The Russian People Have Given The Kremlin Carte Blanche To Get Even

strategic culture |  Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

THEY Tryna Kanye X And Its African American Owner Elon Musk...,

Slate  | To get this out of the way: I am still using the site formerly known as Twitter.

I have been posting regularly on what is now known as X since December 2011. The site brought me many things over the years—close friendships, news from around the world, a husband—but these days I mostly use it for one reason. That reason is that I am a freelance journalist, and Twitter—excuse me, X—is still the most useful place to share and get work. In other words, it helps me get paid.

But there is a certain tension in this. I regularly write on Jewish history and politics. This includes politics around antisemitism, and the threat posed by antisemitism. Increasingly, that means that in order to potentially have the professional opportunity to cover the threat of antisemitism, I use a social media platform owned by someone who, I would argue, is using the same platform to make the threat of antisemitism actively worse.

Twitter has long had its issues, but Elon Musk, since taking over late last year, has made existing problems more pronounced—for example, in allowing accounts that had been previously suspended for hate speech to come back—and has invented problems that didn’t need to exist, including by getting rid of check marks that verified identity (and also firing thousands of staff). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, top advertisers have left the platform and ad sales have reportedly fallen dramatically.

But Musk has found someone other than himself to blame: the Anti-Defamation League, which he has now threatened to sue.

“Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” Musk posted on Monday. He added, “If this continues, we will have no choice but to file a defamation suit against, ironically, the ‘Anti-Defamation’ League.”

The Anti-Defamation League dates back to the 1910s, and per its founder, attorney Sigmund Livingston, exists “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” Today, the organization tracks hate-crime laws in the United States and provides legal services, such as serving as co-counsel in a federal lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for their role in attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

That doesn’t mean the ADL is above reproach. Increasingly, it has come under criticism from the left for putting the fight against antisemitism and for civil rights second to the desire to defend Israel and Zionism. In 2021, progressive outlet Jewish Currents published a report based on interviews with former staffers that charged that “CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has repeatedly chosen to support crackdowns on criticism of Israel over protecting civil liberties, putting him in conflict with his own civil rights office.” Earlier this year, the New Republic ran a piece that took Greenblatt to task for not doing enough to tackle white supremacy, noting that his keynote speech at the ADL’s annual leadership summit this year “had virtually nothing to say about the rise of white Christian nationalism. … Instead, he focused his ire on what the ADL calls ‘hostile anti-Zionist activists groups’ like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which loudly criticize and protest against Israel on America’s college campuses, calling them ‘the photo inverse of the extreme right.’ ” Ironically, Greenblatt faced backlash last year when, on television, he said, “Elon Musk is an amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator. He’s the Henry Ford of our time.”

But one does not need to think that Greenblatt is good at his job, or even to think that the ADL has any credibility as an institution, to be concerned that Musk appears to share with Henry Ford not only ownership of an automobile company, but also a penchant for blaming Jews. In looking for someone to blame for his troubles, Musk is lashing out at a Jewish institution that, at least in theory, exists to push back against antisemitism.

This encourages others to join in: Right-wing figure Charlie Kirk, who days earlier had posted that the ADL today is “a hate group that dons a religious mask to justify stoking hatred of the left’s enemies,” tweeted out a video of Greenblatt on MSNBC that Kirk said showed Greenblatt “bragging” about “how the group extorts every single tech company in Silicon Valley to censor Americans and ‘ban’ hate speech.” Stephen Miller, the former senior adviser in the Trump White House who was called an immigration hypocrite by his uncle, also chimed in, offering: “Speaking as a Jew: ADL is NOT a Jewish organization,” which was then reposted thousands of times. The idea that a person (or, in this case, institution) can be deemed “not really Jewish” and thus fair game for an antisemitic smear is a not uncommon one.

 

Pharis Williams: Alternative Grand Unified Theory Physicist

observing the anomaly  | For many years now, the ultimate quest in physics has been the unification of Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics. Dr. Williams discovered that both these theories can, in fact, be derived from the laws of thermodynamics. The resulting theory eliminates the singularity problems of the conventional theories and makes a variety of intriguing predictions.

In his 5-dimension manifold theory, Williams’ finds the equations of thermodynamics have (as special cases) the otherwise distinct equations of physics including: Newton’s Mechanics, Classical Thermodynamics, Einstein’s Special Relativity, Einstein’s General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Electrodynamics, The Nuclear Strong Force and Weak Force, Gravitational Force and a deeper view of Cosmic Red Shift.

Because his work fills gaps in the Standard Model of Physics from the unexpected starting point of the Laws of Thermodynamics, he has been blocked from publication in the premier science journals of our day. He has 2 books published on his work.
https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3APharis+E.+Williams&s=relevancerank&text=Pharis+E.+Williams&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1

I found one of his books online for free.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160323184244/http://physicsandbeyond.com/DynamicTheory.html

Williams states, “In summary, the book presents detailed derivations of numerous applications of the classical thermodynamic laws with the result that phenomena currently covered by Newtonian, relativistic and quantum mechanics are predicted by these three laws. This is a significant reduction of the number of required fundamental assumptions in the description of these phenomena. Additionally, many new phenomena are predicted that lead to new views of the universe.”

Memorial and Thoughts of a Man with Great Ideas — Pharis Williams

The first thing I found in my research was a DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) document published in 2015 by James O. Shannon (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Warren R. Maines (Sandia National Laboratories), David Mathes (CEO and Founder of Spacelines),and Paul Murad (Morningstar Applied Physics, LLC) titled “Memorial and Thoughts of a Man with Great Ideas — Pharis Williams”
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1248828

Before I dig into the document I want to point out who the authors are. One is Oke Shannon who worked with Pharis Williams at Los Alamos Labs. Another is from Sandia Labs. Paul Murad of Morningstar states in his linkedin profile “has over 25 years of public service as a senior technology analyst for the Department of Defense looking at foreign advanced and game-changing technology as well as defining future U.S. satellite systems for the next twenty years.” David Mathes of Spacelines has a SPI profile that states “ongoing optical research involves Dirac, Majorna and Weyl models of the electron internals, zitterbewegung, Bohmian quantum mechanics, and transactional hypothesis.”

So what does the document about Williams by these authors say? Here is a quote from the abstract.

“By applying simplifying or restrictive assumptions to the main body of the theory, Pharis shows that the major fields of physics are contained within the extensions of this theory. In these extensions, new field quantities appear to become important for systems and technical disciplines. Thus, the Dynamic Theory that he created would unify the various branches of physics into one theoretical structure. Only the future can tell what will be the impact of Pharis’ dynamic theory contributions and how engineers and scientists can gain and find new insights.”

It then goes on to explain his theory and work in more detail. It mentions a “popcorn program” or a “popcorn project” that was apparently an embarrassment to the Navy where Williams reportedly proved that a bunch of nuclear weapons were not being stored properly and a catastrophic event could potentially take place. Apparently, it was the result of him calculating the fusion yields from the tests didn’t match the theory and this is what led to him eventually developing his unified theory. The paper also implies that this embarrassment may have hurt Williams in getting others to look at his work and that the reader should look into the subject further. It says that, “You may read about this program in the archives of the London Daily Mail” however I can’t seem to find anything. I did find a story about UK weapons that could potentially explode if impacted and cause a “popcorning event” which looks related.
https://www.robedwards.com/2008/06/nuclear-bombs-could-explode-like-popcorn.html

The paper states in the conclusion:

“This unique maverick easily walked in both science and engineering disciplines and in doing so, found practical and important applications in shock physics and environmentally clean, compact reactors. From extending The Dynamic Theory to develop what Pharis described as the experimentally proven phat photon to the practicalities of the phat photon laser, such was the breadth of his skill sets where Pharis would then go the extra mile and propose applications in the fields of communications, energy and transportation. The future of The Dynamic Theory is up to the scientists and engineers of tomorrow who not only think outside the box, but can think and work in five dimensions and beyond.”

The Most Amazing Thing (REDUX 1/24/08)

“...of course the term relates to a luminous disc hovering over a scalarly transdimensional tree with its arms upraised... in the gesture of sentient communion...” — overheard at velocities exceeding c to the third.

Contrary to our activity, the discovery and production of more interesting or useful machines is not the penultimate goal of our species. Whatever it was we came to be and experience together definitely has more to do with animals than it does machines — in every possible way. It probably has a lot more to do with trees than machines, too. It defintely has to do with each other.

There are certainly hidden potentials in our human theory and technology we have not yet guessed the shapes or opportunities of — but there are also potentials in other domains we commonly ignore that far outweigh the power of those we are generally habituated to pursue, defend, value and emulate. This ‘library’ of opportunities is vast beyond our wildest imaginings, however our access is blocked by our insistance on mechanical approaches and technological ‘advancement’. The very ways of knowing we look to for enlightenment are consuming us (and our world) while systematically pretending to a heroism their enactions consistently deliver the opposite of.

I believe that the most incredible discovery our species will make will grant us new and complexly evolving experiences of personal, social and cultural liberty. It will be something we do together, for and with each other — all the time — a very general thing. Having found such a new way of experiencing ourselves and our world we will remember our earlier selves as ‘having nearly perished in the attempt to conserve heartful intentions in heartless vehicles and transports of relation’.

That liberty looks like unity. Not an formalized unity, but one that grows in waves of explosive abundance and regeneration — beyond all definition — any time it is experienced and elaborated by any interaction at all. It looks like impossible movement, that grows more impossible and amazing with each motion.

In assembly and form — this movement would be much more akin to an explosively positive game — than a religion, theory, law, philosophy, government, or formal way of knowing.

Formal vehicles resist change and are far too interested in their own reproduction and conservation to deserve our undivided attention. Informal vehicles are made to dissolve themselves, in order to provide access to a transport.

What sort of ‘thing’ could relate to knowledge the way that E=mc2 has come to relate to physics? A discovery of this magnitude would awaken the sleeping potential for the opposite of an atomic bomb: a sort of star exploding in the domain of human sentience, instead of a way of unfolding matter to create horror. We might expect to have direct experience, for the first time in modern history, of a way of being together that would encourage and empower us to share, grow and receive real understanding and access to our potentials — instead of predatory copies of these things masquerading as heroes, while copying themselves endlessly into every possible terrain.

I realize that I repeat myself. In part because I am at pains to solidly convey that I am not referring to a theory, religion or dogma — I am speaking of a transport — an ‘ever-growing set of ways’, to which we will at last have clear and common access, and the powers of mutual uplift, rescue and celebration that will arise in the wake of such a ‘disc over y’.

Am I speculating? No. I speak as though I am for the sake of achieving agreement to explore. What I am speaking about is accessible now, and it has the power to end war, and to allow us to transcend some broken toys that have kept us trapped in games of mutual annihilation, in general.

Something got broken in our species, a long time ago. And we can repair this something, together, now.

A long time ago an expanding ramp of barriers got set up between us and our inherent potentials with knowledge and relation. The time has arrived when we can surpass those barriers together, rapidly, and even turn some of them to the advantage not only of our peoples, but of the delicate nursery in and with which we proceed toward our hidden purposes, potentials, and powers.

o:O:o

 

Americans Will Suffer Devastation And Hell Because Of Our Failure To Hold Anyone Accountable

kunstler  |   “The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” — Hugo Dionisio

The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.

        This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.

      The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

     The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.

      All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.

    The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.

      Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.

      There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity showering the plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

      As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.

      This unearned immunity  might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family amount to an extreme right-wing, white supremacist conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as Reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.

 

Did The Kardashians Do To Poor Kanye What They Did To Bruce Jenner?

 

theatlantic  |  If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended to own the libs by adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election. (Remember the “Deplorables”?) It was written in support of the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, shortly after he wore a white lives matter shirt during one of his fashion shows.

This was just the beginning of a shocking two-month spiral of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has led to the undoing of Ye’s business empire and his full transformation into arguably the most openly bigoted famous person in American life. Throughout this grim unraveling—which has as its backdrop Ye’s ongoing mental-health issues—he has been thoroughly embraced by right-wing media as well as prominent white nationalists. He has also been active on the Republican political scene, most recently dining with former President Donald Trump and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

All throughout, the @JudiciaryGOP tweet stayed up. Over the past eight weeks, people have used it as a barometer for what kind of awful behavior the GOP will accept. And so it is notable that, yesterday afternoon, it was finally deleted after Ye’s calamitous appearance on Alex Jones’s Infowars broadcast. Wearing a black face mask, Ye drank Yoo-hoo, read from the Bible, and repeatedly and enthusiastically offered his praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (“They did good things, too”) while spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric alongside Fuentes.

Was JFK's Assassination A Zionist Coup?

unz |  November 22, 1963 was a coup d’état. That is the premise from which any discussion about JFK’s assassination should start. The coup was invisible at the time, because Johnson created an illusion of continuity. What changed dramatically only became public knowledge in the 1990s. In the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 2009, we read that, “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy With Israel’s Policies.”

Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his. … Not only was he personally a strong supporter of the Jewish state but he had a number of high officials, advisers and friends who shared his view. … These officials occupied such high offices as the ambassador to the United Nations, the head of the National Security Council and the number two post at the State Department. They were assiduous in putting forward Israel’s interests in such memoranda as “What We Have Done for Israel” and “New Things We Might Do in Israel” and “How We Have Helped Israel.” … So pervasive was the influence of Israel’s supporters during Johnson’s tenure that CIA Director Richard Helms believed there was no important U.S. secret affecting Israel that the Israeli government did not know about in this period.[8]

Although Dimona was probably the most urgent reason for replacing JFK with LBJ, as Michael Collins Piper has shown in his groundbreaking book Final Judgment, it was not the only one. The problem of Dimona cannot be separated from the wider geopolitical context of the Cold War. For the Soviets were as worried as Kennedy about nuclear proliferation.[9] Against Piper’s theory, it has been argued that Kennedy had no power to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, and that there was therefore no necessity for Israel to kill him.[10] That may be true: the real danger for Israel was if both the United States and the Soviet Union joined their effort to thwart Israel’s nuclear ambition. When Khrushchev’s minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko visited the White House on October 3, 1963 to discuss ways of expanding the progress of the Limited Test Ban treaty, Kennedy tasked his Secretary of State Dean Rusk to bring up the issue of Israel’s secret nuke program with Gromyko in his evening meeting at the Soviet Embassy.[11] If Americans and Russians agreed to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, Israel would have had to comply.

But worst than the risk of being deprived of their “Samson option”, the nascent cooperation between Kennedy and Khrushchev toward détente presented an even more distressing danger: their common support of Israel’s greatest foe, Egypt. This point is well made by author Salvador Astucia in Opium Lords: Israel, the Golden Triangle, and the Kennedy Assassination (2002, in pdf here)[12]:

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had stronger ties with Egyptian President Nasser than with Israel. Their befriending of Nasser, a living icon symbolizing Arab unity, was a signal to Israel that both superpowers had more interest in the Arab world than in Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish homeland, let alone its expansion into neighboring Arab territories.[13]

“In short,” writes Astucia, “détente would mark the beginning of the end for Israel as a world power because neither superpower had a strategic interest in Israel.”[14] What was urgently needed was to transform Egypt into a ground for confrontation rather than rapprochement.

Astucia published his book in 2002, and lacked hindsight on 9/11 to draw the parallel that can now be drawn between President Kennedy’s assassination and the false flag attacks of September 11^th, 2001. The parallel should be clear to those who now understand that 9/11 was both a massive psychological operation and a foreign policy coup aimed at drawing the U.S. on the side of Israel against its Arab enemies (see my previous Unz Review article). As I wrote for the film 9/11 and Israel’s Great Game: “In 2001, Israel’s reputation had fallen to its lowest level in international public opinion. Condemnations were voiced from all sides against its apartheid and colonization policies, and its systematic war against Palestinian leadership structures. The attacks of 9/11 instantly reversed this trend. Americans experienced the attacks as an act of hatred on the part of the Arab world, and thus felt immediate sympathy for Israel. … Overnight, after the 9/11 attacks, Western opinion had amalgamated the Arab world and the Palestinian resistance with Islamic terrorism.”

Who Among Us Has Deeply Pondered The USonian Rationale?

Rather, they either become consumed by tactical battlefield analyses, or start to fixate on Russia's existential position. Case in point, once the Khazarian bio-labs in Izyium an

But who here is considering the USA's rationale? As the lion, shark or spider must kill to eat, so too must an empire based on debt money consume all available resources. And who has the globe's last great stores? 

What happens to the $USD if we can't access/control these resources to ensure that the dollar power lives on?

This is why Ukraine is really the OK corral. - we're all in. But how do we ensure success? The same way we always have - by establishing the "victims" moral authority to engage in total war. In this case, total war can be rationalized that a desperate Russia used the first battlefield nuke. Why would they do that? Because they were losing so badly as to be on verge of system wide collapse.

How do we "know" Russia is losing across a collapsing front? Because the massed social media (troll army flooding all platforms) repeats the claim as virtual shock troops while the broader audience is bombarded by the MSM.

What is your take away? Patreaus, et al are telling anybody paying attention that we will escalate and retaliate with nuclear weapons as justification for Russia's "first strike".

The Nordstream false flag was just a dry run.

"Russia will attack other Russian pipelines soon" says John Brennan.

Translation: The US will blow up Turkstream. https://t.co/riSbbyhtg9

— Rosie's Social Media Madhouse! (@DarnelSugarfoo) October 3, 2022

Perhaps the global social conversation should move away from passive topical discussion to more actively sounding world-wide alarm:

Whereas,

1. The $US dollar system requires constant expansionary growth to survive;

2. Credit expansion demands energy inputs along the entire cycle of production, delivery, use and service;

3. The world's last great stores of critical natural resources reside within Russia's geographic boundaries and remain under Russia's political control;

4. Ukraine is being used as a fulcrum to advance the collapse of the Russian state to facilitate resource expropriation for the West;

5. The USA lacks any feasible way forward to achieving victory in Ukraine by limiting itself to the use of conventional force of arms;

6. US failure in Ukraine will lead to a collapse of dollar dependent Western political and socio-economic institutions, including the MIC, Federal Reserve and perhaps the U.S. government itself;

7. Failure vis-a-vis Russia in the Ukraine theater therefore threatens the USA with a direct, critical existentional crisis;

8. US policy and decision makers may have already concluded that a Sampson option via escalation represents the most logical option if the USA as it currently exists were to fail anyway.

Therefore,

It is concluded that global and worldwide political leaders, influential persons and other interested voices should appeal to more rationale minds within the U.S. government to reconsider contemplating this course of action.

The Sampson option.

Let's review basic game theory: if the USA (by that i mean the $USD) is guaranteed to lose under existing, conventional circumstances - then why not gamble that your 1 or 2 reply may be defeated/prevented and/or forestalled?

If they too fail, where's the net incremental loss?

You're an American - you know that a failure of the $USD brings down the entire socio political edifice and functioning economy that supports the MIC, FIRE, and those of us peasants not eke-ing out paycheck-to-paycheck survival.

In other words, Russia represents an existential threat to our very way of life.

And what is our takeaway from all the above?

Russia is losing so badly that in a final desperate act to forestall a total government collapse, madman Putin WILL resort to utilizing nuclear weapons.

At that point the collective west will be fully justified in retaliating in like manner and possible escalating in order to defeat the threat of an evil Putin/Russia.

Since the west ($USD) must have Russia’s resources in order to survive, a drawn out, protracted settlement, truce, stalemate in Ukraine doesn't do us any good.

Time is on Russia’s side, not ours. We must collapse, divide & plunder NOW in order to prevail. We can't do that via conventional means, so we must use nuclear weapons.

Finally, we MUST BE ABLE TO blame Russia in order to assert a "victims" moral authority.

 

Sensory Experience As Shortcut In A Multi-Modal User Interface

meaningfulparticipation |  The case against reality by Donald D. Hoffman Subtitled “How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes”

• Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory*: MUI theory states that “perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world.”

Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.

I take my perceptions seriously, but not literally.

startling “Fitness-Beats-Truth” (FBT) theorem, which states that evolution by natural selection does not favor true perceptions—it routinely drives them to extinction. Instead, natural selection favors perceptions that hide the truth and guide useful action.

Space, time, and physical objects are not objective reality. They are simply the virtual world delivered by our senses to help us play the game of life.

Physics and evolution point to the same conclusion: spacetime and objects are not foundational. Something else is more fundamental, and spacetime emerges from it.

Our senses report fitness, and an error in this report could ruin your life. So our senses use “error-correcting codes” to detect and correct errors. Spacetime is just a format our senses use to report fitness payoffs and to correct errors in these reports.

we differ from rocks in two key respects. First, we experience sensations. Second, we have “propositional attitudes,” such as the belief that rocks don’t have headaches we also have meaning, problem solving capability and enactors

Like a rock, we have bona fide physical properties. But unlike a rock, we have conscious experiences and propositional attitudes. Are these also physical? If so, it’s not obvious: What is the mass of dizziness, the velocity of a headache, or the position of the wonder why Chris won’t call?

Our failure to envision a mechanism does not preclude one. Perhaps we’re not clever enough, and an experiment will teach us what we can’t surmise from an armchair. After all, we invest in experiments because they often repay us in surprise.

Sperry’s explanation was simple and profound. When you fixate on the cross in KEY + RING, the neural pathways from eye to brain send KEY only to the right hemisphere, and RING only to the left. If the corpus callosum is intact, the right hemisphere then tells the left about KEY, and the left tells the right about RING, so that the person sees KEY RING.

What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness? I propose it is this: we see reality as it is.

::Perception is always relative to WII. WII creates the context and filter for our perception::

::Placebo as example of reality models making reality::

beauty is a perception of fitness payoffs on offer,

The predictions of evolution about beauty are surprising but, as we will see in chapter nine, its predictions about physical objects are disconcerting: objects, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder and inform us about fitness—not about objective reality.

The Predicament Of Mankind

The Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth” in 1972.

It was funded by industrialists. They’ve been acting profitably on this information since they got it. The inherent short term interest of capitalism has always made it a death cult and everyone who sees capitalism as an organizing principal for an economy is buying into this cult. The death cult has recently become a totalitarian one in the West as the US attempts to make its surveillance capitalism a universal system.

Capitalism may have a place in a sustainable future, but only as a carefully controlled, constrained system for fostering technological competition contained within pro-social, pro-ecological governing structures. We’ve probably moved beyond that possibility already.

I think part of it is that ruling elites have a very difficult time imagining how a society can hold together without the hamster game of work, debt and consumption. One of the things constricting their imagination is the fact that a different system, one less reliant on the radical individualism that seeks to justify outrageous levels of inequality, would eliminate much of their power and privilege.

By now - it should be obvious to even the most psychopathic and parasitic of our elites - that as they make the hamster game harder and harder, that radical individualism twists itself into Free-Dumb to such an extent that society becomes ungovernable. 

When you look at the actions of the Western colonial nations you can see that their intent is to keep the poor countries poor so that they won’t be able to have the high consumption lifestyles of the West. The elites know that there isn’t enough to go around, and they are hoarding what is available. Drilling down a bit one sees that in individual nations in the West the wealthy keep the poor poor so that they too won’t be able to compete for what the wealthy have. It is truly dog eat dog at every level of society. Propaganda is used to make the poor (and increasingly the middle class) think that they too can live the high life if only they get the right credentials and work hard enough. Because it is a zero sum game the wealthy won’t actually allow the poor and middle class to impinge on their lifestyles, but they certainly try to convince them that it is in reach provided…

Pierre Trudeau and the global jet-set are being hoisted on their own petards. No business can build and operate an ocean terminal in Canada to ship Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) to Europe in the next six months. They have turned the world into a free trade scheme whose organizing theory relies exclusively on markets - and - whose sole purpose is to increase corporate profits. Russia, China and Iran are trying to break free of this new world order.

The only response in the West to the shortages and workers missing due to the Ukrainian proxy world-war  - and - ongoing unmitigated coronavirus and monkeypox pandemics - is to raise prices. The globalist bubble is so impervious that it is of no matter that the rising energy prices for most will be unaffordable and many expendable proles will face an unheated winter. No one is thinking of the consequences.

The 2021 Texas Freeze power outages only lasted for one week . These market-driven outages led to: 

• Widespread damage to homes and businesses
• Foregone economic activity
• Contaminated water supplies
• The loss of at least 111 lives

Early estimates indicate that the freeze and outage may cost the Texas economy $80–$130 billion in direct and indirect economic loss” (for example, frozen pipes and water damage to homes and apartments). 

If this happens next Winter in Europe, it will collapse the EU and Western Europe. Yet, there is no talk of an armistice or opening NORD Steam 2 gas pipeline from Russia. The West is at war but with no working sovereign and representational governments. All the West can do is to send money and armaments to Ukraine – ignoring the looming disasters that await.

Declaration On Allied Interaction In The Heartland

indianpunchline |  If the metaphor of the “Great Game” can be applied to the Ukrainian crisis, with the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) at it core, it has begun causing reverberations across the entire Eurasian space. The great game lurking in the shade in the Caucasus and Central Asian regions in recent years is visibly accelerating. 

The edge of the game is above everything else the targeting of Russia and China by the United States. This unfolding game cannot be underestimated, as its outcome may impact the shaping of a new model of the world order. 

Starting with the Caspian Summit in Ashgabat on June 29, the inter-connected templates of the great game in the Caucasus began surfacing. The fact that the summit was scheduled at all despite the raging conflict in Ukraine — and that Russian President Vladimir Putin took time out to attend it — testified to the high importance of the event. 

Basically, the presidents of the 5 littoral states — Kazakhstan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Russia — synchronised their watches, based on the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea — the Constitution of the Caspian Sea — that was signed at their last summit in 2018. While doing so,  they considered the current international situation and geopolitical processes worldwide. 

Thus, one of the key points of the Final Communiqué of the Ashgabat Summit was the reiteration of a fundamental principle regarding the total exclusion of the armed forces of all extra-regional powers from  the Caspian Sea (which primarily meets the geopolitical interests of Russia and Iran.) The fact that the heads of the Caspian countries confirmed this in writing can be regarded as the main result of the Summit. Secondly, the leaders focused on the Caspian transport communications and agreed that the region could become a hub for the East-West and North-South corridors. 

The Caspian Summit was held just 5 weeks after Russian forces  gained control of Mariupol port city (May 21), which established its total supremacy over the Sea of Azov and the Kerch Strait in eastern Crimea. Kerch Strait has a strategic role in Russian policies, being the narrow maritime gateway (5 kms in length and 4.5 km. wide at the narrowest point) which links the Black Sea via the Sea of Azov to Russia’s major waterways including the Don and the Volga. 

In effect, it is yet to sink in that in the geopolitics of the entire Eurasian landmass, the liberation of Mariupol by Russian forces  was a pivotal event in the great game, since the Kerch Strait ensures maritime transit from the Black Sea all the way to Moscow and St Petersburg, not to mention the strategic maritime route between the Caspian Sea (via the Volga-Don Canal) to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

 

United Deep Waterway System of European Russia linking Sea of Azov and  Caspian Sea to Baltic Sea and the Northern Sea Route

Now, to get the “big picture” here, factor in that Volga River also links the Caspian Sea to the Baltic Sea as well as the Northern Sea Route (via the Volga–Baltic Waterway). Suffice to say, Russia has gained control of an integrated system of waterways, which connects the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the Baltic and the Northern Sea Route (which is a 4800 km long shipping lane that connects the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean, passing along the Russian coasts of Siberia and the Far East.) 

No doubt, it is a stupendous consolidation of the so-called “heartland” — per Sir Halford Mackinder’s theory (1904) that whoever controls Eastern Europe controls the Heartland and controls the “world island.” 

Looking back, therefore, there is no question that the reunion of Crimea with the Russian Federation in 2014 was a major setback for the US and NATO. Putin caught Washington and its allies by total surprise. It complicated their objective to integrate Ukraine into the NATO.

Digital Choice Architectures Increase Behavioral Inefficiency

laidlawscholars  |   The internet has been appraised by economists for reducing search costs and increasing market efficiency. This article argues that economists should adopt a more critical view of digital markets because only a small part of the internet is easily accessible to consumers through search engines and this information is easy to be presented suggestively. The digital choice architecture is explored through the concept of digital nudges, which could be used to guide people to make better choices in digital environments.

Digital nudge is defined as an aspect of a digital choice architecture, which alters people’s decisions online in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing economic incentives. This is a similar definition to how Thaler and Sunstein (2008) defined the general nudge. Weinmann et al. (2016) define digital nudges as “the use of user-interface design elements to guide people’s behaviour in digital choice environments.”

The goal of a nudge is to help people to make better decisions. However, often the elements of choice architecture lead people to make worse decisions. This kind of use of choice architecture is defined as “sludge”. (Thaler, 2018)

More and more decisions are being made online and these decisions can be influenced by considering psychological principles when designing the digital choice architecture. An excellent example of the use of the scarcity effect (Cialdini, 2007) is a hotel booking website advertising that you are booking the last room available. Similarly, the same site might benefit from the social proof effect (Cialdini, 2007) by saying that ten people are looking at the same room as you. A streaming service might attempt to hook you into watching multiple episodes in a row by automatically starting the next episode, which is an example of cognitive ease. (Kahneman, 2011) A smartphone might send out a notification informing you about a personal situation at a mobile game to lure you in with a method similar to nudging by presentation. (Thornhill et al., 2019; Acquisti et al., 2017)

Creating a digital choice architecture, where the user ends up making biased decisions is relatively easy and cost-effective. Our literature review found multiple examples of well-functioning digital nudges which show how digital choice architecture can impact people’s decisions online.

According to economic theory, reduced search costs will lead to improved and more efficient competition because comparing prices is easier and more information is available. Electronic marketplaces have been appraised for reducing search costs. (Petersen et al., 2002; Bakos, 1997; Goldfarb & Tucker, 2019) More efficient competition is good for the consumers because they can receive the best possible prices, quantity, and service.

However, the downside of electronic marketplaces is that altering the digital choice architecture is relatively easy making it possible to sludge consumers into buying your company’s product. Even though consumers might have access to more information online, the way in which information is presented also matters a great deal.

 

Another issue is with search engines, which can only access a small part of the internet. Furthermore, consumers are likely to click on only the first results offered by search engines.

Digital nudges

Multiple ways of digital nudging have been proposed. Already in 2002 Mandel and Johnson found that even changing the colours or background photo of a website can prime people to make different choices online.

 

How Ukraine Fits Into The Great Game

goldmoney  |  Ukraine is part of a far bigger geopolitical picture. Russia and China want US hegemonic influence in the Eurasian continent marginalised. Following defeats for US foreign policy in Syria and Afghanistan and following Brexit, Putin is driving a wedge between America and the non-Anglo-Saxon EU.

Due to global monetary expansion, rising energy prices are benefiting Russia, which can afford to squeeze Germany and other EU states dependent on Russian natural gas. The squeeze will only stop when America backs off.

Being keenly aware that its dominant role in NATO is under threat, America has been trying to escalate the Ukraine crisis to suck Russia into an untenable occupation. Putin won’t fall for it.

The danger for us all is not a boots-on-the-ground war — that’s likely to only involve the pre-emptive attacks on military installations Putin initiated last night — but a financial war for which Russia is fully prepared.

Both sides probably do not know how fragile the Eurozone banking system is, with both the ECB and its national central bank shareholders already having liabilities greater than their assets. In other words, rising interest rates have broken the euro system and an economic and financial catastrophe on its eastern flank will probably trigger its collapse.

he developing tension over Ukraine is part of a bigger picture — a struggle between America and the two Eurasian hegemons, Russia and China. The prize is ultimate control over Mackinder’s World Island.

Halford Mackinder is acknowledged as the founder of geopolitics: the study of factors such as geography, geology, economics, demography, politics, and foreign policy and their interaction. His original paper was entitled “The Geographical Pivot of History”, presented at the Royal Geographical Society in 1905 in which he first formulated his Heartland Theory, which extended geopolitical analysis to encompass the entire globe.

In this and a subsequent paper (Democratic Ideals and Reality: A study in the Politics of Reconstruction, 1919) he built on his Heartland Theory, and from which his famous quote has been passed down to us: “Who rules East Europe commands the World Island [Eurasia]; Who rules the World Island rules the World”. Stalin was said to have been interested in this theory, and while it is not generally admitted, the leaders and administrations of Russia, China and America are almost certainly aware of Mackinder’s theory and its implications.

We cannot know if the Russian and Chinese leaders and administrations are avid Mackinder fans, but their partnership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is consistent with his World Island Theory. Since commencing as a post-Soviet, post-Mao security agreement between Russia and China founded in 2001 to suppress Islamic fundamentalism, the SCO has evolved into a political and economic intergovernmental organisation, which with its members, observer states, and dialog partners accounts for over 3.5 billion people, half the world’s population.

We Need Multidimensional Portraits Of Ancient Peoples...,

ineteconomics  |   Napoleon Bonaparte asked, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Graeber and Wengrow come in to shake off the spell of prevailing fables — not as armchair theorists snatching ideas from thin air but as reviewers and synthesizers of a plethora of tantalizing recent discoveries, along with the work of neglected thinkers who (hello, feminist scholars) who drew ire for their attention to glaring inconsistencies in the established narratives. In doing so, they recover frameworks for the way ancient peoples experienced their world that help us to see that we could be organizing ourselves – socially, economically, politically — on principles much different from those that seem inevitable today. This is heartening.

Among the propositions of Graeber and Wengrow are these:

• We barely have the language to express what our remote ancestors were up to 95% of the time.
• The Agricultural Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all. The real story is much more complex – and interesting.
• Ancient peoples lived with a rich variety of social and political structures, even varying according to the season. (Very flexible, those folks).
• Humans aren’t just pawns on a chessboard of material conditions. We’ve been actively experimenting from the get-go.
• Inequality in large-scale human communities isn’t inevitable, nor is it a product of farming. Ditto, patriarchy.
• Past societies that valued women were happier places to live. (Duh).
• We can do better. We have done better.

The authors begin by pointing out that eighteenth-century theories of human history were partly a reaction to critiques of European society offered by indigenous observers. Consider Kandiaronk, a Wendat chief so skilled in debate he could easily shut down a Jesuit, who blew the minds of listeners with penetrating insights on authority, decency, social responsibility, and above all, freedom. Kandiaronk’s critiques, presented in a dialogue form by the Baron de Lahontan in 1703, sparked a whole genre of books voicing criticisms from a “primitive” outsider. Graeber and Wengrow illuminate how profoundly these products influenced Enlightenment thought and helped give rise to social and political experiments (including the U.S. Constitution), as well as defensive strategies to discount such perspectives (also including the U.S. Constitution).

Madame de Graffigny’s epistolary novel of 1747, “Letters from a Peruvian Woman” (1747) tells the story of an Incan princess who rails against the inequality she observes in French society – particularly the ill-treatment of women. This volume, in turn, helped shape the thinking of the economist A.R.J. Turgot, who responded by insisting that inequality was inevitable. He outlined a theory of social evolution posited as progress from hunters to pastoralism to farming to urban commercial civilization that placed anybody not at the final stage as a vestigial life form that had better get with the program. Turgot’s scheme of social evolution started popping up in lectures of his buddy Adam Smith over in Glasgow, and eventually worked its way into general theories of human history proposed by several of Smith’s influential colleagues such as Adam Ferguson.

The new default paradigm formed the lens through which Europeans viewed indigenous peoples the world over; namely as childish innocents or brutal savages living in deplorable static conditions. Everybody was to be sorted according to how they acquired food, with egalitarian foraging societies banished to the bottom of the ladder. The Kandiaronks causing anxiety by pointing out the grotesque conditions of so-called civilization — from the large numbers of starving people to the need for two hours for a Frenchman to dress himself — could now be dismissed. This mindset became prevalent in the emerging field of archaeology, where practitioners churned out biased interpretations of ancient societies that rendered them non-threatening to the modern, capitalist way of life.

Teleological history was the name of the game, and scholars played it endlessly.