John Day
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https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/03/life-support-ruminations.html
It’s the essay above, just re-edited a bit.
I keep ruminating upon the next step in the decline and fall of Globo-Cap. The Hudson/Escobar interview is very long, but this starts “part-2” in my mind.
thesaker.is/in-quest-of-a-multipolar-economic-world-order-with-michael-hudson-and-pepe-escobar/
Michael Hudson: [01:11:30] I can’t give you hope. I am all in favor of public banking and I’m on Ellen Brown’s board of directors for her group. However, supposing you had a public bank in Baltimore and the public bank said, we want to provide credit for Baltimore people to be able to afford homes. They would still have to out create enough credit and enough debt to outbid what commercial banks are lending other people that want to buy houses there. So, you can’t have an Island of efficiency and public banking in a system that basically is still financialized. The problem is systemic.It goes to the courts. You talk about seceding. Then of course it’s possible. And people in Texas were talking about seceding in the 1840s when it was largely a German population. There were more publishers publishing German language books in Texas than there were English language books. But now, I think the way Texans think, if they were to succeed it is not going to be along the lines of public banking that you want . It would be a private bank owned by the oil companies that calls itself, a public bank. We’re in a world of Orwellian rhetoric.
What can the Americans do? They already have voted. We have democracy, they’ve voted for what they wanted to do. What did they vote for? They want shorter lifespans, lower wages, less education and less public services. Their choice is to get these things by a Democrat or by a Republican. But that’s the only choice they have. Other countries have a choice to emigrate, as the Ukrainians and the Greeks and Latvians have done. But I have no idea where Americans can emigrate to.
John again: I personally think Hudson is drawing a bleak, no-way-out picture to avoid drawing attention to what he may see as possible paths out. The military-industrial-financial complex DID use “Super Imperialism” as their cookbook, after all…
There is (as yet) no way out of the financialized, extractive vampire capitalist bleeding box that encloses America, yet. Hudson talks of “revolution” as the only way, and in broad terms. He goes into the current regime being incapable of keeping any contractual obligation, which includes domestic social-contracts with Americans. Social Security has been gutted already. It is still paying out claims, but it is bled dry. It is no longer a cash cow for globo-cap. It keeps Americans placated. As long as American “consent” is needed by globo-cap, Social Security entitlements need to keep going out every month.
The extractive system has to extract from somewhere to keep paying maintenance expenses like S.S.
The rest of the world has been accepting &US, backed by US credit, for stuff they make, and shipping that stuff to Americans, which supports Americans every day. It’s not so much “trade” as extraction, since the US does send some grain, and licensed intellectual property, but mostly military enforcers.
The rest of the world knows it is paying to be enslaved, supporting the system which enslaves and bleeds it. Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and India and Pakistan all know the score.
So do Germany and Japan, but they are regional intermediaries of the imperial system. The intermediaries are important bellwethers. They need to maintain a favorable position in global economy as the hegemony of Western Global Capitalism under the Petrodollar regime is replaced. This transition needs to be “peaceful”, at least not WW-3.
Monetary transition needs a parallel trade and finance system. There is always gold.
“Digital gold” is gold. Physical gold has done more ocean travel in recent years, but it mostly travels conceptually via the internet.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a working parallel trade organization, which Hudson and Escobar discuss.
“The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is an intergovernmental organization founded in Shanghai on 15 June 2001. The SCO currently comprises eight Member States (China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), four Observer States interested in acceding to full membership (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia) and six “Dialogue Partners” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey).”
dppa.un.org/en/shanghai-cooperation-organization#:~:text=The%20SCO%20currently%20comprises%20eight,Cambodia%2C%20Nepal%2C%20Sri%20Lanka%20and
Within those nations, trade is increasing in various non-dollar accounting instruments. The use of the $US as both a means of extraction and a means of bullying-exclusion from global trade has thrust the imperative upon China, Russia, pariah-states and tribute-states alike to build a parallel global trade and finance system. Trust is shot these days, so I think gold-backed cryptocurrency will have to be the fallback.
The Fed can’t print gold, so the Fed loses out. The rest of the world can’t be bled, so “TROW” gets a better trade position going forward. There is massive disruption of trade and accounting, but maybe that will come first. Maybe disruption of global financial accounting will happen, and the world will be forced into some degree of debt jubilee and financial reset, without value extraction by globocap and central-bankers. The technology exists. The rationale has existed longer than any living human, and was broadly seen as inevitable before the 1980s, as Hudson lays out.
In the best case scenario the American people can trade stuff for agency and autonomy. Less cheap stuff will come into the Port of Los Angeles, but we will again be able to devise and create, not merely “comply”. We will work out local economies efficiently, as we, and all of our ancestors have always done. We will need to focus a lot more locally. The $US has also kept us divided and conquered at the local and regional levels. At least Americans, some Americans, can still vote with their feet. That stands to really hurt the people who cannot move away from places like Chicago and Detroit.
American cities and states will need broad debt-forgiveness, but those trapped people still need food, water, shelter, fuel, community and medical care. They need physical protection, too.
Parasitic gangs need productive-economy options, decent jobs. Parasitic-gang members have the same needs as everybody else, and need a better job-offer. A national infrastructure and public works project has been the historical answer. Some people will be abrasive, lazy, scheming and will do crap work. They still have to be rehabilitated from outright criminality.
I think that local money, community banking can come in at this point. A gold-backed $US will be forced upon the current seat of empire. No more free-printing.
Local communities would create local credit for local projects, as Ellen Brown sees in the Bank of North Dakota, and Hudson mentions.
There could be national reserve currency, backed by gold and silver, and local credit money, through community banking. The local credit money should be incentivized to stay local. Distant extraction of rents should really be eliminated, since it “kills the host”.Word of the day: (Good work everybody, and good civility)
Epistemology (/ɪˌpɪstɪˈmɒlədʒi/ (About this soundlisten); from Greek ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē ‘knowledge’, and -logy) is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Epistemology is considered one of the four main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, logic, and metaphysics.[1]Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas:[2][3][4]
The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification
Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony
The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs
Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments
In these debates and others, epistemology aims to answer questions such as “What do we know?”, “What does it mean to say that we know something?”, “What makes justified beliefs justified?”, and “How do we know that we know?”@Michael Reid,I grew up in big cites and small towns, and military bases, which are more like medium towns with a plantation economy, and the Yokohama area. I really miss people responding to a smile with a smile, but it has gotten a bit better in Austin since the deep freeze.
I naturally look people in the eyes and smile. Some are completely blank.Major vaccine-industry advocate…
White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci declared Sunday that children either need to be vaccinated or must wear face masks if they want to play together.
http://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/watch-fauci-says-kids-need-wear-face-masks-play-togetherLook at these graphics. Texas is sliding into natural herd immunity.
This was happening already before vaccinations started.
Peak cases were in mid January.
Spring break didn’t even cause an uptick.
12% of Texans are fully vaccinated.
Kids are mostly back in school.
http://www.texasobserver.org/tracking-covid-19-in-texas/At least the threat of global shipping through the arctic with Russian icebreakers is now forestalled!
The Ever Given is out of the Suez Canal, thanks to full (super) moon, high tide, big tugs and dredging.
http://www.zerohedge.com/markets/megaship-blocking-suez-canal-80-partially-refloatedSurgeon Warns Vaccinating People Infected With COVID Could Cause ‘Avoidable Harm’
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm says we’re taking the COVID pandemic problem, where a half-percent of the population is susceptible to dying, and compounding it by vaccinating people who are already infected.
childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaccinating-people-infected-covid-cause-avoidable-harm/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=cc4fbf8a-fef7-446e-b013-777366a5330aGilad Atzmon has more on that story, with a focus on the relationships between Pfizer, the Israeli government, and Israeli vaccine trial subjects without informed consent.
In Israel yesterday, an independent legal body that calls itself the Civilian Probe (CP)* published its finding regarding the catastrophic impact of the Pfizer vaccine on the nation.
In their report, which they submitted to the Attorney General and the Health Minister, the committee listed a chain of critical legal and ethical failures that point at a possible attempt to mislead not just Israelis but also the entire world. Since the beginning of January I have been reporting on an undeniable correlation between vaccinations, cases and deaths (here , here, here and here ). The CP confirms my suspicions but their study also presents alarming medical findings regarding the scale of lethal side effects.
In the document the CP points at a government attempt to conceal its dealing with Pfizer...
“What do we learn from the facts on the ground?” the CP report asks. “An examination of mortality data published by the government shows that there is a correlation between number of vaccinations and the number of deaths. The excess mortality is noticeable among people up to 70 and also among adults over the age of 70, and remains even after offsetting the deaths attributed to Corona. In the population over the age of 70 – in January 2021 an excess mortality of 19.5% was observed compared to October 2020 – the month when the corona data were highest, and 22.4% compared to January 2020. In the younger population – an excess mortality of 7% was observed in January 2021 compared to the month October 2020 – the month in which the corona death numbers were the highest, and 7% compared to January 2020. It should be noted that this trend continues in the following month as well.”
As mentioned above I have been writing about the devastating correlation between vaccines and deaths since early January. In Britain and the USA, we detect identical correlation between mass vaccination and death. However, far more problematic is the realm of side effects, something which governments, the WHO, the corrupted pharmaceutical industry, and of course social media giants attempt to suppress in the most Orwellian manner. The Israeli CP seems to have produced the first robust report on Pfizer’s vaccine side effects. They published a table of their findings, which they summarize here:
“As one can detect looking at the table – there are close to 200 deaths, and this – only by examining about 800 reports of cases of serious side effects. As mentioned, the CP is still working on analyzing side effects and we have hundreds of additional reports that are subject to analysis. Our study so far indicates that about 25% of deaths are from people under the age of 60. About 15% of them are under 50 years old. 7 of the deceased are at young ages – below age 30. Also, the study identified 27 cases of heart problems in people under the age of 60, of which 24 cases are among young people aged 17-30. Regarding the issues to do with female medical complications (including labor-complication, delayed menstruation or irregular menstruation, etc.) – it should be noted that the committee has about 200 additional reports that have not yet been included in the final list of our findings.”
[We tried to report vaccination side effects in a patient at our clinic last week. It was extremely cumbersome, an intimidating process, and we are not sure that we were successful. The RN left a recorded message. No organization can afford what it takes to report mild-to-moderate side effects within this US format.]
gilad.online/writings/2021/3/23/the-probe-into-the-israeli-vaccine-policy-and-its-outcome-is-beyond-damningBetter refloat that boat! Russia does already have a fleet of icebreakers…
Russia Pitches Frosty Arctic Sea Route As Superior Alternative To Blocked Suez Canal
http://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-pitches-frosty-arctic-sea-route-superior-alternative-blocked-suez-canal“Biden” floats a rival plan for global trade to counter China’s Belt-and-Road initiative, “New Silk Road” to Boris Johnson.
Both of these men are titular heads of government within the rentier globalist/Atlantacist financial capitalist order.
What can this rentier new-world-order have to offer that is not rentier extraction?
This is a head-fake, a narrative-adjustment.
http://www.zerohedge.com/economics/biden-floats-rival-plan-chinas-belt-road-call-uks-johnsonBut, but, but what else can there possibly be? This is the riddle of the Sphinx.
Monetary adaptation to planetary emergency: addressing the monetary growth imperative
Conclusion: In any economy where money hoarding and accumulation is not curtailed, and where most of the money in circulation is issued by private banks as debt, with or without interest, there will be a system-wide scarcity of money available to people and organisations to service their debts – unless, that is, there is continual economic growth. To avoid the deleterious implications of a shortfall of money in an economy, policies are used to maintain economic growth, which is therefore a form of imperative on society. This MGI may be accentuated, at a system-wide level, by the practice of full-reserve re-lending of money. Interest is not the main driver of the imperative, but because it increases the transfer of money to those who are wealthy and more likely to hold that money in a stagnant form that is not available for debt servicing by others, interest charges may indeed exacerbate the MGI. We conclude that the debt-money system creates a competition for money between debtors and savers which is resolved through creation of more debt-money, which in turn drives growth and the resulting ecological and climate emergency.
insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5993/How did these guys trust each other back then? What was the secret? They were clearly murderous scoundrels.
Secret societies? Help me out. Samo Burja:
With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. This trust at a distance provided the conditions for ocean-based commodity markets to beat regional commodity markets. After this material transformation, the plantations in the New World and workshops in India became logistically closer to a city than shepherds living in geographically nearby hills.
Before this point, city-based labor markets had the highest impact on society, while the role of markets in exchanging the raw resources of the countryside for the finished products of the city was minor and easily replaced by customary trade. With the social technologies of long-distance commerce, the labor market of a city became connected to a commodity market that could match its pace, opening massive potential to make the city a center of material production.
Creating those markets involved mass dislocation. Armies rip people from their homes and turn them into soldiers; this was well understood in antiquity. During industrialization, the shock of dislocation from previous social ties combined with a newly institutionalized environment to produce distress not too dissimilar from the shock of incarceration or hazing...
The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.
When times change—and you don’t need or can’t sustain the full pace of industrialization anymore—the vast masses of the industrial population prove themselves difficult to demobilize from their war of production. They can’t be returned to the social fabric of agricultural society, since the urban environment that enabled the agricultural hinterland to function no longer exists. The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life.
The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional. Bureaucracies decay in a way that is much less visible than the decay of factories.
The real upward mobility of dysfunctional agriculturalists to functional industrial workers is replaced by the on-paper upward mobility of functional industrial workers to dysfunctional knowledge economy workers. Despite these measures, the real downward mobility is eventually made apparent.
(I see it, peekaboo! Hey, where do competent workers go, now?) …
If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.
What then follows is slow decay, first of production and then of advanced technology itself. At a macro scale, this is the deep root of civilizational collapse...
Mostly, the adjustment to decline would just be an invisible lowering of expectations. When political incentives at all layers of the government pyramid go against ascertaining the truth of a situation, the truth isn’t ascertained.
Social scientists wouldn’t see it coming, since official numbers would be about as reliable as public health messaging during a pandemic. Wealth can shrink by 1% per year for a century, while measures such as GDP can show continued growth by 2% per year. The Soviet Union’s era of stagnation had 30 years of solid growth according to their metric of NMP (Net Material Product). American economists only noticed and revised our GDP estimates for the Soviet Union after its collapse...
Whatever solution our civilization might find to escape the post-industrial trap, it will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.
{Spiritual honesty?}
palladiummag.com/2021/03/24/the-end-of-industrial-society/Blog post is up: http://www.johndayblog.com/2021/03/lost-opportunities.html
I opened with Hudson and Escobar, which you have seen. I’ll put in some other things piecemeal to avoid blocking.
Everything that made industrial capitalism rich, everything that made America so strong in the 19th century, through its protective tariffs, through its public infrastructure investment all the way down through world war two and the aftermath, was that we had a mixed economy in America. Europe also had a mixed economy, and in fact, every economy since Babylon has had a mixed economy.
But in America you’ve had something entirely different since 1980. Something that was not foreseen by anybody, because it seemed to be so disruptive: namely, the financial sector saying, “We need liberty – for ourselves, from government.” By “liberty” they meant taking planning and subsidy, economic and tax policy, out of the hands of government and put into the hands of Wall Street. The result was libertarianism as a “free market.” In the form of a centralized economy that is concentrated in the hands of the financial centers – Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse. What you’re having today is an attempt by the financial sector to take on the role that the landlord class had in Europe, from feudal times through the 19th century. It’s a kind of resurgence of feudalism.
If you look at the last 200 years of economic theory from Adam Smith and Marx, onward, everybody expected a mixed economy to become more and more productive, and to free itself from the landlords – and also to free itself from banking…
But in the United States and England, you have finance becoming something completely different. Banks don’t lend money to build factories. They don’t create money to make means of production. They make money to take over existing assets. Some 80% of bank loans are mortgage loans to transfer the ownership of real estate.
But of course, that’s what created a middle class in the United States. The middle class was able to buy its own housing. It didn’t have to pay rent to landlords or absentee owners, or to warlords and their descendants as in England and Europe. They could buy their own homes. What nobody realized is that if you borrowed the money to take a mortgage, there’s still an economic rental value. Most of it is no longer paid to the landlords. It’s paid to the banks. And so in America and Europe, the banks now play the role that landlords played a hundred years ago… The fight really is against government that would do anything that is not controlled by the 1%, and by the banks. Essentially, the merger between Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – the FIRE sector. So, you have a relapse of capitalism in the West back into feudalism, but feudalism with a financialized twist much more than in medieval times. The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that we’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let them run everything. Then Americans will lend them the money or buy them out and thus control them financially. China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. The fury in the West is that the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources and foreign agriculture… What’s is ironic now is what has happened in the last few years in the fight against Russia and China. America has killed the free lunch. It said, okay, now we’re going to have sanctions against Russia and China. We’re going to grab whatever money you have in foreign banks, like we grabbed Venezuela’s money. We’re going to excommunicate you from the SWIFT bank clearing system. So, you can’t use banking. We’re going to put sanctions against banks that deal with you.
So Russia and China have seen that they can’t deal with dollars anymore, because the United States just unilaterally rejected their use by any country that does not follow its military and financial diplomacy. If countries do have dollars as reserves and lend them back to the United States, it’s going to spend them on building more military bases around Russia and China, to make them waste their money on military defense spending. So, America itself has ended the free lunch, by the way in which it’s fighting against China and Russia.
And now Russia and China, as you pointed out, are de-dollarizing. They’re trading in each other’s currency. They’re doing the opposite of what Bretton Woods tried to create. They’re inspiring monetary independence from the United States… At issue is what kind of an economy we need in order to raise living standards and, wages and self-sufficiency and preserve the environment. What is needed for the ideal world that we want? [Description follows…] The banks fear this because they see that Modern Monetary Theory no longer gives them control. They want the rich One Percent to be able to have a choke point on the economy, so that that people cannot survive without borrowing and paying interest. They want to control the choke points to extract economic rent. So you have the West turning into a rent-extractive economy, a rent-seeking economy. The ideal of Russia, China, and other countries is that not only of Marx, but also of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and even Ricardo in the sense that the aim of classical economics was to free economies from economic rent. The American economy is all about extracting rent through the real estate sector, the financial sector, the health insurance sector, monopolies and the infrastructure sector. The US economy has been Thatcherized and Reaganized. The result is a fight of rentier economic systems against China and Russia… Industrial capitalism was evolving toward socialism. It was socialized medicine, socialized infrastructure, socialized schooling. So, the fight against socialism is also a fight against what made industrial capitalism so successful in the United States and Germany. What you’re seeing now is a fight for what direction civilization will follow……And it was expected that once you had capitalism free of the landlord class, free of something that wasn’t really industrial capitalism at all (it was a carry-over from feudalism), you wouldn’t have this overhead of the idle 1%, only consuming resources and going to war.
World War I changed all that. Already in the late 19th century the landlords and the banks fought back. They fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalists, and they euphemized it as free markets. That slogan meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Americans call that a free market. The Free World was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance. So, it’s Orwellian double-think… Well, as opposed to that, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, and that do not have a banking class and landlord class controlling the economy. The kind of arrangement that you had in Germany in the late 19th century: government, industry and labor coordinated. The question was how to provide the financing for industry so that banks can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
China is doing just what made America rich in the 19th century, and what made Germany rich. It’s the same logic of industrial engineering. This plan is based on economic expansion, environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, so this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
Europe had a choice: Either it could shrink and be an American satellite economy, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously to forego growth and become a set of client oligarchies and kleptocracies. It is willing to let its financial sector take over just as in America. That’s a “free market,” because I’m told by American officials that they can just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable.
http://thesaker.is/in-quest-of-a-multipolar-economic-world-order-with-michael-hudson-and-pepe-escobar/I’m glad to have reopened the conversation (wound).
Birth rates have fallen below replacement in many “advanced” countries.
Are we doing the right thing despites the imperative for economic growth?
Are we actually as coordinated as a colony of termites, perhaps?
I’m just askin’.
What might be our mode of coordination?
Pheromones don’t work any farther than masks do, right?
This is soluble with coordinated effort.
What makes us rightfully uneasy is that a powerful group, the group mostly at the helm, is clearly willing to sacrifice the lives and any other goods of the rest of us cattle for “selfish” (harsh word) benefit.
I think we need to offer a plausible alternative, which will be less threatening to the owners, as well as to the herd. The owners are also threatened by the (other) owners.
This is clearly possible within basic food and environmental constraints, though it’s a window in time…
Perhaps a series of steps down from the current neo-feudal-financial-colonialism model can build trust and a fairer economy together.
Back to Hudson and Escobar…@Upstate NYer: Mask mandate ended before spring break in Texas. Businesses as open as the owners desire. Massive spring break travel. Tested “cases” and percent-positives on tests done continue to fall right through that. Looks like final glide path into herd-immunity, and not due to vaccines.
The graphs here are good. They scream “HERD IMUNITY”. The article says (PC)that something like ALL adult Texans would need to be immunized to get herd immunity, but look at the graphs. Everybody is traveling and this thing is fading away to nothing. It’s the graph of herd-immunity in Texas.
https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronavirus-cases-map/That being said, Texas is not New York for weather. You might die without AC. Actually might die.
Sure could not sleep in the summer without electricity. Having a cool sleeping porch was a major feature of Texas houses before electricity.We might not be as different as you think. I write the way I write to allow people to engage the ideas I present, not because it does not bother me.
The problem we need to face is how to sustain our economy in the long term without killing a lot of people periodically. When we can work that problem, we don’t need the owners to do that going forward. Their economic utility to our species survival will have been mooted.
I believe this may require fuller engagement with our spiritual nature.
AI might not do the trick.
@Michael Reid: The owners kill off excess stock when we overgraze the pasture. Same as it ever was, right? How do we agree not avoid overgrazing without being culled?GO GERM! GO GERM! GO GERM!
(Because “Jeremiah” sounds kind of like your name)
Our owners in “the big exclusive club, and we’re not in it” are trying very hard to deal with an unfortunate threat to the global economy, our life support system, which is kind of like keeping the Texas power grid from crashing last month. A few had to sort of be sacrificed to save the rest.
We should try to be more understanding.
We are using up all of the fuel and ore resources that the economy needs to support us, and we need to cut down and cut back something like 90%, to go “carbon neutral”, because carbon sources are running out, and toxic byproducts are running out.
To save the economy, our life support system, 90% of us should make the sacrifice of shortening our days. We can do this knowingly, or in a series of steps that lead to the same outcome, without being burdened by the knowledge of what is coming. Remember how the autistic girl designed a more humane and efficient slaughterhouse assembly line for cattle?
Just don’t ask questions that you don’t really want to know the answers to, OK?
This past year is what something like 5% voluntary reduction in hydrocarbon production looks like with a stable population.
This is very difficult, and if you cannot present a workable solution, then you have no moral basis to complain about those in responsible positions doing the best that they can for all of us.As for me, I’m trying to deal with this looming downturn in energy and stuff by being a small, but engaged part of a much larger, adaptive self-organizing-system. I think we might have even bigger problems to deal with than running out of oil and copper. Maybe we don’t, but just because I, personally, can’t see how to do this, does not mean that it won’t get done. We are the species that bounced back from the Black Death and The Little Ice Age, to put Neil Armstrong on the moon mere centuries later. Some of us grow vegetable gardens. We need to trust in the process and shuck the outdated system, which is collapsing.
That’s my argument for not-going-along.
You are welcome to adopt the same argument. It’s open source.Understanding-but-still-noncompliant
Top House Democrat Says Biden Plans to Stay in Afghanistan Beyond May 1st
Rep. Adam Smith claimed May 1st is ‘too soon’ to pull out, but the Pentagon said it can meet the deadline if ordered to withdraw
news.antiwar.com/2021/03/24/top-house-democrat-says-biden-plans-to-stay-in-afghanistan-beyond-may-1st/False Spirituality Is The Friend Of Corrupt Power. True Spirituality Is Its Enemy. Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/25/false-spirituality-is-the-friend-of-corrupt-power-true-spirituality-is-its-enemy/#comment-59704Is Pfizer more powerful than Argentina on the global chessboard?
Where are the actually powerful humans, whose interests are served?
The game is certainly not what we envision it to be when a vaccine maker can take military bases of “sovereign nations” as “collateral” against future-lawsuits from vaccine-injured citizens.
odysee.com/@januszkowalskii1979:e/The-Truth-about-Pfizer—Pfizer’s-Corporate-Takeover-of-the-World:9This was inevitable, and it looks bad, so don’t let people look at it. Oops.
Now, what is Plan-B?
Border Facility Photos Leak Revealing Hundreds Of Children Huddled In “Terrible Conditions”
(I humbly submit that giving these teenagers ivermectin prophylaxis from COVID, and flying them “home” with some money in their pockets, and some money for the home-government, is the cheapest and most expeditious option to the current American administration.)
http://www.zerohedge.com/political/border-facility-photos-leak-revealing-hundreds-children-huddled-terrible-conditionsConsolidation of power at the top. Does that end up hurting anybody?
What does “power” do? What is “power”? Do Google, the CIA and NSA have a “thing”?
Leaked Docs Show Obama FTC Gave Google Its Monopoly After Google Execs Helped Obama Get Re-Elected
Leaked documents from the FTC’s 2012 investigation of Google show exactly what is wrong with the state of American antitrust enforcement.
Records and reporting about the 2012 investigation suggest the FTC did so while bending to political pressure from the Obama White House — which was, in turn, bending to political pressure from Google. William Kovacic, a former FTC chair under President George W. Bush, reviewed the more than 300 pages of documents leaked to Politico and concluded the agency overlooked “what many experts and regulators would consider clear antitrust violations,” calling the specificity of issues outlined “breathtaking.”
thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/leaked-docs-show-obama-ftc-gave-google-its-monopoly-after-google-execs-helped-obama-get-re-elected/Old & New media: the many roads to perdition , John Ward, The Slog
Some examples from this weekend. The Telegraph runs a piece saying scientists are “excited” about a new type of test that can ‘help senior citizens get treatment more quickly’. It was so exciting, in fact, that the bedazzled journo forget to tell us what it is. Or how it works. Or why it might be better than simply giving the over 60s Ivermectin whether they have symptoms or not. It’s pure virtue signalling, designed to distract from the unsolved mystery of why experimental not-quite-vaccines that import mRNA (and kick other nasties down the road) have been preferred to HCQ/Zinc and Ivermectin….both of which were targeted by a concerted smear campaign from health bureaucrats, most notably the US and French...
Above all, the golden rule is no opeds or speculation about the bigger game in play.
You can mention that Covid has made Rishi Sunak’s life difficult. You can express the view that Biden’s spending splurge and opened borders may have risks attached. You can suggest that the EU has some existential problems. But don’t mention what the IMF is up to, don’t ask why “temporary” Zirp is still with us nine years later, and under no circumstances suggest that the Gigarich have everything to gain from a virus that miraculously appeared within months of them all hinting at ‘the danger’.
Because that sort of non-violent terrorism, of course, is also wild conspiracy theory.
therealslog.com/2021/03/21/old-new-media-the-many-roads-to-perdition/?unapproved=967490&moderation-hash=790b6d00a0723a8ce57d3b3c6e09cefd#comment-967490So what is the use of lockdowns? Really? To what interests are lockdowns useful?
They keep going on and on. They don’t reduce “excess deaths”. They must do something right.
Lockdown One Year On – It doesn’t work, it never worked & it wasn’t supposed to work
off-guardian.org/2021/03/23/lockdown-one-year-on-it-doesnt-work-it-never-worked-it-wasnt-supposed-to-work/Up to half of us might be domestic-terrorists, or at least sympathetic to domestic-terrorists.
Glenn Greenwald: The U.S. Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics
Involvement of the intelligence community in the domestic activities of U.S. citizens is one of the most dangerous breaches of civil liberties and democratic order the U.S. Government can perpetrate. It was after World War II when the CIA, the NSA and other security state agencies that wield immense and unlimited powers in the dark were created in the name of fighting the Cold War. Legal and institutional prohibitions on wielding that massive machinery against the American public were central to the always-dubious claim that this security behemoth that operates completely in the dark was compatible with democracy. As the ACLU noted, “in its 1947 charter, the CIA was prohibited from spying against Americans, in part because President Truman was afraid that the agency would engage in political abuse.”
Since then, Truman’s fear has been realized over and over. Some of the worst post-WW2 civil liberties abuses have been the result of breaches by the CIA and other agencies of this prohibition. As the ACLU documents, the CIA in the 1960s was caught infiltrating and manipulating numerous domestic political activist groups. Under the auspices of the War on Terror, entire new bureaucracies (such as the Department of Homeland Security) and new legal regimes (such as the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act) were designed to erode these long-standing limitations by dramatically increasing surveillance powers aimed at U.S. citizens. And by design, the infiltration of these security state agencies in U.S. domestic politics has dramatically escalated.
As the first War on Terror was escalating, The Washington Post — under the headline “CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations” — reported in October, 2002, that “The Central Intelligence Agency is expanding its domestic presence, placing agents with nearly all of the FBI’s 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities.” …
In the years following, two NSA whistleblowers — William Binney and Edward Snowden — both cited their horror over the turning of the surveillance machinery against American citizens as the reason for their decision to denounce their agency. One of the aspects that most disturbed me about the Russiagate conspiracy theory from the start was that it was created and disseminated by the CIA and related agencies with the intent, first, to alter the outcome of the 2016 election, and then to undermine the elected president with whom they were at war...
The head of the Church Committee, Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), made clear in his iconic quote on Meet the Press in 1975 that those reforms were primarily motivated by fears that the U.S. Government would one day turn its vast intelligence powers onto the American people, rendering core civil liberties an illusion...
…the Biden administration, along with leading Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), have been stating explicitly that one of their top priorities is the adoption of new laws designed to import the Bush/Cheney/Obama War on Terror onto U.S. soil for domestic purposes.
greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-intelligence-community-floutingBush: ‘You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists’ – 2001-09-21
http://www.voanews.com/archive/bush-you-are-either-us-or-terrorists-2001-09-21Thanks Eleni. A Wilderness Of Lies
Similarly, the militarization of Washington is becoming another topic for regime experts to analyze. The bizarre reaction of the inner party to the very peaceful demonstrations in January makes no sense at face value. There must be another reason for why they are telling the citizens that they will shoot the next demonstrators who come into the city to petition their rulers for redress. The question is, what are they plotting next?
That is the problem with black-box government. When Brezhnev was in control of the party, people did not need to know what was going inside the Kremlin, because the Kremlin was predictable. It is why Russians who remember those days look back fondly on those times. It was a time relatively free of politics. They woke up every day knowing the rules were going to be the same as they were yesterday. When the black box became unstable, no one could be sure of anything.
This is the state of the American regime. No one knows what is really going behind the razor wire and Army troops patrolling it. We are left to analyze video of Biden falling down the stairs of Air Force One and reading the body language of his handlers. Amateur linguists try to tease meaning out of his incoherent mutterings on Zoom sessions. The other geriatrics running the party are scrutinized by regime analysts, looking for clues to contextualize their behavior.
Like the Soviet empire, the American empire is now a confusing black box. It does things and makes noises, but none of it can be accepted on its face, so the world is left to guess. As citizens, we are forced to rely on private networks and create our own narratives to explain what we are seeing. There is the public truth and then millions of private truths. This is the result of black-box government. It is a wilderness of lies.
http://www.takimag.com/article/a-wilderness-of-lies/False Targets is the blog post today. I’ll pick some pieces to avoid failed posts.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2021/03/false-targets.htmlDr.D said:
“Intuition is that we are attached to, made of, and spring forth of the eternal source, consciousness. As we are connected, beneath our “conscious” minds, or those who have worked to unite the subconscious and conscious, then we have ‘signals’, perhaps in the body, perhaps in the mind or imagination, that we can interpret to be a radar-reality, the ‘seeing’ of “what is”, the “I am”, the universe that is out there past our knowledge and sight. As this trickle issues forth differently for each person there isn’t a single training course on it, but everyone worldwide knows intuition, clairvoyance, ghosts, etc.”
🙂 Nice to get to know you better, Mate!Also said:
“Marx: No that would be Trotsky and the eternal revolution. Followed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Crystal…as the joke of calling them “Neo CONs” is that they are Trotskyites from the far LEFT burrowing up like prairie dogs in the Right. …Joke and irony now long since lost.”Yep, Marx mainly just described the capitalism of his day excruciatingly well, and did NOT prescribe some future course to unseat it, believing that to already be underway, and probably seeing that it was too complicated to possibly prescribe a reparative mechanism to amend its flaws.
@Archie: I had this song about “Lonely People” in my mind on my bike commute to work today.
More about “A-theistic” Buddhism.
There is not (necessarily) a deity, though as Buddhism spread to places that already had a lot of demons and angels, gods and goddesses, it did not try to stamp them out, but just made them different incarnations, along with worms and eagles.
I have practiced Buddhism with Tibetan teachers for the most part, and Tibet had lots of spirit entities and Shamen. Bon was accepted. Buddhism was accepted. Tibetan Buddhism is ornate. Japanese Buddhism is not ornate. Shinto observed that “God” was in everything, or that nothing was outside of “God”. It’s a pretty coarse translation. I like “universal consciousness” better.
Buddhism teaches that you are universal mind, if I may take liberties with words, and that you are separated from your true nature by delusions and habits. Those delusions and habits can be gradually changed through practice and paying attention, and they might suddenly change in the prepared seeker, in events or direct wisdom transmissions from a teacher. Our most typical teachers are all the people who piss us off and trigger cognitive dissonance within us. We might consider gratitude to them as part of our learning who we are.
I grew up on USMC and Navy bases, and sunny southern California, and Brooklyn, and a cattle ranch in rural Texas, and Japan. I have lots of triggers, and see things kinda’ funny most of the time. When we moved from my grandfather’s ranch to Kamakura when I was 15, I finally gave up on trying to fit in and belong, and adopted the self-identification of “foreigner”. It really fit everything since I was 6. There are certain freedoms in being a foregner, and some core boundaries, too.
Maybe I’ll know “myself” as universal mind, and will know “all-Y’all” better, but I probably won’t be able to say much useful about it.
Maybe not.
Who knows?@Zerosum: Your immune system and every cell in your body need vitamin-D.
Carry-on, Brother.@Dr.D and Madamski: Buddhism is the atheistic religion, which is why some Muslims only kill Buddhists and not Christians or Jews.
Capital Controls?
• Covid: £5,000 Fine For People Going On Holiday Abroad (BBC)https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/03/celestial-winds.html
This past Saturday we had a very modest Spring Equinox garden party, with more lovely food than we could disposition, good company, and intellectually engaging conversation about life, the universe and everything. Mel, who has worked extensively for NASA in Florida and Teas, was talking about new scientific findings about the heliosphere and the plasma fields of interstellar space. He said that this is public information, but that they are making it obscure, not publicizing it. I google-searched and all I found was stuff “debunking” “Electric Universe” models, and the electric universe and thunderbolts sites following them.
Mel was able to help me with this main link to the IBEX information:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/index.htmlThis seems to be the best overview:
NASA’s IBEX Charts 11 Years of Change at Boundary to Interstellar Space
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-ibex-charts-11-years-change-at-boundary-interstellar-space-heliosphere-sunThe shape of the “heliosphere” (helio-croissant?) is also a hot topic, and I saw it presented as-a-fact in 2 different forms in various of the NASA explanatory articles. This seems to be the thing we are not supposed to think about too much. All of this information fits best with “electric universe” in gross terms. This does not definitively endorse any specific theory of astrophysics, but it may open up a can of electric eels that jump out and squirm around.
Uncovering Our Solar System’s Shape
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/uncovering-our-solar-system-s-shape
NASA’s Cassini, Voyager Missions Suggest New Picture of Sun’s Interaction with Galaxy
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-s-cassini-voyager-missions-suggest-new-picture-of-sun-s-interaction-with-galaxyInterstellar space is full of hazards to life-forms: Cosmic radiation, plasma fields, highly energized particles. (There are also these flows of highly energized particles within our heliosphere, which are not called “silly-string”, so I won’t call them that, but it keeps popping into my mind.)
We are protected by our planetary magnetosphere and radiation belts, and that protection lies within the massive, hard working protective shield of our mother-star. It’s like the “force shields” on Star Trek. It is plowing through the interstellar magnetic field.
NASA’s IBEX Observations Pin Down Interstellar Magnetic Field
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-s-ibex-observations-pin-down-interstellar-magnetic-fieldHmm, maybe not posting again. Here’s the link to today’s post, which opens with “Celestial Winds”, which atually different information about our world, and not in the news-cycle at all.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2021/03/celestial-winds.htmlSidney Powell is in court for a gazillion dollars against a big, mean machine with teeth.
She has to employ the most effective legal argument possible, which is saying “uncle”.Oh,MAN!,
What a song!
He never messed up once. How could he sing all those thousand places so fast and get them all right, and right on time?
Johnny Cash, what a wonder of the world…@WES: I think you win whatever it is today.
Great travel tale!@Madamski: Charles Hugh Smith knows all of that, and he grows vegetables, and he used to build houses. He is pretty well prepared. He has moved back to Hawaii, near Hilo, Big Island, where his wife is from. He went to high school and worked for decades in Hawaii.
Charles is going-to-ground.Last Friday Madamski said:
“As for Gospodin Putin: I see him as someone who developed a logical psychopathic shell to preserve a decently beating feeling loving heart. One hates to break it to the hypnotized, but part of being a leader of a nation state is deciding who to kill. It’s their reasons for doing so and how they go about it that can wildly differ.
I have a simple word for Putin: a man. A “real man” even.”Admiring John: You’re real insightful, old girl. I like your style, too.
@Madamski:
Sorry, my bad; didn’t mean to make you feel like THAT, like disgraced Prince Andrew.
Perish the thought!@All-Y’all: Look at what Germ posted by John Ward, The Slog, which is excellent analysis and equally excellent use of the English language, of which I am fond.
Liars AND Fools, but not haters. I’m a hater for saying that. Hate speech is intolerable.
The other 2 links make your eyes glaze over like a glass of Scotch lased with Rohypnol, are the extensive phase 3 clinical trials of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, really extensive, looking at all kinds of potential complications, and still recruiting subjects, to be completed some time in 2022. Don’t wait. Get a vaccine yesterday, please, while you still could.
Oh, that’s the Astra-Zeneca vaccine that you needed to get yesterday in 20 countries. Funny thing with young, healthy people dying of blood clots. Prob’ly unrelated, abundance of caution, and so forth.20+ Countries Suspend Use of AstraZeneca Vaccine, But Regulators Insist ‘Benefits Outweigh Risks’
Uh, whaddaya mean the production vaccines are not like the clinical trial vaccines? Why won’t anybody answer? How can this be a secret? Just address the content of the leaked emails, guys and gals!
Data Leak Shows Regulators Had Major Concerns About Pfizer’s mRNA Vaccine
Rumored “Russian asset”, Paul Craig Roberts. Thanks Wiggs (Where are you from?)
Putin came to power as the American neoconservatives were girding up to establish US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark told us, seven countries were to be overthrown in 5 years. The American preoccupation with the Middle East permitted Putin to throw off American overlordship and reestablish Russian sovereignty. Once Washington realized this, the American establishment turned on Putin with a vengance.
Stephen Cohen, Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union), myself and a few others warned that Washington’s refusal to accept Russian independence would reignite the Cold War, thus erasing the accomplishment of ending it and resurrecting the specter of nuclear war. But Washington didn’t listen. Instead, Cohen and I were put on a list of “Russian agents/dupes,” and the process of trying to destabalize Putin began. In other words, once an American colony always an American colony, and Putin became the most demonized person on earth.
Today (March 17) we had the extraordinary spectacle of President Biden saying on ABC News that President Putin is a killer, and “he will pay a price.” This is a new low point in diplomacy. It does not serve American interests or peace…
In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda. Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.
This response is far outside the boundaries of the 20th century Cold War. It precludes any rational or intelligent approach to American foreign policy. Sooner or later the Kremlin will comprehend that it is confronted by a gangster outfit of the criminally insane. Then what happens?Washington Has Resurrected the Specter of Nuclear Armageddon
Are the Russians getting suspicious of America?
Russian ambassador to US summoned back to Moscow for consultations on future relations with Washington
https://www.rt.com/russia/518406-ambassador-antonov-us-biden/Them’s Fightin’ Words!
Putin Responds To Biden’s “Killer” Slur: “It Takes One To Know One”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-responds-biden-killer-slur-it-takes-one-know-one(Irish-Russian?) RFK, Jr. to President Biden: No. 1 Driver of Vaccine Hesitancy Is Mistrust of Regulators
Children’s Health Defense Chairman RFK, Jr. says transparency, robust science and a functional surveillance system are the only ways to build public trust for the COVID vaccine.RFK, Jr. to President Biden: No. 1 Driver of Vaccine Hesitancy Is Mistrust of Regulators
Russians Kill Everybody
https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/03/russians-kill-everybody.htmlHelen of DesTroy (Thanks Wiggs, RUSSIAN Alert!)
Faith in Big Brother’s willingness to toss out a last-minute lifesaver has bred a profound laziness into the American media establishment – a phenomenon some have dubbed ‘truth decay’ – that has wrecked not just its quality, but its believability. The media establishment, effectively dominated by just six companies – Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Comcast, Viacom and CBS – survives to fight another day, but at what cost? Even the most amateur-hour alt-media enterprise comes off more believable than an article from the Washington Post or the New York Times, which bear up each other’s falsehoods only to see themselves further discredited, driving their former audiences into what they insist on dubbing the ‘fringe’ – outlets populated by their own former employees who, no longer capable of looking themselves in the eye after a workday spent lying furiously to their public, are abandoning their former employers like rats deserting the proverbial sinking ships.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/518367-establishment-media-cartel-narrative-collapse/Glenn Greenwood, via the slanderous, pro-Russian, renegade Substack platform:
How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-oftenRumored “Russian asset”, Paul Craig Roberts. Thanks Wiggs (Where are you from?)
Putin came to power as the American neoconservatives were girding up to establish US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark told us, seven countries were to be overthrown in 5 years. The American preoccupation with the Middle East permitted Putin to throw off American overlordship and reestablish Russian sovereignty. Once Washington realized this, the American establishment turned on Putin with a vengance.
Stephen Cohen, Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union), myself and a few others warned that Washington’s refusal to accept Russian independence would reignite the Cold War, thus erasing the accomplishment of ending it and resurrecting the specter of nuclear war. But Washington didn’t listen. Instead, Cohen and I were put on a list of “Russian agents/dupes,” and the process of trying to destabalize Putin began. In other words, once an American colony always an American colony, and Putin became the most demonized person on earth.
Today (March 17) we had the extraordinary spectacle of President Biden saying on ABC News that President Putin is a killer, and “he will pay a price.” This is a new low point in diplomacy. It does not serve American interests or peace…
In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda. Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.
This response is far outside the boundaries of the 20th century Cold War. It precludes any rational or intelligent approach to American foreign policy. Sooner or later the Kremlin will comprehend that it is confronted by a gangster outfit of the criminally insane. Then what happens?Washington Has Resurrected the Specter of Nuclear Armageddon
Are the Russians getting suspicious of America?
Russian ambassador to US summoned back to Moscow for consultations on future relations with Washington
https://www.rt.com/russia/518406-ambassador-antonov-us-biden/Them’s Fightin’ Words!
Putin Responds To Biden’s “Killer” Slur: “It Takes One To Know One”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-responds-biden-killer-slur-it-takes-one-know-one(Irish-Russian?) RFK, Jr. to President Biden: No. 1 Driver of Vaccine Hesitancy Is Mistrust of Regulators
Children’s Health Defense Chairman RFK, Jr. says transparency, robust science and a functional surveillance system are the only ways to build public trust for the COVID vaccine.RFK, Jr. to President Biden: No. 1 Driver of Vaccine Hesitancy Is Mistrust of Regulators
