Instead of: Thinking, Honour, Sacrifice, Joy and Love
We are totally convinced we have a right to cheat – and even more furious that that makes us losers
Note - reading time is not as auto-estimated - TONS of links follow the main piece.
Hey Folks!
Today I want to do something direct and ‘evergreen’ instead of topical – though I will use a few fairly recent examples to make my point clearer. And the real point is – bullshit will no longer cut it – not on any side, and we are all so deeply addicted to our habits of bullshit, that we are choosing to doom ourselves – voluntarily – rather than adopt some very simple and time-tested techniques of humanity, to do better.
My regular readers will already know the next thing I’m going to say – by simple I DON’T MEAN EASY. When we (word-spewing observers and critics, on platforms large and small) talk about better ways to do things, we all too often pretend that what works for us, should work for everyone – not so. (In fact silly). But we can share clues.
A friend of mine recently reminded me of a quote from my work (of many years ago) and it holds up very nicely.
"Some people have some options – some have others – but we all have the option to learn how to feed our better energies, be better friends, love truer and more fully, and sacrifice – not with the deadening stiffness of machismo, but the cheerfulness of duty accepted and well borne.
Happiness isn’t about that thing or title that we don’t yet have, but the hope, empathy, curiosity and above all love that we do have. Gratitude and good humour are the key to unlocking the lessons that life is always trying to teach us, every time we slip and fall."
One of the clearest, most compact and most directly positive true and sensible things I ever wrote.
Naturally, I went digging through my (ridiculously overstuffed) files of old essays and poems, trying to find the original context of the quote – and when I did, I laughed out loud! The tasty concision was because the words were part of the advertising ‘copy’ for my second book! And ad copy must be compact! (Absolute requirement of the ‘form’). Gives some funny new, far less art-sacred meaning, to one of my favourite quotes from Lorne Coutts, a wise and relentless old artist friend of mine, who said:
“New mediums force new risks”
Which is not only absolutely true – but also a great reminder about how easy it is to re-invigorate our pleasure or excitement with our creative work (or start something brand new), when we have dug ourselves into a track of too much safety and habit, to still be reaching the true risky and juicy stuff.
Not saying that ‘everyone is or should be an artist’ (nope, everyone is what they are, which varies A LOT – and that is just fine). Only that we all get to feeling boxed-in sometimes, and when we are, it is easy to look around at the walls of our trap, and forget that we made that mental trap ourselves, by convincing ourselves that those confining walls of comfortable habit are the only possible way.
One of the themes I come back to again and again is the difference between a citizen and a consumer – and the reason I return there, is that citizens might perhaps still change our many lemming strategies into humane and survivable ways of being (societal, political, environmental and economic), whereas consumers (the vast majority, in every describable faction) – don’t even think that’s their job.
As I mentioned recently, when we are convinced that we have no influence or stake in things, we retreat from courage duty and responsibility and revert instead to infantile complaint, selfishness and ingratitude – bitterness is all we can taste, because it is all a sad consumer can earn themselves.
But I’m already in trouble – just from the word ‘convinced’. Do I mean to suggest that people who approach the world with a citizen mindset have some grandiose dreams of huge personal impact?
Nope! In my experience (and this has held true for a half a century, despite all culture shifts) citizen minded people are infinitely more realistic about all aspects of reality, than consumerist-egotists.
But they are capable of extrapolation – what happens if none of us stand for principle? Zero principle.
What happens if millions more than do already, take a stand for principle? Principle might live again!
Consumerists like to say “You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.” Well, citizens understand that you can’t have a society, unless some people act like they might have an impact, even if they know that they almost certainly won’t. Drop in the ocean? – penny on the pile? – or just maybe the straw that breaks the camel’s back – remembering that every straw before that, which seemed utterly useless at the time – still counted toward that sudden state-change total!
But let me return to the bitterness point – because that is as important as can be. When we box ourselves into a mental trap where we are convinced that the proven impossible is absolutely necessary (whether consumerists or citizens) we set our minds up to be anger-generators, all day long. And when we operate angry, we miss chances to be useful, responsible, kind – even to accept love (purpose) from others.
The world has way more than enough objective things to be angry about, as it is – we really ought not to work so hard on being our own happiness-opponents! (though I fall prey to this myself, all the time).
One reason we get attached to our own mental prisons is that the modern world doesn’t offer us (territorial hominids that we are) any territory! This is extremely unnerving for critters like us, and lacking any solid and reliable physical home-range in the world, we shift a lot of those ancient longings onto complexes of ideas.
But that just means that we end up staying inside a prison which makes us miserable, because it is more comforting and less frightening emotionally, than risking responsibility, relevance, pain and JOY.
I know, I know – we’re supposed to be too cool and sophisticated to talk about joy, plainly. What if we offend someone else by having a different definition of it? Or make someone who is sad feel bad, for even suggesting that such a thing exists?
Well, try the inverse – what if we never mention joy is practical? What if it becomes a fading myth, a rumour, nostalgia?
I don’t just suggest, I INSIST. And I don’t mean the transitory pleasure of a victory or an orgasm, I mean the pleasure of knowing that you did the harder thing, for the right reason, and it worked! (please note – getting personal credit for the effect is a whole different thing entirely – and often outright weakens the impact sought – be clear about how you want to be paid, ‘cause you can only be paid for a thing once).
I’m not saying that you would ever want to expect let far alone demand a practical outcome like this. The whole point of DUTY (a concept which some find almost as embarrassing to talk about as JOY) is doing the right thing, whether or not you get the result you were hoping for. It isn’t cost-benefit transactional, it is an investment in faith in yourself AND the world as a whole.
As I’ve told young artists for decades now – you will need shit-jobs and side-hustles to get by – but do those jobs well, even if they are frustrating. Train yourself for excellence, every time you do anything. Not because they are paying you enough for your excellence – but because they aren’t paying you enough for you to degrade your standards of performance in all things – make you spend your days training to be a lesser person, who is only capable of half an effort.
Yes, I spent most of my life on the left, and I can do the surly “Don’t self-exploit for greed-heads” speech also – but this isn’t that. The question is really – are we going to captain our own ship based upon negative emotional reactions to people who don’t respect us? Or use our own inner compass? (Understanding that navigation is OUR JOB – and not a matter for the reckless, or the faint of heart).
Steer by bitterness alone for long enough, and I can predict exactly where you’ll end up living!
I was delighted when people started talking about ‘brain plasticity’ – and the way we can use our brains to solve novel problems (general case) or train it to be very good at doing a particular thing, by working the problem repeatedly (special case) in which case our brain lays down special neural pathways which are expert in that task, and can operate far faster and more precisely than for general case ‘solving.’
But we actually knew all of this stuff long before we had that catchy new ‘plasticity’ way to think of it – and even a half a century ago you could find your way there from dedication to fine arts, martial arts, meditation, even surpassing efforts in science and history. Do a lot of good work in a certain direction – your brain makes new custom circuits to do even more (and even better) work! (We can all level-up).
Of course, we also want to consider “Be careful what you ask for – you just might get it!”
As a mixed up teenager in the early 80s, long before Yoga was commercialized (and then zombified) by western consumerists, I found a few yoga books in yard sales, went to a few drop-in Kundalini classes, and asked a few friends and mentors with deep knowledge for their insights, but one of the best and worst things about teenagers, is how easily they can become obsessive – mostly I just practised.
Because I was doing A LOT of yoga (a couple of hours a day, for a couple of years) I managed to train my body in some ways which were very interesting and useful to me. Most of all, I learned to be able to effectively control my own breathing, so I could overcome my reactions of anger, fear and pain.
I’ve probably talked way too much already about escaping a cult and realizing everything I was taught in my early life was considered crazy (or crazy-adjacent) by the normal outside world – the same outside world that we were always told was evil threatening and unwholesome in every last way.
When your old foundations are being knocked down all day, every day, anger fear and pain can really twist you up, and make it much harder to connect with others. Yoga gave me a beat, a way to step back from mere reaction and consider – was that meant to hurt or insult me? Or am I just working off the old foul paradigms that used to trap and hurt me, and missing where these new people are coming from – just because my safe comforting habit of old and already proven-false ‘values’ are so different?
Just that pause, that slow deep breath that let me consider and try a smile, where before I might have exploded, been paralyzed, or just slunk away in shame, made all the difference for me.
It let me be courageous (and go home proud of myself) instead of prickly, bitchy, selfish and foolish.
(‘Self-harmingly selfish’ sounds contradictory – but actually – almost every variant of selfish is).
I was also lucky enough to have no less than three talented jazz improvisers as mentors – and though it took them awhile, they taught me that false-shame (almost as bad as anger fear and pain) is the exact thing that stands in the way of our best creative work. Another trap we make – that says “I can’t.”
(or it won’t be worth it, or it won’t be appreciated, or the people I want to reach will misunderstand...)
Doesn’t matter. More precisely – that (outcome) isn’t EVER for us to say! (determined by our input)
I don’t mean we should act without even thinking about the world and people around us – but only that we should not be inhibited by our own malign fantasies about either. Study harsh reality – try anyhow!
So why did I say – be careful what you ask for, you just might get it? Well, the best piece of advice I ever got about yoga, came from a friend who had started on a spiritual track, descended into corporatism and greed (advertising) then came out the far side and returned to the spiritual, where he was most comfortable (and also felt most satisfied – even at a very small fraction of the pay).
He told me “Well sure you’re very flexible, but that’s because you’re a teenager. BE CAREFUL ABOUT YOUR BACK. There are things you can do now, that will injure you in your thirties.”
(And yes he was very experienced with yoga, in his thirties – and already had a bad back!)
But hey – kids are obsessive (and boys especially, like to test themselves against punishing standards). So I worked very hard on a few Kundalini exercises which were about gaining conscious control over your pain-threshold set-points, and then adjusting those set-points, to where you want them to be.
In essence – your brain will tell you “You’re going to be in pain soon” long before you actually are. It will then say “You can’t do this,” and “this will hurt so much soon” when those also are not true.
Finally you get to a point where you really do experience pain, and your mind says “This will hurt badly tomorrow, and you are going to injure yourself” – though this is STILL NOT TRUE.
Only somewhere way out past that initial ‘imaginary’ warning from your brain, do you encounter the threshold where your continued willpower will really and truly do you actual serious lasting injury.
So – what does dummy-boy (your now-humbled author) do? Run the test out to the extreme, of course!
For awhile, I was able to joke that my unusual ability to extend a pose as a model (try holding a raised hand pose for fifty minutes straight) was my own personal ultra-Canadian (passive aggressive) machismo.
But the really important point is that I gave myself sciatica with that willpower – by mistaking a genuine signal of injury, for just one more imaginary threshold that my brain drew from assumption.
If you haven’t had sciatica (yet) is is INCREDIBLY PAINFUL and frightening also – because no one will ever tell you for sure, when or if, it will ever go away (sometimes it does, sometimes not) months of severe pain and inability to do your favourite things, seems to be the minimum version of the lesson.
I’m so incredibly smart I’ve had the pleasure of re-learning the lesson four freakin’ times now! (though only once since I began art-model work in my forties, and that wasn’t from the model stand where I’m very careful about bracing and alignments, but from writing way too long without a chair-break).
So let me, as the old man now, pass on this key (futile?) warning. “Be Careful With Your Back, Kids!”
I already indicated two good things about being a citizen, instead of a consumer. Responsibility is more work, but it is also the only way to earn non-fleeting joy, and so, absolutely worth it! (even selfishly – as long as we have enough self-respect to really want those better possibilities and outcomes).
Many sad consumerists, in the modern world especially, actually treasure and actively reinforce their own misery, because that feels like a decent substitute for control. Deciding on a miserable world in advance, and rejecting all signals which don’t fit your assumptions, will reliably let you live there.
(comfortingly miserable – and rationalizingly helpless – forever).
Lots of “political” people end up in the same trap – defining their heroism in terms of their success at denting a brick wall with their forehead (so proud of all the cuts and scabs, they ignore the futility).
Rather hilariously, consumerists on the left and right can always see this false, dishonest and pointless ‘heroism’ in the other, but not ever in themselves. Thankfully, citizens can both laugh at themselves AND learn from their opponents, and don’t just listen to people who agree with them on all points. (Cause it is actually hard to learn ANYTHING amazing from people who already agree with you that much).
Now, there are two experience-referents which I consider myself very lucky to have, as an X-er, which my older friends never really noticed were perishable moments, and many of my younger friends have never even heard of, or thought much about.
One is Skokie – and the other is sex and relationships just before AIDS.
The Skokie Illinois case was considered the gold standard test for American free speech for decades, because it was as objectively offensive as can be in context and content (literally, Neo Nazis marching in a neighbourhood with Jewish holocaust survivors) but was judged a matter of FREEDOM above all.
The clear ideas involved were – the government has no business judging the content of speech or the hurt feelings of citizens. Only direct threats of violence are illegal – because if we stifle offensive speech, and cut off that crucial pressure-relief-valve, we are liable to see even more offensive action.
How correct the speaker is, is completely irrelevant. What other people think of them, likewise.
The reason being so clear about this limit to government power and judgment was so clearly a good choice to people on both left and right, back then, was that everyone recognized there were corrupt people on both sides, and nobody wanted anyone to abuse the power of the state, for indoctrination and thought-control. Not even their own team – for fear they would normalize it for the other guys, too!
I can remember giant arguments with my Trotskyist pals in the 80s, where they insisted “We should go and smash the press of Ernst Zundel, so he can’t publish his racist lies anymore.”
To which I said, “then how do you complain when his goons smash YOUR press tomorrow night?”
What makes this WAY WAY funnier (in the most horrifying sense) is that Ernst Zundel (Who published such ‘masterworks’ as “The Real Hitler and Why We Loved Him”) and absolutely was a demented racist scumbag would probably have been ranting alone in obscurity forever if not for his right-hand man – Grant Bristow – who was the one who organized meet-ups with other racist groups – ran the publishing and distribution side of things and even coordinated fundraising for Zundel, to make sure the movement could maximize their impact.
In our moment of madness – when the Green Party in Germany demands Nuclear Weapons – and the birthplace of John Stuart Mill now arrests citizens for re-tweets, this won’t surprise many. But a few decades ago, we were shocked when Grant Bristow was revealed to be an agent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – who used to be our FBI and CIA in one, but lost the CIA bit to the far more recently spawned CSIS (not even an original acronym, for godssakes), over catastrophically dumb shit like this.
Now of course some paranoids will insist – the government ran, funded and actively boosted the worst racist they could find in the entire country, just so they could keep tabs on all the other racists. But if you also ask the question – how many of those other racists were created by the government promotion of racism? – you will make yourself awfully nauseous, awfully fast.
Can’t help thinking of all those so-called terrorist plots, where dumb saps were caught up in grand elaborate plans by whole gangs of agents of the state (in both the US and Canada) and then encouraged, trained and even outright supplied, all by these government agents, to do crazy things none of them were otherwise interested in.
All so that they can scream “See! See! There is a threat, our budgets must be increased!” (and why not amplify fear and racism in the culture, too, just in case)
In any case, the old spirit of treasuring free speech in common, because it lets off steam and prevents far worse outcomes (which I remain sure is correct, except where government or monopolist-corporate power puts its thumb on the scales for the deliberate promotion of evil) is now way in the past. I know I am not the only one truly horrified by latest US moves to work against free speech and stifle online criticism. But Germany and England got there long before Donald did – even when it comes to actively criminalizing the deliberate (and evil) conflation of anti-war sentiment with racism. They just want a legal body-count to brag about, not a better world.
And like many others, I was horrified by the efforts the Democrats made along these lines – that is, I already noticed that principle was being burned down to the ground years ago, for the purposes of short-term tribal wins, emotional polarization and political advantage. Just as people were freaking about Trump the first time, when I still wasn’t over being mad about Obama enshrining the worst evils of W. (Hard to give people the startled reaction they expect from you, when you never did go back to sleep!)
For awhile I was keeping a list of all the things that you could not say on social media, because they were MISINFORMATION – which later turned out to be COMPLETELY TRUE ALL ALONG – and many even proven by evidence that was already widely available – at the time the speech was banned!
We fired hundreds of thousands of experienced MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS during the worst health crisis of our lifetimes – for the all-new (and completely insane) “Crime” of simple DISOBEDIENCE. And this was AFTER a Pfizer representative testified before the European parliament that “We were moving at the speed of science,” so they didn’t actually even test whether it reduced transmission.
Seriously folks – THE STATE said you must take this, to prevent transmission – when the company that made it hadn’t even checked to see whether there was ANY useful transmission prevention effect or not.
All those people who said “Follow the science” were actually saying “MY FEELINGS ARE THE WHOLE NATURE OF REALITY, SO YOU MUST OBEY THE LEMMING LEADERS I OBEY.” Because the (fake-dumb) ‘left’ got so angry and scared, they couldn’t pause, laugh and see anymore, just panicked and grabbed for some means to power desperately, even if that meant legitimizing tools that none of them would ever have thought fair, if used by others against them.
People who think prayer in school is unconscionable psychic violence, insisted on forced medical interventions. History will not be kind.
I get these next few pieces of the puzzle from Jeffrey Sachs, who is careful about how he puts them together, so I’ll try to be respectful, by using the same care. For those who don’t know – Sachs is not only an economist of high standing – and also the “Where’s Waldo” of contemporary history (there in almost every room, whenever anything truly bizarre happened) – he was asked to put together one of the earliest serious science journal papers about the proximal origins of SARS COV2.
To put it bluntly, he was used as the mouthpiece for a lie, (and was lied-to himself) because propagandists thought his personal integrity would help sell-it to the world.
Thing is – once he realized that he had been lied to, in assembling that paper (actually consulted with several of the worst people involved, who were already covering up their own malign efforts), he didn’t just keep quiet like Colin Powell or Adlai Stephenson, when their integrity was abused by the state. He got mad and he dug into it. Helps to have a lot of friends at the top of their scientific fields (trying to be useful, really does add-up).
What he found was this. SARS COV2 has one unique quality which is not shared by any zoonotic (naturally occurring) variant of the virus – a furin cleavage site – and this is what makes it so wildly contagious. He also found that (saint) Anthony Fauci himself (using USAID funding) commissioned research into inserting a furin cleavage site into a Sars virus – just to see how bad that would be, if someone tried that.
Yes I know it sounds completely INSANE when I say it that clearly. But that really is the theory under which the USA continues to do work on bioweapons, despite being a signatory to a treaty banning them. No, you see, we have to make some bioweapons, just so we can figure out how to defend against them. They did this kind of work at university labs in the USA for decades, but for this particular project, they got a little bit of push-back, so they subcontracted it to the Wuhan Virology laboratory, through Ecohealth alliance, run by Peter Dazig, who was one of the main experts who was lying to Sachs!
Of course I cannot say for sure that that was the same virus which escaped and did so much damage to the world – we would have to be the kind of people who trusted ACTUAL SCIENCE instead of power and tribes – to know a useful thing like that.
But it sure as heck seems like quite a co-inky-dink, don’t you think?
It gets worse though. That six foot circle of personal space was actually totally arbitrary. The only numbers that did show (very small) results were MUCH higher than that, and thus totally impractical, even for lining up for covid shots! So, instead of admitting that social distancing wasn’t ever going to work, they made it compulsory, but at a distance that they already knew would have no appreciable effect whatsoever.
Masks did not work (according to the benchmark gold-standard Cochrane ‘study of studies’) not even for professionals with the best quality masks and best training on their use. Nope – whole forests of chin-diapers served only to signal tribal allegiance, and to excuse a great deal of unfriendly behaviour towards strangers for not being (or not being sufficiently) compliant.
We also spent five years fear-yelling at kids about their masks – though there was NEVER ANY possibility that children would be properly fitted OR wear them properly, even if the damned things did work! This was utterly empty ritual, loaded with dire emotion.
We literally made “SCIENCE” an excuse for mass child abuse and alienation for YEARS ON END. (and then we insult them for having bad attitudes - truly gross).
To be very clear, I was already a caregiver for my wife by then, so I did mask faithfully, for any slight marginal benefit it might give us (that study came much later, anyhow). But I now suspect my zinc lozenge and stairs-over-elevators habits, helped much more.
What really got us all through that man-made plague – and fresh proof of the danger of hubris and denial – and orgy of state-control excess – and festival of destructive tribalism – was the combination of the irresistible contagion and far more survivable symptoms of omicron and natural human immunity. (I know, I know, but simple truth).
You can argue any of those points with me (if you still love your fear and anger that much). But the argument you can’t win is this. Covid hurt older people and those with multiple co-morbidities by far the most (why it was so unusually deadly in the USA).
By contrast, kids in decent health were at almost no risk at all from the disease – their fresh and energetic immune systems just figured it out and cleared it. This was the point that Dr. Jay Battacharya was trying to make, early on (for which he was silenced).
Had we (as he and dozens of other experienced specialists suggested, then) put maximum resources on the weak, we might have saved many MANY more lives.
All of this stuff is clearly documented, on the public record and was covered very well by Glenn Greenwald’s SYSTEM UPDATE show on RUMBLE (perhaps the single best antidote to BigNews Stupefaction out there - though Sheerpost comes very close).
But one thing is for sure – had we done NOTHING at all – our kids would have been absolutely fine by now anyhow – and instead – by pretending that our fear and tribal anger was THE ONLY IMPORTANT THING for which all else must be sacrificed – we managed to do severe (likely life-long) damage to ALL OF OUR CHILDREN.
Yes I know, I’m biased, I come from a whole commune full of righteous assholes and mass child abuse – yes, I’m sensitive to such things. But seriously folks – HARMING ALL THE KIDS IS ALWAYS WRONG.
For boomers who still don’t understand the revulsion which now increasingly attaches to that term for younger generations, a bit of reflection in that direction might yield fine and useful clues. Don’t Hurt Kids is not supposed to be a subject in the rocket sciences. It is supposed to be a priority so thoroughly obvious, that we don’t even have to argue about it, and willingly overcome all tribal nonsense to work on it, together.
By contrast a sentiment like “But my personal fear and ignorance (and inevitably anger, right after those) is incredibly important” is in the category of – take a breath, pause – SMILE – and then think again. To adults.
But this really is a great measure of how tribally demented we now are, as a society. When the Liberal party in Canada tries to pass legislation to stifle free political speech (much as laws in England now have their police arresting and charging thousands of citizens every year, just for their online posts or even re-tweets), they say they are doing it to try to ‘protect children’ (from ever having or even hearing about any choice in politics other than liberal, for the rest of their lives?) Safetyism as psychosis.
Rightists now policing what is obviously anti war speech as if it is instead racist, is yet another case of them borrowing from the established LEFTIST playbook. (As I first learned from a hustler-cabbie decades ago, when I was a scrawny all-hours teenager – “Don’t be the one to pull a knife in a fist-fight, or you are liable to end up getting stabbed”).
Skokie, people – his press could be your press next. It isn’t because we actually like idiots like those marchers, but because we’d rather they speak and vent than be pushed underground, seethe for years in profound resentment then explode and burn.
(You can always make the case for REAL goodness in terms of self-interest, if awake).
Most importantly, many powerful people are insane, and if we let ANY of the powerful (ours OR theirs) decide who can speak, we’ll end up with more and more crazies in charge, and less and less people-power to do anything about it – which is to say, Biden did incalculable harm to the spirit principles and influence of the American “left” by swinging them into a state of mass dishonour, an abandonment of all basic principles.
January sixth was a protest that turned into a riot. By supporting the (fear anger and ignorance-based) CIA idea that it was an “insurrection” and invoking absolutely disgusting anti-citizen laws which the left had opposed for literally a hundred years, just to ‘get em’ because ‘em was so clearly not ‘us’ to them, the (fake) left filled entire shiploads of diapers for years. Which means there is now lots of cleaning up (and owning up) to do, ETHICALLY, before they can seem serious or trustworthy to the bewildered middle again. (Not saying that makes others great, just leaves a vacuum)
The other thing that has not been properly considered on the so called left in America (because they really did enjoy the fear-porn and sanctimony aspect of the plague, so very much) is that by firing every disobedient person in every government institution they could, (absolutely NOT for selfishness or irresponsibility, as so many advertising people insisted, so fascistically), the government pretty much got rid of all the most principled courageous unique stubborn and interesting people, in practically every institution in the western world. The eccentrics, the stand outs, who had creative spark and real guts.
The wilful ones who know the whole faculty disagrees, but insist on principle, all the same. The ones who put full fairness ahead of all favours, and err with too much enablement and sacrifice, instead of playing petty politics and vengeance. The ones who makes the dean mad, and the union rep also – because they TEACH first, and comply only once their calling has been sufficiently answered.
The laughing but ornery ones who say – I don’t want to submit my life’s work to the supervailence of oligarch controlled software just to be here, this is supposed to be a freakin’ art school, you dummies!
I don’t know about you, but in my life, those stand-outs who care, who don’t just follow rules to get along, but actually act on their principles, without ever having to be cattle-prodded into decency, were some of my most important role models, mentors and ShorDurPerSavs of all. (Short Duration Personal Saviours – one of many wonderful concepts from the brilliant satirical “Church of the Subgenius”).
I don’t say that to insult my dear friends who still teach. As Larry Johnson said about his days in the CIA, sometimes you have responsibilities that make acting on full principle impossible. Sometimes you need ‘fuck-you money’ as he put it, to speak your mind to a superior, who doesn’t want to hear it.
But like I said about the individual effect and the doing it anyhow. If none of us acts on principle, we’ll have (and have earned) none of it. Got to show up and do the thing, to lay down those expert circuits!
Geez, I said compact and direct, didn’t I?
Let me try to wind it up in a compact way, at least
The other touchstone I wanted to go for, was to talk about where relationships seemed to be evolving, just before AIDS hit, and turned everything personal into a gigantic polarized and vicious political battle, all over again.
When I was a kid, I recognized that some of the people in my commune were ‘different’ but not how. Later I realized they were gay, and not only deeply ashamed of it, but taught that it was wrong and bad by our immaculate matriarch (freaky-clairvoyant or sneaky cold-reader, depending on the day and hour).
As a teenager I knew some kids who were gay, some who were straight, and some who weren’t sure. Big deal. I mean honestly, no one cared and no one felt they had to separate into groupings that were just like them, to be understood. Same goes for race and culture. We could joke and play around, but also openly share the treasures that each brought to the table – no big deal. Didn’t come from anger or vengeance politics, fighting for fast dwindling table-scraps from the aristocracy – it was just people being friendly curious and playful with each other. NORMAL – so recently in terms of culture, that it often makes me want to SCREAM. Believe me, the 80s wasn’t Norman Rockwell sweet, but still.
I am honestly not sure how specific this moment is, but I’ll say it anyhow – this was also the moment when the Hite report was all the rage, and for the cohort in which I found myself, at least, we were far more anxious about learning to actually please a girl properly, address her (still mysterious) needs, than we were into conquering or cynically racking-up numbers. Sure, there were still plenty of things we misunderstood, but we were all increasingly interested in finding new ways to be good to one another, and even in working things like marriage with a different balance (I think Xers were the first generation to do house-husbands properly in huge numbers, as high paid work steadily shifted away from working class men and toward highly educated women, in a big way). For a bleak economic moment, it was very aspirational!
In any case, what I’m really after is that basic compassion naturally and eternally wants to reach across every gulf of understanding there is. Just as the search for freedom from tyranny is reborn with every new generation. (not a ‘snake’, but a spirit)
No one taught us this compassion, no one raised us at all (we were the last feral generation – mostly raised each other). We saw that we did not need institutions to goad, prod, condition or re-shape, to gradually discover and become our better truer selves, we just needed to be and have (and/or create) better friends, families and communities. Sure, just a drop in the ocean, a penny on the pile, right up until it’s the straw that broke...
And then, before you know it, we might even have ourselves something resembling an actual genuine organic and well knit-together society again. A society which reflects many well, that we’d all be proud to contribute to. Duty that naturally feels like a higher calling, and not an eternally resented chore for some offstage asshole.
Not because a tyrant designed a nicer prison for us, or because we made our own private cell prettier, but because we finally make the big jail-break at last, and are working on figuring-out life on the outside of all these stupid prisons, together.
People do good, my friends. Not states, not experts, actors, bankers or warmongers. People.
I mean, if, that is, of course.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have shared several key Jeffrey Sachs dialogues on our great plague years before, so I won’t go all deep archives on you and repeat them (don’t want to get stuck back there in that old foetid bitterness anyhow – only to learn some freakin’ lessons from that staggeringly huge and mutual forced-sacrifice).
This talk is much fresher and more directly relevant to the turmoils of our moment. It is both the meeting of two serious and influential intellectual economists with a deeply humanist orientation, and a meeting of two true friends and comrades also.
Yes it is kind of long – but the very opposite of boring. Jeffrey Sachs and Yanis Varoufakis – WOW! (you’ll soon understand where I get my where’s Waldo of modern political history idea about Sachs, too. His freakin’ day-planner is history!)
Now – This Wonky Week – a festival of links, questions, and plenty of further research.
In rough-order. Determined, Deep, Dire, Desperate – then some uplift for a finisher
First, a real stalwart tilter at non-windmills – a trio from Mike Hampton’s superb SSDG (Same Shit Different Government) substack. South Africa was once a great concern for people in the west – and then, briefly a great hope. Now? It is a great tragedy of ever-thwarted promise and a huge entangled (political) mess!
Mike goes deep into the politics and corruption (layers of deception, too), not looking for the easy (manufactured propaganda and or scam-runner) answers, but trying to get right past them, to something more like truth, accountability and democracy!
No surprise that he has faced a great deal of hostility, in our age of wilful misunderstanding. But the fact that he saw a mess this big and still bothered to dig, instead of turn away, gives ME hope.
“...Antisemitism, like all racism, is wrong!
Conversely, if South Africa is being manipulated to promote Zionism that kills Palestinians and boosts the careers of local politicians, that’s wrong too.
Can a democracy exist if voters don’t know the motives of the party they’re voting for?
It’s unknown whose funding the ruling ANC since it unofficially became bankrupt, nor the EFF (founded by ex-ANC Youth Leader Julius Malema).
Consequently, propaganda has taken root i.e., that, directly or indirectly, China and Russia (and criminals) are their backers. Someone must be backing them but, without evidence, why is it being spread by people favourable to the DA and their splinters?
In return, the role of the Oppenheimers in election funding becomes anti-white rethoric. The EFF has already made an entire newsletter about it. If their election support declines, it becomes the fault of white monopoly capital. If they improve, they stood against white monopoly capital.
South Africa matters. It has strategic minerals and influence on Africa, the ‘game board’ for the West versus the East. The 2024 elections will determine South Africa’s difficult balancing act between superpowers, and where its morality (if any) stands.”
“...It should be noted that South Africa only pretends to be a democracy, and that false image is supported by the West. I’m assuming those ‘liberal’ countries do so because that’s an easier public image to trade with. It’s akin to their ‘NGOs’ pretending to be human rights organisations whilst seeking to change the government of the countries they operate in (and when they get kicked out, their MSM friends use it as proof of tyranny e.g. Russia, China and Hungary).
Reversing the mirror, the USA supported Apartheid South Africa in its illegal war against Angola and South-West Africa (now Namibia) in the Seventies and Eighties.
The CIA arranged Nelson Mandela’s infamous imprisonment, and thus enabled him to become a global brand.”
“...The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was a sham. It never investigated the corporations that profited out of the slavery of black and brown people. It left foreign sanction busters alone. Instead, the ANC allowed those companies to relocate their criminal profits to London.
The ANC were supposed to be the enemies of the racist National Party Government yet appear to have been its partners. The ANC allowed National Party leaders to remove R30-billion from the country via an operation called Project Spear. Part of South Africa’s gold supply was stolen. It could also be viewed as a golden handshake during a change in management (but with the owners remaining the same).
As late as 2012, during the reign of Jacob Zuma whom many perceived as the defender against capitalism, the SABC (State-funded TV) stopped a documentary about Project Spear from being broadcast. Zuma was probably unaware, which would mean that the real controllers of South Africa and the mass that is Government are larger than a president.
The first significant action by Cyril Ramaphosa, when he became interim President in 2018, was to visit the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR is an organisation for corporations that many consider to be the the biggest unchecked forces in the world. Did Ramaphosa bow to Power?”
Now here are a few deeply thought-provoking extracts about the nature of life and intelligence from the brilliant Ian McGilchrist
“...Slime moulds are amoeba-like organisms found on moist decaying organic matter. Clearly they have no neurones, each consisting of just a single, giant cell. They are, however, capable of behaviour that looks intelligent. They are attracted to one another and fuse, creating a plasmodium, which may be up to several metres long – the slime mould that is visible to human eyes. This plasmodium is essentially a flat, liquid-filled sac, but it behaves like an organised colony:
Every part rhythmically expands and contracts, pushing around the fluid inside. If one part of the plasmodium touches something attractive, like food, it pulses more quickly and widens. If another part meets something repulsive, like light, it pulses more slowly and shrinks. By adding up all of these effects, the plasmodium flows in the best possible direction without a single conscious thought. It is the ultimate in crowdsourcing.[26]
These plasmodia can make decisions, comparing different options (for example, food sources) and selecting the best one: the plasmodium touches all the potential meals and then either ‘decides’ to move towards one, or splits itself among many. It can even balance its diet.[27] A mould can forage while making decisions with more than one objective, and it can be persuaded experimentally, as can humans, to behave irrationally at times.[28] It even turns out that moulds make better decisions if they are not rushed.[29]
Plasmodia regularly break out of Petri dishes in laboratories, and can escape from traps and solve mazes.[30] Slime mould colonies can learn to avoid certain paths that lead to a noxious stimulus, and moulds that have so learnt can transfer this memory of the adaptive response by cell fusion to new colonies that have never encountered the noxious stimulus. Even in cases where three out of four moulds in the fused organism were ‘naïve’ and had had no opportunity to learn, the information was transferred to the resulting fused slime mould from the one that had had the noxious encounter.[31]
Does a slime mould have awareness? If it does, and I suspect it does, the awareness cannot be much like ours. It does have memories and would seem to act intentionally upon them. According to Scott Turner, ‘arguably, the roots of our own intentionality permeate deeply through the living world: the living world may be rife with intentionality.’[32] I believe this to be a reasonable deduction, and will have more to say about it in Chapter 27.”
It seems to me that an explanation in terms of a whole that follows attractive formal patterns or fields – Gestalten – is better than an explanation in terms of chains of causation of parts. That we cannot as yet ‘see’ or measure such patterns or fields should not be a definitive argument against entertaining the possibility of their presence. Many physical forces cannot be directly visualised or measured: we posit their existence only on the basis of their apparent effects.
Such is the case with a magnetic field. We visualise it through its effects on metallic bodies. Below is a simple illustration from D’Arcy Thompson, showing cytokinesis (a phase of cell reproduction) in a fish egg. The similarity to iron filings in the magnetic field of a bar magnet is so striking that it has been remarked on for 150 years.[33]
On the one hand, biologists speaking the language of mechanics do not want to invoke a heavenly engineer (nor do I); but on the other, as I have already suggested, few biologists any longer believe that just waiting for the right sequence of accidents – random mutations – is how nature works.
One solution to this conundrum is genetic animism – Dawkins’s genes with an agenda. Externality and instrumentality are inescapable logical requirements in whatever it is that one claims drives the machine model. So for genes to do the necessary work to support the machine model, they must both carry the idea of instrumentality, and be in some way external to – ontologically, causally and temporally prior to – what they are making (the rest of the organism). But this gambit ‘promotes the misunderstanding that DNA stands in contradistinction to the rest of the components in a cell by virtue of its ability to exert executive power over cellular operations’.[3] We have seen that this falls down on every count. DNA is not ontologically, causally or temporally prior to the cell, nor does it stand over against the cell in any sense, bring it into being for a purpose, or simply exert power over it.
The other possible gambit to save the machine model is really just to reinvent God, put his eyes out, and call him by another name.[4] The analogy of the world to a watch, which implied the existence somewhere of a watchmaker, was used by the English clergyman William Paley to buttress his argument for a God. Dawkins, the author of The Blind Watchmaker, used the same analogy to buttress his argument against God. He writes that ‘I suppose people like me might be labelled neo-Paleyists, or perhaps “transformed Paleyists”.’[5] However, this does not help, for two substantial reasons: organisms are not at all like a watch; and evolution ‘simply does not proceed like a watchmaker, blind or otherwise’, as Nicholson points out.[6] Both Dawkins and Paley make the same mistake, as Dawkins himself hints.
At a fundamental level is nature discrete or continuous? I see no evidence whatever for discreteness. All the discreteness we see in the world is something which emerges from an underlying continuum … Quanta are emergent … they are not built into the heart of Nature.’[1]
Analysis never stops until it reaches unchanging particles: if these parts took to changing (and they do), it would have to split them up in their turn.[2] It can end only once separation and stasis have been achieved. The difference between flow and the rapid substitution of static elements may sound no big deal, especially since the invention of ciné film, and subsequent digitised media. But it changes a whole host of things.
Living beings cannot be understood simply by reducing them to an aggregation of parts. Knowledge of the parts can often bring useful information, but that is not the same thing. And in today’s science establishment what is most highly rewarded is seeing minutiae in the whole – the more minute the better – not the whole in which the minutiae inhere. Both exercises are important: according to Schrödinger, much more the latter.
Now – sorry, but, more frightening politics (it is a busy moment, after all – cries out for infinitely more varied and intelligent context than we ever seem to get)
Here’s Ken Klippenstein with a trio about the very latest in excesses against speech (and plans for more) from whatever faction it is (from whatever planet) behind Trump.
“...The arson attack on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home has unified the national security state around a broader threat it sees in the American people.
Inside the government, sources tell us, officials are scrambling to define the moment. They’re exploring if there’s any connection between the attempts on Donald Trump’s life; Luigi Mangione and his sympathizers; Tesla vandalism; and even earlier attacks, like the one on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
The Trump Justice Department and the domestic terrorism fighters think they have an answer: Nihilistic Violent Extremists.
They’ve already got an acronym — NVEs.
“...White House counterterror czar Sebastian Gorka said today that Americans who are not on board with the Trump administration’s immigration policy are “on the side of terrorists."
“It's really quite that simple,” Gorka said in a little-noticed interview with Newsmax. “We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists.”
He didn’t stop there, going on to say this is tantamount to “aiding and abetting” — which he called a crime under federal law.
“And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them?” Gorka continued. “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”
“...Trump’s executive order has formally designated cartels and other transnational criminal organizations as terrorists, potentially opening figures like Maryland Sen. Chris van Hollen to legal charges, Gorka suggests, for providing them with “material support.”
I’ve been following Gorka closely for months now. The man once fired from his position in Trump’s first administration has now risen to be the top counter-terrorism official at the White House. Social media influencer when he’s not bloviating on TV, he still constantly appears on his old Newsmax show to opine.
But this time I noticed in his response something I’ve never seen before: he walked back his remarks. Gorka was no longer threatening supporters of Kilmar Abrego Garcia with arrest. Now, he was just saying that if one gave money to terrorist groups, they could be arrested. Wow, thanks for that sparkling insight!
To my amazement, the media has barely paid any attention to Gorka, despite his being the country’s top counterterrorism official (he’s currently rewriting the national strategy to counter domestic terrorism!)
Well, they’re paying attention now.”
Here’s Matt Taibbi’s “Racket” with more about the way the idiot Dems under Biden normalized such excesses (did I say idiots?) Racket is also making a whole archive of key anti-speech material and documentation available, for speech advocates to win fights.
“...You likely already know from reading Racket that the Biden administration was very active in targeting misinformation and disinformation, even as it engaged in those practices.
Racket’s Twitter Files and other reporting have extensively documented many of the anti-disinformation and misinformation programs and organizations that the federal government supported, like the Election Integrity Project, Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI League), and the Center on Narrative, Disinformation and Strategic Influence at Arizona State.
But the number of grants? We didn’t know that. Now we do.
The Free Press reports that since 2017, the federal government has awarded about 800 grants to counter mis/disinformation — and the Biden administration is responsible for more than 600 of them. The 800 grants amount to more than $1.4 billion.
The findings by reporters Gabe Kaminsky and Madeleine Rowley are based on a new database of anti-mis/disinformation programs. The database was created by the free speech advocacy group liber-net.
“A large number of these projects cynically employed the ‘misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation’ framework to counter their political adversaries, with U.S. government funding making it possible,” liber-net’s director, Andrew Lowenthal, told the Free Press.
People who still think the Liberals are serious about Canadian sovereignty and national security have simply not been paying attention for the last decade. Justin signed us up for AUKUS – a truly insane warmongering plan – which is meant for nothing but a great war with China – and even Australia (which is at least supposed to get spiffy new subs out of the deal) now regrets the incredibly foolish move (both for their own sovereignty – and also on the bankruptcy-side). Bad partners. STOP IT.
I know, I know, people vote on emotions, conditioning, assumptions, etc. (damn Edward Bernays anyhow).
Still, you should read this one. Doesn’t even mention Canada at all (that’s how important we are, to this evil pact) but it will leave you wondering – we did this WHY?
And here’s another of special interest to my fellow Canucks (apologies for extra worry)
“…It would appear that the banking industry orchestrated fraud of epic proportions. The staggering aspect of this part of our history is just how extensively all this was planned, and we should assume that it was planned. It may be that things just happen, randomly because honest errors, misguided regulation, political opportunism, incompetence and trivial greed. But if all these ingredients consistently benefit one group while harming all others in society, we have to consider the possibility that the group that benefits could be orchestrating the events, formulating the enabling regulatory measures, empowering the “incompetent” politicians, and determining the system of incentives that drives the whole process forward.
Historian Ramsay MacMullen said that in order for us to arrive at a correct interpretation of history, we need to understand the motivations of groups and individuals who shaped it. The events around Alberta oil, Iraq invasion, the housing bubble and the subsequent bank bailouts were not random. At least at some level, they were orchestrated by powerful interests in our society. Much fraud was committed, yet nobody was charged criminally, suggesting that those who benefited the most aren’t subject to law enforcement in the same way that most of the rest of us are. “There is no such thing in economic life as a nonfinancial event”, James Galbraith reminds us, so “Finance is the only way to understand the economy.” At the same time, the powerful interests that benefit through the mechanisms of finance are terribly keen that we can’t properly understand the economy.”
Here’s another sharp one from Krainer – this time about European military panic (two words that should not ever go together) Yet another incredibly badly-judged round of madness from senile capitalists, that Canada should back away from, full-reverse!
“...Project Ukraine is coming apart at the seams and Europe’s ruling oligarchies are getting increasingly frenzied to do something – anything - to prolong the war, open new fronts, or cobble up a Coalition of the Willing to reinforce the withering Ukrainian troops. But it’s headwinds… So far as the coalition is concerned, it turns out they’re not exactly willing: out of 30 candidate nations, only six are prepared to send troops to Ukraine where the supposed peace-keeping mission could turn into a war fighting mission faster than you can say “freedom and democracy.”
We know five of the willing: Britain, France, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The sixth state, for some reason, remained unknown . By now, we have reasons to suspect that it is the Netherlands. Namely, Le Monde reported that General Onno Eichelsheim, the highest ranking officer of the Dutch Army, signed a letter ordering 76,000 Dutch military personnel - both active and civilian - to prepare for military operations “as quickly as possible.”
And as always – I delight in thinking about the limits to any argument I find persuasive. (about the limitations of even an advanced western view, like that of Sachs)
“...For all JS’s clairvoyance, his analysis and proposals produce two absences, two realities which, although they exist, are produced as non-existent and as such can no longer contribute to any diagnosis or solution. The non-existence of such realities is not the result of an act of will on the part of the analyst. It stems from the epistemological presuppositions of analysis. It stems from the sleep of reason. The West’s problem lies not so much in the state to which it has led the world, but in the epistemicide it has caused along its historical path, in other words, in the knowledge and experiences of the world that it has actively destroyed in order to impose its domination and neutralize any resistance. This destruction was not just of bodies and ways of life. It was also the destruction of knowledge, wisdom and ethics, of ways of living together of people and nations, of cultures of relationship with nature, with the living and the dead, with time and space. This multifaceted destruction has produced a specific form of blindness that consists of looking without seeing, explaining without understanding, observing without knowing that you can’t observe without being observed. I distinguish, among many others, two absences: the different/useless beyond the friend/enemy; living and letting live beyond order and disorder.”
I keep looking for smart economic perspectives on what is really going on (why I have several of them at once, existing simultaneously as competing or interlocking strong and weak maybes, all waiting for more and clearer data).
But I have been outright shocked at how many leftist economists recognize that our old patterns are a road to certain ruin, and even that if done right (which no one thinks they are) tarrifs can be very useful in certain ways. In any case – please don’t think I’m stumping for just one interpretation – just offering some more quality clues, here.
“...The US trade deficit in 2024 was approximately 1.2 trillion dollars. GDP was approximately 30.1 trillion dollars. That’s a trade deficit of an eye-watering 4% of GDP. By contrast, the EU had no significant trade deficit as a percentage of GDP. Zero. Even the chronic UK trade deficit was only 2.2% of GDP.
Does it matter? Well, historically not much.
The US, as the world’s reserve currency, has been able simply to create more dollars through bonds or quantitative easing to finance its trade deficit. Nobody—including the US Federal Reserve—really knows how many dollars exist in the world. On the wide M3 measure encompassing cash, bank accounts, government bonds and all other instantly convertible dollar-denominated instruments, it is believed there are about 21 trillion dollars in the world. (This is a measure of money, not of assets such as property and shares).
Nobody knows how much of this money is held outside the United States; about 65% seems a broad consensus but you can find estimates from reputable institutions ranging from 45% to 75%.
Because the US is the world’s reserve currency and essential to trade, at least half and probably most dollars exist outside the US economy. That is what is unique about having the world’s reserve currency. It means nations will always be willing to borrow from you more money you have just created, to finance their purchases of oil, grain and other essentials and luxuries.
What prevents governments in general from just printing more money is fear of inflationary effects by devaluing the currency (though the notion that this is a simple relationship is less prevalent now than at the height of monetarism). However, the unique advantage of the United States is that any domestic inflationary effect from creating more dollars is effectively buffered by the fact that most dollars are not in your economy: they are in other people’s economies, or sitting in overseas reserves. You can thus create dollars without creating much domestic inflation.”
The financial markets were already hanging by a thread long before President Trump’s second term in office. The mountain of debt is insane and valuations on the stock markets are maniacal. Since 1987, investors (or rather speculators) have relied on the central banks to come to their rescue in the event of a financial market collapse. This was the case in 1987 (“Black Monday” and the subsequent Greenspan Put), 1998 (systemic shock caused by the Russian sovereign default + hedge fund long-term capital management crisis), 2001 (dotcom crash), 2008 (financial crisis – Ben Bernanke and his quantitative easing (QE)) and 2020 (corona crash: Jerome Powell and his renewed quantitative easing (QE)). Investors are talking about the so-called Fed put (when things go wrong, the Fed simply “prints” money) and believe they have a common-law right to a bailout. As the US Fed is owned by the banks and most Western central banks are too, there is no need to ponder for long whose interests these ladies and gentlemen represent in their ivory towers; certainly not the interests of the citizens. Rescuing the financial markets for the benefit of speculators and banks is at the expense of the currency, as it becomes weaker with every such action.
”Everything is Possible - Unfortunately” - On Sonar 21
The policy, far from a sound plan to re-industrialize America or genuinely balance America’s trade deficit, is instead meant to maintain America as “the world’s dominant superpower.”
The paper claims that:
To maintain that global positioning—and thereby best protect the homeland and our own democratic institutions—it is critical that the United States strengthen its manufacturing and defense industrial base at the same time that it increases the reliability and resilience of its globally dispersed supply chains. That will necessarily require the onshoring of a significant portion of production currently offshored by American multinational corporations.
While this seems to at first suggest a general re-industrialization of America’s economy, none of the actual measures required to do so are discussed with any serious attention – measures such as the sweeping education reforms and massive state investment in infrastructure and industry required to actually re-industrialize America.
The policies described within the pages of Project 2025 and now being implemented further under the current US administration are meant instead to disrupt global economic activity including trade and industry, particularly those of China, while compelling industry abroad to be moved to the United States.
An example of this is semiconductor manufacturer TSMC which was forced to move facilities to Arizona in the continental United States. A combination of poor infrastructure, weak supply chains, and a lack of skilled workers have caused massive budget and schedule overruns as well as necessitating the movement of hundreds of workers from Taiwan to the United States to fill roles American employees are incapable of fulfilling themselves.
And
The Worst-Case Scenario
While the most immediate and intuitive explanations for growing US tariffs against nations worldwide stem from protecting uncompetitive but deeply entrenched corporate-financier monopolies within the US from increasing foreign competition, or a specific strategy to contain China’s growing economic influence worldwide, there is a much more concerning possibility being overlooked by many – the US decoupling from a global economy it seeks to deliberately destroy through a combination of economic and actual warfare.
The obvious and growing impact tariffs will have on the cost-of-living crisis in the United States represent a high and unsustainable cost politically, socially, and economically for the United States – so much so that little else besides anticipation ahead of a major conflict could justify such costs as acceptable.
Were the US preparing for the deliberate destruction of the current global economic system, or large-scale war with one or more of its declared “adversaries,” decoupling itself from the global economy first on its own terms ahead of time – especially in terms of America’s dependence on China for supply chains including all throughout its military industrial base, would be a necessary prerequisite.
Worst Case Scenario - Trump’s Tariffs walling US off ahead of wider world conflict
For people who still think I’m silly, for objecting to the idea that the whole western world should be run by psychotic bankers and state-enforcement elites (a plan already well-advanced and utterly ruinous, in Europe) perhaps some of Cynthia Chung’s superbly researched work will wake you up and scare you (properly)
Some big-good news for a change?
"...The essence of antitrust law is to try to keep the system working by recognizing that, at certain points, some companies may get too big for their own good, they're self-imploding, or the technology may become so dominant that it's just crushing all other elements where there can be innovation." - Judge Leonie Brinkema, 2023, United States v. Google LLC
Today, Judge Loenie Brinkema, in a detailed opinion, ruled that Google is an unlawful monopolist that controls the software used by publishers to manage online ads as well as the exchanges used to buy and sell them.”
This one is highly imperfect (the reviewer still buys some things which have clearly been proven false) but also a really well written and interesting piece – and Cohn truly was one of the great evil shits for the ages – no question there.
“...But one other individual, previously reduced to a footnote in history, holds the prime responsibility for changing Donald Trump’s fortunes, where a chance meeting in a New York nightclub initiated much of the spooky good fortune one man has experienced for nearly half a century — an unparalleled run of prestige, where astonishing wealth, power, and privilege have been repeatedly balanced by multiple instances of public embarrassment, appalling scandal, financial collapse, and the more recent threats of impeachment, jail time, and even assassination. In retrospect, this opportune encounter a 27-year-old Donald Trump experienced with Roy Cohn inside Le Club in 1973 can be seen as the first act in a complex mentorship that recalls nothing less than the Devil’s bargain embodied in Goethe’s Faust, an exchange of values which remained unapparent, even obscured, for decades (at least to those long familiar with the most public of public figures), but is now seen as the signature influence, the very ink and dye, Trump has used to dominate our politics and write himself into American history.”
I owe you a fresh Klarenburg and some more Africa – so here’s something very weird and creepy, which I hope evaporates entirely, before causing at least ten thousand more kinds of trouble (where they definitely have enough already).
“...In recent months, Somaliland has become a subject of intense, unprecedented interest for the Western media. As Israeli and US officials scramble to find a destination to forcibly relocate Gaza’s population from their shattered homeland, the little-acknowledged, unrecognised breakaway statelet is increasingly viewed as an attractive option. Multiple mainstream media reports indicate officials in Tel Aviv and Washington are making discrete overtures to Hargeisa on the topic. On March 14th, the Financial Times revealed:
“A US official briefed on Washington’s initial contacts with Somaliland’s presidency said discussions had begun about a possible deal to recognise the de facto state in return for the establishment of a military base near the port of Berbera on the Red Sea coast.”
Somaliland’s President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi has made international recognition a major priority, and the prospect of a permanent US military presence insulating the breakaway territory from violent instability that regularly engulfs Somalia is also no doubt enormously attractive. From Washington’s perspective too, such an arrangement offers profuse geopolitical gains well-beyond the involuntary relocation of millions of Palestinians, to make way for Trump’s fantasised ‘Gaza-Lago’. For one, Somaliland’s proximity to the Arabian peninsula makes the territory an ideal staging ground for strikes on Yemen.”
Here’s Freddie deBoer – a genuinely witty insightful and enjoyable ‘cranky leftist’ – when he’s on his own best topics (as here).
“…I will never not be fascinated by those issues or arguments or perspectives that are studiously ignored by the media generally and the New York Times in particular. I’ve whinged about this many times when it comes to education, as the NYT is simply not going to consider the notion that different individual people have fundamentally different levels of academic potential in its pages, not even in an attempt to rebut the idea. I suppose that notion is just too challenging to the elite meritocratic liberalism that the Times epitomizes; the idea that we are all ultimately capable of achieving academic and professional greatness flatters the high-achievers who read and write the paper, and the “anyone can be anything” ethos is pleasant and unchallenging. It’s also destructive, which is the point. Bad ideas grow like weeds in the shade, or whatever the saying is. Disability issues are another place where the Grey Lady is very picky about what ideas to consider, and as usual they set the rhythm for many other publications.
And here’s Chris Bray (“Tell Me How This Ends”) one of the funniest ornery writers on the right. I only wish we had to make this kind of stuff up. (Makes me think of the viral Douglas Murray 3-Stooges mashup - quite a world we have here, eh?)
Here is another super strong piece from Freya India – one of our best literary witnesses of the special problems of this most intensely alienated and tragically (emotionally) undernourished generation.
“...It’s often said that my generation has lost faith. We are losing faith in God, losing faith in love, losing faith in the future. But I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Closer to the truth, I think, is we never learnt faith to begin with.
The psychologist Erich Fromm saw faith and doubt as character traits. Rather than having faith in something specific, faith for him was a way of seeing the world, a disposition of the soul, a temperament. For Fromm, faith meant not only religious belief, but a feeling of deep trust in ourselves, in others, and in life itself. This is what my generation did not develop. We are a chronically doubtful generation.
Understandably, since we live in a culture of doubt. Generations before us had it harder, at least materially, but in their world, even as it sometimes fell apart, something beneath stayed intact: customs, understanding, a shared floor and foundation. Ours is one where all that underneath has been destroyed. We have everything, except anything that holds humans together. Whatever we try to have faith in is mocked, destroyed, or disappears too fast. And so we doubt. We question everything. We doubt what it means to live, what it means to love, what it means to be a good person, why any of that matters. Nothing is certain. And so, no, we aren’t so much in doubt as to whether we will live tomorrow, but whether there is any point to.”
And
“...I worry because young women like me were raised with only one vision of hell. Now our only nightmare is being restricted by religion, by a relationship, or burdened by responsibilities. But what if hell is also the opposite? What if hell isn’t the faith that makes you stay, but the doubt that makes you leave? What if sometimes the devil is not the voice keeping you trapped, but the one whispering that you are being restricted, wronged, held back—deserve a fresh start? Have we ever considered that the most dangerous ideology might not be the one asking us to have faith through hard things but the one training us to doubt what is good, to see something that should be treasured as a trap?”
Sam Kriss is one of the best essayists alive (in English, anyhow). Brilliant and human – a confection that will stimulate your brain for months after, every time. He even manages to do very original takes, without just being critical of things because they don’t appeal to him, personally (way too rare).
I have called the derivation of ‘left’ and ‘right’ into question myself – but still thoroughly adore any rebuke as funny and smart as this!
“...Thomas Friedman once tried to divide the world into ‘web people’ and ‘wall people.’ This is pleasingly insane. We could try out some others. A political spectrum split between the Party of the Sun (Leninists, reactionaries) and the Party of the Moon (liberals, anarchists). Maybe in the background there’s the unimaginable politics of the stars. Or we could divide the world between birdism, migratory, globalist, and beastism, rooted, wallowing. It’s fun. But if you want to actually understand reality, I still think the old left-right model is the only one that makes sense. As I’ve written before, politics is only really meaningful if it can be plotted on that axis. Dig into anything that claims to be entirely off the map, and you’ll usually find there’s nothing but fascism and styrofoam inside. There will always be a right. There will always be a left.
But even I can admit that lately, things have been getting weird.”
Here is the funniest piece of science I’ve come across in ages! (And I say this as the idiot who hand-drew my own periodic table (with electrons per shell) just to work it into my brain).
Rat Says – kinda reminds me of Bugs-Bunny working-class libertarianism – cheerful/cynical/realist, but updated for our modern dystopian age, and with loads of extra torque on the political, surreal or both axes at once! (much like the also superb and wonderfully original “inmate at the asylum” who I have shared before and will again).
My wife and I look forward to “Good Time of Day Humans” Every single day!
Finally, here’s something truly lovely about just how much complex intention and narrative even an “innocent” looking painting can contain. We forget about this kind of density of layered meaning nowadays, we look too fast to notice anyhow. We dumb.
“...The old Paris is no more”, wrote Baudelaire in an 1861 poem titled “the Swan”. Lamenting the modernization of his beloved Paris, he added “the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal’s heart.”
Baudelaire wasn’t the only one to observe the rapidly changing urban landscape of 19th. century Paris. In the painting below, by Édouard Manet, titled “the road-pavers”, we see the view from Manet’s studio in the rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, looking onto the newly built rue Mosnier (renamed Rue de Berne in 1884) in North-West Paris.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My internet access runs out in 20 minutes so only got halfway, but...
The latest mob violence in Nigeria, that resulted in a lot of 'normal folk' cheering as a lot of innocent people were burned alive, was not an "insurrection".
I haven't forgiven Greenwald for promoting Alex Jones, effectively his remodeling of himself away form the proverbial Left and into profitable independence.
I miss arcade games. They were my favourite. There was more joy in finding 20 cents, evading mother, and walking to the shop than playing on a laptop. Plus there was a pool table in that "evil place".