Charles August Albert Dellschau

designobserver |  Sometime in the mid-1960s, a junk dealer in Houston, Texas acquired 12 large notebooks that had been thrown out to the curb after a house fire. Filled with mysterious, double-sided, collaged watercolor drawings, the journals were eventually discovered at the junk shop in 1969 by art history student Mary Jane Victor. Victor attended the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where she worked with art patron Dominique de Menil. After telling Menil about the books, Menil purchased four of the notebooks for the (then) hefty sum of $1,500, and included them immediately in an exhibition at Rice University in Houston. Pete Navarro, a local graphic artist and mystery enthusiast, upon seeing the exhibition — eventually acquired the remaining books, studying them obsessively for more than 15 years. Navarro eventually sold the remaining books to museums and galleries.

It turns out that the drawings/watercolors were the work of one Charles August Albert Dellschau (1830 - 1923). Dellschau was a butcher for most of his life and only after his retirement in 1899 did he begin his incredible career as a self-taught artist. He began with three books entitled Recollections which purported to describe a secret organization called the Sonora Aero Club. Dellschau described his duties in the club as that of the draftsman. Within his collaged watercolors were newspaper clippings (he called them “press blooms”) of early attempts at flight overlapped with his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret formula he cryptically referred to as “NB Gas” or “Suppa” — the “aeros” (as Dellscahu called them) were steampunk like contraptions with multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments. Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic, these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to 1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost magical. Newspapers of that period were full of stories about air travel feats and the acrobatic aerial dogfights of WWI were legend.

Researchers have found no account of a Sonora Aero Club, not in Texas or California. So was this simply a fantasy-fueled creative exercise by a retired man smitten with the wonders of flight? There were numerous accounts of pre-20th century UFOs in the Houston area — so perhaps Mr. Dellschau had witnessed something that ignited his simmering creative soul? The best we can do is speculate on the mystery and be thankful for the Houston junk dealer who saved a piece of art history.

All works are watercolor, pencil and collage on paper, approx. 17 x 18 inches, Images are from various public and private collections, supplied by Stephen Romano, Brooklyn, NY. A book on the images is forthcoming at the end of March from Marquand Books/D.A.P.

What Destroyed Advanced Ancient Human Civilization? Open Thread IQ Test Continued...,

bibliotecapleyades |  As mentioned in the beginning of this book, I have been for many years interested in the work of George Gurdjieff. A series of articles written by William Patrick Patterson for Telos Magazine entitled “Gurdjieff in Egypt” and a subsequent video released by Patterson with the same title rekindled my interest in Gurdjieff’s work. In his second book, Meetings With Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff had stated that he once had seen a map of “pre-sand Egypt” in the possession of an Armenian monk. This map had stimulated Gurdjieff to go to Egypt and search for teachings about human origins in ancient wisdom schools.

Patterson had also been fascinated with Gurdjieff’s travels to Egypt and had done extensive investigations of his work. Patterson is convinced that Gurdjieff had seen an image of the Sphinx on the map of “pre-sand Egypt” and went to Egypt to investigate for himself. Of course, I contend that if the map was indeed of a “pre-sand Egypt”, it would have contained the pyramids as well as the Sphinx at ancient Giza before the current desert conditions. According to Patterson, Gurdjieff had stated that his teachings had come from a complete system of “Esoteric Christianity” that originated in ancient Egypt many thousands of years before the time of Jesus. I met Patterson at a talk he gave in Denver, Colorado in July of 1999. Both Patterson and I agreed that Gurdjieff might have come in contact with the indigenous tradition over 100 years ago, especially in his extended stay in Ethiopia. Gurdjieff adamantly maintained that the source of all modern esoteric systems had their origins in predynastic Egypt, essentially supporting our paradigms of ancient Khemit.

However, Patterson also mentioned other statements of Gurdjieff that stimulated further investigations on my part. Gurdjieff had stated in his writings and discussions that he had found inscriptions on the walls of the Temple of Horus in Edfu, which is in the south of Egypt, that mentioned the myth of Atlantis. In his articles Patterson mentioned a book by British Egyptologist E. A. Reymond, The Origins of the Egyptian Temple, in which translations of the texts of Edfu were given. Reymond called these inscriptions “The Building Texts” and claimed they were the myths of the origins of ancient temple buildings.

I found Reymond’s translations of the Edfu texts to be incoherent and poorly done and decided to discuss these texts with Abd’El Hakim in Egypt. On our tour in October of 1999, we went to the Temple of Horus at Edfu and found the inscriptions on the walls ourselves. It became apparent to us that the texts at Edfu were copies of much older texts, the temple having been built in the Ptolemaic period ca. 200 BC, and were discussing events that had taken place in ancient Khemit many thousands of years before the temple was built. Gurdjieff had stated that the texts spoke of an advanced people, whom Reymond referred to by the standard Orthodox translation of the term Neter, as “Gods” who had come from an island that had been destroyed by a flood and had brought their wisdom to the ancient Khemitians. However, Hakim’s interpretation was vastly different. I believe the texts are referring to the time of the ancient Ur Nil over 30,000 years ago when the vastness of the river had turned all of Northern Africa into a series of large islands.

As the Khemitians became united, they moved from island to island, erecting temples and pyramids and creating the ancient Khemitian civilization. Once again, this became a basis for the future myth of Atlantis. Hakim was definite that the texts were not referring to a more advanced non-Khemitian people coming from outside Africa, and teaching the Khemitians how to build in stone. I propose that the ancient people followed the river from the south and the west and formed the union of the 42 tribes in the Land of Osiris, Bu Wizzer, and other ancient sites in the south, such as Edfu and Abydos.

The texts are therefore describing the Khemitian’s ascension into higher consciousness, becoming “one” with the Neters, opening their senses and creating high civilization. The texts discuss how the “Neters arrived” from different islands, and began the process of erecting large--scale edifices in stone. We did not find any references to cataclysms, but even so, the ancient Khemitians may have “island hopped” until the 42 tribes united and coalesced into a coherent civilization.

There may have been an advanced island civilization in the Atlantic (or Antarctica, as has been claimed) that perished as a result of the great cataclysm proposed around 11,500 years ago. But it may also be that there were large islands in Northern Africa as a result of the ancient Ur Nil around this same time that were populated by an advanced civilization of ancient Khemitians. The Myth of Atlantis may have referred to the entire Global Maritime Culture that existed in many parts of the world prior to 10,000 years ago, much of which was almost completely destroyed by cataclysmic events. I believe ancient Khemit should be included in that mythology.

Ancient Khemitian priests may have entertained Greek travelers with stories of cataclysms destroying island civilization as an oral history of the Global Maritime Culture that once existed, knowing full well that ancient Khemit was part of that past glory, but not revealing the complete story to the “barbarian” Greeks.

Return to La Atlantida

Return to Egipto

Ancient Egypt - Open Thread IQ Test Continued...,

bibliotecapleyades |  To comprehend fully the secret information in the Bible, it is important to understand the extent of the subterranean tunnel system and associated chamber facilities existing below the surface of the Pyramid Plateau, for it was there that major elements of Mystery School teachings developed.

What happened under the sands thousands of years ago is not reflected in today's history books, and discoveries made in the last eight decades or so verify that point.

The Fayum Oasis district, just a few kilometers outside the boundary of the Memphis Nome, presents a site of unusual interest. It was in that lush, fertile valley that Pharaohs calling themselves the "masters of the royal hunts" fished and hunted with the boomerang ⁽¹⁾, Lake Moeris once bordered the Fayum Oasis and on its shores was the famous Labyrinth, described by Herodotus as "an endless wonder to me".

The Labyrinth contained 1500 rooms and an equal number of underground chambers that the Greek historian was not permitted to inspect, according to Labyrinth priests, "the passages were baffling and intricate", designed to provide safety for the numerous scrolls they said were hidden in subterranean apartments.

That massive complex particularly impressed Herodotus and he spoke in awe of the structure:

There I saw twelve palaces regularly disposed, which had communication with each other, interspersed with terraces and arranged around twelve halls. It is hard to believe they are the work of man, The walls are covered with carved figures, and each court is exquisitely built of white marble and surrounded by a colonnade. Near the corner where the labyrinth ends, there is a pyramid, two hundred and forty feet in height, with great carved figures of animals on it and an underground passage by which it can be entered. I was told very credibly that underground chambers and passages connected this pyramid with the pyramids at Memphis.

The pyramids at Memphis were the pyramids at Giza, for Giza was originally called Memphis (see reference, "Giza formerly Memphis" on Nordan's map from Travels in Egypt and Nubia, 1757, on page 152 of previous chapter).

Many ancient writers supported Herodotus' record of underground passages connecting major pyramids, and their evidence casts doubt on the reliability of traditionally presented Egyptian history. Crantor (300 BC) stated that there were certain underground pillars in Egypt that contained a written stone record of pre-history , and they lined access ways connecting the pyramids.

In his celebrated study, On the Mysteries, particularly those of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and the Assyrians, Iamblichus, a fourth-century Syrian representative of the Alexandrian School of mystical and philosophical studies, recorded this information about an entranceway through the body of the Sphinx into the Great Pyramid ⁽²⁾:

This entrance, obstructed in our day by sands and rubbish, may still be traced between the forelegs of the crouched colossus. It was formerly closed by a bronze gate whose secret spring could be operated only by the Magi. It was guarded by public respect, and a sort of religious fear maintained its inviolability better than armed protection would have done. In the belly of the Sphinx were cut out galleries leading to the subterranean part of the Great Pyramid.

These galleries were so art-fully crisscrossed along their course to the Pyramid that, in setting forth into the passage without a guide throughout this network, one ceasingly and inevitably returned to the starting point.

It was recorded in ancient Sumerian cylinder seals that the secret abode of the Anunnaki was,

"an underground place... entered through a tunnel, its entrance hidden by sand and by what they call Huwana... his teeth as the teeth of a dragon, his face the face of a lion". 

That remarkable old text, unfortunately fragmented, added that "He [Huwana] is unable to move forward, nor is he able to move back", but they crept up on him from behind and the way to "the secret abode of the Anunnaki" was no longer blocked.

The Sumerian record provided a probable description of the lion-headed Sphinx at Giza, and if that great creature was built to guard or obliterate ancient stairways and lower passages leading to subterranean areas below and around it, then its symbolism was most appropriate.

Local 19th-century Arab lore maintained that existing under the Sphinx are secret chambers holding treasures or magical objects. That belief was bolstered by the writings of the first-century Roman historian Pliny, who wrote that deep below the Sphinx is concealed the "tomb of a ruler named Harmakhis that contains great treasure", and, strangely enough, the Sphinx itself was once called "The Great Sphinx Harmakhis who mounted guard since the time of the Followers of Horus".

Open Thread: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response ASMR

wikipedia |  Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a colloquial term used for an experience characterized by a static-like or tingling sensation on the skin that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. It has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia.^[1][2] ASMR signifies the subjective experience of "low-grade euphoria" characterised by "a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin". It is most commonly triggered by specific acoustic, visual and digital media stimuli, and less commonly by intentional attentional control.^[3][4]

The term "autonomous sensory meridian response" was coined on 25 February 2010 by Jennifer Allen, a cybersecurity professional residing in New York^[5] in the introduction to a Facebook Group she founded entitled the ASMR Group.^[6]

Prior to the subsequent social consensus that led to what is now the ubiquitous adoption of that term, other names were proposed and discussed at a number of locations including the Steady Health forum, the Society of Sensationalists Yahoo! Group and the Unnamed Feeling Blog.

Proposed formal names included "Attention Induced Head Orgasm", "Attention Induced Euphoria" and "Attention Induced Observant Euphoria", whilst colloquial terms in usage included "brain massage", "head tingle", "brain tingle", "spine tingle" and "brain orgasm".^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]}

Whilst many colloquial and formal terms used and proposed between 2007 and 2010 included reference to orgasm, there was during that time a significant majority objection to its use among those active in online discussions, many of whom have continued to persist in differentiating the euphoric and relaxing nature of ASMR from sexual arousal.^[13] However, by 2015, a division had occurred within the ASMR community over the subject of sexual arousal, with some creating videos categorized as ASMRotica (ASMR erotica), which are deliberately designed to be sexually stimulating.^[14][15]

The initial consensus among the ASMR Community was that the name should not pose a high risk of the phenomenon being perceived as sexual. Given that consensus, Allen proposed "autonomous sensory meridian response". Allen chose the words intending or assuming them to have the following specific meanings:^[16]

• Autonomous – spontaneous, self-governing, within or without control
• Sensory – pertaining to the senses or sensation
• Meridian – signifying a peak, climax, or point of highest development
• Response – referring to an experience triggered by something external or internal

Allen verified in a 2016 interview that she purposely selected these terms because they were more objective, comfortable, and clinical than alternative terms for the sensation.^[17] Allen explained she selected the word meridian to replace the word orgasm due to its meaning of point or period of greatest prosperity.

The term "autonomous sensory meridian response" and its initialism ASMR were adopted by both the community of contributors to online discussions and those reporting and commentating on the phenomenon.

Open Thread: Disclosures of Government Drug Complicity a Limited Hangout for Much Worse?

bibliotecapleyades |  We’ve got a lot to cover today and let me give you a rough approximate outline of the the things that I’d like us to get into. First, let me ask how many of you have had at least one course or workshop on hypnosis? Can I see the hands? Wonderful. That makes our job easier.

Okay. I want to start off by talking a little about trance-training and the use of hypnotic phenomena with an MPD dissociative-disorder population, to talk some about unconscious exploration, methods of doing that, the use of imagery and symbolic imagery techniques for managing physical symptoms, input overload, things like that. Before the day’s out, I want to spend some time talking about something I think has been completely neglected in the field of dissociative disorder, and that’s talking about methods of profound calming for automatic hyper-arousal that’s been conditioned in these patients.

We’re going to spend a considerable length of time talking about age-regression and abreaction in working through a trauma. I’ll show you with a non-MPD patient -- some of that kind of work -- and then extrapolate from what I find so similar and different with MPD cases. Part of that, I would add, by the way, is that I’ve been very sensitive through the years about taping MPD cases or ritual-abuse cases, part of it being that some of that feels a little like using patients and I think that this population has been used enough. That’s part of the reason, by choice, that I don’t generally videotape my work.

I also want to talk a bunch about hypnotic relapse-prevention strategies and post- integration therapy today. Finally, I hope to find somewhere in our time-frame to spend on hour or so talking specifically about ritual abuse and about mind-control programming and brainwashing -- how it’s done, how to get on the inside with that -- which is a topic that in the past I haven’t been willing to speak about publicly, have done that in small groups and in consultations, but recently decided that it was high time that somebody started doing it. So we’re going to talk about specifics today.

[Applause]

In Chicago at the first international congress where ritual abuse was talked about I can remember thinking, "How strange and interesting." I can recall many people listening to an example given that somebody thought was so idiosyncratic and rare, and all the people coming up after saying, "Gee, you’re treating one, too? You’re in Seattle"...Well, I’m in Toronto...Well, I’m in Florida...Well, I’m in Cincinnati." I didn’t know what to think at that point.

It wasn’t too long after that I found my first ritual-abuse patient in somebody I was already treating and we hadn’t gotten that deep yet. Things in that case made me very curious about the use of mind-control techniques and hypnosis and other brainwashing techniques. So I started studying brainwashing and some of the literature in that area and became acquainted with, in fact, one of the people who’d written one of the better books in that area.

Then I decided to do a survey, and from the ISSMP&D [International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation] folks I picked out about a dozen and a half therapists that I though were seeing more of that than probably anyone else around and I started surveying them. The interview protocol, that I had. got the same reaction almost without exception. Those therapists said, "You’re asking questions I don’t know the answers to. You’re asking more specific questions than I’ve ever asked my patients." Many of those same therapists said, "Let me ask those questions and I’ll get back to you with the answer." Many of them not only got back with answers, but said, "You’ve got to talk to this patient or these two patients." I ended up doing hundred of dollars worth of telephone interviewing.

What I came out of that was a grasp of a variety of brainwashing methods being used all over the country. I started to hear some similarities. Whereas I hadn’t known, to begin with, how widespread things were, I was now getting a feeling that there were a lot of people reporting some similar things and that there must be some degree of communication here.

THEY Overcome Space-Time to Get Interstellar Caviar Out Your Booty!!!

cbsnews |   With no formal training in science or engineering, Robert Bigelow created an aerospace company with scientists and engineers that's achieved what no one else in the industry has done. His expandable spacecraft are the first and only alternative to the metal structures that have housed every astronaut in space for over half a century. 

For Bigelow, it all began with growing up in a time of nuclear tests. As a young boy, he would watch the skies over Nevada light up with the bursts of atomic bombs.

Robert Bigelow: Witnessing those explosions in the 50s and 60s, you weren't aware of the ultimate ramifications of those kinds of things but there was a real strong feeling of energy and a secretiveness and so forth and it was cool.

Armstrong: "That's one small step for man…"

Later, he watched Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon, a moment in history he said still inspires him.

Robert Bigelow: The approach wasn't lightening fast…

But on this canyon road just outside Las Vegas, Robert Bigelow's story takes a turn that some may find, to put it lightly, improbable. He told us this is where his grandparents had a close encounter with a UFO.

Robert Bigelow: It really sped up and came right into their face and filled up the entire windshield of the car. And it took off at a right angle and shot off into the distance.

Open Thread: More Human Than Human

Brain item -- AI processing problem...??
would require AI to have the listener's entire life history stored in its memory to determine proper context....??

Your brain fills gaps in your hearing without you realising

No BD. Not an AI processing problem, just an illustration of the mechanical and necessarily error-prone nature of both language and auditory language processing. It's not a Voight-Kampff test and "Context doesn't require a life history".  In fact, with the benefit of big data, and centralized cloud storage and processing of hundreds of thousands of utterances and their associated meanings, the probability of an AI making either the sensory or grammatical error is greatly reduced.  

...Here's a no-nonsense AI item: Turns out AI is not sufficiently stupid to allow PC liberals to shove ridiculous egalitarian concepts down its throat. AI just looks at the *FACTS* and calls it like it sees it....

Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use, scientists say

No BD. Unfortunately, you are still trapped in the realm of language and language constructs your reality. Your language reflects your tendencies - which are racist - and so what FRANK is reflecting back at you is not the truth, merely the truth about you.  Fist tap Big Don.

Open Thread: ATLAH stands for “All the Land Anointed and Holy”

Open Post: Prove You're Not a Bot

How a typo took down S3

28blackdaysin2017 |  If you already recognize that Black gestures, speech, trends, ideas and attitudes are not exclusive to actual Black Bodies then you are ready for the concept of BlacOS.
If you already recognize that Not All Black People Are The Same (aka, I'm not your Monolith,) and that Alain Locke was onto something with his "New Negro," and that "Black Is Beautiful" was an adjustment in Black folks' ways of being in the world then you are ready for the concept of BlacOS.
If you understand that any given instance of Black representation in the media is a complex mixture of agency, randomness, creative inspiration, hopelessness and straight coonery then you are ready for the concept of BlacOS.
It's simple: Blackness, however you understand, celebrate or loathe it, is software: an operating system (OS) to be specific. The job of the OS is to make the resources of a computing system's hardware and programs available to the user. Windows. Macintosh. Linux. Be. Android. iOS. These are all systems that sit on top of a layer of hardware, and make it possible for you to interact with web browsers, video games, word processors, screen savers, and spreadsheets. You know, the stuff that makes the computer usable. 

Open Thread IQ Test - What Are Your Thoughts On This?

Fist tap Dale

Open Thread: Who is Playing This Hand?

The Trump card is always the most powerful in the deck, it is also the most feared and unpredictable. Trump is the perfect wrecking ball and that's obviously a YUUUGE part of his mission. 

He has wrecked the GOP. 

He has wrecked the DNC. 

He has wrecked the MSM. 

He has exposed the fraudulent election process, phony candidates, fake platforms, fictitious campaigns, and fabricated debates. 

You don't get to be a Manhattan real estate mogul without the backing of certain oligarchs. You don't get to participate in the gambling "industry" without the backing of certain oligarchs. With the exception of ancient gambling oligarch Sheldon Adelson, all the known power brokers who brought Trump to the dance back in the day are dead and gone. 

So who, exactly is holding the Trump card about to be put in play in the White House? 

What are their objectives aside from clearing the decks of all the useless, impotent, and limp-wristed oxygen thieves who've demonstrated a profound inability to equitably govern and to steer the American ship of state onto a course of sustainable profitability? 

Is This Superficially Deep or Deeply Superficial?

Open Thread Thursday

motherjones |  If you believe that the criminal justice system is racially biased, you need to know Heather Mac Donald. 

She'll mess with your mind and make you either up your politico-cultural game or admit you were wrong. What worries me is that so few on 'our' side can, or bother to, go toe to toe with her. Just about every one of her pieces is a statistical and analytical tour-de-force, while we liberals tend too often to mouth liberal pieties like inside jokes. Just yesterday, I was listening to Angela Davis address the Commonwealth Club (sorry. speech not posted) on my car radio. I agreed with nearly everything she said, but they were dissatisfying lefty bromides, one and all. Racist criminal justice system. Slavery was bad. War in Iraq. The crowd whooped and hollered, but where was the beef, the analysis, the facts? Forgive me Angela, patron saint of the streets, but Mac Donald would have had you for lunch.

According to her byline, Mac Donald "is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute". She's also among America's harshest critic of blacks. Harshest and most devastating; unlike most of the right-wing blovio-sphere, home girl does her homework. And for her, 2 and 2 always equal black deficiency, whether in morals, culture or crime. Trouble is, she comes loaded for bear. 

I read her religiously—even have a Google alert set up in her honor—much the same way one looks for dismembered limbs and blood stains at an accident scene while knowing one shouldn't. One will only get upset if successful and MacDonald upsets me every time because with every piece, she sets out to prove that the only problems blacks face are of their own making. 

She doesn't mess around. Her City Journal latest is a devastating response to the liberal shibboleth that the criminal justice system is racist and designed to criminalize and incarcerate blacks en masse. No, says Mac Donald. Black incarceration rates are a simple function of rampant black crime.

is it on a par with black wednesday?

marketwatch |  U.S. stock futures unraveled early Friday morning in New York, after the U.K. declared its intention to end its four-decade relationship with the European Union after a so-called Brexit vote.

Investors have been fretting that such an unprecedented decision to leave Europe’s trading bloc could destabilize the Europe’s fragile union and rattle markets.

Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average YMU6, -2.53%  fell as much as 700 points, but losses were paring from that ugly fall. 

Most recently, the Dow was down 485 points, or 2.7%, to 17,436. Futures for the S&P 500 ESU6, -3.26% tumbled 80 points, or 3.7%, to 2,028 and Nasdaq-100 futures NQU6, -3.24% cratered 173 points, or 3.9%, to 4,289.

Check out: MarketWatch’s live blog on Brexit

Markets began plunging after U.K. broadcasters BBC and ITV in the early hours of Friday morning local time forecast that the “leave” campaign had won the Brexit referendum and that the U.K. will sever its ties with the trading bloc it has been a member of since 1973. 

European stock-market indexes were being punished in the aftermath of the vote, with the Stoxx Europe 600 SXXP, -6.61%  off 8% at 318.81.

But moves in currencies, in particular, the British pound USDGBP, +6.7519% were the most pronounced. Sterling hit a low of $1.3230, a 10% slide from $1.4871 late Thursday in New York. But it has since pared some of that decline most recently at $1.3796. 

The stunning moves come after global markets rallied, betting that Britons would vote to reject Brexit, or a British exit from the EU. 

All three U.S. indexes soared into Thursday’s close, with the Dow DJIA, +1.29%  surging 230.24 points, or 1.3%, to finish at 18,011.07, while the S&P 500 SPX, +1.34% gained 27.87 points, or 1.3%, to close at 2,113.32. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +1.59%  climbed 76.72 points, or 1.6%, to close at 4,910.04.

Indications that the “leave” vote has won sets up global markets for the most volatile and frightening trading day since the market sank last August on fears about a slowdown in China’s stock market.

State Power, or something else? (quote starts at 6:00 in:)

I have often thought that our economies should have crashed thru the floor several years back, either because of declining net energy, or the debt burg. Yet, here we are, limping along, with very little blood in the streets...  

"Now many people, particularly the economic experts, believed that by the end of 1938 the Nazi economic policies would fail. We all, myself included, underestimated what could be achieved through state power; through pay freezes, through price freezes, through exchange controls, and

though the use of concentration camps. It lasted longer than one would have thought."* - Johannes Zahn, Economist & Banker since 1931, on the situation of a looming, second German hyperinflation due to loans taken out to rearm Germany.

The Nazis - A Warning From History, Episode 3 Part 2

cities

radiolab |  There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can't explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who's walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that's slipping away.