ezlxa1949
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Lyrebirds are totally amazing. How and where the photographer got that video I don’t know; the birds keep to themselves. In that clip I heard an old-fashioned motor-driven camera, a kookaburra and a whipbird. There were more but I can’t identify them.
And magnificant creatures like this are of no interest to the growth machine. If their destruction brings economic growth, then so be it.
Here’s a few bits and pieces from Charles Hugh Smith,with a few small ideas of my own. I was reacting to news about Amazon’s new wonder store in London which has no staff and no check-outs. Anything you carry out with you is detected and charged to your credit card. You can’t even get into the store unless you have Amazon’s app on your tracking device (mobile phone).
The System is intrinsically hostile to human life, fundamentally evil. People who work in the system are not necessarily evil but they get swept along with it. Just about the entire planet is swept along with it.
The System is hostile to non-human life also. Witness how environmental and ecological considerations figure so little in corporate plans.
The modern myth has some unique characteristics that make it particularly powerful and particularly dangerous at the same time. The modern myth tells us the following about the world and our place in it:
1. Humans are in one category and nature is in another.
2. Scale doesn’t matter.
3. History can be safely ignored because modern society has seen through the delusions of the past.
4. Science is a unified, coherent field that provides all the rational principles by which we can manage the physical world.None of these is true.
We may think The System is huge and unstoppable, but it’s not. It is in fact highly fragile. Some characteristics of a fragile system include:
1. centralised
2. tightly networked
3. optimised for “efficiency”
4. lacking redundancy.Amazon’s retail model possesses all four characteristics in abundance.
The Soviet Union in 1988 was mighty and strong and here forever. By 1991 it was gone. Amazon may think it’s here forever but I’m not so sure. Problem is, Amazon and its ilk can cause untold suffering on the way to their collapse.
@afktt
Good history lesson. Assuming Airstrip 4 is Oz (sorry, I’ve lost track), then AS4’s assigned role in the world is that of taxpayer-subsidised resource dispensary. Anything the world wants, if we have it then thay can come here and get it at great prices.Like AS5, our manufacturing and other transformative industries have largely been left to languish. China will supply us with everything we need and can afford. Nothing left for us to do except cut each other’s hair, and I reckon They are working on a robot to do even that.
And we wonder why youth suicide rates are high and going higher.
Somewhat altered lyric al excerpt:
Ninety-nine Chinese balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it’s red alert
There’s something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky
Where ninety-nine Chinese balloons go byNinety-nine decision street
Ninety-nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we’ve waited for
This is it, boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As ninety-nine Chinese balloons go by.Chinese Balloons
I wonder what it cost for China to make and release that unguided balloon. It cost the US one fighter jet plus fuel plus $400,000 missile to pop it. (Was the balloon that tough?) What if China released hordes more? 99 of them? Or more? Hmmm.
Remember this?
The rhyming seems reasonably clear: Ukraine 2023 = Spain 1936-1939.
A great testing ground for weaponry. And every bit as nasty.The Aboriginal population of Australia has been a thorn in the side of the conquerors ever since the invasion started in 1788. At first we (“we” because I am of European ancestry) regarded them as doomed to extinction, and we did what we could to help them on their way out.
But the first nations people did not simply die out. Stubborn.
Public pressure in recent decades has forced TPTB to acknowledge their existence and accept their humanity, but they keep getting in the way of invariably destructive “development” proposals. It would be so useful to TPTB to get rid of them once and for all.
May God have mercy on us all. TPTB certainly won’t.
Woke up to this article in The Conversation:
“Yes, masks reduce the risk of spreading COVID, despite a review saying they don’t”Claims and counter-claims. I note that it argues against one meta-analysis (Cochrane Review). Otherwise I don’t have time to go into it in any depth.
So tired of all of this.
Visitng friends yesterday who during conversation casually mentioned how Russia is destroying “all the hospitals and schools” and so on. I said nothing.
Their only source of info is the MSM, so naturally they repeat what they’re told. I don’t blame them. Russia is the fons et origo of all kinds of evil, while Ukraine is the beleagured victim valiantly defending itself and assured of victory. We shall see.
I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for the Empire to collapse. I am old enough to remember the British Empire minus India, lots of red on the map, still large and important in the world, telling itself and everyone else that it was and had been and would continue to be beneficial and constructive and just and fair and etc etc etc. It took decades of decline for it to ariive at its present sad, withered, etiolated state.
All depends on one’s point of view, doesn’t it: centuries to build, yes, decades to decay, yes; but to me it felt like AGES.
Just heard that they shot down this terrifying balloon. Clever chaps, these Chinese: they send off an unguided balloon subject to the vagaries of the winds and bear witness to international consternation. Maybe it had a cargo of Caesium-137 ?
Interesting painting. Diogenes seems appropriately grimy, the women clean and neat.
However, according to the cultural norms of that era, for a woman (not a girl) to let her hair down in public was a sign of very loose morals. The other women have their hair decently covered. Was this depiction deliberate on Waterhouse’s part, or did he simply like his model’s hair?
Agree that DUMBs are putative graves. I fail completely to understand why anyone would want to live in a society, on a planet, which has destroyed its ability to support much if any human life of any quality, and yet it seems that this is where so much geopolitical activity is heading. It’s all fundamentally insane. Don’t look for any Noah’s Arks in this era. There’s no hiding place.
@John Day
“I’ll die on the surface, like most people.”
Me too, please. If the crazies in the various basements around the world throw even ONE nuke in any direction, given the evident groupthink among the elites, that is likely to trigger a cascade of more nukes. We’re all vividly aware of that possibility — but what about the crazies in the DUMBs?Hmmm. The G7 wants India to accept the price cap on Russian oil.
Will India agree? They recently became no. 3 car market in the world: China, US, now India. Most of the new Indian vehicles are petrol-powered. Where will that fuel come from? How much are they willing to pay for it?
The geopolitcal manoeuvrings continue.
@Germ
Thanks for that link to the NSW Health Surveillance Data. It is indeed extraordinary! Official data showing that the officlal line is false.Now how are TPTB going to respond to this? Treat it with ignore, minimise its exposure, create a different analysis, etc. They’va gone too far to back down now. The juggernaut rolls on.
With this as a background, it’s easy to see why stories about damaging vaccines fail to gather much of an audience. Sure, I know (other) people who doubt the official narrative, but they’re rather thin on the ground. We’ll just have to wait and see how things develop and what it will take to shift the paradigm.
For weeks and months now I have been reading in the TAE’s comment stream reports of sudden cardiac arrests and accelerated cancers and tapeworm-like bloodclots and so on.
But Canberra is one of the most vaccinated cities on the planet. Most people are jabbed, and most people are functioning normally. It’s largely back to business as usual. Restaurants and cafés and shops are open. Small business is doing well. Masks are disappearing. People are optimistic. Endless population growth is still on the agenda, as it is for the NSW government also.
So what’s going on here? The dam hasn’t broken yet? The media is concealing the true state of affairs? I await developments with morbid curiosity.
@phoenixvoice: In my part of the Anglophone (Oz, NZ, UK, ZA, etc) world the word for buttocks is still “arse”, deriving from the Greek orhos meaning buttocks. The word “ass” when I were a lad denoted an animal, only that and nothing more. Even in the US the word “arse” was in use, and I have seen it in US literature as recent as Hemingway or Ogden Nash.
“Ass” was introduced as a euphemism and the other word seems to have fallen out of use. Now it seems that the euphemism needs a euphemism!
In Oz the term “ass” seems to be growing in usage, thanks mainly to the growing perfusion of US culture. I dislike it because the way the thought police seem to be heading, we will no longer be able to mention even the braying of an ass. Pity. There are so many asses braying around here. They need to be pointed out.
Another good word is “bum”, meaning one’s posterior. Dead common in Oz, NZ, UK, etc. To have a good audience is to have a lot of bums on seats.
Quoted by John Day: “It’s the U.S. penchant for exporting its ideology that is the main concern for many.”
Don’t forget that free trade agreements with the US have often if not always included a clause permitting cultural access.
In other words, in the name of trade and commerce, Hollywood is permitted to penetrate and alter the other country’s culture, mores, attitudes, hopes, dreams, etc.
Even before that, however, I grew up in the 1950s (in Oz) and well remember the Cold War propaganda on TV, such as Superman (“Truth, Justice, and the American Way!”) or Captain America (softened here to Jet Jackson), or endless movies about how we won WW2 and now are fighting the Commies. All so blatantly obvious now but of course at the time I absorbed it unthinkingly. Took years to undo the conditioning.
In your copious spare time, I suggest you read “Hollywood vs America”, by Michael Medved. Here’s a Wikipedia link to a review. He is a conservative fim critic and doesn’t approve of what his industry stands for.
Existing weaponry has no economic value. Our addicted structures require new production.
John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 1992, p580.
He got that right!
The Antipodes experienced the Longest Day yesterday. Still warming up (32 predicted for Thursday). Harvested the rest of our broadbeans. New lots of silver beet growing nicely. People are in holiday mode.
Gets my mind of feeling like a tiny proto-mammal dodging the clumping feet of the dinosaurs.
A few comments about chimpanzees.
Chimps are nasty. I was told by a keeper of primates at the Wellington Zoo (NZ) that a fully-grown chimp has the strength of 10 adult men. TEN. The zoo has elaborate security and safety procedures and facilities in place. (For the record, a fully-grown orangutan has the strength of 7 adult men. SEVEN. No wonder orangs are routinely killed in Borneo when their forest is destroyed for palm oil plantations.) If a chimp manages to get hold of you the monkey can easily hold you in place, tear off your limbs, poke out your eyes, and you can do nothing about it except pray and scream for quick rescue.
The chimps one sees in the movies are all juveniles, as they are still weak enough to control easily. Chimps are nasty: they are unpredictable and can be very destructive.
In Africa there is a very similar-looking species, the Bonobo, whose territories tend to be adjacent to those of chimps. Bonobos are gentle and good-natured, and predated upon by chimps.
Why on earth the human race has gravitated to the vicious chimp instead of the gentle bonobo is a mystery. Or is it?
A few comments about the Australian aborigines.
Scholarshp in recent years has greatly expanded our knowledge of their societies and cultures.
No, they weren’t perfect. They had their squabbles and fights. They’re human beings after all, just like the rest of us.
No record of cannibalism, ritual or otherwise.
At the time of the European invasion, they were managing the entire continent almost as one huge estate, and managing it very well.
Little starvation, even in central Australian areas. Early British explorers starved to death in country that was supplying the aborigines with an ample, healthy diet.
In south-eastern regions, the Aborigines were harvesting and storing food surpluses in purpose-built granaries. The British burned them down upon discovery.
The country has been “sheep-wrecked”. Sheep and cattle have hard, chisel-like hooves which cut into the ground, destroy plants and damage the soil. (Same sort of thing is going on in contemporary Scotland.) Sheep feed by pulling plants out of the ground. The flat-footed marsupials feed by cutting the plants off above ground, letting them regrow. Cattle have been similarly destructive, especially in view of the deliberate over-stocking.
Many European photographs of Aboriginals sitting under primitive shelters depict not a primitive, unmeritable culture but rather a defeated, dispossessed people. Their means of livelihood have been denied them, their food supply decimated. (Reminiscent of parts of modern Europe.)
In some areas the British gave the Aborigines blankets infected with smallpox. Reasons obvious.
There is much, much more. I can provide references if anyone is interested. Otherwise I shall say no more.
Afewknowthetruth wrote, “By the way, I hate today’s artwork. Too much blue-and-yellow. Thoroughly sick of blue-and-yellow.”
Me too, especially the way it’s constantly thrust in front of us. But the national colours of Sweden are also blue and yellow. I wonder how they feel? Not that there’s a lot of choice in colours for flags, unless we enlarge the palette by using mixtures such as salmon pink or steel grey or cack brown. Etc.
From yesterday, a bit more re New Zealand a.k.a. “The Land of the Long White Cloud.” I’ve heard that parodied as “The Land of the Wrong White Crowd.” One could say something similar about its near neighbour, Australia. The European plunder machine has been harsh and unmerciful in how it uses both countries.
Hmmm, masks are ineffective. I won’t bother showing this to anyone. It’s easily dismissed: we may have 3 or 4 papers showing their ineffectiveness, while the other side have multiple dozens showing the opposite.
The average citizen has little or no time to look into such matters and relies on official pronouncements for ideas and opinions. It’s not their fault.
The term “black hole” is obscene in Russian — and maybe some of the other Slavic languages also. They use the term “frozen star.” Seems as good as any.
As I (try to) read the propaganda from both sides of this stoush in Europe, I wonder at the extraordinary amounts of money, time and weaponry being squandered on a massive game of King of the Mountain. The average Ukrainian suffers and suffers and no relief is in sight. Not that our leadership seems to care. So many resources wasted when so much of the world is in dire straits and in urgent need of help.
The US and NATO seem to be expending their strength in vain. But the Russians also seem to be expending their strength in vain. I think all sides have walked right into a trap.
Amazing painting by Shishkin! Almost photographic in its glorious detail and colours. Never knew he existed until you brought him to light — many thanks, Raúl. Good to see works by artists outside the mainstream.
Not in Australia. A public school is taxpayer-funded, a private school is, well, privately funded. This “public school” term is quite British.
Zerosum wrote, “The countries of the center of world capitalism do not care much about the hungry, especially since the inequality caused by the current world order remains the main cause of hunger.”
During the Irish Potato famine, the island of Ireland was growing a quantity of grains adequate to feed the population, but Her Majersty’s government refused to divert the food to the needy because they “did not want to disturb the market.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Another thought: if nukes do start popping up, that’s the end of the Australian electricity grid. I don’t think it’s been made EMP-proof at all.
And likely the end of the US grid too, or at least of enough of it to make life horrendous for huge numbers of people.
And the European grid(s). Ditto.
Are we committing electrical suicide?
Hmmm.
Ukraine is a testing ground for weapons systems. Reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War which I don’t personaly remember. That helped promote WW2.
Now we have nuclear threats being thrown around. Very reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I do presonally remember. That passed, but what might this Ukrainian Missile Crisis lead to?
Randy Newman’s song, “Political Science,” seems morbidly relevant Here’s some:
Boom goes London, boom Paree,
More room for you, and more room for me
And every city, the whole world ’round
Will just be another American town
Oh, how peaceful it’ll be
We’ll set everybody free
You wear a Japanese kimono, babe
There’ll be Italian shoes for meThey all hate us anyhow
So let’s drop the big one now
Let’s drop the big one now.@willem
“Regarding the “end of energy”, a useful post was put up by a TAE community member a few weeks ago. (Whoever you are, please forgive me for failing to credit you properly.)”That was me but please, give me no credit; rather, give it all to Al Bartlett. I suggest downloading Prof Bartlett’s article from The Physics Teacher, and using Equation 5 to assess depletion rates yourself. The maths is not hard and there is a good worked example in the article.
It’s common for economists and politicians to trumpet the discovery of some new resource, and to annouce that it will last for X number of years. True, but they usually calculate the time to depletion on a steady rate of extraction based on current rates of usage. When the time is re-calculated based on the desirable, exponentially-increasing rateh of extraction, the picture changes completely.
I like Bartlett’s observation that “some prominent people reject the notion of limits.” They have to, they must, or else their system, their world, indeed their entire raison d’être, fails. For them, to acknowledge the existence of limits is highly likely to provoke a severe and possibly suicide-inducing existential crisis.
If you want to gain a yet better feel for limits, I suggest you watch
Riding Light – Traversing the Solar System at the speed of light.While breaking many of the laws of physics, this video nonetheless succeeds in giving us a splendid idea of how HUGE the Solar System is in comparison to planet Earth, how achingly and HOPELESSLY SLOW light is, and how TINY Earth’s storehouse of resources is when tasked with getting us off-planet and “conquering” space. “Conquering?” What a joke.
No wonder the transhumanists want to achieve immortality: without it our species will have died out or evolved into who know what eons prior to getting anywhere.
And what will Homo hubris DO with its “conquest” of the Solar System or the Galaxy?
The excerpt entitled “5 Thoughts on the Globa Dictatorship” by Paul Cudenec struck a strong chord with me, in particular this: “[it] deeply offends my ethical aesthetics of honour, justice, truthfulness and value.”
One aesthetic he doesn’t mention as such but which is clearly visible in his writing is that of Beauty.
The various global systems of governance and politics, trade and commerce and economics, media and entertainment, even religion, all strike me as not merely oppressive and polluting and contaminating, as Cudenec writes, but also as Ugly. Simply UGLY. None is a joy to behold nor contemplate; all are to be endured rather than enjoyed; they depress rather than uplift; destroy rather than build.
The theologian N.T. Wright has I think analysed the situation well. (Please set aside for a moment your scepticism that anything good can come from a theology.) He posits:
There are seven features of human life, which can be observed across different societies and times. I name these ‘vocations’, though they are often present as inarticulate aspirations and impulsions. We know them in our bones….
The seven are Justice, Beauty, Freedom, Truth and Power, Spirituality, and Relationships. Our modern word ‘religion’ doesn’t get near this complex of categories, which may be why many today leave ‘religion’ alone. The point about all seven, to put it crudely, is that we all know they matter but we all have trouble with them.
Justice? Too little.
Freedom? Badly eroded.
Truth? Stands far off.
Power? Grossly misapplied.
Spirituality? Flaccid.
Relationships? Stolen.How do we turn this around? I am trying but I can do only a very little.
Fed Gov. Chris Waller’s house drive-by: oh man, is that ever the weirdest exhibition ever. Why? What on earth is the point of it? Why, oh why, must people worship deathand the symbols of death?
Saddest thing is that Halloween has finally seeped into Australia after centuries of being gloriously absent. (So has St Valentine’s Day.) It’s not just another American import; it’s hugely popular in Italy among other places. Trick or treat is not at all a good or fun thing for kiddies to do: it gives them a grounding in extortion, threats and menaces.
No wonder so much of the planet is in dire straits, with ceremonies like this as part of the glorious cultural background and training.
Hmmm. “High excess deaths in Australia.” Maybe an extra reason why the federal government is being urged to resume high levels of immigration, in tghe order of 200,000 per annum. Never mind that we don’t have the resources or facilities to deal with such numbers. The only way our leaders know how to keep the economy alive is by endless increases in population numbers. Such is the design of The System that the entire country could be as densely built-up as Hong Kong and it still wouldn’t be enough.
Babylon is mad.
Interesting thing I learnt yesterday. One of my social circle retired a few months ago from his job as a Hansard reporter in Australia’s federal parliament. His job required him to work inside Parliament House. According to him, no-one working in Parliament House needed to be vaccinated, nor any MP.
Some decades ago I was working for the feds in a minor IT role. The neoliberal Howard government got elected and immediately implemented a policy of “if it moves, privatise it; if it doesn’t, sell it”. The IT sections of just about all government departments, including mine, were sold off to the likes of IBM and others. An acquaintance with an IT job in Parliament House tld me that the privatisation mandate did not touch them.
One rule for them, another rule for us…
Dr. D wrote, ” The territory you can get back; the men you can’t. The men take 25 years of careful growing with full mothers and happy homes.”
Cue AI soldaten, warrior robots that won’t take 25 or even 18 years to reproduce and need neither full mothers nor happy homes.
Next question. Who’s ahead in the AI race?
