Inexcusable Oxygen Theft By The Professional Managerial Class

The professional managerial class lives in an Atlassian/Tableau fantasy world (formerly Powerpoint and Excel) Their ability to ‘model’ and then ‘pitch’ (and fund) a decision (read, allocation of Other People’s Money), using an elaborate smokescreen of elementary finance and decision science that masks a few dumbed down operating assumptions (or worse, ‘benchmarks and kpi's’) carries a far higher paycheck and prestige than the hard work, expertise and experience required to discover real world inputs.

 

In fact, real world experience is actively harmful in PMC world. After all, it tends to result in ‘FUDs’ (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), and therefore no greenlight and no remunerative follow on workstreams (see ‘Bu!!sh!t Jobs)

 

Having a degree does not make one a member of the PMC, it is being in an institutional or professional setting where you are subject to pressure about your work product and process, despite the appearance of some degree of autonomy by virtue of elite status. It most certainly is not just about credentials or pay. And you don’t have to be senior either. 

 

Increasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a PMC job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way. Industries such as finance have seized and held onto larger and larger proportions of the economy.  The same disproportionate growth can be seen in financialised healthcare and finacialised education.

 

In other words, being a member of the PMC critically includes that you are sufficiently not in control of your work process or product that if you object to widespread practices (either in the industry or at your place of employment) that you find morally offensive, you can expect to suffer serious career or income costs. Most people believe they can’t afford that and so go along with the program.

nakedcapitalism  |  In the years 2016-2020:

1)The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) attained class consciousness.

2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop.

3) The press replaced reporting with advocacy.

4) Election legitimacy is determined by extra-Constitutional actors.

5) “Fascism” became an empty signifier, not an analytical tool.

Let us look at each of these claims.

1) The PMC attained class consciousness. As Thomas Frank has shown (Listen, Liberal!), the PMC has replaced the working class as the Democrat Party base[1]. During the period 2016-2020, the PMC, collectively, experienced Trump’s election as literal, actual trauma (as pain, as an energy suck, as constant stress, as depression, etc. Parents wept to tell their children, and so forth. That the burden of such trauma is — with respect to the post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by, say, soldiers. abuse victims, or the homeless — quite slight may lead some — well, me — to mock it (“How was brunch?”), but the trauma is deeply felt and real). Importantly, as Steve Randy Waldman has urged, the class position — and hence the class consciousness — of the PMC is marked by “predatory precarity“; the predation comes from what a professional must do to maintain their class position in a financialized economy driven by rent-seeking; the precarity comes from the fact that their class position is maintained, not by the ownership of capital, or the inheritance of a title, but by expensive “positional goods” like credentials. Trump’s right-wing populism, with its distrust of experts — the same meritorious experts whose Esq.s were on every foreclosure notice or dunning letter, and whose M.D.s were on every surprise medical bill — struck directly at both exposed nerves. Not only might they not be consulted on how best to rule, their very credentials might turn out to be worthless. Hence the rage, the fear, the hate, certainly universally expressed in the press, but also in such organizations as Indivisible, the Women’s March, etc. The PMC as a class came to consciousness screaming Make it stop!

2) The PMC was and is embubbled by a domestic psyop. Make it stop! was, however, followed hard upon by I didn’t do it! Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, describes how Robbie Mook deployed RussiaGate to delegitimize the newly elected President in a meeting with the rest of the defeated Clinton camp the day after Election Day 2016. RussiaGate became the Goebbelsian propaganda operation that it was — if there had been anything to it, Pelosi would have impeached Trump for it, Mueller Report or no[2] — through an unholy alliance of the Democrat Party apparatus, the intelligence community, and the press. All were variously motivated — “There in stately splendor, far removed from the squalid village below, they fight their petty battles over power and money” (Bob and Ray) — but the effect on the PMC was extraordinary: To this very day, any opposing or dissenting force to the liberal Democrat orthodoxy of the day can be dismissed with a one-liner about Putin! I’ve never seen anything like it.[3] Both (1) and (2) combined to drive turnout, voluntering, donations, and everything else. (That the Democrat base is too slim to rule on its own is another issue entirely.)

State And Local Governments About To Get A Self-Inflicted Shit-Hammering...,

jacobin |  Centrist Democrats are tacking hard right on the shaky premise that calls for Medicare for All and policing reform flattened the anticipated “blue wave.” And in statehouses, that wave proved less than a ripple: Republicans now control both legislatures in thirty states and have a “trifecta” stranglehold (claiming the governor’s office, too) in twenty-three of those.

All this will make it harder to address one of the starkest failures of the government’s response to the COVID-19 economic crisis: the sustained neglect of state and local finances. State and local governments are directly responsible for providing essential services, including education and public health. And they are an important source of (mostly) good jobs, employing almost 20 million people — or about one in eight workers — when the virus struck.

The CARES Act included $150 billion in aid to state and local governments, but with the proviso that it could only be used to defray the unanticipated costs of fighting the pandemic — not for any “regular” budgetary lines. In some states, governors either skirted these limits (using federal funds, for instance, to fill potholes) or made dubious decisions as to who to protect. Both Arizona and Iowa used large chunks of their CARES grants to backfill their unemployment insurance trust funds — shielding employers from future tax increases even as their workers lost access to extended or expanded unemployment benefits.

The only other assistance was an effort to financialize state and local desperation. The CARES Act authorized the Federal Reserve (through a new Municipal Liquidity Facility) to buy state and local bonds. This line of credit just kicked the crisis down the road. And the loan terms and costs were so onerous that, as the Center for Popular Democracy concluded in June, all but a handful of the jurisdictions that met the program’s population thresholds were “functionally excluded.”

As summer spilled into fall, it became clear that no further federal money was on the way. The Heroes Act earmarked more than $1 trillion for state and local aid for any pressing needs (including shoring up revenues) but the Republican response — not a penny for state and local governments and sweeping immunity for business from COVID-related lawsuits — ground negotiations to a halt.

Recessions always savage state and local budgets, but this one — given its suddenness and severity — has been especially rough.

Represent Constituents?!?!?! Silly Tlaib - We Have A Mandate From Paying Donors!!!

dailycaller |  “Despite an obvious preference by Democratic leadership to focus on the suburbs and former Republican voters rather than working-class communities of color, progressives like Stacey Abrams, Rep. Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib are showing us – through turnout results in their states and cities – where Democrats must invest to build the party,” the memo says.

“We’re not going to be successful if we’re silencing districts like mine,” Tlaib said, according to Politico. “Me not being able to speak on behalf of many of my neighbors right now, many of which are black neighbors, means me being silenced. I can’t be silent.” 

“We are not interested in unity that asks people to sacrifice their freedom and their rights any longer,” Tlaib continued. “And if we truly want to unify our country, we have to really respect every single voice. We say that so willingly when we talk about Trump supporters, but we don’t say that willingly for my Black and brown neighbors and from LGBTQ neighbors or marginalized people.”

Progressives are pushing for power in the Joe Biden administration, despite the criticism from moderate Democrats. Tlaib reportedly wants to see a public educator and labor advocates in top positions. Progressives and left-wing strategists don’t want Biden to work across the aisle with Republicans, although Biden has expressed his desire to create a sense of unity by doing so.

“If [voters] can walk past blighted homes and school closures and pollution to vote for Biden-Harris, when they feel like they don’t have anything else, they deserve to be heard,” Tlaib said, choking up as she expressed frustration near the end of an interview this week. “I can’t believe that people are asking them to be quiet.”

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is calling for an “unapologetic agenda” that is distinct from the GOP “instead of trying to play to notions of civility,” Politico reported. Specifically, Ocasio-Cortez wants the Democratic Party to establish a cohesive message on racism because “Democrats don’t want to talk about race.”

 

They'll Be Fooling No One And It Will Only Add To The Rage

straightlinelogic |  The idea of individual rights protected by the government was the foundation of the American experiment. It was and has been imperfectly realized; it is an ideal and humanity rarely attains its ideals. Government is and always will be the antithesis of that still revolutionary ideal. The US government’s massive expansion has been at the cost of the people’s liberty and has destroyed most of their rights. That destruction has been ongoing since the beginning of the republic and Trump has done nothing to stop or reverse i. Philosophical insight and consistency are not among his virtues.

Nevertheless, a Biden administration will be worse, much worse. The Democrats now openly aspire to the collectivist ideal—the complete subjugation of the individual to the state. We’ve gotten a preview of coming attractions with coronavirus totalitarianism, which has obliterated the few freedoms and joys left to Americans. For the millions of Americans who voted for him, including me, Trump represented the last, best hope for what we consider the American way of life.

There’s no going back, and the way forward is for those who cherish the American ideals of individual rights, freedom, limited government, the rule of law, and equality before that law to break away from Washington’s and it’s aligned states’ corruptocracy and sunder the ties that bind us. Nations and governments are not cast in stone for time and all eternity.

Certainly the bankrupt dis-United States and its government aren’t. The bill is coming due for the debt orgy and an unprecedented and catastrophic global economic cataclysm will take down whomever is unlucky enough to be the president. A defeated Trump would dodge that bullet. The resulting chaos will be unmanageable by a government that produces only debt, can steal little or nothing from a bankrupt economy, cannot borrow at anything but ruinous interest rates, and which must cover its soaring budget deficits with scrip it either prints or creates via computer entries, whether or not it outlaws real money (gold) or forces its increasingly worthless scrip to stay in the banking system.

At that time, an organized secession movement has a real chance. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Collapse will be freedom’s staunchest ally if the moment is seized. It won’t be easy and it won’t be without blood. Until it happens, prepare for the worst, it is assuredly coming and coming soon, but work towards a brighter future in a nation that does not yet exist.

For those who don’t want to wait, almost six years ago (January 7, 2015) I published “Revolution in America,” which presents a nonviolent way to take down the government by attacking it at its weakest point. It requires the collective action of millions of people and at that time I believed the recommended course of action would remain hypothetical. Things change. Although the hour is late, any significant fraction of Trump’s rightfully enraged 71 million voters could still put the plan into effect. The article merits a second look. Please pass it, and this article, on.

So What Will The Deplorables Do?

Asia Times |  US intel is very much aware of well-documented instances of election fraud. Among them: NSA software that infiltrates any network, as previously detailed by Edward Snowden, and capable of altering vote counts; the Hammer supercomputer and its Scorecard app that hacks computers at the transfer points of state election computer systems and outside third party election data vaults; the Dominion software system, known to have serious security issues since 2000, but still used in 30 states, including every swing state; those by now famous vertical jumps to Biden in both Michigan and Wisconsin at 4am on November 4 (AFP unconvincingly tried to debunk Wisconsin and didn’t even try with Michigan); multiple instances of Dead Men Do Vote.

The key actor is the Deep State, which decides what happens next. They have weighed the pros and cons of placing as candidate a senile, stage 2 dementia, neocon warmonger and possible extorsionist (along with son) as “leader of the free world”, campaigning from a basement, incapable of filling a parking lot in hs rallies, and seconded by someone with so little support in the Dem primaries that she was the first to drop out.

The optics, especially seen from vast swathes of the imperial-interfered Global South, may be somewhat terrible. Dodgy elections are a prerogative of Bolivia and Belarus. Yet only the Empire is able to legitimize a dodgy election – especially in its own backyard.

Welcome to the New Resistance

The GOP is in a very comfortable position. They hold the Senate and may end up picking up as may as 12 seats in the House. They also know that any attempt by Biden-Harris to legislate via Executive Orders will have…consequences.

The Fox News/ New York Post angle is particularly enticing. Why are they suddenly supporting Biden? Way beyond internal family squabbles worthy of the Succession saga, Rupert Murdoch made it very clear, via the laptop from hell caper, that he has all sorts of kompromat on the Biden family. So they will do whatever he wants. Murdoch does not need Trump anymore.

Nor, in theory, does the GOP. Former CIA insiders assure of serious backroom shenanigans going on between GOP honchos and the Biden-Harris gang. Trade-offs bypassing Trump – which most of the GOP hates with a vengeance. The most important man in Washington will be in fact GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Still, to clear any lingering doubts, a vote recount would be absolutely necessary in all 6 contested states – WI, MI, PA, GA, NV and AZ. Through hand counting. One by one. The DoJ would need to act on it, immediately. Not gonna happen. Recounts cost a ton of money. There’s no evidence Team Trump – on top of it short of funds and manpower – will be able to convince Daddy Bush asset William Barr to go for it.

While relentlessly demonizing Trump for spreading “a torrent of misinformation” and “trying to undermine the legitimacy of the US election”, mainstream media and Big Tech have declared a winner – a classic case of pre-programming the sheep multitudes.

This Is Not About Biden, It's About The Crime Syndicate Behind Him

theautomaticearth |  With Biden you don’t get Biden, you get the entire cabal that went after Trump, the Democratic Party, the media, the intelligence agencies. And yes, Biden was and is very much part of that cabal. How people do not find that a whole lot scarier than Donald Trump is beyond me.

If -and no that is not when- Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20 2021, that cabal will take over the country. And we’ve seen plenty indications that they intend to make it impossible for the Republicans to ever get one of their own elected as president again. Moreover they will not be investigated for what they concocted over the past 4-5 years.

How the Hillary campaign and the DNC leaked things to the FBI, and the FBI to the MSM, how they lied in courtrooms to get FISA applications on Trump campaign people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. How they set up Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn so he wouldn’t be Trump’s National Security Adviser, because Flynn knew too much.

It’s a scheme so full of illegal actions that it will be devastating for the entire American political system if it is never investigated, or even if it isn’t investigated very very thoroughly, by an impartial party. And it won’t be if Biden becomes president.

The cabal wants you to think this is about Trump, and any given way to get rid of him is justifiable no matter what, but that is a very dangerous way of thinking. If crimes have been committed, they must be brought into daylight and before a court.

Problem is, of course, that at least half the nation has no idea of what’s been going on. Because they get their news and information from those media that are in on the whole deal. They won’t know that the DNC paid for the Steele Dossier, or that is was just a bunch of lies, or that the FBI knew this even before Rosenstein appointed Mueller as Special Counsel. All that has been kept away from them.

And yes, 4 years ago Trump said he would fight the swamp, but landed right in the middle of it. Early in his presidency he found himself surrounded by the likes of McMaster, John Kelly, Tillerson, and many other swamp creatures, and today he still has people like Mike Pompeo. But at least Trump is an outsider, and if anything can ever be done to drain the swamp, it will have to come from an outsider. That it may take more than 4 years is something we have to take for granted.

The swamp has fought back, and they may yet win. Joe Biden is the face of that. But people who celebrate that victory should think again, whether they like Trump or not. The swamp is not good for you, and it’s not good for your country, your rights, your freedoms. Its entire MO is to take all these away from you. This is not a partisan thing; the fat ass of the swamp easily fits and sits across the divide.

 

$15 - $25 Trillion? The True Wild-Assed Guess Cost Of Transitioning To Renewables

oilprice |  This is the amount of money to be invested in new power capacity globally over the next three decades. Most of this—80 percent—will be poured into renewables. This certainly makes the energy transition far from cheap, but no one—at least no one reputable—ever said going green would be cheap. Yet the amount of investments to be directed towards expanding wind, solar, and associated systems will not be the only costs to be borne during the transition. There may well be steep environmental costs as well.

BloombergnNEF, which conducted the analysis that resulted in the investment estimate for the next 30 years in energy, also said that between 2020 and 2050, another $14 trillion will be invested in the grid, likely to adapt it for a surge in solar and renewable power deployments, which, according to the analysis, will constitute 56 percent of total global generation capacity by 2050. And it will have spurred a mini golden age in mining.

Wind power, like solar power, requires a lot of metals and other minerals to produce essential components for the installations. Therefore, as the demand for wind turbines and blades jumps, so will the demand for the metals they are made of. It’s the same with the metals and minerals necessary for the production of a solar panel.

Here’s just one example that could perhaps illustrate the trend: according to a 2017 report by the World Bank, demand for silver could soar from the then-current 24,000 tons annually to more than 400,000 tons. And that’s under a best-case scenario that features a greater penetration of silver-free thin-film PV panels in the energy mix, at the expense of crystalline silicon panels that use silver. Under a worst-case scenario, demand for silver could top 700,000 tons.

This is quite an increase that will require a major expansion in mining and mining is an energy-intensive, not particularly environmentally friendly way of getting finite resources out of the ground, as investor Sam Kovacs writes in an article for Seeking Alpha addressing the challenges of the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Now add to silver a host of other metals used in renewable energy installations, and the mining expansion becomes even more substantial, adding economic, social, and environmental costs to the transition.

Then there is energy storage. Without it, the transition will simply not happen. In fact, some are questioning whether it could happen given the current stage of development of energy storage technology. Two years ago, an article by James Temple for the Massachusetts Technology Review questioned the viability of the energy transition precisely because of energy storage, which, Temple argued, was still prohibitively expensive in light of the scale, to which such storage would need to be developed.

 

Go To Sleep Little Sheep - The World You Know Is Ending...,

theguardian  |  Normalcy and the restoration of a modicum of decorum to the White House: that is what many elite supporters of Joe Biden hope for now that he has won the election. But the rest of us are turned off by this meagre ambition. Voters who loathe Trump celebrate his loss, but the majority rue the return to what used to pass as normal or ethical.

When Trump contracted Covid-19, his opponents feared he might benefit from a sympathy vote. But Trump is not a normal president seeking voters’ sympathy. He doesn’t do sympathy. He neither needs nor banks on it. Trump trades on anger, weaponises hatred and meticulously cultivates the dread with which the majority of Americans have been living after the financial bubble burst in 2008. Obscenities and contempt for the rules of polite society were his means of connecting with a large section of American society.

The reason 2008 was a momentous year wasn’t just because of the magnitude of the crisis, but because it was the year when normality was shattered once-and-for-all. The original postwar social contract broke in the early 1970s, yielding permanent real median earnings stagnation. It was replaced by a promise to America’s working class of another route to prosperity: rising house prices and financialised pension schemes. When Wall Street’s house of cards collapsed in 2008, so did this postwar social contract between America’s working class and its rulers.

After the crash of 2008, big business deployed the central bank money that refloated Wall Street to buy back their own shares, sending share prices (and, naturally, their directors’ bonuses) through the stratosphere while starving Main Street of serious investment in good-quality jobs. A majority of Americans were thus treated, in quick succession, to negative equity, home repossessions, collapsing pension kitties and casualised work – all that against the spectacle of watching wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few.

By 2016, the majority of Americans were deeply frustrated. On the one hand, they lived with the private anguish caused by the permanent austerity to which their communities had been immersed since 2008. And, on the other, they could see a ruling class whose losses were socialised by the government, which defined the response to the crash.

Donald Trump simply took advantage of that frustration. And he did so with tactics that, to this day, keep his liberal opponents in disarray. Democrats protested that Trump was a nobody, and thus unfit to be president. That did not work in a society shaped by media which for years elevated inconsequential celebrities.

Even worse for Trump’s opponents, portraying him as incompetent is an own goal: Donald J Trump is not merely incompetent. George W Bush was incompetent. No, Trump is much worse than that. Trump combines gross incompetence with rare competence. On the one hand, he cannot string two decent sentences together to make a point, and has failed spectacularly to protect millions of Americans from Covid-19. But, on the other hand, he tore up Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement that took decades to put together. Remarkably, he replaced it swiftly with one that is certainly not worse – at least from the perspective of American blue-collar workers or, even, Mexican factory workers who now enjoy an hourly wage considerably greater than before.

Moreover, despite his belligerent posturing, Trump not only kept his promise to not start new wars but, additionally, he withdrew American troops from a variety of theatres where their presence had caused considerable misery with no tangible benefits for peace or, indeed, American influence.

 

 

Peak Oil: Why The Narrative Can't Keep Up With The Facts Under The Ground

consciousnessofsheep |  The geology of US oil might have been straightforward; the economics was a little trickier.  In the course of the Second World War, the USA supplied six out of every seven barrels of oil consumed.  Venezuela accounted for most of the seventh barrel; with small contributions from British Persia and the Soviet Caucasus.  Germany’s oil sources had been inadequate to power its civilian economy; and its failure to capture and bring online the Caucasus oil in 1942 is the primary reason why it lost the war.

The war-torn economies which emerged from the ashes of war in 1945, then, were almost entirely dependent upon oil from the USA.  And this allowed an internal American oil cartel – the Texas Railroad Commission – to extend its price fixing to the entire world.  So long as US oil made up a large part of global oil production, and so long as US oil fields had excess capacity, the TRC could regulate the global oil price.  If prices began to rise too high, the TRC would order companies to produce more oil.  If prices sank too low, the TRC would order production cuts.  As a result, throughout the boom years 1953 to 1973, the world oil price remained stable at around $25 per barrel (at today’s prices).

When the US conventional oil fields peaked in 1970, the TRC lost its ability to prevent prices from rising by expanding production.  This was a boon for Middle East and North African producers whose production costs were higher than those in the USA.  And although the first – 1973 – oil shock was in part a response to western support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, sooner or later the newly empowered OPEC was going to cut supply to drive up prices.

It is an irony that a capitalist system which claims to be built upon competition and free markets has proved stable only in those periods when its source of value – energy – has been controlled by cartels.  Once OPEC-led price stability was regained in the mid-1980s, the stage was set for the global debt-boom of the 1990s and early 2000s.  And with the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent conversion of China to state capitalism, for a brief moment the world seemed content.

Peak oil had not, though, gone away; it had merely been postponed.  Britain discovered this the hard way after its North Sea deposits – which had once produced more oil than Kuwait – peaked in 1999.  By 2005 – the year global conventional oil extraction peaked – Britain had become a net importer of oil and gas.  Today, Britain’s North Sea deposits produce 60 percent less oil than in 1999; and the projected price of the remaining oil is not enough to cover the decommissioning costs.

By 2005 though, had we but known it at the time, we had bigger problems to deal with.  The experience of the oil shocks of the 1970s convinced many peak oilers that once the peak of global oil extraction had been reached, prices would rise remorselessly as a consequence of supply and demand imbalance.  This, indeed, is what appeared to happen after the 2005 peak was reached:

By 2012, Michael Kumhof and  Dirk V Muir from the International Monetary Fund were anticipating global oil prices of more than $200 per barrel by 2020.  But that isn’t what happened.  Instead, from 2014 the oil price slumped and has been on a steadily downward trend ever since.  The reason is because there is more to peak oil than geology and engineering.

Indeed, many peak oilers make the same mistake as economists in treating oil – and energy in general – as being just another relatively low-cost factor of production.  The wage bill, for example, is always far higher than the energy costs of running a business.  But as economist Steve Keen explains; “capital without energy is a statue, labour without energy is a corpse.”  Or as engineering professor Jean-Marc Jancovici explains: “energy is what quantifies change.”  Nothing happens in the world without energy.  And when the cost of the world’s biggest primary energy source – oil – begins to spike upward, the impacts are felt in every area of our lives.

The story of the 2008 crash is usually told in financial terms; and is used to blame the victims.  The cause of the crisis, we are told, was so-called sub-prime borrowers taking on mortgages that they couldn’t possibly pay back.  Except, of course, prior to 2008 they had been paying them back.  So what happened to change their circumstances so that they could no longer repay debts?  The answer is interest rate rises.  The banks had based their lending on the assumption that the economy was stable; that inflation would grow at around two percent; and that interest rates would remain relatively low.  With house prices supposedly guaranteed to keep rising, and having securitised the risks, banks – with the assistance of governments – could extend home ownership to the masses.  But from 2006, central banks had been raising interest rates; tipping borrowers into default.

Why had the central banks been raising interest rates?  Because from 2005, inflation began to break out of the 1 to 3 percent band that they were charged with maintaining.  According to all of the textbooks they had been brought up on, the central bankers had been taught that the way to bring inflation back under control was to raise interest rates.  But they – and the economics textbooks – were wrong.  What they believed to be inflation – too much currency chasing too few goods – was actually an economy adjusting to its first supply-side shock since the 1970s.

 

Take Care Not To Perform Righteous Deeds In Order That People May See Them....,

 c-span  |  I DON'T PUSH BACK, I WITNESS, I OBSERVED, I THINK IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT THAT WE BECOME OBSERVERS OF OUR EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, EXPERIENCES, THE MORE THAT YOU CAN OBSERVE EVEN THE PART OF SHAME AND GUILT IS TO NOT NOT WANTING TO LOOK AT IT, NOT WANTING TO SEE IT BUT THE MOMENT THAT YOU TAKE TIME TO OBSERVE THE IMPACT, EVERYTHING THAT IT IS HAD ON YOU AND GIVE SPACE OBSERVING NOT JUST SHAME AND JOY NOT TO SHAME AND GUILT BUT JOY AND LOVE, WE SOMETIMES ASSUME THAT WE CAN FULLY FEEL LOVED AND JOY BUT SOMETIMES THERE'S SO PRACTICE IN SHAME AND GUILT THAT EVEN WHEN LOVE AND JOY COMES OUR WAY WE CANNOT RECOGNIZE IT AND SO I'M A BIG FIRM BELIEVER OF OBSERVING OUR FEELINGS, OUR EMOTIONS, OUR BEHAVIORS GIVING THEM SPACE SO YOU CAN HAVE MORE LANGUAGE AROUND WHAT IS HAPPENING, I PRACTICE WHAT IS CALLED GENERATIVE FOAM ONYX, MANY OF US IN THEIR MOVEMENT HAVE BEEN TRAINED IN IT OR HAVE GONE THROUGH THAT TRAINING AND IT'S REALLY AN OBSERVATION OF THE BODY AND EVERYTHING WERE GOING THROUGH A FINAL SWEEP IT SLEEP ENOUGH MY EYEBALL TWITCHES, I'M NOT TAKING ENOUGH WATER AND IF WE JUST TAKE A MOMENT TO OBSERVE INTO NOTICE, WE COULD HAVE MORE LANGUAGE ABOUT OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES, WHAT IS GOING TO WORK FOR US AND I THINK ABOUT THAT, THAT IS THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL, IMAGINE IF WE COULD COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS AND DESIRES, I THINK THAT'S WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER WAS SO PROFOUND FOR BLACK PEOPLE BECAUSE IT BECAME A THING THAT WE DID NOT REALIZE THAT WE NEEDED AS A COLLECTIVE TO GALVANIZE AROUND, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR TRAUMA, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR RESILIENCE, WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES AND THE CLOSER WE CAN GET TO FREEDOM.

YOU WILL BE SHOCKED HOW MUCH YOU REMEMBER AS YOUR PROBED AND ASKED QUESTIONS. I REALLY SAT AND SAID LET'S START FROM THE BEGINNING AND WE WERE PRETTY MUCH IN CONVERSATION ON A DAILY BASIS LIKE AT THE CRACK OF DAWN AND SOME OF THE STORIES IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS TALKING TO GET TO THE NEXT STORY, A CHAPTER ON MY MIDDLE SCHOOL YEARS CALLED 12 WHERE I TALK ABOUT THE FIRST TIME I AM ARRESTED, THAT WAS NOT SOMETHING I PLANNED ON PUTTING IN THE BOOK I WAS NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT THAT BUT I WAS TALKING A LOT TO KIND OF EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCES IN THE SCHOOL THAT I WENT TO, WHEN I WENT TO SUMMER SCHOOL, MY HOMESCHOOL, THE HOMESCHOOL MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND A COP CAME AND ARRESTED ME AND WAS LIKE WAIT A SECOND, WHAT HAPPENED AND I WAS LIKE 0 YEAH WHEN I WAS 12 I GOT ARRESTED AT SCHOOL AND SHE WAS LIKE OKAY THAT NEEDS TO GO IN THE BOOK, YOU'VE TALKED SO MUCH ABOUT YOUR SIBLINGS AND THE BOYS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD BUT YOU WERE ALSO CRIMINALIZED IN THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK GIRLS AND WE HOLD ALL THE STORIES, WE STORE THEM, THEY DON'T LEAVE OUR BODIES, THEIR IN THERE SOMEWHERE AND WHEN THEIR UNLOCKED, I THINK THEY CREATE A LOT OF THINGS, OPPORTUNITY, SOMETIMES TOO MUCH FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE SURVIVORS ESPECIALLY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND VIOLENCE, SOMETIMES YOU LOCK AWAY THE MEMORIES FOR SURVIVAL AND SAFETY AND OF THOSE ARE UNLOCKED WITHOUT GETTING THE SUPPORT CAN REALLY CAUSE A LOT OF HARM, I SAY THAT BECAUSE I'M NOT ROMANTICIZING THE MEMORY THAT I HAVE AND WHAT I UNLOCKED, I VERY MUCH GO TO THERAPY, I DO THERAPY TWICE A WEEK, I TRY MY HARDEST TO REALLY TAKE CARE OF MY EMOTIONAL HEALTH EVEN MY OWN HISTORY WITH COMPLEX PTSD, GIVEN WHAT I'VE GROWN UP WITH AND WITNESSED, THIS BOOK BUILDING OF THIS MEMOIR DID REMIND ME THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO ME AND MY FAMILY WAS REALLY, REALLY UNACCEPTABLE AND VERY DISTURBING INCREDIBLY TRAUMATIC AND I WILL PROBABLY NEED TO BE, NOT IN A JUDGMENTAL WAVE AND LIFELONG THERAPY BECAUSE OF IT, I WAS JUST TEXTING WITH MY MOM, DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THERAPY.

I AM VERY TRANSPARENT, I'M IN THERAPY HOPING SHALL BE LIKE MAYBE I'LL DO IT TO, WE DESERVE HEALING FROM WHAT IS HAPPENED TO US IN WHAT CONTINUES TO HAPPEN, WE DESERVE THE TIME AND SPACE, MY BIG DEMAND ON MY LAST BOOK TO HER I WAS SAYING IN EVERY CONVERSATION FIRST OF ALL I BELIEVE IN REPARATION BUT I THINK THERE SHOULD BE A WHOLE SECTION WHEN WE CREATE OUR REPARATION IMPACTED ENTER PACKAGE ON HEALING JUSTICE, EVERY SINGLE BLACK PERSON IN THEIR FAMILY SHOULD HAVE A DESIGNATED WHO CAN SUPPORT THEM UP WITH THEM THROUGH THE HISTORY OF TRAUMA THAT WE HAVE GONE THROUGH TO GET US CLOSER TO BEING WHOLE HUMAN BEINGS, WHEN YOU'RE TRAUMATIZED, YOU'RE NOT A WHOLE HUMAN BEING, YOUR ACTING FROM YOUR TRAUMA PLACE, WE DESERVE TO BE FULLY REALIZED HUMAN BEINGS, I THINK REPARATIONS WILL GET US THAT AN ACTIVE THERAPY, A LOT OF OTHER THINGS AS WELL THE ACTIVE THERAPY AS WELL.

Van Jones..., SMDH - Jes Dayyum...,

RT |  CNN host Van Jones is being hauled over the coals on social media, facing accusations of hypocrisy for tearfully heralding the end of Donald Trump’s presidency despite working with his administration.

After Democrat Joe Biden was projected to have won the election on Saturday, the CNN commentator launched into an emotional speech about how “it’s easier to be a parent this morning.” 

“It’s easier to be a dad this morning. It’s easier to tell your kids, ‘Character matters, being a good person matters,’” he said.

The pundit then broke down into tears and continued: “And it’s easier for a whole lot of people. If you’re Muslim in this country, you don’t have to worry that the president doesn’t want you here. If you’re an immigrant, you don’t have to worry if the president is going to be  happier to have babies snatched away or send dreamers back for no reason.”  

The clip was widely shared on social media and many people, including NBA star LeBron James and actor Mark Ruffalo, applauded Jones for his words.

However, thousands of others noted that Jones’ remarks were markedly different from comments he previously made about what Trump had done for the black community and the fact that he worked with the administration.

Photos of Jones, who was an official in the Obama White House, alongside members of the Trump administration and family racked up thousands of likes on Twitter. News articles about Jones’ comments and his ties to the administration were also widely shared.

Indeed, just over two weeks ago Jones said that Trump doesn’t get enough credit for his actions to help black people.

“I think it's really unfortunate because Donald Trump, and I get beat up by liberals every time I say it but I keep saying it, he has done good stuff for the black community,” Jones said on CNN.

“Opportunity Zone stuff, black college stuff, I worked with him on criminal stuff, I saw Donald Trump have African American people, formerly incarcerated, in the White House, embraced them, treated them well. There is a side to Donald Trump that I think he does not get enough credit for,” he added.

Black Teens Create More Online Content Than Any Other Group

suntimes  |   In the book, Stuart cites a University of Chicago study that says Black teens create more online content than any other racial group. In February, the Sun-Times reported that less than 5 percent of workers at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are Black.

Drill also crosses paths with hip-hop’s “Blog Era’ — a period where local artists such as The Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall made names for themselves by releasing new content via music blogs instead of relying on music industry gatekeepers, along with rappers with strong, national DIY followings such as Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Curren$y, and Gary, Indiana, native Freddie Gibbs, among others. 

“These guys all blew up and had all these videos with millions of plays, and all this notoriety and songs and mixtapes getting downloaded,” said Andrew Barber, owner/creator of “Fake Shore Drive,” a Chicago music blog. “But none of it counted toward the new certifications that the RIAA has in place or the Billboard charts.”

Due to the subgenre’s reputation, many record companies refused to sign drill artists; their music was banned by venues.

“I just thought you need to have these ridiculous bar guarantees and rental fees, and later in life I find out that was just a Black thing, or a risk assessment type of thing, even though there was never a risk,” said concert promoter and Complex Studios co-founder Marques “Merk” Elliston, who says he partnered with Hologram USA to have Chief Keef’s hologram perform at a Hammond, Indiana, venue before local police shut it down citing safety issues. “That’s why you see the lack of remorse for a lot of these people [venues].”

Due to those fears, some of the genre’s artists are opting to move away from the drama. 

“It was a part of our lives; we saw it as normal,” said Bronzeville native Sasha Go Hard, who is featured in the theme song for the Comedy Central series “South Side.” “It became a trend to start dissing people. … These are not just songs that people are making; it’s really happening. It was easy for me to branch away from drill. I went a different route by touring overseas and making EDM songs.” Fist tap Big Don

Trump Getting Coronavirus Like Freddie Mercury Getting AIDS - But Nobody Was Like "How'd He Get It?"

dailybeast |   As his now infamous 2016 line about giving Trump a chance—inadvertently echoed in Biden’s victory speech earlier Saturday night—revealed, Chappelle’s politics have never been simple to characterize. His public criticism of Hillary Clinton in the final days of that election were bad enough that he had to later clarify that he was “not a Trump supporter.” His willingness to give Trump a “chance” followed him for months, at least until he told Stephen Colbert in 2017, “It’s not like I wanted to give him a chance that night.”

More recently, during an episode of David Letterman’s Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Chappelle answered a question about Trump’s Muslim ban by offering up what easily could be considered a both-sides take on the two presidential candidates.

“You don’t expect necessarily that empathy, compassion or cultural astuteness from a guy like that,” Chappelle, who converted to Islam in the early ‘90s, told Letterman. “What you’re sad about is that the chair doesn’t have more humanity in it. But has that chair ever been that humane? When Biden called Trump the first racist president ever, well clearly that’s not true. So how do I feel when I hear a white person say some stupid shit?”

As Letterman laughed, Chappelle answered his own question with a comical shrug.

“I would implore everybody who’s celebrating to remember, it’s good to be a humble winner,” Chappelle said on Saturday. “Remember when I was here four years ago? Remember how bad that felt. Remember that half the country right now still feels that way. Please remember that.”

“Remember that for the first time in the history of America, the life expectancy of white people is dropping because of heroin, because of suicide,” he continued. “All these white people out there that feel that anguish, that pain, that man, they think nobody cares. Maybe they don’t.”

“Let me tell you something: I know how that feels,” he added. “I promise you, I know how that feels. If you’re a police officer and every time you put your uniform on, you feel like you’ve got a target on your back, you’re appalled by the ingratitude that people have when you would risk your life to save them, believe me, I know how that feels.”

“But here’s the difference between me and you,” Chappelle said. “You guys hate each other for it. And I don’t hate anybody. I just hate that feeling. That’s what I fight through. That’s what I suggest you fight through. You’ve got to find a way to live your life. You’ve got to find a way to forgive each other. You’ve got to find a way to find joy in your existence in spite of that feeling. And if you can't do that…come get these n---a lessons.”

An Anonymous, Whydte-Identified Gamma Jew Loses His Shidt Over Hozumi's Musty Panny-Hustle...,

tremr  |   Tada is correct in his insistence on the need to approach politics from a partially personological (rather than a purely systemic) approach. In order to understand the roots of Oluo's deeply deficient and distorted perspective, it is very important to understand that studies indicate major differences in narcissistic personality traits among individuals from different racial groups. 

In general, African Americans tend to exhibit the highest rates of narcissistic personality traits, with East Asians (perhaps with the exception of Tada) possessing the lowest levels of groups measured. While some have suggested that the alleged "black self-esteem advantage" that is well-known among social scientists, may explain these heightened levels of narcissism, as a kind of compensatory attempt at preserving self-esteem in the face of marginalization, other marginalized groups, such as Hispanics, do not exhibit this heightened self-esteem, throwing this hypothesis into question.

Such a self-esteem advantage is likewise absent among East Asians, and East Asians have lower levels of self-esteem than whites. Of course, since East Asians, on average, have higher levels of income than Caucasians in the U.S., we may rightly question whether it is proper to consider them "marginalized" in any meaningful sense of the word. Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Marion T. Wallace stated their "Overview and Predictions" in their three studies as follows:

"Our goal for the present studies was to examine whether racial differences emerged for narcissism in a manner that was similar to the Black self-esteem advantage. This was accomplished by conducting three studies that compared the narcissism levels of Black and White individuals. The present research extends the findings of Foster et al. (2003) by using various measures of narcissism rather than relying solely on the NPI. Also, the present studies accounted for factors related to narcissism such as self-esteem level and socially desirable response tendencies in order to clarify the nature of any racial differences in narcissism that emerged. Given previous research concerning racial/ethnic differences in narcissism as well as the fragile nature of the high levels of self-esteem reported by Black individuals, we expected Black individuals to report higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. Finally, Study 3 included indicators of psychological adjustment so that we could examine whether race moderated the association between narcissism and psychological adjustment."

In their second study, they found that "Black individuals possess higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. The magnitude of the differences varied across the facets of narcissism such that the largest differences were found for those facets that captured grandiosity and self-absorption...". Consistently across these studies, they found that black individuals exhibit higher levels of narcissism than white individuals. This is exactly what one would expect in a cultural context in which activists in the Black Lives Matter movement insist that blacks cannot be racist. Their claim is that the definition of "racism" was changed a few decades ago, so that it can only be used to speak of those whose systemic power allows them to express their prejudices institutionally. Of course, the only reason they insist on this definition is because of the tremendously negative emotional payload the word "racism" has.

The obvious underlying psychological motive in insisting that the definition of "racism" can only refer to discrimination by those with the institutional power to enforce their prejudices is that blacks cannot be held accountable for their actions in spite of the fact that, on an individual basis, they tend to engage in much higher rates of race-based crime, and they likewise feel comfortable accusing whites of being racist merely for being white, despite the fact that whites are far less likely than blacks or Hispanics to engage in interracial crime on an individual level. While systemic racism exists, we must emphasize that in this post, we are merely following Tada's approach in looking at racism from a purely personological perspective.

Tada - Macking On Musty Patchouli Pannies Involves A Swole Peen, Not A Swole Belly....,

selfishactivist |  For the last two years, I’ve been actively and covertly being bullied by a group of people who have been engaging in accountability abuse and smears about me in various local communities around Montreal and the general area of the Pacific North West.

This has resulted in the loss of relationships with colleagues and clients, as well as work and income that went along with those relationships, including more recently being asked to step away from facilitation at an ancestral skills gathering, after smears reached some of their stakeholders.

During this time, I’ve also suffered from debilitating chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and vertigo during this period, which has been profoundly affected by the bullying. I’m luckily more resourced, in both a psycho-emotional sense and financial sense, than other people in my community, but I know many people in my community would not have been so lucky and ended up permanently traumatized.

As I am coming out of the worst of my condition, I feel like finally have the energy to address these matters more actively and take the responsibility to protect myself and the people who are connected to my work.

I want to specify that this note is a call for accountability from those who have bullied me, with the understanding that accountability is a path to repair.

Here, I want to share with you how I define what has been happening to me as accountability abuse and a form of defamation.

In the more-than-a-year period of constant secretive communications of projections and fabrications about me being spread in my local communities, I have received no direct contact or engagement from any core parties about the actual claims of me, and therefore no due process, no clarification, and no attempt at verification, all the while I have suffered massive damage to my mental health and relationships.

The innate lack of transparency and accountability of these claims defines what I refer to as accountability abuse – abuses of power that happen under the pretense of holding someone accountable for harm, which in turn abuses the spirit of accountability itself.

Adding to this problematic dynamic has been that the many community members who were engaged by this campaign, many of whom are organizers with ample social capital, would tell me that they cannot share who the claimants or what the claims are because they deserve to be protected, even while they pursued or enabled actions that harm me emotionally and financially.

My feelings about this are very clear: it is problematic for people to be able to say whatever they want about others under such protective anonymity AND have their claims validated through belief and action – it creates an extremely untransparent and unaccountable dynamic that is easily manipulated. For myself, I would love to see our communities adopt a standard that claims are deemed lacking actionable validity until they are specifically backed up by information such as who is the claimant and what they are claiming AND all parties are able to respond to transparent information.

Survivors 100% deserve trauma-informed attention and be heard, that is my core belief as a therapist, but we also need to be held responsible for having courage, in order to facilitate real healing and prevent traumatic patterns causing unnecessary harm through projection and fabrication. What I have seen over and over again is that, without such responsibility, survivor support turns into codependent coddling that reifies trauma.

 

Tada Hozumi: Woke Soy Boy Macking On Patchouli Pannies ...,

selfishactivist |  I understand that for some people this may draw confusion because the hall-of-fame of somatics in our minds is plastered with the images of white teachers and innovators.

Yet, somatics remains an Asian cultural form in its modern roots.

Acknowledging this is similar to how we may appropriately recognize funk and rock n’ roll as Black music. While robust polyrhythms and boisterous dance circles are a feature of almost any culture if you excavate deeper, it is undoubtedly Black people and their culture, i.e. the collective work of their ancestors, that have kept alive these Afro-diasporic traditions and gifted them to those of us who live in the context of the modern post-colonial project.

Somatics, the practice of affecting change through felt-sense interoception of the body, has a similar story. Since the post-war era of the 1950s, and even before that on a smaller scale, Asian cultural practices such as qigong, yoga, zen, energetic martial arts, energy work, and Chinese medicine proliferated throughout the Western world, often accompanied by a variety of Asian philosophical orientations from Buddhism to Daoism.

The modern Western somatic modalities we have come to commonly know, from Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, Generative Somatics, Embodied Leadership (Strozzi Institute), Feldenkrais, and so on, all derive their foundational somatic practices from these Asian cultural traditions. In more recent years, these embodiment tools that have been traditionally accessed for individual healing are now more and more being accessed for politicized collective healing.

Now, here is a question: with all this resourcing from our ancestors, how much do people actually know about Asian cultures? Or even better, how much can people humbly admit that they DON’T know? Because while our ancestors’ treasures have been sending gifts to the West, there has been very little understanding of who we are, what it is, the essence of ‘Asianness’ we embody, even within social justice circles that purportedly are about exploring and celebrating that which is marginalized.

The reality is, we have continuously been the last thought, constantly triaged out of relevance using a metric that we know as the hierarchy of oppression. And perhaps, there is some twisted validity in the idea that things just aren’t as bad for us so we matter less.

But lying deeper than this surface logic is a problem that eats itself. The supposedly semi-reasonable idea that we are the least important issue in the problem of racism, doesn’t mean that healing anti-Asianness can’t be the most critical key to solving the koan that systemic oppression is.

My aspirations in cultural somatics have always been about addressing this very core issue – to reclaim somatics, as an Asian cultural form, as an Asian person. In my own first explorations of the work that I now refer to as cultural somatics was a yearning to create a framework that understands change, even social change, as wholly encapsulated in the body and its innate mysterious non-dual nature, that flips and synthesizes yin and yang in a constant process of alchemy.

This mattered to me deeply because in all honestly, I just had enough of activist spaces that touted banners of ‘resistance’ and ’solidarity’ but consequently had no room for the distinctly Asian embodied sensibilities of ‘yielding’ and ‘fluidity’ as power and resource. I definitely have the first-hand experience of getting shut down for suggesting that these may be also valuable strategies for ‘fighting the enemy’.

what means remember yourself! (originally posted 9/15/15)

feldenkrais |  Relaxation: a concept that is often misunderstood
Let us look at the lower half of the jaw. Most people keep their mouths closed when they are not speaking, eating, or doing something else with it. What keeps the lower half of the jaw drawn up against the upper half? If the relaxation that has now become so fashionable were the correct condition, then the lower jaw would hang down freely and the mouth remain wide open. But this ultimate state of relaxation is found only among individuals born idiots, or in cases of paralyzing shocks.

It is important to understand how an essential part of the body such as the jaw can be in this permanent state of being held up, supported by muscles that work ceaselessly while we are awake; yet we do not sense that we are doing anything to hold up our jaw. In order to let our jaw drop freely we actually have to learn to inhibit the muscles involved. If you try to relax the lower jaw until its own weight opens the mouth fully you will find that it is not easy. When you have succeeded you will observe that there are also changes in the expression of the face and in the eyes. It is likely that you will discover at the end of this experiment that your jaw is normally shut too tightly.

Perhaps you will also discover the origin of this excessive tension. Watch for the return of the tension after the jaw has been relaxed, and you will at least discover how infinitely little man knows about his own powers and about himself in general.

The results of this small experiment can be important for a sensible person, more important even than attending to his business, because his ability to make a livelihood may improve when he discovers what is reducing the efficiency of most of his activities.

No awareness of action in antigravity muscles
The lower jaw is not the only part of the body that does not drop down as far as it can. The head itself does not drop forward. Its center of gravity is well in front of the point at which it is supported by the spine (it lies approximately between the ears), for the face and front part of the skull are heavier than the back of the head. Despite this structure the head does not fall forward, so obviously there must be some organization in the system that keeps it up.

If we relax the muscles at the back of the neck completely, then the head will drop to the lowest possible position, with the chin resting on the breastbone. Yet there is no consciousness of effort while these muscles at the back of the neck are contracted to hold up the head. If you finger the calf muscles (at the back of the leg, at about the middle) while standing, you will find them strongly contracted. If they were entirely relaxed the body would fall forward. In good posture the bones of the lower leg are at a small angle forward from the vertical, and the contraction of the muscles of the calves prevents the body from falling forward on its face.

We stand without knowing how
We are thus not aware of any effort or activity in the muscles that work against gravity. We become aware of the antigravity muscles only when we either interrupt or reinforce them, that is, when the voluntary change is made in clear awareness. The permanent contraction that is normally present before any intentional act is done is not registered by our senses. The electrical impulses, which derive from different sources within the nervous system, are involved. One group of these produces deliberate action; the other group causes contraction in the antigravity muscles until the work done by them exactly balances the pull of gravity.

moshe pinchas feldenkrais (originally posted 9/18/15)

wikipedia |  Feldenkrais was born in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) city of Slavuta. In 1918, he left his family, then living in Baranovichi, Belarus, to emigrate to Palestine.^[1] There he worked as a laborer before obtaining his high-school diploma in 1925. After graduation, he worked as a cartographer for the British survey office. During his time in Palestine he began his studies of self-defense, including Ju-Jitsu. A soccer injury in 1929 would later figure into the development of his method.^[2]

During the 1930s, he lived in France where he earned his engineering degree from the École Spéciale des Travaux Publics, and later his Doctor of Science in engineeringat the Sorbonne where Marie Curie was one of his teachers. During this time he worked as a research assistant to nuclear chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Radium Institute. In September 1933, he met Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo in Paris. Kano encouraged him to study Judo under Mikinosuke Kawaishi. Feldenkrais became a close friend of Kano and corresponded with him regularly.^[3] Kano chose him to be one of the doors through which the East attempts to meet the West. In 1936, he earned a black belt in judo, and later gained his 2nd degree black belt in 1938. He was a co-founding member of the Ju-Jitsu Club de France, one of the oldest Judo clubs in Europe, which still exists today. Frédéric, Irène Joliot-Curie, and Bertrand Goldschmidt took Judo lessons from him during their time together at the institute.

Just as the Germans were about to arrive in Paris in 1940, Feldenkrais fled to Britain with a jar of "heavy water" and a sheaf of research material with instructions to deliver them to the British Admiralty War Office. Until 1946, he was a science officer in the Admiralty working on Anti-submarine weaponry in Fairlie, Scotland. His work on improving sonar led to several patents. He also taught self-defense techniques to his fellow servicemen. On slippery submarine decks, he re-aggravated an old soccer knee injury. Refusing an operation, he was prompted to intently explore and develop self-rehabilitation and awareness techniques through self-observation which later evolved into the method. His discoveries led him to begin sharing with others (including colleague J. D. Bernal) through lectures, experimental classes, and one-on-one work with a few.

After leaving the Admiralty, he lived and worked in private industry in London. His self-rehabilitation enabled him to continue his judo practice. From his position on the international Judo committee he began to study judo scientifically, incorporating the knowledge he gained through his self-rehabilitation. In 1949, he published the first book on the Feldenkrais method, Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning. During this period he studied the work of G.I. Gurdjieff, F. Matthias Alexander, Elsa Gindler and William Bates. He also traveled to Switzerland to study with Heinrich Jacoby.

In 1951, he returned to the recently formed Israel. After directing the Israeli Army Department of Electronics for several years, in 1954 he settled in Tel Aviv where he began to teach his method full-time. He began training Mia Segal as his assistant and his first student in 1957.^[4][5] In the same year, he gave lessons in the Feldenkrais method to David Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister of Israel, enabling him to stand on his head in a yoga pose.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s he presented the Feldenkrais method throughout Europe and in North America (including an Awareness Through Movement program for human potential trainers including at Esalen Institute in 1972). He also began to train teachers in the method so they could, in turn, present the work to others. He trained the first group of 13 teachers in the method from 1969–1971 in Tel Aviv. Over the course of four summers from 1975–1978, he trained 65 teachers in San Francisco at Lone Mountain College under the auspices of the Humanistic Psychology Institute. In 1980, 235 students began his summer teacher-training course at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. After becoming ill in the fall of 1981, after teaching two of the planned four summers, he stopped teaching publicly. He died on July 1, 1984. There are well over 2000 practitioners of his method teaching throughout the world today.

What Makes China So Competitive

theanalysis |   But what I’m getting at is a progressive people’s movement and the progressives that have been elected to Congress, what should they be demanding? What do real solutions look like?

Michael Hudson: What they should be demanding is something that cannot be done within the existing two-party system. First of all, the way to keep down housing prices and to get the cities and states out of their deficit is to tax unearned income. Tax the land, have a real estate tax that’ll collect all this rent that is being paid right now to the banks as mortgage interest. Either you pay the banks the contractual interest that they’re due on all of these loans, and you go broke. Or you realize the banks have become averse to economic welfare. You have to let the financial system go and replace it with banking and credit as a public utility.

That’s what makes China so competitive. Why is China able to outstrip American labor? The Chinese have almost; I’d say, an equal standard of living from everything that I’ve seen there. Well, the reason is that China is doing exactly what the United States did to become an industrial power in the late 19th century. China has public utilities, public enterprises providing basic needs, and basic public services at a subsidized rate or freely, such as education, it’s free. Foreign labor doesn’t have education debt like the United States. Education is free. Health care is public. It’s provided freely. There’s no huge limit.

Paul Jay:  Let me say, I think that’s not quite as rosy as it appears. My understanding is that while health care is supposed to be free and public, that you actually have to wind up having to pay doctors some cash, or you really can’t get in to see them.

Michael Hudson: Yes, that is fair. I do acknowledge that fact. But the most important public utility to answer the question that you brought up, the important thing is that banking and finance in China is a public utility. The government is the creditor. When there’s a pandemic like this and companies cannot afford to pay the debts or have to lay off labor, the government, as a banker, can say, OK, we’re just not going to collect the debt and force you to go under and force you to lay off your labor force.

It’s easy to cancel debts when you, the public, and the government are the creditor. Because you’re canceling debts owed to yourself, and that’s one of the main reasons why banking should be a public utility.