Become Aware Of It, Pay Attention To It. Read About It, Learn About It, Write About It, Talk About It. Teach It.
Reflections upon anything under the sun and beyond. It may not be easy to be a Global Citizen, but it's not hard to engage the Globe.
My Intellectual Immune System is Weak
I keep getting PMs from friends on Signal who subscribe to grand conspiracy theories regarding our C19 experience. I replied with links to articles from different perspectives that I thought might inform their thinking for a while. I was wrong to believe that they would be interested in any content that didn't support their narrative.
I will refer to “The Narrative” so allow me to first set the stage. I nicked the quote below from Rebel Wisdom’s latest post regarding their new film.
“Lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.”
Setting the stage:
Next February, the seventeenth, in the year of a particular Lord, two thousand and twenty-three, there will only be 526,403 people alive on this great earth. Finally, the re-wilding of the "commons" and the building of Golf Courses, pleasure palaces, and sports stadiums will begin in earnest, and everyone, everyone I tell you, will have their own customized, shape-shifting sex robot. Homo Sapiens will have been saved from The Great Game by the Players of The Great Game. It's exciting to know that soon the Players will begin this uber endeavor—culminating with the invention of an even better game. In the not too distant future, they can export this new, and supreme culture to inhabitable planets in this particular Universe. Because, don't you know, that in eight thousand years our sun will be a Dyson Sphere and Elon Musk (he will be alive then) will be using the Penrose Process to find said inhabitable planets. (Elon could do it now, by the way, but that would mean that the Plebs would benefit, and they are simply not worthy.)
This was my final message to one of my Signal interlocutors. From now on, when any of my conspiracy-minded warriors on Signal or even WhatsApp share a link to something regarding our wonderous C19 experience, I will send back a photo of gelato.
I wonder if reading the content at this link will make me roll my eyes? I want to click on the link, but then I ponder, why? It's not like I'm in the tribe. My interests are too broad. I've rummaged around in that bubble for a while, and I get it. Enough. Joe Rogan? LOL! I am beginning to think you are not a reader? Sincerely, should we stop sharing anything except photos of gelato? There are facts to be found within the know-it-all narrative, but the narrative itself is shallow. But fuck me, right? I'm stupid and blinkered. I'm a normie. I'm alt-middle or alt-sensible. I took the wrong color pill. I've been infected by the dreaded "@-the-real-propaganda." I don't consume garbage day and night, which has made me weak. My intellectual defenses are not strong enough because my reading habits are too clean, peppered with authors who are experts in their field, and therefore incentivized by billionaires who fund their research. OMG, maybe that's why I don't do my own research. 😂 I won't click on the link you have shared. I already understand the narrative. I'd rather read a good book that I can learn something from. Pass that crap around to the properly woke-woke people—keep driving your knowledge of the grand conspiracy home. You and yours will save the world. Thank you in advance. 🙏🥰
Bon Appétit!
The New Normal Conspiracy
But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
— Lysander Spooner
This normie, bog-standard, middle stream, CIA cutout (Cirtifyably Insane Association) scribbler would like to share a piece someone wrote about "The Way Thing Really Are."
"The UK New Normal Dictatorship" UK Column News — Lian Davis
This post title from The UK Column says a lot if you think about it.
Spoiler alert! Everybody's in on it, even the Plebs.
This is a classic and informative piece — it's all there. It parrots every buzzword, pulls every trigger, and has hyperlinks to more of the same. It contains many scary and easily identifiable propositions and big words, some with definitions from mainstream encyclopedias. Peppered with references to ideas and realities that are indeed alarming, it weaves a standard narrative about the powers that be.
And by golly, some of the content contains observations that ring true and may even represent problems worth a mortal struggle. However, I prefer different sources of cultural criticism and polemic to writers who refer to so many worn-out conspiracy theories.
You may feel: #powerless #hopeless #outraged after reading it.
You are not a fan of this genre if you are not entirely familiar with every shocking pseudo revelation.
Would you please tell me what the author's ideological bent is? It has to have a name.
Suppose you are a fan of actually understanding how things work. In that case, you will know we are far from perfect governance systems, whether referring to global corporations, nongovernmental institutions, economic schools, social systems, political systems, etc., in any arena or Nation-State. But you will also know that civilization has always been structured around various messy things, people and institutions.
Systems Theory and Complexity Theory are difficult topics to understand, much less be knowledgeable about to the point where they become valuable tools — so are socioeconomic theories and practices. Let's not mention all the other domains this piece touches upon.
If you genuinely understand how various systems work, you might have some good ideas on how to repair them, reform them, change them, destroy them or even innovate from them.
Do you have to do a lot of reading to achieve that? What kind of reading? You tell me.
These narratives are entertaining but far from empowering, nor do they offer any alternative solutions. The cry is, "Fight back by following “the” narrative!"
One might wonder what a blogger in the early 16th Century might have written about the opaque goings-on in court. Isn't conspiring face-to-face a more satisfying activity? But back then, the powerless people were illiterate, and only the big players played the game. One can imagine conniving goings-on from every class during the Roman Empire.
Perhaps the only times safe from institutions were when there were only bands, tribes, and small nations of indigenous people. You can't conspire very effectively when everyone around the fire is watching. I wonder if large nation-states can ever enjoy perfect governance. I don't think we will ever see a happy-go-lucky world of libertarian tiny states and city-states.
Doggone it, I wish I could be more optimistic. Sometimes a little apathy goes a long way.
But come hither and tell me your ideas, thoughts, and feelings. What should we do about this?
Lian Davis writes for online publications like UKCOLUNM that all have a certain kind of catastrophic color. He seems like a fun man to have a few drinks with; take a look at the rest of the contributors for UKCOLUNM — forget drinks, let's have a party! No pun.
No Jail For The Wicked
I like to read books. I am not sure how much good it’s done me. I wish everyone read more.
Take a look at the bibliography in this short article from Ralph Nader posted at SHEERPOST. Think of the implications of this. Why are normal people so powerless in the face of this kind of corruption and greed? Perhaps, throughout history, the lower classes have always been relatively powerless and lazy.
The “Players” make the rules and have the freedom to break them. There are no crimes they can’t commit with impunity.
We are living in a culture where one only needs money.
Along the same vein, don’t miss this post from Christopher Hedges, American Satyricon.
A licentious, money-drenched, morally bankrupt and intellectually vacuous ruling class, accountable to no one and free to plunder and prey on the weak like human vultures, rise to power in societies in terminal decline. This class of parasites was savagely parodied in the first-century satirical novel “Satyricon” by Gaius Petronius, written during the reign of Nero. Epstein and his cohorts for years engaged in sexual perversions of Petronian proportions, as Miami Herald investigative reporter Julie Brown, whose dogged reporting was largely responsible for reopening the federal investigation in Epstein and Maxwell, documents in her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.”
Despite many books being published on corporate crooks, there have been no corporate crime law reforms, no additional prosecutions of these CEOs, not even comprehensive congressional or state legislative hearing. What gives?
Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement by John Coffee
Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation by Elizabeth Burch
Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance … by Rena Steinzor
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
Closing Death’s Door: Legal Innovations to End the Epidemic of Healthcare Harm by Michael J. Saks and Stephan Landsman
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?… by Guillaume Coudray
The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption… by Carey Gillam
The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business by David Courtwright
Frankie: How One Woman Prevented a Pharmaceutical Disaster by James Essinger and Sandra Koutzenko
Killer Airbags by Jerry Cox
Making the World Safe for Coke by Susan Greenhalgh
Big Dirty Money by Jennifer Taub
Business and Human Rights by Ellen Hertz
Industrial-Strength Denial by Barbara Freese
Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker
Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations by Brandon L. Garrett
Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age by Samuel W. Buell
Profiteering, Corruption and Fraud in U.S. Health Care by John Geyman
Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power by David Dayen
Global Banks on Trial by Pierre-Hugues Verdier
Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception by David Michaels
Murder, Inc.: How Unregulated Industry Kills or Injures Thousands of Americans Every Year…And What You Can Do About It by Gerald Goldhaber
Paradise Lost at Sea: Rethinking Cruise Vacations by Ross A. Klein
Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller
Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in An Age of Fraud by Tom Mueller
Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban
GMOs Decoded: A Skeptic’s View of Genetically Modified Foods by Sheldon Krimsky and Marion Nestle
GM: Paint it Red: Inside General Motors’ Culture of Failure by Nicholas Kachman
The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives by Jesse Eisinger
Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy by Richard Cordray
First Class: The U.S. Postal Service, Democracy, and the Corporate Threat by Christopher Shaw
Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War by Erik Edstrom
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America by Eyal Press
Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar
Public Citizens by Paul Sabin
The United States of War by David Vine
The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions by Chuck Collins
Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis
The Case Against George W. Bush by Steven C. Markoff
Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer by Erica Payne and Morris Pearl
Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet by Dr. Michael Jacobson
Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy by Daniel G. Newman
Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits by James D. Zirin
Stealing Our Democracy by Don Siegelman
Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor by Steven Greenhouse
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Monique El-Faizy and Barry Levine
Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic by Christopher Shaw
Troubled Water: What’s Wrong with What We Drink by Seth M. Siegel
Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy by Mike German
United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America… by Mickey Huff and Nolan Higdon
The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu
The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail
Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator by Dr. Gregory Jaczko
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
America, Democracy & You: Where Have All the Citizens Gone? by Ronald R. Fraser
Unsettled (on Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family) by Ryan Hampton
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh
Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World by Nomi Prins
Attention All Passengers: The Airlines’ Dangerous Descent and What You Can Do To Reclaim Our Skies by William McGee
Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science by Carey Gillam
The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop It by Steven Clifford
World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, …. and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald
The Culture Seems To Love Gun Violence—is it at war with itself?
Will I be pilloried for mentioning glaring evidence of cultural differences?
The debate about firearms rages on in the United States while gun ownership skyrockets.
Michigan has approximately the same population as Portugal.
In 2019, there were 742 firearm suicide deaths in Michigan, including 31 children and teens (ages 0–19).
According to the latest WHO data published in 2018, Suicide Deaths in Portugal reached 1,450 or 1.61% of total deaths. The age-adjusted Death Rate is 8.62 per 100,000 population ranks Portugal #97 in the world.
In 2019 there were 1,471 suicides in Michigan. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in Michigan.
As of Feb. 1, 2018, Michigan had 621,327 active concealed pistol licenses on file — about 8 percent of the state’s adult population.
As of 2021, the number of licensed gun owners in Portugal is reported to be 216,000.
Recent surveys find that about 40% of adult Americans own a gun or live with someone who does. A majority of those gun owners cite protection as their primary reason for owning a gun, and most believe the gun or guns they own make their homes safer. (Why do they need protection?) But research has consistently shown that households with firearms are actually less safe — with markedly higher risks for accidental deaths, suicides, and domestic homicides. AP
I lived in Japan for over 9 years, where the death rate by firearms per 100,000 people is practically nonexistent.
Gun crimes Japan 2011–2020
Published by Statista Research Department, Oct 21, 2021
In 2020, the number of reported cases involving damage caused by the firing of firearms in Japan amounted to 17 cases. This represented an increase compared to the previous year when 13 cases of damage by firearms were reported. The population of Japan was 125.8 million (2020).
Japan’s Homicide by firearm rate was 0.0 (cases per 100,000 population) in 2014.
In 2020, Japan had 4 homicides by firearms. *WORLD DATA ATLAS JAPAN CRIME STATISTICS
I lived in Hong Kong for over 10 years. Between 2003 and 2017, Hong Kong’s homicides by firearm rate remained stable at around 0 cases per 100,000 population.
Hong Kong movies would make you think that there were shootouts every month in Hong Kong. There are shootouts every month in the United States.
In China, the total annual homicides by any means in 2018 amounted to 7,525. The population of China in 2020 was 1.402 billion. (You can find good statistics on worldwide homicide rates from many reputable sources if you want to.)
America seems to think that armed conflicts, no matter how limited, are essential for its security.
THE HUMAN COST OF THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN:
American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.
U.S. contractors: 3,846.
Afghan national military and police: 66,000.
Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states 1,144.
Afghan civilians: 47,245.
Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.
Aid workers: 444.
Journalists: 72.
In 2021 so far there have been 39,654 deaths in the USA due to firearms. Let’s imagine that there has been an average of 12,000 gun-related deaths a year in the USA over the last 20 years. During the 20 year duration of the war in Afghanistan, the death toll in the US due to firearms would amount to 240,000. The total number of deaths during the 20-year war in Afghanistan added up from the above numbers was 171,246.
It seems to me that America is at war with itself.
In a highly armed culture where its leaders seem to encourage violent “police actions” worldwide, what will happen in the United States if its institutions are damaged beyond repair?
I hear people in the United States talking about civil war. Now, please, are you fucking kidding me?
Seek And Your Intuition Will Be Stronger
We all think we know what to do until we know what to do.
intuition
noun
— the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning
— a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feelings rather than conscious reasoning.
I also hear heuristics. I think of neuroscience. I think of agency. I think of connections and connectedness.
I've been thinking about intuition lately. I have thought about intuition for decades, and what I think about it is constantly evolving. The evolution of understanding is the core of intuition.
The more curious one is, the more one explores and experiences, the better one's intuition gets.
Ontology
Epistemology
Empiricism
If you read a lot across many subjects; if you have traveled and worked in several different businesses or industries; if you are deeply curious about the nature of things and how things work; if you are constantly questioning what you know and what other people seem to know; if you are not afraid of reality or truth no matter how uncomfortable it may be; and, most importantly, if you embrace these experiences and attitudes with openness, a bit of joy and excitement — perhaps even love and compassion — your intuitions will be strong and more accurate than average.
Many people are comfortable on a well-worn path. Most people are happy with what they have learned long ago, are at home in their inherited circumstances, and are uncomfortable with unfamiliar things. Perhaps, we could say that they are more traditional.
We are creatures of habit, all animals are, but homo sapiens have the capacity of profound exploration. The need to explore is one of the traits that make our species unique and successful. Throughout our species history, there have been those who would wander off the path and explore unfamiliar things. In doing so, they ignite their imagination and liberate creative impulses that allow them to discover new things, new experiences, new challenges, and new knowledge. With new knowledge, we would create new stories, ideas, processes, tools, and technologies.
I often wonder about the state of people's minds as they evolved towards the phase transition that brought us language. Can you imagine the first humans in one of our ancestral species that, for some reason, started naming things and later, much later, how grammar spontaneously emerged from the use of those symbols?
And the flesh made word a miraculous being.
It didn't happen suddenly, it only emerged gradually and imperceptibly, and then there were generations of creative people experiencing life in entirely new ways. For a long time, for many generations, we could not easily imagine what we might be able to create. Still, some of us ventured out and randomly discovered new possibilities. We learned through our active existence, acquiring knowledge, and experimenting until we deliberately created something.
The trouble with our civilization is that it doesn't value intuition enough, the kind of intuition that comes from adventurousness, imagination, exploration, curiosity, and a deep appreciation of what one encounters. Here I am not talking about the market of such things — not Instagram. I refer to the intense desire to break free.
We are programmed to be timid and fit into our niche, and do our work. We are programmed to be greedy attention seekers. We are, perhaps, a bit too needy of validation.
I was reading about a study of people who claim to talk to God. It turns out that it takes a lot of practice to experience that. One has to pray a lot. To quiet the mind and experience, one's more authentic nature. One might practice meditation, for example, for a very long time before a profound sense of what one truly is, disperses into one's consciousness. We practice sports, music, and dance diligently over time and experience flow states. You know what I mean. Getting good at anything requires commitment and practice: even our moral intuitions, feelings of compassion, empathy, and love. Before becoming loving, one must practice care, consideration, listening, affection.
Context and Preconditions
One can learn how to kill and how to love.
One can kill with reverence to survive.
There is a context for everything. Depending on the conditions we've grown in and our sensibilities, our intuitions will be different. It takes many kinds of people to make our civilization operate as it does.
Intuition is not magic, and yet it's magical.
I was listening to Liv Boeree talking with Alexander Beiner on the Rebel Wisdom channel on YouTube. Ms. Boeree is an impressive woman. When I hear people like her talk about things they know well, I am always impressed by their epistemic humility, their grappling with reality, and their courage in the face of failed experiments. Even if I don't understand some of the things they refer to, I have a strong intuitive sense that what they are communicating makes sense. I trust them and am inspired to consider carefully what they are trying to say.
People I enjoy listening to have encountered some of the same things I have encountered on my journey. Yet, they have unique ways of expressing their experiences and knowledge that engage my imagination.
We have crossed paths; by that, I mean, explored the same things in different ways and at different times in different contexts from different perspectives. We are moving through reality, building on our experiences and what we've learned from others while feeling an intense need to communicate our experiences with those we've encountered. We are peering out at the world on the shoulders of giants, looking for more, knowing we will never know enough or have enough experience to be satisfied. And we are comfortable with that, even excited by the thought of our limitations and constraints.
Highly intuitive people need to share. Intuitive people need to learn from people. If you seek wisdom, knowledge, and novel experiences unleashing your creativity, you build intuitive power.
I looked at the video description of "A Poker Pro Explains Game Theory" and found a link to a Slate Star Codex post from 2014, Meditations on Moloch. I read that post in 2014. When I first read it, it was at once new, exciting, and very familiar. I reread it this morning and experienced the essay in entirely new ways, and it was still utterly familiar to me.
The magical aspect of a good intuition is that our ideas, thoughts, and feelings broaden as we explore strange things, allowing us to feel familiarity regardless of incomplete understanding.
Where one person is confined to the familiar because of fear or narrowness, a more intuitive person embraces the unfamiliar, no matter how scary or challenging. Seeking out the unknown leads to familiarity — and the world becomes more hospitable.
The more familiar one is with various things, the greater one's intuition.
The tricky question is: What preconditions inspire these traits in some people and not so much in others. I recognize that all people are curious, but clearly, some more than others.
Intuition is still mysterious to me, no matter how much I read, explore, meditate or pray, there will still be new intuitive states I can look forward to experiencing.
In 2010 I would talk with people down the pub about Bitcoin and Climate Change, and they would look at me like I was a foolish goofball. Ten years later, they are trading Bitcoin for a bit of fiat buck and having climate change stories hurled at them from every media source twenty-four seven. You will not be very popular if you bring up strange things with people. Too few will engage with the unfamiliar.
Most of us will stay on the well-worn path until circumstances dictate that we find another way.
The problem today is that we need more intuitive people to help navigate a world where our intuitions and explorations have helped us paint ourselves into a corner where existential risks have the potential to put an end to our species.
If you have been paying attention, you feel it.
What, if anything, will we do about it?
When I encounter intuitive people, I'm thrilled to be in such good company. But what I need is to work with people nearby to cultivate values that lead to a wise, intuitive culture that loves and reveres everything about being alive and life on earth. That’s my utopia — simply doing that.
I want to intuit a loving culture emerging.
Redefining Wealth, Prosperity, and Growth
I'm happy to see Ms. Williamson talking with Peter Joseph. I recommend The New Human Rights Movement to people weekly. Work this train of thought in your communities, and let's hope it scales rapidly. Marianne Williamson is an earnest, wise, and compassionate author whose work has inspired many people. She also ran for President of the United States. Arrogant? Presumptuous? She believed she could do some good. It should be a breath of fresh air to have a woman with her disposition in a presidential race. (Yes, I know, she's Oprah Winfrey's spiritual advisor— we can forgive her for that.) Peter's book is a compelling survey of our socio-economic culture that may spark your interest in delving more deeply into how our system works and why it's not sustainable. He does not have all the answers, nor does he pretend to. Engaging with his train of thought will require a good-faith effort to understand concepts that may be uncomfortable for many people to ponder these days. (How can we criticize a system that got us all this cool stuff, and what about Steven Pinker's take on the glories of Western Civilization? Surely it's all good?) He has a structuralist perspective and talks about structural violence and racism, for example. Today, even bringing up racism will trigger many people in the USA who are tired of the subject. Peter is not utopian in his thought. He simply understands the necessity of imaginative, innovative, and structural change if we intend to sustain civilization. Redefining wealth, prosperity, and growth is a great way to start.
Looking Forward to a Clockwork Orange Horror Show
The Big Lie won't go away. Between now and the 2022 midterm elections, the country will get crazier and crazier. Instead of Left and Right-wing organizations LARPING war with paintball guns, we might see some live-fire battles in the streets of American cities.
Trump won 74,222,958 votes, or 46.8 percent of the votes cast. There are still tens of millions of people in the USA that support The Big Lie and are all in on dozens of insane conspiracies.
What's the percentage of Americans who can think clearly, I wonder?
Forget about the garbage flowing out of cable news networks and ponder for a moment the mad shyte firehosing from alternative media platforms and the good old world wide web.
Things in the United States are at a fever pitch of emotion now. The contagion of inane ideas from America spreads around the world like a memetic mental pandemic. Bad ideas and conspiracies are everywhere. And undergirding it all is a brand of stubborn, willful ignorance unprecedented in world history. People were probably saner when they were illiterate.
We are facing serious existential threats to global civilization, and misinformation and perniciously odious lies are all we can regurgitate as we separate into disastrous clubs and go to war with anyone who doesn't subscribe to our fantasies, illusions, and delusions.
We can look forward to a Clockwork Orange horror show. Perhaps it's time to start a tune-out movement. Do movements even work these days?
https://www.facebook.com/globehackers www.cospolon.eu
LET’S TAKE THE PROFIT OUT OF WAR
We all should know by now that war is a profitable business. It should not be this profitable. We must not incentivize profit-seeking and corruption when we are pursuing rational and moral defense policy.
CEOs shouldn’t have a financial stake in the murderous mass violence of modern warfare.
By Sam Pizzigati | August 25, 2021
In the 21st century, many of us are used to the murderous mass violence of modern warfare.
After all, we grew up living it or hearing about it. The 20th-century rates as the deadliest in human history — 75 million people died in World War II alone. Millions have died since, including a quarter-million during the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan.
But for our forebears, the incredible deadliness of modern warfare came as a shock.
The carnage of World War I — with its 40 million dead — left people scrambling to prevent another horror. In 1928, the world’s top nations even signed an agreement renouncing war as an instrument of national policy.
Still, by the mid-1930s the world was swimming in weapons, and people wanted to know why.
In the United States, peace-seekers followed the money to find out. Many of America’s moguls, they learned, were getting rich off prepping for war. These “merchants of death” had a vested interest in the arms races that make wars more likely.
So a campaign was launched to take the profit out of war.
On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats set up a committee to investigate the munitions industry and named a progressive Republican, North Dakota’s Gerald Nye, to chair it. “War and preparation for war,” Nye noted in 1934, had precious little to do with “national defense.” Instead, war had become “a matter of profit for the few.”
The war in Afghanistan offers but the latest example.
We won’t know for some time the total corporate haul from the Afghan war’s 20 years. But Institute for Policy Studies analysts Brian Wakamo and Sarah Anderson have come up with some initial calculations for three of the top military contractors active in Afghanistan from 2016-2020.
They found that total compensation for the CEOs alone at these three corporate giants — Fluor, Raytheon, and Boeing — amounted to $236 million.
A modern-day, high-profile panel on war profiteering might not be a bad idea. Members could start by reviewing the 1936 conclusions of the original committee.
Munitions companies, it found, ignited and exacerbated arms races by constantly striving to “scare nations into a continued frantic expenditure for the latest improvements in devices of warfare.”
“Wars,” the Senate panel summed up, “rarely have one single cause,” but it runs “against the peace of the world for selfishly interested organizations to be left free to goad and frighten nations into military activity.”
Do these conclusions still hold water for us today? Yes — and in fact, today’s military-industrial complex dwarfs that of the early 20th century.
Military spending, Lindsay Koshgarian of the IPS National Priorities Project points out, currently “takes up more than half of the discretionary federal budget each year,” and over half that spending goes to military contractors — who use that largesse to lobby for more war spending.
In 2020, executives at the five biggest contractors spent $60 million on lobbying to keep their gravy train going. Over the past two decades, the defense industry has spent $2.5 billion on lobbying and directed another $285 million to political candidates.
How can we upset that business as usual? Reducing the size of the military budget can get us started. Reforming the contracting process will also be essential. And executive pay needs to be right at the heart of that reform. No executives dealing in military matters should have a huge personal stake in ballooning federal spending for war.
One good approach: Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s Patriotic Corporations Act.
Among other things, that proposed law would give extra points in contract bidding to firms that pay their top executives no more than 100 times what they pay their most typical workers. Few defense giants come anywhere close to that ratio.
War is complicated, but greed isn’t. Let’s take the profit out of war.
Article from otherwords.org
People like to talk about God's Glory, The Love of God, and God's Love.
I understand the sentiment. If it’s we are referring to a nonegocentric, connection with “Creation,” but I can’t imagine God being prideful of the stuff “He” made. “Glory to badass me.” But people are mostly like that, and people write the stories.
“Pride comes before the fall.”
It's not cool to be a sage these days. Being wise takes a special kind of effort to acquire skills and attitudes that are not popular in schools these days. Education is too narrow, too institutionalized. There has to be a place for community-based education. Perhaps we should think of it as a culture of learning.
I feel it's glorious to be alive, the miracle of nature, and what's wrong with being in awe of particles doing their thing within something we know as the laws of physics — the mysteries of star stuff and all of that.
(We think we know a lot, but we don't know shit.)
I sincerely don't believe that God is needy like humans. I can't imagine God pining away for me to pay attention to "Him," although I do feel God's "love," and since we are part and parcel and all of that, I'm sure he feels "my" love.
(Love is not only a conduit, and it’s surely not a base transaction.)
LOVE is more profound than human love. I can't imagine a Human God. I am not Greek. Perhaps my mystical self is not human. LOL.
One can’t deny our need for love.
God LOVES We Love THE LOVING is the whole thing.
Jesus was co-opted by culture and power and used in various nefarious and also benign ways by people and institutions that needed, for whatever reasons, to use Jesus to parse the narrative for whatever purpose.
Yeshua is someone I know a lot better, and I see reflections of him everywhere — even in people's actions, thoughts and feelings.
I swear I could write his story. I'd call it "Tales of Hippy Yeshua who came to America from Guatemala."
But a God without an institution is very hard to worship. There has to be a hierarchy of commands. People are difficult to control. Or perhaps, too easy to manage?
I'm pretty sure that if people didn't have “The Book,” they’d have met Yeshua anyway.
Facing Facts Allows Us To Reshape The World
This post was inspired by a comment to a comment I left on a video about Climate Change. Sometimes people can be very generous and positively inspiring.
Humans have been changing the landscape and affecting the environment since they started playing with fire and pointy sticks.
Sooner or later, one must face facts.
Everything is interdependent. Your independence is expressed through what you know. Those of us who have stopped learning, know nothing.
Visit the links and understand what it all means. Click on every hyperlink. Take your time.
1 — All civilizations have collapsed into the sand because of the desiccation of the local environment.
2 — Bio-Complexity has been exponentially decreasing since pointy sticks and fire.
Dynamical shifts between the extremes of stability and collapse are hallmarks of ecological systems. These shifts are limited by and change with biodiversity, complexity, and the topology and hierarchy of interactions. Most ecological research has focused on identifying conditions for a system to shift from stability to any degree of instability—species abundances do not return to exact same values after perturbation. Real ecosystems likely have a continuum of shifting between stability and collapse that depends on the specifics of how the interactions are structured, as well as the type and degree of disturbance due to environmental change. Here we map boundaries for the extremes of strict stability and collapse. In between these boundaries, we find an intermediate regime that consists of single-species extinctions, which we call the extinction continuum. We also develop a metric that locates the position of the system within the extinction continuum—thus quantifying proximity to stability or collapse—in terms of ecologically measurable quantities such as growth rates and interaction strengths. Furthermore, we provide analytical and numerical techniques for estimating our new metric. We show that our metric does an excellent job of capturing the system's behaviour in comparison with other existing methods—such as May’s stability criteria or critical slowdown. Our metric should thus enable deeper insights about how to classify real systems in terms of their overall dynamics and their limits of stability and collapse.
3 — The IPCC is vastly understating what is happening.
4 — As much as 80% of all non-human or agricultural life is already gone, and the rate of extinction is increasing.
Plant and animal extinctions are occurring at a rate of at least 1,000 times faster than the time before humans, a new study says.
In the study, published Thursday by the journal Science, lead author and biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University and colleagues, calculated a “death rate” of species going extinct each year out of 1 million. On pre-human earth, the death rate was 0.1, but that number spiked to between 100 to 1,000.
The main reason is attributed to habitat loss, as animals are left without places to live as areas around the planet are being taken over and changed by human presence. With the added pressures of invasive species and climate change, the study writes, species are vanishing faster.
5 — The Earth has lost one-third of its forest cover since the last ice age.
6 — Anthropogenic global warming or "climate change" is a fact.
The fact is, if you want to, you can do something about this. Start with educating yourself about the topic. Ask yourself, is life on earth important enough for you to take action. Do your children’s future ability to live meaningful lives matter? Choose your leaders wisely. Engage with your local community to solve problems and create new economies.
A rigorous theory of money, credit, and bankruptcy in the context of a mixed economy, uniting Walrasian general equilibrium with macroeconomic dynamics and Schumpeterian innovation.
What is wealth? Wealth is life and conscientiousness. What is economics?
“Every short statement about economics is misleading (with the possible exception of my present one.)”
If you really don’t care about what happens to life on Earth, continue on aping the behaviors you’ve learned and throw away your agency and sovereignty. If you are fortunate, enjoy and be thankful for what you have — come what may.
Have You Been To The Mountain Top?
How far do we have to go back in history before we find no warriors and, therefore, no mythology about war? How might a warrior mentality serve the cause of peace and long-term survival as we cook our habitat? And remember, "Mental toughness is a lifestyle." Please tell me how we expunge the violence within us. How will we make peace? "You live uncomfortable to gain growth." True or not? Our heroes today need to apply their passion, discipline, and skill to solve existential risks caused by our current global culture. Can we have "belief in ourselves" without violence as our motivation and end-game? Who do the Special Forces serve? Point to a time and a culture in history where you had ideal men and women. What were they like? What was that culture like? Perhaps you can't find one in the past, so please, imagine a culture of peace, abundance, and spiritual growth that might exist in the future. Tell me about that. How do we create that world? Imagine the sacrifices we’ll have to make. Can you bear that cross? Can you imagine the mountain top?
I watched the events on September eleventh, 2001 on TV in Tokyo. That day I stumble upon The Mountain Top speech on my computer. The first time I read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech was in high school. The second time I read it was on 911.
I knew things would change in ways I couldn’t imagine. In 2021 I see changes coming at me like stampeding mustangs. Today it seems everyone is against everything. No one can agree on anything. I feel nothing but nostalgia for the days when leaders inspired people.
Every year since 911 something has inspired me to read the speech again. This morning it was pondering the drone wars that put me on to it. So here I go. Join me. Find a quiet place and read this out loud.
Thank you very kindly, my friends. As I listened to Ralph Abernathy in his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about. It's always good to have your closest friend and associate say something good about you. And Ralph is the best friend that I have in the world.
I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow. Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.
As you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" — I would take my mental flight by Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there. I would move on by Greece, and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even go by the way that the man for whom I'm named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church in Wittenberg.
But I wouldn't stop there. I would come on up even to 1863, and watch a vacillating president by the name of Abraham Lincoln finally come to the conclusion that he had to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. But I wouldn't stop there. I would even come up to the early thirties, and see a man grappling with the problems of the bankruptcy of his nation. And come with an eloquent cry that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
But I wouldn't stop there. Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."
And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.
That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what is unfolding. And I'm happy that He's allowed me to be in Memphis.
I can remember, I can remember when Negroes were just going around as Ralph has said, so often, scratching where they didn't itch, and laughing when they were not tickled. But that day is all over. We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God's world.
And that's all this whole thing is about. We aren't engaged in any negative protest and in any negative arguments with anybody. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God's children. And that we don't have to live like we are forced to live.
Now, what does all of this mean in this great period of history? It means that we've got to stay together. We've got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh's court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that's the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.
Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now, we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window-breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that one thousand, three hundred sanitation workers were on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that.
Now we're going to march again, and we've got to march again, in order to put the issue where it is supposed to be. And force everybody to see that there are thirteen hundred of God's children here suffering, sometimes going hungry, going through dark and dreary nights wondering how this thing is going to come out. That's the issue. And we've got to say to the nation: we know it's coming out. For when people get caught up with that which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.
We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do, I've seen them so often. I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round." Bull Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on." And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water. If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed. If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.
That couldn't stop us. And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take them off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome." And every now and then we'd get in the jail, and we'd see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs. And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn't adjust to; and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.
Now we've got to go on to Memphis just like that. I call upon you to be with us Monday. Now about injunctions: We have an injunction and we're going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.
We need all of you. And you know what's beautiful tome, is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. It's a marvelous picture. Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and say, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Somehow, the preacher must say with Jesus, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor."
And I want to commend the preachers, under the leadership of these noble men: James Lawson, one who has been in this struggle for many years; he's been to jail for struggling; but he's still going on, fighting for the rights of his people. Rev. Ralph Jackson, Billy Kiles; I could just go right on down the list, but time will not permit. But I want to thank them all. And I want you to thank them, because so often, preachers aren't concerned about anything but themselves. And I'm always happy to see a relevant ministry.
It's all right to talk about "long white robes over yonder," in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It's all right to talk about "streets flowing with milk and honey," but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can't eat three square meals a day. It's all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God's preachers must talk about the New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.
Now the other thing we'll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it.
We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, "God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."
And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
But not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank—we want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. So go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something we don't do ourselves at SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We're just telling you to follow what we're doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies in Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in."
Now these are some practical things we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base. And at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. I ask you to follow through here.
Now, let me say as I move to my conclusion that we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But with him, administering first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother. Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop. At times we say they were busy going to church meetings—an ecclesiastical gathering—and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that "One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony." And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather to organize a "Jericho Road Improvement Association." That's a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effort.
But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 miles, or rather 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?" "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.
Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.
You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up. The only question I heard from her was, "Are you Martin Luther King?"
And I was looking down writing, and I said yes. And the next minute I felt something beating on my chest. Before I knew it I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. And that blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that's punctured, you drown in your own blood—that's the end of you.
It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."
And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.
And they were telling me, now it doesn't matter now. It really doesn't matter what happens now. I left Atlanta this morning, and as we got started on the plane, there were six of us, the pilot said over the public address system, "We are sorry for the delay, but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane. And to be sure that all of the bags were checked, and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane, we had to check out everything carefully. And we've had the plane protected and guarded all night."
And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. — Dr. Martin Luther King
My Initial Response To Jamie Wheals Recent News Letter (Warning, Dark)
This is my initial response to Jamie Wheal’s recent newsletter. And, understand one thing, I have a huge crush on Jamie Wheal, I think he’s a good man.
Find our way back to what, Jamie, “It’s the economy, stupid” or dropping acid in Golden Gate Park? Were the good old days, the caveman days, or those frolicking moments when we ran wooly mammoths off of cliffs? Put like this, Jamie... Go back to 1968 or 1958 or 1929 or... This cheap energy, modern industrial system was morally bankrupt and broken before it was born. The Internet and viral memes have stuck our ugliness in our faces and made us confront our madness or embrace our madness, and because NOW is now, we think this broken, violent, dishonest crap is something new and exclusive to wee little "us." Greed and violence, you little Peaky Blinder, Boardwalk Empire, Tony Soprano, God Father, Vietnam War, 1929 Crash, Great Depression, WWI, WWII, Napoleon in Russia, Kill All The Brutes, Empire Baby, Roman Empire, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Poll Pot, Mongol Hoards, Jack The Ripper, Greed Is Good, Wolf of Wall Street, Debt and Circuses, WikiLeaks, Who Killed Kenedy, Irish Potato Famine, no germ theory, age of reason, US Civil War, Jim Crow, Leopold II, Scythian raiders, Samurai, Rape of Nanking, Serial Killer psychopath and on and on and on and on, little, I noticed moral high ground fella. WTF do we have to call it, Human Nature? And yet, we are sublime and beautiful all the same. Homo Sapiens had a good run and never really wised up. The Stoic Sage, Taoist Monk, Budding Buddha, Celtic Hermit, Kung Fu, Beatitudes Jesus, Joseph Campbell, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, Bhagavad Gita, Book of Five Rings, Be Like Water, Socrates, Pericles, Marcus Aurelius, Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Qin Shi Huang, Man's Search for Meaning, Cosmos, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Conquest of Happiness, This is Water, Meditations, Letters from a Stoic, Oh, The Places You Go!, An Intimate History of Humanity, The Road Less Traveled, thing never really caught on.
[Read Jamies Wheal’s book— “Recapture The Rapture.” Do it now.]
Wisdom, it seems was never valued enough to supplant our murderous tendencies. Although, “Wisdom” can be a nice business model for a very special niche market. So now we run our omnicidal killing machine, AKA modern civilization with post, post-modern tendencies, right over the cliff. Splat, the coyote, doesn't walk away from reality after all. “Boil, boil, toil, and trouble.” The devil may care and we were created in God’s image. Now that’s entertainment.
Jamie’s recent newsletter:
You may well have missed this last week, but a relatively unknown podcaster posted a string of tweets outlining the alt-right/Capitol Riot justification for how they see things, and why revolt appears reasonable these days. Tucker Carlson devoted over 7 minutes to it on his show, and then DT retweeted it too. After that, all hell broke loose in the chattering classes.
Our buddy Tristan Harris (Social Dilemma, Center for Humane Tech) sent it to a small group of us, asking for thoughts on the breakdown in shared reality.
I'd been conceiving of writing something like this reply for ages but resisting almightily because I can't stand the political, reactive, culture war washing machine––but it was a good group to woodshed the ideas with, and now that it's written, figured I'd pass along. (and if any of these conclusions don't jive with your own particulars, just play through, it's the larger point and pattern, not the pissing match we're trying to illuminate here)
So, if you've kinda wondered why/how we've all got festering splinters in our minds these days––here's my sense of a bit of what's been happening...
My sense is "Russia gate" is only one of several epistemic schisms we've had in the past five years, and each one has prompted a specific maladaptive response in the collective psyche.
Few examples (would be curious if you guys are tracking others):
1) Access Hollywood Tape Never has any national candidate survived a comparable smoking gun scandal. Without it, #Metoo would likely have never happened with the same virulence.
2) Trump/Putin 🤝 Bizarre repeat coziness, never before seen between US and its arch rival. Combined with the Cambridge Analytica scandal and shock election, it prompted all sorts of WTF scrambling for meaning as the Poles shifted––suddenly Republicans were defending a special relationship with a KGB mastermind and Dems were looking to the FBI/CIA/NSA, who had been the villains of Civil Rights and social justice as their potential saviors.
3) Mueller 🤠 Fit everyone's idea of a beyond reproach Cary Grant/John Wayne traditional father figure/G-Man, and after two years of hyping and hoping that Daddy would sort it all out and put us back on the tracks of Platonic Truth...nothing. He just sort of faded to black while Barr crowed from the rooftops "nothing to see here!" and bizarrely, everyone sort of went along with it, despite pages and pages of damning findings.
4) Epstein TWO US PRESIDENTS AND THE ROYAL FAMILY directly and repeatedly implicated in a massive super shady something or other and then the motherfucker up and dies in prison with no video tape! Were it not for Epstein, we likely would never have had pastel QAnon and #savethechildren. His spooky island temple and little black book gave proof to the PizzaGate fever dream.
5) Global/National/Partisan Response to Virus 🦠 The crisis playbook for the past fifty odd years has been transnational in flavor, with orgs like the WHO and CDC leading the way, and all G6-8 Nations' leaders falling in line, generally sharing resources and data and emphasizing coordinated response to global events. (see 9/11 initial response, etc.). None of it was perfect, but that was at least the dominant coordinating narrative. FFW to 2020 and we have US Gov't casting aspersions at those efforts, suppressing testing, slandering public health experts, refusing to mobilize a national emergency power to coordinate supplies (even within and for US citizens), explicitly suppressing aid to some states due to the political affiliation of their governors or voting persuasion of their citizens, and, perhaps for the first time ever, making bog-standard basic protocols like mask usage, a signifier of tribal identity. A complete and utter abdication of national unity and global responsibility.
5) George Floyd His words "I can't breathe" ricocheted around the world, and became the rallying cry in Paris, London, et al. The notion of "to serve and protect" being overridden by a seemingly murderous cop and then militarized police response to peaceful protests (Never mind the parsing of the event, actual stats on black on blue violence etc etc––just talking about the psychic shockwaves of the flashpoint itself). Without this and "good people on both sides of Charlottesville" we would not have #defundthepolice, Antifa or CRT/Anti-racism in quite the same way.
6) Wuhan Lab/NIH/Fauci It's a bit like post-mortems showing that Bush sr. admin helped Bin Laden family members exit the US post 9/11. All a bit too cozy, too much overlap to be pure coincidence, wheels within wheels, conspiracy fodder. And the fact that mainstream press and even peer reviewed journals like the Lancet all fell in line, despite no compelling epidemiological "smoking gun" to confirm natural origin, fully undermined their later backtracking. (to say nothing of all the inept and shifting guidance from masks to distancing to vaxes, boosters, openings)
7) Capitol Riot The party of law and order fomenting and even glorifying lawlessness (doesn't matter how justified or not you think it was, it's a HUGE flip for conservatives to be in that role and not the radical left)––with half the right claiming victory and the other half claiming false flag op, is evidence of the epistemic confusion.
There's tons of others, at least half of which sprang from Trump's admin––from villainizing the "rain, snow, dark of night" Post Office as partisan stooges, to upending Tea Party deficit vigilance and breaking budgets, to voter suppression in a "free democracy" suddenly being talked about out loud, to RINO now meaning (an actual conservative who refused to bend the knee to Trumpism vs. the other way round) to "fake news" becoming the rallying cry of a president who produced more documented lies than any figure in history––it's all become classic schizophrenic double bind territory––the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance is to go crazy, or to subscribe to a grand narrative that can explain it all.
My sense is that partisans on both sides have been putting thumbs on the scales of their propaganda engines for a while, but if you had to call it, I'd make the case that the Blue Church well and truly lost its mind during the Trump admin due to many of the schisms mapped above (amplified by a totally captured right wing news media), and upon realizing that the old rules of fair play and debate had been thoroughly shredded and they were getting their asses kicked, abandoned their own standards of due process, fact-checking, right of reply, etc with a vengeance. To the point where "liberals" are openly advocating some the most illiberal policies in the public sphere, in the name of leveling injustice.
#yesallmen #whitefragility etc. could not exist as the "guilty until proven innocent" stand that they are, without the trampling of good faith civil discourse.
Unfortunately, the Blue Church/Mainstream media has been serving up a hat trick of own goals, so they've lost huge chunks of whatever reasoned credibility they might have once held––the meritocrats and technocrats that held claim to running media, government, academic and NGOs since Bretton Woods, have all effectively shat the bed, and we're now looking at Turchin's thesis of overproduction of elites coming home.
See recent Atlantic article: The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse
Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford) JD Vance (Yale Law) Bannon (HBS/Goldman) Hawley (Stanford/Rhodes), Cruz (Princeton), and lots of others are exploiting the populist turn and there's nothing strong enough at the center of the old consensus to hold them back.
***
Hope that helps map the wonky-ass terrain we've been traversing and maybe even sheds some light on "splinters in your own mind"––little nagging wounds that have festered under the skin.
It’s not always super fun to have to go back through a litany like that––in many cases we’d all prefer to forget what we’ve just been through––but in order to find our way back to common ground, it’s important to note all of the things that knocked us off track.
We haven’t gone crazy, the world has. And if we’re going to find our way back to mutuality, respect and shared commitments to Life, Liberty and that ever-elusive Pursuit of Happiness, it’s important to reclaim our cognitive liberty. No one should ever be renting space in our heads, without our consent.]
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.
The Rivalrous Game "The West" Invested and China is Winning
The game the anglo cultures invented is now being played expertly by China. China is winning simply because the Players in the West are greedy and ethically and morally bankrupt. The rich get obscenely more decadent while compliant consumers meekly and mindlessly further the destruction of habitat. On a biblically dramatic scale, we know not what we are doing. If we did, we might change direction. Instead, the machine makes us high, and we keep feeding the machine.
This blog post is a long, detailed, and entertaining read that you won't want to miss. Trust me; it's fun to understand what's going on. Don't worry; you don't have to do anything. Simply enjoy being aware of it all.
The Most Important Project
The Internet of Influencers, intellectuals, and floggers of all things is a crowded space. Everyone is busily looking for their thousand true fans. Regardless of what we are learning about or explaining to others, there is one thing we all have in common, we all drink from the same information trough.
We are using the Internet to research whatever we are interested in; in many cases, we subscribe to the same aggregators, email lists, YouTube channels, newsletters, etc. We probably have read the same books.
Some of us are better presenters, more exciting talent than others. Some of us are in it for the money, others for clicks, and many of us are still doing things online for its pure joy and adventure.
However, it is irksome when presenters become so full of themselves that they believe, repeatedly, that they have somehow scooped the rest of us. Most of the time, I hear people present things I have already read about or heard about from other sources. In many cases, months ago. Still, many people feel like because they are saying it, it's finally going to break. We all are biased towards our fame, whether our influence is genuinely significant or not. We are motivated to maintain our audience and grift audience share from others in the same space.
I am a follower of current events and very curious about many things. My curiosity doesn't make me unique — I'm simply that kind of person. It takes different people a certain amount of time to pay attention to a story or an event. By the time they catch up, they are often too late to call their reporting a scoop. They are simply parroting, albeit in their unique way, information that they have digested from older sources. Regurgitating info while thinking we are original is reasonably typical. I am not criticizing people for taking a stab at a subject.
We should, however, be humble and acknowledge our sources, not just the things we have recently looked at, but things that our predecessors uncovered months ago. We should admit to being influenced by trends in the culture, the zeitgeist, and even our prejudices. We are interdependently swimming in the same ocean of life. Very few of us will ever have an original idea or break a story that most people don't know about. We shouldn't get too enamored by taking credit for things.
When I find an excellent cause, I always hope the information market gets saturated with contributors who support the cause — this is how we can create universal validation and adoption of something good. It helps when the information is out there and unavoidable. I am not talking about propaganda, marketing material, or public relations. You know what I mean.
I would love it if all of my Internet Intellectuals encouraged people to support Daniel Schmachtenberger's Consilience Project. And no, I am not saying Daniel came up with this all by himself or even that the idea is his original idea. He always works with a team of amazing people and sources from everywhere any necessary support.
My father had a project like The Consilience Project back in the 1970s, "Catalyst Complex." Sometimes it takes too long for great things to take off.
In my ever so humble and unimportant opinion, The Consilience Project is the most critical initiative in the world today. I am hoping it catches on worldwide. I won't explain it here; please follow the links below and learn about it. We must learn how to make sense of our increasingly fast-paced, scientific, technological world culture and everything having to do with what it is and how it got this way. We need to make better sense of the word to make better decisions and have more and higher quality agency and sovereignty. If we don't, we will not make it much further into the future, and our quality of life will drastically diminish.
For what it's worth, Buliamti.
Jim Rutt Show
https://www.jimruttshow.com/currents-daniel-schmachtenberger/
The Consiliense Projet
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 2012.
Status, Money, Fear and the Story Structure of The Big Game A
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
I listened to Chris Hedges on the Sheer Intelligence podcast the other day. Robert Sheer and Hedges are very concerned about Julian Assange. Sheer was amazed that more people in the media profession and journalism were not as concerned. That got me thinking again about what I’ve noticed since I was pretty young, something that I think anyone reading this has understood as well. Status and money are vital to people in our culture. Suppose an opinion becomes detrimental to your ability to maintain your wealth and status. In that case, it’s in your interest to change that opinion or set it aside and focus on things that protect you. Our species is like that, and one doesn’t have to audit Robert Sapolsky’s lectures to know it.
Then I realized how “The West” is an astoundingly wonderful place to be rich. Increasingly other countries that used to be poorer are becoming that way too, as consumerism takes hold worldwide. China also has lots of fun ways for people to spend money. Japan has for a long time. In the United States, one can buy almost anything, more things than in most places, and more conveniently. Do you want a sports franchise, a ski resort, a superyacht, a private jet, a house in some of the most amazing cities on earth? It’s all there for the buying. The wealthiest countries in Europe are also like this; they are very nice places to be rich. In the T.V. series “The City on the Hill,” an immigrant from northern Ireland tells her new American friend that she “came for the money, of course.” What are refugees looking for; is it true that the only path to safety and security is cash?
If you are working for the Players, you may have the price of a ticket to the ball game and a six-pack, and that might be enough for you, as long as you can provide for your family and get a bit of respect from friends, family, and workmates. There are plenty of fun things for servants to do in an affluent society.
Entertainment is big business, and some well-paid entertainers are in media and journalism. They maintain the pro-business narrative needed to keep the consumer credit system rolling. If you are lucky, you get paid well to be a part of the system. Happy Days! You are a son of Uncle Sam.
Then I thought about a Netflix series I watched called “Sons of Sam,” and I realized how controlled that story was while it happened. The resolution of the case was the end of a perfect narrative structure. There is also a relatively tragic personal story of Author Maury Terry who starts connecting dots until his whole world became a connect-the-dots, never-ending obsession. The world can become a lonely place when you go too far down into a rabbit hole.
Of course, a group like “Q” conspiracy theorists must emerge from this system. Maury Terry was a prime example that you would inevitably see some pretty ugly connections if you look hard enough.
It’s interesting how traumatizing events must always have a beginning, middle, and end. They must be tied up neatly like a T.V. drama. There has to be an ending where the good guys win, and people can feel safe again. The talk therapy that Gabor Mate espouses is inaccessible to most people. Our culture isn’t concerned that deeply with the health and welfare of ordinary people.
Look at Epstein, at G.W. Bush on the aircraft carrier, Obama patting himself on the back when U.S. special forces killed Osama. The D.C. riots burned out just in time for investigators and prosecutors to chase down the insurrectionists and get justice. Biden rode in with his tried and true bit players to save the day after Trump tried to tear everything down. Wow, that was close; now everything is safe and regular again.
If there were no bad guys, we’d have to create one, which is what our culture does. Why do we need a war on drugs? Why did some folks at various agencies miss the Soviet Union so much? Because many folks work for people who want to be Players, they would lose their wealth and status without bad guys. The Players have a lot more, but the bit players have just enough to feel terrified of losing what they have.
Yes, I know, there are bad guys out there, and we must protect ourselves from them. But can you imagine that there are some cultures where there are far fewer problems and far fewer bad people, fewer sick people?
To keep ordinary people from tearing down a corrupt system, you need to keep them distracted, busy and just enough stressed that they haven’t much energy left to think deeply about things. When the system starts to break, the best distraction is a feared enemy or a criminal gang — “super-preditors.” Make people afraid, even if there is nothing really to be fearful of, and then have the powers that be come in and fix it. If you are a fan of history, you can see this playing out since the dawn of civilization.
The product the C.I.A. provides the U.S. government is all about this game of fear and hostility. It’s vital to the core values of American culture, American exceptionalism, and American innocence.
The pandemic is like Assange and Son of Sam; it provides a narrative for people to obsess over so they can release tension without focusing on the systemic and structural nature of their problems. It is always more profitable for The Players to have a crisis; it distracts from the real issues and consolidates more power and control. This game of thrones is the core of the system’s logic. There is no need for a conspiracy. Evildoers must be identified and defeated by heroes within the system over and over again. The cycle is relentless. Look at how connected Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein were. Corrupt people in high places are central players within the Big Game A.
It is also essential to maintain the belief in the population that ordinary people can become Players, someone with power and control and vast wealth and resources. That’s the dream. We constantly fantasize about what we’d do if we were Players. It keeps us going. Would we be a good Emporer or just exact vengence?
We worship football hoodlums and apologize for their horrific crimes because you see, they are football fans, addicts. They can’t help it. And we think it would be cool to get away with murder. These brutes become heroes, with popular YouTube channels garnering millions of views. Why is that?
A news organization is lucky to find a salacious story that will sell longer than the usual 24-hour news cycle. We call this market a news cycle, and they are cycling so fast now we can’t remember what was in vogue three months ago.
You must train yourself not to be taken in by this. It’s your only hope.
Think of all of these stories’ seemingly bizarre connections as a kind of six degrees of separation. If you look hard enough, everything is connected. Our problems are systemic, structural, and complex. We need to think slowly, clearly, and long term to find a way forward that isn’t this same old racket of violence and neglect.
Many people, groups, and organizations are working on providing pathways out of this insanity, but I fear it won’t catch on. And that’s what keeps me up at night.
Profits First— Preface
Communities and Societies are built on trust.
Trust can be inspired in very different ways. Think of “In God We Trust” on the dollar bill, or an International Financial Consultant’s business card that might say, “A & M Investments, a business built on trust.”
A “Profits First” ethos is unsustainable for many reasons. Many books have been written across many thought domains, if not explicitly then implicitly on this very subject.
At the scale of our 21st-century science and technology-driven world, we can't avoid prosocial considerations or global resource management and sustainability questions. We all live in a networked, global culture. There are cultural differences across nation-states, of course, but no one who understands our world would deny that our economy is global.
careful management of available resources.
(It would be best to understand the origins of words, how words evolve, and their significance to various cultures and societies at any given time. The same goes for concepts, ideas, and theories.)
Suppose we desire to go back to a period where we live in traditional communities and cultures of a much smaller scale, say, communities that thrived over nine thousand years ago. In that case, we don't need to worry much about sustainability or prosocial issues. Back then, we would most probably possess an animistic reverence for nature and our environment that, even though it would not have been scientific, would have helped us understand and care for our ecosystem in the hope that it would sustain our children in the future. Our community culture would help to reinforce norms and best practices that were good for the community and its environment.
Communities are groups of people where everyone is easily recognizable and where everyone has a stake in everyone else's success. We all work together to thrive.
a particular area or place considered together with its inhabitants.
Jordon Hall has an interesting way of articulate areas surrounding community and society.
At our present scale, this kind of community exists in a limited sense with layer upon layer of organizational and ideological structures that must exist to drive society's tremendously creative and productive power. These are societies governed by abstractions that serve the machine, the greater good. Religion, philosophy, ideology, and later physics, and science were all used to varying degrees to structure and systematize extremely complex institutions needed to achieve greater and greater leverage of various forms of power.
Suppose we are going to solve the many challenging problems of today. In that case, we will need to understand how science, technology, education, and wisdom traditions might combine to assist in the mindful development of cultures that place greater value on natural services, our environment, our resources, and general health.
We need a genuinely pro-life world order. We cannot rely solely on competition to achieve success; we must work harder at diplomacy, cooperation, and collaboration.
Although we may be in some sense winning, if we can't approach the development of power more wisely (wisdom is a big, amorphous bucket, I know), the world we know can only, ultimately, be a death machine.
The changes required to ensure a future for Homo Sapiens requires us to have faith and a rich imagination. We must re-engineer, restructure, and redesign everything having to do with society while maintaining the best elements of what we have created and developed to this point. We need nothing short of a new calendar. Instead of thinking of all the days to come as being A.D. (After Death), we need to know that from this day forward, from day one, we are living in a Pro-Life world.
We don't progress so much as continue, and it would be hard to argue against continuing to make things a bit better.
Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future. —William Wordsworth
If you allow me to indulge my curation habit, I suggest you listen to this Pitchfork Economics podcast episode.
Do wealthy Americans have too much power—with Thom Hartmann.
Is the U.S. an oligarchy, or does it just have a bunch of super-rich people living in it? Is there a difference? Author Thom Hartmann joins Nick and Paul to explain the relationship between wealth and American political power and share some of the research that went into his latest book, ‘The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.’
Thom Hartmann is the #1 progressive radio talk show host in the US and a New York Times bestselling author.
Twitter: @Thom_Hartmann
Prep For A More Perfect Union
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” — Abraham Lincoln
By now, most of us know about the prepper community. I have to say that I like preppers. Preppers, or what we used to call survivalists, are people interested in things that might be critical in an emergency. Some of them have diverse skill sets that they've been developing for many years. There are many decent YouTube channels, websites, and blogs offering sound advice about survival and thriving through an emergency. Canadian Prepper has an extensive online store with all the gear one might need. Acquiring things is fun.
One can argue about how effective any given "prep" might be or whether particular fears and concerns are warranted. However, I feel that, in general, preppers are focused on doing good things for their families and communities. Many seem to have an active, healthy lifestyle that they enjoy. At any rate, what's wrong with being prepared for the worst.
If society breaks down and you are on your own, you won't survive very long, no matter how well prepared you are.
Imagine if you had a very nice, well supplied and defended farm. Suppose some gang wanted it, and you didn't have a platoon of special operative mercenaries or a larger community willing to protecting it. In that case, the bad guys could easily take everything from you. If you are a billionaire paying a private army, what happens when your currency is no longer worth anything to your soldiers? How long would it take for the team's alpha to depose you? Think of Mongolian or native American raiders; heck, if you are not interested in history, think of the tribes in the TV show, The Walking Dead. There will always be another group with good reasons to take your resources.
So if you want to be well prepared, you will be a member of a well-organized team of skilled people.
We live on a fantastic scale. Please think of how extensive, productive, and elaborate the global economy is; what's more, we are all dependent on every institution, business, and person who helps run the global economy. If you aren't, you live in a cave in the wilderness somewhere. Even if you are off-grid, you depend on institutions that afford you the right to private property. Unless you are squatting, slash, trespassing in the wastelands somewhere. Yes, even the wilderness is under some institution's dominion.
It is fascinating to learn how indigenous tribes or nations thought of the resources required to sustain themselves. We are far from hunter-gatherers. We are dependent on container ships, jet airplanes, and Satellites, for goodness sake. Most of us couldn't live without a networked computer in our pockets.
When I hear extreme libertarians complain about the government or this or that institution, I think to myself, go ahead, try to get on without them, and see how well you do. When people spend their days on conspiracy websites where bloggers complain about Klaus and The Great Reset, I think of how helpless and powerless they must feel and how confused they are about the social system they’ve inherited.
It is tough to set up a sustainable institution. And once you have something, you need to maintain it and evolve to meet new needs and challenges. History has a lot to teach us here.
What does it take to form a "more perfect union," and who is in charge of that project?
What we think of as democracy today may be far from democratic. The main reason is that I don't believe the Demos (whole citizen living within a particular city-state) is up to the challenge of taking responsibility for the Kratos (power or rule.) What runs our world is corporate interests. A person's utility serves the profit-making machine that feeds the upper classes. Today's democracy is similar to classical periods of history when the power to rule and vote was limited to members of a club of "citizens" who were then trusted to look after laborers, slaves, merchants, farmers, soldiers, etc. The only difference now is that people who don't directly serve the corporate class's interests are arguably much better off than in antiquity.
But, of course, one might say that people back then were illiterate, more straightforward, with ritual and magic to frame their lives. They didn't have to bother with understanding artificial intelligence while nursing a dozen addictions. Today, if we don't know about the sixth extinction, quantum computing, enlightenment era political philosophy, nuclear bombs on hypersonic missiles, climate change, quantum mechanics, etc., we can hardly call ourselves well informed. Our ancient brothers and sisters only had to fear the usual wars and marauding gangs. If Roman Legions could keep things stable, then let Legions be Legions and get on with life.
So what would it take to engage in the project of forming "a more perfect union?" In my opinion, it would take a much better-educated society. Who decides what a well-educated society is if not all of us, and we need to take responsibility to make that happen. We need to step up and take power but in the right way. Being more responsible, having more agency, and sovereignty starts with educating ourselves.
Social systems, cultures, economies, etc., have changed throughout history and will continue to change.
We must understand how our institutions work and how they operate in concert to manage all the services we take for granted. We need to comprehend what's wrong with our institutions, with our systems if we are going to reform them and improve them structurally. Our challenges today are unlike any that have come before.
We can be productive members of society, working to make things better, overcoming complex challenges in our rapidly changing world, or one can sit back and complain as if our only options were violent revolution or living in a cave.
Radical change is necessary, but today that is a very delicate endeavor. If we don't do it right, we lose everything; we lose the future.
We may be frustrated with people working in corporations, working for government agencies, or the myriad of diverse institutions required for civilized life on a global scale. Still, without them, no matter how well prepared you might be, you wouldn't last long.
After this world falls apart, it will take generations of survivors to get back to anything resembling civilization. I don't think we want that to happen. I mean, isn't continuing to learn about our amazing universe, our unique selves, and everything else that informs us a wonderful thing? Don't you want to see thousands of future generations have a chance to take this marvelous adventure?
Our only real option is to understand in-depth what risks we face and discover ways to avert these threats through a vast community effort— working together within well-governed institutions to ensure the world doesn't fall apart.
Let's not let our emotions get the best of us; instead, let's let our minds inform our feelings and be the best we can be.
What's Left To Say? Lots, and lots more to learn.
I'm sharing a video of Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, dark web public intellectual, and his professor in exile wife, Heather E. Heying, also an evolutionary biologist discussing their opinions on vaccine safety in a broad, nuanced, and contextualized way. They are not medical experts, math whizzes, like Bret's brother, Eric, or statisticians, but they are sincerely making an effort to make sense of the subject. They have left most, not all, of their ideological peccadillos to the side. This type of expounding of informed opinion is my kind of candy, a treat with a probability of an upside.
I have several good friends in the "Scamdemic" camp. I've followed that narrative for many months now. I find these things entertaining; I don't think perversely so. I learn something from it. The mayhem and confusion surrounding the pandemic are grist for humor and improvised rants. However, the pandemic continues to be tragic. Making a bit of fun can be a stress reducer sometimes; trust me on this.
One of my friends sent me yet another opinion piece from a Doctor telling us how the world has hysterically gotten it all wrong, and every institution is in on it. Sorry, if you want to steelman the piece, please read it. I find it interesting, although I am not a "Truther."
Here's the link: "What's Left to Say?" The author is Dr. Malcolm Kendrick.
Who is Dr. Malcolm Kendrick's (Scottish Doctor-GP-author, speaker, sceptic.) Have you look at Dr. Kendrick's book titles. I am not against this man. I'm interested in "The Great Collestol Con" as much as any older man with a cardiovascular system. I'm curious about where the man is coming from ideologically; it gives me information about how the good Doctor arrives at his opinions. In my opinion, his work is as biased as any I've seen. One could get one's best advice on cholesterol in the blood from a chiropractor or a GP, but I believe that there are better sources of information on it. I'm not saying that he didn't do his research for his books. Maybe he did excellent research. I have not read any of his books. As far as his article is concerned, what do I know? I can only say that I smell the Scamdemic Gish Gallop all over it; call it intuition.
A claim to fame:
(Just one week prior to this talk, delivered at CrossFit HQ during a CrossFit Health event on Dec. 15, 2018, Kendrick's Wikipedia page was deleted because, as he explains, "I'm now considered dangerous enough to be removed from public consumption." In this talk, he shares one thread of his "dangerous" thinking — a thread that follows the distortion of data pertaining to cholesterol and statin research, which he explores in greater detail in his second book, Doctoring Data.) https://www.crossfit.com/essentials/malcolm-kendrick-ddc-lecture
Don't get me wrong; I enjoy the bad pharma, bad science books, and ideas as much as any curious fellow. I like dangerous. I like heterodox thinkers, as long as they can be trusted a bit. Some people up that alley are earnest, and some are just trying to make waves and make a name for themselves. We will all choose our white jackets based on our own biases and call it science's truth. But science is complex and scientific opinion is always provisional. New Data is always coming in.
I'd like to see what Heather and Bret's take on his piece is; I'd like to follow their thought processes as they puzzled through it. I think, if they wanted to, they'd present an earnest effort.
To my "Samdemic" friends, I often suggest spending a half-day with Dr. Mark Crislip; I'm guessing they could learn something valuable from a skeptical infectious disease Doctor during a pandemic. I've followed him for 15 years. He's undoubtedly taught this medical dummy a thing or two. Bully for me.
I like that Heather and Bret refrain from pretending to be experts in the domain of medicine while making a sincere effort to comb through some info on the Covid-19 vaccine subject. The examples in their video were a bit generic; I have to say. I mean, SNOPES and NBC—FFS—you'd think they'd know better. Perhaps they didn't want to invest the time in throwing up some better sources to make their point. Being as lazy as your average man, I can certainly understand this. I am not calling them lazy.
While I'm at it, I'd pass Dr. Kendrick's blog post by Steve Novella; he is a Sceptic with a 'K' from the USA and a neurosurgeon; I'd also love to see how Dr. Crislip filters Dr. Kendrick’s science-informed opinion writing. They all follow the science; they all read graphs and run stats. It is not all rocket science, you know. It takes decades to become an expert in one domain of science if you are not a certified genius. It is a fact that experts in their specific relevant fields have more nuanced views of their subjects of research and practice. It might help to listen to them sometimes. We might learn something.
Update: It is a rare talent to make complex subjects accessible. Zdogg (DR. ZUBIN DAMANIA, MD) has a great sense of humor, expertise and explains things nicely, calmly, and humorously.
From The Mud— Agape
Try to imagine what the world would be like right now if we didn't have vaccine science/technology. Take your time. Next year won't be much different from last year. That I can tell ya. The problems that were causing the most damage to people and life on earth will still be here, accelerating, and getting worse. Please forgive me for saying that, but we are adults here and we can face up to the challenges of the 21st Century, right.
The strange thing is, for the first time in my life, I almost feel like I can't imagine what the world will be like in 10 years. I'm not talking about iPhones, VR Goggles, The Premier League, The NBA, or Politics in general, I'm talking about culture, society, children, the environment, travel...
[materialism (n.) 1748, "philosophy that nothing exists except matter" (from French matérialisme); see material (n.) + ism. As this naturally tended toward "opinion or tendency based upon purely material interests," it came to be used by late 19c. for any low view of life (opposed to idealism). As "a way of life based entirely on consumer goods," by 1930.]
People only seem to strive for more things. Right now, people across the United States think they can look forward to grand, mad, mayhem on Black Friday next year, a very, very commercial Christmas time, and the mother of all hangovers on New Year's Day. They think they will get vaccinated and happy days will be restored when the arm pain subsides.
They didn't notice the real threats to their health in 1979, 2008, 1018 and they won't in 2023. Tend your garden, friends, cultivate love, enjoy the days. Agape! Maybe Jesus got a little bit of his concept of love from the Greeks, God existed before the Greeks, right? Let your imagination fly to the heavens. Many things are improbable and anything is possible. You will still find your feet in the mud at the end of the day. Life, what a blessing.