats itself purple and red.
***
USA? Don’t be surprised if we get HiroNagasaki’d. A preemptive strike that our radars totally fail to detect. Combined with equally deft surgical removal of critical USA grid sectors. America can’t even get its airliners and space rocket engines to work, while Russia is doing that old Cold War space/arms-race things as well today as it did back in the Bad Old Days of Khrushchev and Brezhnev of the forested eyebrows.
I don’t think anyone wants much to do with us other than gently deflate our economy so as not to deflate their exposure to our economy too fast, while making sure that whatever military madness we unleash (how can we not? we’re homo saps) remains domestic or at least continental. Altho I suspect Canada and Russia will be making nicey-nicey real soon, since they share a common bonanza: the thawing tundra and Arctic Ocean.
USA? We’ll be left to suffer the worst we have to offer, to ourselves, by ourselves. If we’re lucky. Otherwise we’ll suffer that and the worst others have to offer us also.
One thing is obvious: we ain’t gonna win. We ain’t gonna win much of nothing. Hell, we can’t even convict a notorious crook (Trump) and serial rapist (Trump) from the White House cuz everyone who would impeach him is also a crook and serial rapist.
“I just can’t give a shit about the rest; I’ve already kissed off the U.S. government as corrupt, incompetent, and irrelevant…
The world moves on…
Minus the U.S., the future is potentially very interesting…”If this meme takes off, I might have a wisp of hope for Assange’s release.
Only our news media could declare a War on Balloons:
Reality check, at least from my perspective:
Often, there is only room in a hole for one digger. Often, 15 minutes in said hole is enough to fatigue/sweat a worker to exhaustion. Another worker takes over. Periodically, there are conditions when all workers shake a tail-feather clearing debris, placing equipment, etc. Traffic is traffic even when all workers are busy, hence the need for a dedicated traffic controller.
segue alert: we are the problem. Not our politicians or the institutions employees thereof. Them people come from us. We is them peoples. We let them boss us around. We boss them around sometimes when we’re sufficiently recovered from our turn digging in the hole. We deserve the leaders we put up with. We deserve the results of our inactions.
“What moves people to say such things? I would never dream of calling this guy’s -or anyone’s- knowledge “non-existent”. Where does that come from?”
Re: China:
John Day’s remarks reminded me that just this pre-dawn AM, I was having an imaginary conversation with some imaginary friend (let’s call him Roscoe) about how long, compared to those of Russia, Germany, USA has been China’s crawl through the rubble of its own wreckage has taken close to 130 years, if we count from the death of the Empress Dowager, which is being kind to Chinese history since the rot had taken many decades getting there.
China is several 1,000 years old. Russia barely has a grand in its history. Germany a handful of centuries. USA, not quite 2&1/2 centuries. China has some crawling still left to do, imo, while Russia is entirely through its Bitter Lesson crash recovery curve, having been at its crash curve collapse recovery almost as long as China.
Russia has another advantage: its synthesis of paganism with Xtianity. And, of course, all that lovely frozen tundra which, while said tundra will be methaning us lower nations into fricaseed heat wave by mid-21st century, will itself become fine soil and mineral deposits and freshwater aquifers and the world’s richest and cleanest fishing stocks…
China will fuck itself up yet. The blue print is already there, Silk Road Redux or not. It has one more major violent internal upheaval to go through, imo.
And then, I know it’s becoming kinda cliche to say in some circles, but Russia has Putin while China has Xi, a man whose name backwards says ‘icks’. My money is on Russia to do best off all, maybe by far.
Since my kids haven’t taken my advice to learn Russian (and Spanish), I now tell them to try and be there when Russia accepts immigrant indentured labor to work its oil/mineral deposits. Almost a kind of charity on the Russian’s part but hey, slave labor is a major carbon offset, so my kids can be slaves AND help save the planet!
Dream Nice Dreams, Y’all:
