Comes now Big Don making a locally showcased donation to the collective offering plate of radical reengineering solutions. This is actually pretty cool in the context of who'da thunk type initiatives.
Before tissue culture, it wasn't feasible to farm bamboo on large-scale plantations because it was hard to find enough seed or divisions to plant. Despite their invasive reputation, bamboos are in short supply because most species flower and produce seed only once every 60 to 120 years, and propagation by division is labor intensive and iffy.
That all changed with the advent of cloned bamboo.
"We've never had a true supply of bamboo," Heinricher says. "We don't know how big the market will be." Boo-Shoot is the main commercial player in America, successfully cloning bamboo types that can be used for horticulture, agriculture, industry and carbon mitigation. A Belgian company, Oprins, clones mostly landscape bamboo. This winter, Heinricher retrofitted her greenhouses, enabling her company to produce 4 million plants a year.
Heinricher sees bamboo as an alternate lumber and source of pulp for paper, a way to ease pressure on trees. Bamboo plantations on unused agricultural land could be sustainably harvested while simultaneously functioning as carbon sinks. And, she asks, what about highway plantings for erosion control and noise reduction?
Cracking the code to 'the perfect plant' opens a path to saving the planet Since the primary up-front challenge has been met, this now sounds like a business with low-capital cost franchise opportunities written all over it. It's been my experience that picking up the phone or dropping an email is typically all that's required to get a good-faith bidnis dialogue spun up in earnest. Sounds like this one has at least some of the benefits of hemp cultivation with none of the associated social stigma and legal downside risk.
NYTimes | Maybe the essential thing about technological evolution is that it’s not about us. Maybe it’s about something bigger than us — maybe something big and wonderful, maybe something big and spooky, but in any event something really, really big.
Don’t get me wrong. I join other humans in considering human welfare — and the welfare of one human in particular — very important. But if we’re going to reconcile human flourishing with the march of technology, it might help to understand what technology is marching toward.
Could it be that, in some sense, the point of evolution — both the biological evolution that created an intelligent species and the technological evolution that a sufficiently intelligent species is bound to unleash — has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain? Kind of in the way that the point of the maturation of an organism is to create an adult organism?
If we grant the superorganism scenario for the sake of argument, is it spooky? Is it bad news for humans if in some sense the “point” of the evolutionary process is something bigger than us, something that subsumes us?
I have to admit that I’m not totally loving the life of a cell. I’m as nostalgic as the next middle-aged guy for the time when focus was easier to come by, and I do sometimes feel, after a hard day of getting lots of tiny little things more-or-less done, that the superorganism I’m serving is tyrannical — as if I’m living that line in Orwell’s “1984”: “Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigor of the organism.”
But at least the superorganism that seems to be emerging, though in some ways demanding, isn’t the totalitarian monster that Orwell feared; it’s more diffuse, more decentralized, more reconcilable — in principle, at least — with liberty.
And that’s good news, because I do think we ultimately have to embrace a superorganism of some kind — not because it’s inevitable, but because the alternative is worse. If technological progress grinds to a halt, it will be because chaos has engulfed the world; and if we don’t use technology to weave people together and turn our species into a fairly unified body, chaos will probably engulf the world — because technology offers so much destructive power that a sharply divided human species can’t flourish. Fist tap Nana.
WSJ Archives | Washington this week officially welcomed the newest industry on the hunt for financial and regulatory favors. Big CarbonCap may have the same dollar-sign agenda as Big Oil or Big Pharma, but don't expect Nancy Pelosi to admit to it.
Democrats want to flog the global warming theme through 2008 and they'll take what help they can get, even if it means cozying up to executives whose goal is to enrich their firms. Right now, the corporate giants calling for a mandatory carbon cap serve too useful a political purpose for anyone to delve into their baser motives.
The Climate Action Partnership, a group of 10 major companies that made headlines this week with its call for a national limit on carbon dioxide emissions, would surely feign shock at such an accusation. After all, their plea was carefully timed to coincide with President Bush's State of the Union capitulation on global warming, and it had the desired PR effect. The media dutifully declared that "even" business now recognized the climate threat. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who begins marathon hearings on warming next week, lauded the corporate angels for thinking of the "common good."
There was a time when the financial press understood that companies exist to make money. And it happens that the cap-and-trade climate program these 10 jolly green giants are now calling for is a regulatory device designed to financially reward companies that reduce CO2 emissions, and punish those that don't.
Guardian | A march by thousands of Occupy Wall Street supporters is under way in New York, swelled by the backing of more big US unions and backed by a national student day of action.
With a fine autumn evening in prospect, protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in preparation for the march. Students were due to meet in Washington Square, after classes at nearby New York University. Both groups were due to converge on Foley Square, where union members were gathering.
There were predictions that the march could be bigger than Saturday's demonstration, when more than 700 people were arrested after being corralled by police on Brooklyn Bridge.
In the pre-march build-up at Zuccotti park, legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild gave the crowd lessons in their rights and handed out leaflets with advice on what to do if stopped by police or arrested. In Foley Square. thousands gathered, and a party atmosphere reigned. Follow the Guardian's live march blog here Karen McVeigh meets the Occupy Wall Street organisers
James P Hoffa, leader of the Teamsters Union, which represents 1.4m workers. confirmed its backing for Occupy Wall Street in a statement. has confirmed. Here's his statement:
No one should be surprised that Occupy Wall Street is gaining support and spreading quickly around the country. The American Dream has disappeared for students, whose reality is debt and unemployment. The dream disappeared for workers forced to take wage cuts by employers sitting on billions of dollars in profits. The dream disappeared for working families who paid too steep a price for Wall Street's greed, stupidity and fraud.
It's clear what this movement is all about. It's about taking America back from the CEOs and billionaires on Wall Street who have destroyed our nation's economy. It's about creating good jobs. It's about corporate America treating its workers and customers with honesty and fairness and paying its fair share to stimulate the economy.
Teamsters all over the country are participating in Occupy Wall Street events, and I support and encourage them. We stand in solidarity with Americans who want better lives for themselves and for future generations
In an earlier visit to Florida, Mitt Romney, (Jack Benny) the Republican presidential hopeful, prompted anger by suggesting the Occupy Wall Street protesters represented "class warfare".
Another candidate, Herman Cain, (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) also addressed the Occupy Wall Street protests. He said in a Wall Street Journal interview:
I don't have facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama administration. Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself! It is not someone's fault if they succeeded.
Guardian | RuPaul likes to speak in deeply heartfelt but somewhat opaque
rhetorical flourishes, so I ask if he means that Drag Race has a
political message about humanity.
“Yes! It doesn’t have a political agenda in terms of policies in
Washington. But it has a position on identity, which is really the most
political you can get. It has politics at its core, because it deals
with: how do you see yourself on this planet? That’s highly political.
It’s about recognising that you are God dressing up in humanity, and you
could do whatever you want. That’s what us little boys who were
maligned and who were ostracised figured out. It’s a totem, a constant
touchstone to say, ‘Don’t take any of this shit seriously.’ It’s a big
f-you. So the idea of sticking to one identity – it’s like I don’t care,
I’m a shapeshifter, I’m going to fly around and use all the colours, and not brand myself with just one colour.”
Pinning him down on precisely what all of this means can be tricky,
in part I think because he doesn’t want to offend anyone by explicitly
acknowledging the contradiction between his playfully elastic
sensibility and the militant earnestness of the transgender movement.
The two couldn’t be further apart, I suggest.
“Ye-es, that’s always been the dichotomy of the trans movement versus
the drag movement, you know,” he agrees carefully. “I liken it to
having a currency of money, say English pounds as opposed to American
dollars. I think identities are like value systems or currencies;
there’s not just one. Understand the value of different currencies, and
what you could do with them. That’s the place you want to be.” But to a
transgender woman it’s critically important that the world recognises
her fixed identity as a female. RuPaul nods uneasily. “That’s right,
that’s right.”
What I can’t understand is how transgender women can enter a drag
contest. Last year RuPaul’s Drag Race was widely acclaimed for featuring
its first openly transgender contestant, called Peppermint – but if
transgender women must be identified as female, how can they also be
“men dressing up as women”?
“Well, I don’t like to call drag ‘wearing women’s clothes’. If you
look around this room,” and he gestures around the hotel lobby, “she’s
wearing a shirt with jeans, that one’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt,
right? So women don’t really dress like us. We are wearing clothes that
are hyperfeminine, that represent our culture’s synthetic idea of
femininity.”
In the subculture of drag you do occasionally find what are known as
“bio queens” – biological women who mimic the exaggerated femininity of
drag. Would RuPaul allow a biological woman to compete on the show? He
hesitates. “Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once
it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a
big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really
punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.”
So how can a transgender woman be a drag queen? “Mmmm. It’s an
interesting area. Peppermint didn’t get breast implants until after she
left our show; she was identifying as a woman, but she hadn’t really
transitioned.” Would he accept a contestant who had? He hesitates again.
“Probably not. You can identify as a woman and say you’re
transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body. It
takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re
doing. We’ve had some girls who’ve had some injections in the face and
maybe a little bit in the butt here and there, but they haven’t
transitioned.”
There’s something very touching about RuPaul’s concern to stay
abreast of subcultural developments and find a way to embrace even those
he finds confronting. “There are certain words,” for example, “that the
kids would use, that I’d be like, ‘Wait a minute, hold up now.’ But
I’ve had to accept it because I understand where it comes from.” Such
as? “Well, one of the things that the kids do now is they’ll say,
referring to another drag queen, ‘Oh that bitch is cunt, she is pure
cunt’, which means she is serving realness,” by which he means
presenting herself as realistic or honest. “They say it knowing it’s
shocking, knowing it’s taboo, and it’s the same way that black people
use the N-word.”
popularresistance | Margaret Flowers: You’re listening to Clearing the FOG,
speaking truth to expose the forces of greed, with Margaret Flowers. And
now I turn to my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael is the president of the
Institute for the Study of Long-term, Economic Trends, ISLET. He’s a
Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of
Economics at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. He’s also the
author of numerous books and recently updated his book, “Super
Imperialism: The economic strategy of American Empire.” Thank you for
taking time to speak with me today, Michael.
Michael Hudson: Well, thanks for having me on Margaret.
MF: You’ve talked a lot and written a lot about dollar hegemony and
what’s happening now with de-dollarization. Can you start out by
explaining to my listeners what dollar hegemony is and how it has
benefited the wealthy class in the United States?
MH: Dollar hegemony seems to be the position that has just ended as
of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in
Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United
States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military
spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971,
President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought
America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by
having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they
thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a
deficit, instead of being a creditor.
Well, what happened was that, as I’ve described in Super Imperialism,
when the United States went off gold, foreign central banks didn’t have
anything to buy with their dollars that were flowing into their
countries – again, mainly from the US military deficit but also from the
investment takeovers. And they found that these dollars came in, the
only thing they could do would be to recycle them to the United States.
And what do central banks hold? They don’t buy property, usually, back
then they didn’t. They buy Treasury bonds. And so, the United States
would be spending dollars abroad and foreign central banks didn’t really
have anything to do but send it right back to buy treasury bonds to
finance not only the balance of payments deficit, but also the budget
deficit that was largely military in character. So, dollar hegemony was
the system where foreign central banks keep their monetary and
international savings reserves in dollars and the dollars are used to
finance the military bases around the world, almost eight hundred
military bases surrounding them. So, basically central banks have to
keep their savings by weaponizing them, by militarizing them, by lending
them to the United States, to keep spending abroad.
This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery
store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week
you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they
say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use
the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that
deliver. You can use this as your money and just you’ll as a customer,
keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU
is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it
was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States
grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves
and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries.
And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer
safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them
in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US
investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia.
So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy
fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do
not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that
its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy.
MF: Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. So, are we seeing then other
countries starting to disinvest in US dollars? You’ve written about how
the treasury bonds that these central banks buy up have been basically
funding our domestic economy. Are they starting to shed those bonds or
what’s happening?
therealnews | But why is so much of
the American foreign policy establishment, the political class, the
military leadership, the vast majority of that whole stratum wants to
maintain a very antagonistic position towards Russia, and why?
ROBERT
ENGLISH: You know, four or five reasons that all come together, pushing
in this Russophobic direction. We've always had sort of unreconstructed
Cold Warriors, people who never were easy with the new Russia, right?
Zbigniew Brzezinski and people of that ilk, who wanted to just push
Russia in a corner, take advantage of its weakness, never give it a
chance. Then you have people in the military-industrial complex, for
lack of a better term, whose vested interests lie in a continued
rivalry, and continued arms-racing, and continued threat inflation. You
have other people who normally would be liberal progressive, but they're
so angry at Hillary Clinton's loss, they're so uncomprehending of how
someone they see as vulgar and unqualified as Trump could get elected,
that they're naturally unwilling to let go of this "the Russians hacked
our election, the Russians got Trump elected" theme, and therefore,
Russia is even bigger enemy than they would be otherwise. These and
other strains all come together in a strange way. Some of this is the
hard right, all right? Some of it is from the left, some is from the
center. And across the board, we have ignorance. Ignorance of Russia.
PAUL
JAY: Now, in an article you wrote recently, you went through some of
the history, and we're going to do another segment that digs into this
history more in depth, but when you look at the history of the '90s, and
Yeltsin, and the whole role of the United States in helping bring down
the Soviet Union, the whole point of bringing down the Soviet Union, and
standing Yeltsin up, and interfering in Russian elections to make sure
Yeltsin wins, and so on, was to open Russia for privatization for
American oligarchs. I don't think the idea was to do it for Russian
oligarchs, but that's how it turned out. Is that part of what is making
this section of the American oligarchs so angry about it all?
ROBERT
ENGLISH: You know, when people look at Russia today, they try to
explain it in terms of one evil man, Putin, and that sort of conceals an
assumption that if we could just get rid of Putin, everything would be
better, and that Putin is the way he is anti-American because he's
from the KGB. You don't need to go back to his youth or his time in
intelligence to understand why he's very skeptical, why we have bad
relations with Putin and all those around him. You don't have to go back
to the '50s or '40s. You can go back just to the '90s, when we
interfered in Russia, when we foisted dysfunctional economic policies on
them, when we meddled in their elections repeatedly, and basically for
an entire decade, we were handmaidens to a catastrophe economic,
political, social that sowed the seeds of this resentment that
continues to this day. It's a-
PAUL JAY: Yeah, you mention in your
article that the consequences of the '90s depression in Russia far
surpassed anything in the '07-'08 recession in the United States.
ROBERT
ENGLISH: They far surpassed that. They even far surpassed anything in
our own Great Depression of the early 1930s, of '29, '30, '31 you
know, the Great Depression, under Hoover and then Roosevelt. At that
time, our economy contracted by about a quarter, and the slump lasted
about three years before growth resumed. Russia's economy contracted
almost by half, and the slump lasted an entire decade, and it resulted
not just in widespread poverty, but millions of excess deaths, of
suicides, of people dying of despair, of heart disease, of treatable
illnesses caused by the strains, the ... This deep, unbelievable misery
of that decade. It's no wonder that there is deep resentment towards the
US, and this underlies a lot of the Putin elites' attitudes towards us.
It's not something pathological, Putin being a bad guy. If you got rid
of Putin tomorrow, the next guy who came along, the person most Russians
would probably elect in democratic elections, wouldn't be so different.
It wouldn't be another Yeltsin or pro-Western liberal, believe me.
PAUL
JAY: Well, even if everything they say about Putin is true, and I doubt
and ... Quite sure not everything is true. If he is such a dictator,
United States foreign policy has never had any trouble with dictators,
as long as they're our dictators, so the thing drips with hypocrisy.
ROBERT
ENGLISH: Hypocrisy and double standards all around are what Russians
see, okay? I mean, where do you begin? Look at the recent ... The vote,
the referendum in Crimea to secede from Ukraine, and of course, then
Russia annexed it into Russian territory, and we find that outrageous, a
violation of international law, and the Russians say, "Yeah, and what
did you engineer in Kosovo? You yanked Kosovo out of Serbia, you caused
Kosovo to secede from Serbia with no referendum, no international law.
How is that different? Right? When it's your client state it's okay, but
when it's ours, it's not?" And of course the list is a long one; we
could spend all afternoon going through them. So the first thing we need
to do is stop the sanctimony, and deal with Russia as an equal great
power. But, you know, can I say one more thing about the '90s
that connect it with what's going on today? In 1991, we had George
Herbert Walker Bush in the White House. It was still the Soviet Union,
Gorbachev was still in power for the rest of the year, and a warning
came from our ambassador in Moscow, Jack Matlock, which was passed on to
the White House. He had inside information from sources, from
confidential sources, that a coup attempt was being planned. And, by the
way, of course it happened in August of that year. That information
came from our Ambassador Matlock, from his sources in Moscow, to the
White House. George Bush had been instructed that this was highly
sensitive, do not reveal the source of the information, keep it
confidential. Bush fouled up, and within hours, he got on the phone to
Moscow, a line that was open, monitored by the KGB, trying to reach
Gorbachev, and he revealed the information, and he revealed the source,
which went straight to the KGB. This was an unbelievable breach of
confidentiality, dangerous, potentially deadly results, and the greatest
irony is that George Herbert Walker Bush had been Director of the CIA
before. Now, why am I telling this story? Obviously, my first
point is, presidents have fouled up, and have declassified unwittingly,
or sometimes for political purposes, highly sensitive information all
the time. I'm not excusing what Trump did it looks like he was very
sloppy but the first thing to note is it's not unusual, this happens a
lot. The second thing, and let's talk about this, is sharing
information intelligence with the Russians. Guys, we've been doing this
for nearly 20 years. After 9/11, the Russians offered us valuable
intelligence on the Taliban, on Afghanistan, to help us fight back
against bin Laden, and we've been exchanging intelligence on terrorists
ever since. A lot of people wish we'd exchange more information; we
might have prevented the Boston bombing. So this hysteria about sharing
intelligence with our adversary, no, we are cooperating with Russia
because we have a common enemy.
PAUL JAY: Now, I said in the
beginning that I thought we should separate Trump's intent from a
policy, which seems more rational, not to treat Russia as such an
adversary, and try to work both in Syria and other places, negotiate
more things out. But when you do look at the side of intent, I don't
think you can negate or forget about the kind of historic ties that
Trump has with Russian oligarchs. Some people suggest Russian Mafia.
Tillerson's energy play, they would love sanctions lifted on Russia, and
I'm not suggesting they shouldn't be lifted, but the motive here is
they want to do a massive play in the energy sector. So it's not ... I
don't think we should forget about what drives Trump and his circle
around him, which is they have a very big fossil fuel agenda and a
money-making agenda. On the other hand, that doesn't mean the policy
towards Russia isn't rational. I mean, what do you ... I don't know if
you agree or not.
therealnews | Well actually, there’s three new books because I published The Global Police State in 2020, and this year, there are two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure?
But what happened was I was writing and thinking about and speaking
about this crisis from 2008 and on, and then the pandemic hit. And it
became clear to me as I started researching that and engaging with other
people that the pandemic has accelerated in warp speed the crisis
itself, and it’s introduced a whole new set of concerns as we face this
crisis of humanity. And that book also goes into considerable detail on
digitalization, because the digital transformations underway are
absolutely tremendous. They’re linked to everything else.
But then the companion to Global Civil War – And both of these came out in 2022 – Is Can Global Capitalism Endure?,
which is really the big summation of the crisis and what we can expect
in the following years and the following decades. So if it’s possible, I
would love to put out a summary here of where we’re at with this
crisis.
This is a crisis like never before. This is an existential crisis.
It’s multidimensional. Of course, we can talk about the economic or the
structural dimension, deep economic, social crisis. We’re on the verge
of a world recession, but I think it’s going to be much more than that.
It’s going to be another big collapse which might even exceed what we
saw in 2008. But it’s also a political crisis of state legitimacy, of
capitalist hegemony, of the crack up of political systems around the
world. And it’s also a social crisis of what technically we can call a
crisis of social reproduction. The social fabric is disintegrating
everywhere. Billions of people face crises for survival and very
uncertain futures. And of course, it’s also an ecological crisis, and
this is what makes it existential.
I am suggesting that the 21st century is the final century for world
capitalism. This system cannot reach the 22nd century. And the key
question for us is, can we overthrow global capitalism before it drags
down and destroys all of humanity and much of life on the planet along
with it?
So let me step back and say that we can speak about three types of
crises. Of course, there are periodic receptions, the mainstream goals
of the business cycle that take place about once every 10 years, but
we’re in something much more serious. We’re in what we can call a
structural crisis, meaning that the only way out of the system is to
fund it. The only way out of the crisis is to really restructure the
whole system. The last big structural crisis we had was the 1970s. The
system got out of that by launching capitalist globalization and
neoliberalism. Prior to that, we had the big structural crisis of the
1930s, the Great Depression. System got out of that by introducing a new
type of capitalism, New Deal capitalism, social democratic capitalism,
what I call redistributive nation state capitalism. And before that,
just to take it back once more – Because these are recurrent, they
happen, these structural crises about every 40 to 50 years – Was from
the late 1870s to the early 1890s. And the system got out of that by
launching a new round of colonialism and imperialism.
So now, from 2008 and on, we’re in another deep structural crisis.
And I know later in the interview we’ll get into that dimension, that
economic structural dimension. Technically, we call it an
overaccumulation crisis. But I want to say that there’s a third type of
crisis, and that actually is where we’re at: a systemic crisis, which
means the only way out of the crisis is to literally move beyond the
system. That is, to move beyond capitalism. So when I say that we are in
a systemic crisis, this can be drawn out for years, for decades. But we
are in uncharted territory. This is a crisis like no other. If we want
to put this in technical terms, we’re seeing the historic exhaustion of
the conditions for capitalist renewal. And the system, again, won’t make
it to the [22nd] century.
As you pointed out in the introduction, the ruling groups, at this
point, are in a situation of permanent crisis management, permanent
state of emergency. But the ruling groups are rudderless. They’re
clueless. They don’t know how to resolve this crisis. And quite frankly,
they cannot. They can’t. What we’ve seen is that over the past 40
years, world capitalism has been driven forward by this trickle process
that I lay out in these two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure?,
of globalization, digitalization, and financialization. And these three
processes have aggravated the crisis, really created and aggravated the
crisis many times over. And just to summarize a couple other things
here, what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is the buildup of this
structural crisis and the problem of surplus capital, meaning that
corporate profits in 2021 were a record high even in the midst of us all
moving down and suffering. Record high profits. So the transnational
capitalist class has accumulated enormous amounts of wealth beyond what
it can reinvest, hence stagnation, beyond what it can even spend.
And what this has led to is this mass of what we call – I know we’re
going to get into this later in the interview – This mass of fictitious
capital, meaning all of this capital around the world which is not
backed by the real economy of goods and services. It’s what technically
we call fiat money, this unprecedented flow of money. And it’s led to
this situation where in the world today we have this mass of predatory
finance capital which is simply without precedent, and it’s
destabilizing the whole system.
But let me conclude this introductory summary by saying the problem
of surplus capital has its flip side in surplus people, surplus
humanity. The more the surplus capital, the more hundreds of millions,
even billions of people become surplus humanity.
And what that means is that the ruling groups have a double
challenge. Their first challenge is what do they do with all the surplus
capital? How do they keep investing in making profit? Where can they
unload this surplus capital and continue to accumulate? But the second
big challenge, because the flip side is surplus humanity, is how do you
control the mass of humanity? Because there is a global class revolt
underway. That’s the title of the book, Global Civil War. After
the late 20th century worldwide defeat of proletarian forces, now the
mass of humanity is on the move again. There are these rebellions from
below breaking out all over the world. And the ruling groups have the
challenge of how to contain this actual rebellion underway and the
potential for it to bring down the system from, oh, no.
reddit | Yes,
exactly- someone being the minority doesn't mean they should be out of
sight, and it doesn't mean that the majority's rights are being
infringed by seeing it or having to (the horror!) explain it to kids.
One, kids are a lot less fragile than people think, and two, you can't
shield them from everything. Like you pointed out, the same people would
probably hate to explain the existence of black people, Jews, the
disabled/people in wheelchairs/people with amputations/people with heavy
scarring, pregnant people... Actually, really take a long think about
that last one. Pregnancy is about the closest it gets to explicit sex,
because pregnancy is proof sex happened at some point. And sure, you can
explain the baby's presence without sex- but you can also explain
attraction towards the same sex without sex, too, by describing it the
way you would a straight relationship. They're in love, they're holding
hands, they're kissing. If you can do one, you can do the other. (Worth
noting: the same Texas GOP platform that declared LGBT identity
abominations, also says that all children must be taught that fetuses
are people and that live begins "from fertilization". How do you explain
fertilization without explaining what sex is? The GOP's own platform
undercuts their claim that this is about protecting children from sex.)
I
understand your reluctance to think of children having sexualities.
This is why the split attraction model is used. Have you ever heard
terms like "homoromantic asexual"? The model was used for people like
that, who don't experience sexual attraction but do have romantic, but I
think it would help for you to think of everyone in those terms to
understand this. Most adults are heteromantic (fall in love with adults
of the opposite sex) and heterosexual (want to have sex with adults of
the opposite sex.) Most kids are heteromantic, but don't have sexual
feelings yet, which is why they're okay with movies like Beauty and the
Beast. But some kids are homoromantic. They don't have sexual attraction
yet either, but they do have romantic ones. If you can understand a 12
year old girl having a boyfriend, you can understand a 12 year old girl
having a girlfriend, too.
I think
you are falling into a fallacy of fundamental attribution error. You,
and other heterosexuals, have feelings which may or may not include sex.
But LGBT people are sexualized so severely that people try to assign
sexual meaning even to us just holding hands or kissing each other on
the lips. Our motivations are stripped away by people who insist we are
driven only by sexual desire. That's part of the reason "love is love"
has been such a big part of our messaging; because we have had to
convince people that we even experience love and other emotions separate
from sex in the first place.
When
we get accused of "grooming" kids (and note that they chose a word
associated with child molestation, when they could have, if they really
felt we were changing kids into something else, used "converting" which
would have worked just as well- this is deliberate) we are being made
out such that our existence is inherently that of a sexual deviant
predator.
Truth be told, that's
another insidious layer to the denial that LGBT youth even exist. If
they occur naturally, it weakens the argument that children are being
preyed upon. Only by furthering the narrative that this is an unnatural
behavior that occurs only in either adults or in children who have been
"tainted" by a perverted adult can the narrative be upheld. In other
words, people don't call LGBT people groomers because they are truly
worried about the kids; they mention the kids because it supports the
narrative they have already created.
I
hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as a Jew, I thought I would bring up
some similarities in the genocidal language and actions used.
You
are probably familiar with a certain picture of a Nazi book burning
immediately before Hitler rose to power. What you are likely not aware
of is that this was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexuality
institute, that studied LGBT people extensively. The first successful
gender confirmation surgery was performed there. The books being burned
in that photo? They were years of studies on LGBT people.
Weimar
Germany, in the years leading up to Hitler seizing power, was known as
the best place in the world to be LGBT. Transgender people were even
allowed to get special markers on their IDs to exempt them from
gender-restricted dress codes. When Hitler seized power, those IDs were
used to imprison trans people. Trans women were treated the same as gay
men and given the pink triangle. Trans men were treated as lesbians and,
while persecuted, were not sent to concentration camps.
After WW2 ended, LGBT people in the camps were sent back to prison to serve out the remainders of their sentences. Some weren't freed until the 1970s.
LGBT
people, leading up to the Holocaust, were accused of grooming and
molesting children. Not coincidentally, Jews were also depicted as
stealing and converting children to Judaism and sinful lifestyles,
particularly in political comics and caricatures.
The
current anti-trans movement is symbiotically fused with antisemitism.
There are countless conspiracy theories that Jewish elites- particularly
George Soros- are funding pharmacies to "trans the children" so they
can make money from the medications and surgeries. Anti-semitism and
transphobia almost always occur clustered together.
The
rise of the Great Replacement Theory is also linked to both of these.
Jews are accused of bringing the immigrants into this country to replace
white people. They're also accused of pushing "the trans" so that white
children will be rendered infertile (despite the huge numbers of trans
people of color, which they ignore) and drive down their numbers. An
Idaho legislator who penned an anti-trans law explicitly says she sees
it as an extension of the pro-life debate due to her worries about
"teenagers losing perfectly healthy reproductive organs."
In
Nazi Germany, the role of women was primarily to make more good little
Aryans and raise them properly. While abortions were often performed
involuntarily on Jews and other undesirables, they were forbidden for
white women. There was a high stigma for infertile women.
Taking
all of these facts into account, I think you can see how it's hard for a
lot of people to believe that the concern over children is actually
genuine. It's something much more sinister and linked to a lot of other
forms of bigotry, and we are seeing echoes of it now.
You
don't call a group of people "groomers" if you want to live peacefully
with them. Pedophiles are seen as subhuman, as dangers to society. Not
one person on the planet wants to coexist peacefully with pedophiles.
(And despite your insistence that they mean "grooming" as in converting,
they never try to invoke that imagery. It's always claims of
perversion, of sexual abuse- pedophilia without ever actually touching a
child.) Once a group is perceived as being a front for pedophiles, it
takes decades of advocacy for them to be seen as human beings again- if they are so lucky as to not be targeted for extermination instead.
This
is genocidal language. It doesn't have to mean genocidal as in trains
and gas chambers. It can also mean things like forcing them in the
closet (which is to say: if you let Jews live, but said them going to
temple was banned, and didn't let them wear their traditional clothing
on the grounds that this was upsetting to children, that would be a form
of genocide), taking their children away (there is a growing sentiment
that LGBT couples should not be allowed to have or adopt children, and
there is only one place that line of thinking leads. If it's grooming to
tell someone else's kids it's
okay to be gay, then it's grooming to tell your own kids, too, which
means any LGBT adult with a child is now a groomer. Not to mention
Texas's new initiative to have parents of trans kids investigated by
CPS, which DeSantis has indicated he is interested in bringing to
Florida), and otherwise making their lives unbearable in an attempt to
drive up suicide rates (Trans people already have a 40% rate of
attempting suicide, and this is higher when they are in unsupportive
environments or those in which they can't access gender-affirming care,
which both Abbott and DeSantis have said they want to ban in all
circumstances in their states).
Further,
there are increasing calls for pogroms against LGBT people from elected
officials, those running for office, and/or people with heavy influence
on elected officials. This has resulted in a sustained campaign of
terror against LGBT people from the alt-right. Just twenty minutes from
my hometown, two weeks ago, a U-Haul full of Patriot Front members was
stopped on their way to attack an LGBT Pride event. At the same event,
there were instances of harassment perpetrated by other groups,
including, you guessed it, parents with kids being called groomers.
The
LGBT community is in danger right now. I understand people like you who
may have concerns, but the problem is that those concerns are often
used as a pretext for the alt-right to radicalize people against LGBT
people. The entire "groomers" rhetoric, for reference, started as a
campaign on 4chan a year or two ago. And look how effective it has been
just in the last six months. Five years ago, anyone who objected to
LeFou being gay in the new Beauty and the Beast movie was laughed off
the internet; if that movie was released now, there would be riots in
Anaheim. This is getting out of hand at an alarming rate, and this
really isn't a good time to be on the fence or "have concerns."
therealnews | Years before he became president, Barack Obama got his start as a
community organizer on the south side of Chicago. Now out of the White
House, Obama is coming back to the south side to build his $500 million
presidential center. But Obama now faces a pushback from the same
community he once organized with. For months, south side residents have
been holding protests. They don’t oppose the center, but they want to
make sure it doesn’t cause gentrification and displacement.
SPEAKER:So we’re here to make this stand, to
say that we don’t want displacement to happen in this community. We
don’t want to see the jobs come from outside, be filled by people from
the outside, the people living here don’t get a chance to work.
AARON MATE:South side residents have formed a
coalition, calling on Obama to sign a community benefits agreement
which, among other things, would help protect low income residents from
eviction and higher rents. Coalition Member Paru Brown outlined their
demands.
PARU BROWN:We are pushing for a city
ordinance that would, one, set aside 30 percent of new and rehab housing
for low-income and working families; two, freeze property taxes for
longtime residents; three, require large developers like the University
of Chicago to invest in new affordable housing; and four, independently
monitor local hiring.
AARON MATE:But Obama and his foundation are refusing to sign a CBA. The former president recently told Chicago residents why.
BARACK OBAMA:And the danger here is that if
we sign an agreement with any one organization, or two organizations, or
five organizations-. I’ve lived on the south side and in Chicago long
enough to know that they’re not representing everybody on the south
side. So now suddenly I’ve got five other organizations to say, hey, how
come, how come you signed with them? What about us? And then you got
10, oh, I just formed an organization. You know what I’m talking about.
And next thing you know you’ve got 40 organizations or 50 organizations,
everybody has their own organization, saying we should get, we should
have say, control, decision-making over who gets the contract, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
AARON MATE:Well, Obama’s plans have now
taken a big step forward. The Obama center has just won approval from
two city commissions and the full City Council, moving the project to
federal review. South side activists are not giving up their fight.
Jawanza Malone is executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community
Organization, and a member of the Obama library South Side CBA
coalition. Jawanza, welcome. Talk to us first just about the struggle
that you’ve been involved in for many months now, and the state of it
now, and the aftermath of these city votes moving the project forward.
JAWANZA MALONE:Thanks for having me on,
Aaron. For the last two and a half years, actually, the CBA coalition
has been working to craft a community benefits agreement that involves
not just the Obama Foundation but also the University of Chicago and the
City of Chicago. In all the turmoil and excitement around President
Obama himself, people forget that the University of Chicago is actually
the entity that wrote the bill that was awarded to get the Presidential
Center on the south side of Chicago in Jackson Park. And Mayor Rahm
Emanuel had, you know, said two years ago that he was willing to move
heaven and earth to make sure that it happened. And that’s what we’re,
we’re seeing it happen over concerns raised with the city councilmen,
over concerns raised by the community, particularly about where the
money is going to come from for the infrastructure changes that the
foundation has called for.
As you said in your intro, the city council and a
quasi-governmental appointed body has voted to approve the plan moving
forward. What we’ve been asking for is very simple. We’re asking for a
legally binding agreement to ensure that residents are not, do not
continue to get displaced from the area, because we’ve already seen
displacement taking place. And so without a clear community benefits
agreement that protects low-income and working families, who is the
predominant population in that part of town, we’re going to see mass
displacement of people, unfortunately.
Brain item -- AI processing problem...??
would require AI to have the listener's entire life history stored in its memory to determine proper context....??
Your brain fills gaps in your hearing without you realising
No BD. Not an AI processing problem, just an illustration of the mechanical and necessarily error-prone nature of both language and auditory language processing. It's not a Voight-Kampff test and "Context doesn't require a life history". In fact, with the benefit of big data, and centralized cloud storage and processing of hundreds of thousands of utterances and their associated meanings, the probability of an AI making either the sensory or grammatical error is greatly reduced.
...Here's a no-nonsense AI item:
Turns out AI is not sufficiently stupid to allow PC liberals to shove ridiculous egalitarian concepts down its throat.
AI just looks at the *FACTS* and calls it like it sees it....
Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and
gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use,
scientists say
No BD. Unfortunately, you are still trapped in the realm of language and
language constructs your reality. Your language reflects your tendencies - which are racist - and so what FRANK is reflecting back at you is not the truth, merely the truth about you. Fist tap Big Don.
Tonight all I ask you to follow the advice I gave in this article:
EVERYBODY WAIT! DO NOT JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS!
We have no facts. What US politicians (including generals – US generals are all politicians) say does not matter and is not “fact”.
The truth is that we won’t know for sure for at least 24 hours what
took place. The aggressors will present the attack as a huge success.
Don’t believe it! The last time around it took several days to find out
what really happened.
This is still my best advice to you: wait for the facts and don’t listen to the Ziocon propaganda machine!
None of the above should distract us from what is by far the biggest
danger currently facing us all – the risks of a US-Russian war in Syria.
In fact, this reality seems to be slowly dawning even on the most
obtuse of presstitutes who are now worrying about a spill-over effect. No, not in Europe or the USA, but on Israel, of course.
Still, the fact that there are folks who understand that Israel might
not survive a superpower clash on its doorstep is a good thing. Maybe
the Israel lobby in the USA, or a least the part of it which cares for
Israel (many/most only pretend to), will be more vocal than all the
silent Anglo shabbos-goyim who don’t seem to be able to muster even a
minimal amount of self-preservation instinct? Bibi Netanyahu felt the
need to call Putin after the Israeli ambassador to Russia was read the
riot act by Russian officials following the (admittedly rather lame)
Israeli airstrike on the T-4 Syrian air force base. Not much of a hope, I
admit..
This is not about good guys versus bad guys anymore. It’s about sane
versus insane. I think that we can safely place Trump, Bolton, Haley and
the rest of them in the “terminally delusional” camp. But what about
the top US generals? I asked two well-informed friends, and they both
told me that there is probably nobody above the rank of Colonel with
enough courage left to object to the Neocon’s insanity, even if that
means WWIII. Again, not much hope here either…
There is a sura (Al-Anfal 8:30) of the Qur’an which Sheikh Imran Hosein often mentions which I want to quote here: And
[remember, O Muhammad], when those who disbelieved plotted against you
to restrain you or kill you or evict you [from Makkah]. But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners.
And since we are talking about Syria where Iran and Hezbollah are
targets as much (or more) as the Russians, it is also fitting here to
quote a very popular Shia slogan which calls to remember that the battle
against oppression must be fought ceaselessly and everywhere: “Every Day Is Ashura and Every Land Is Karbala”. And, of course, there are the words of Christ Himself: “And
fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul:
but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” (Matt 10:28).
Such religious references will, no doubt, irritate the many
“enlightened” westerners for whom such language reeks of obscurantism,
fanaticism, and bigotry. But in Russia or the Middle-East, such
references are very much part of the national or religious ethos. To
illustrate my point I want to quote from Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s “Divine Victory Speech”
spoken in 2006 following the crushing victory by a relatively small
Hezbollah force of the combined might of the Israeli ground, air and
naval forces:
We are today celebrating a big strategic, historic,
and divine victory. How can the human mind imagine that a few thousand
of your Lebanese resistance sons – if I wanted, I would give the exact
number – held out for 23 days in a land exposed to the skies against the
strongest air force in the Middle East, which had an air bridge
transporting smart bombs from America, through Britain, to Israel;
against 40,000 officers and soldiers – four brigades of elite forces,
three reserve army divisions; against the strongest tank in the world;
and against the strongest army in the region? How could only a few
thousand people hold out and fight under such harsh conditions, and [how
could] their fighting force the naval warships out of our territorial
waters? By the way, the army and the resistance are capable of
protecting the territorial waters from being desecrated by any Zionist.
[Applause] [And how could their fighting] also lead to the destruction
of the Mirkava tanks, which are an object of pride for the Israeli
industry; damage Israeli helicopters day and night; and turn the elite
brigades – I am not exaggerating, and you can watch and read the Israeli
media – into rats frightened by your sons? [How did this happen] while
you were relinquished by the Arabs and the world and in light of the
political (human solidarity was profound though) division around you?
How could this group of mujahidin defeat this army without the support
and assistance of Almighty God? This resistance experience, which should
be conveyed to the world, depends – on the moral and spiritual level –
on faith, certainty, reliance [on God], and readiness to make
sacrifices. It also depends on reason, planning, organization, armament,
and, as is said, on taking all possible protective procedures. We are
neither a disorganized and sophistic resistance, nor a resistance pulled
to the ground that sees before it nothing but soil, nor a resistance of
chaos. The pious, God-reliant, loving, and knowledgeable resistance is
also the conscious, wise, trained, and equipped resistance that has
plans. This is the secret of the victory we are today celebrating,
brothers and sisters.
These words could also be used to describe the relatively small
Russian task force in Syria. In fact, there are numerous parallels which
could be made between Hezbollah’s role and position in the Middle-East
and Russia’s role and position in the world. And while both are
well-trained, well-armed and well-commanded, it is their spiritual power
which will decide the outcome of the wars waged against them by the
Hegemony. AngloZionist secularists will never understand that – they
just can’t – and that will bring their inevitable downfall. The only
question is the price mankind will have to pay to have that last Empire
finally bite the dust.
MotherJones | IN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Bush had stigmatized the Republican Party almost beyond redemption. A global financial crisis had discredited the disciples of free-market fundamentalism, and Americans were ready for serious change.
Or so it seemed. But two years later, Wall Street is back to earning record profits, and conservatives are triumphant. To understand why this happened, it's not enough to examine polls and tea parties and the makeup of Barack Obama's economic team. You have to understand how we fell so short, and what we rightfully should have expected from Obama's election. And you have to understand two crucial things about American politics.
The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.
Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
Unions, for better or worse, are history. Even union leaders don't believe they'll ever regain the power of their glory days. If private-sector union density increased from 7 percent to 10 percent, that would be considered a huge victory. But it wouldn't be anywhere near enough to restore the power of the working and middle classes.
And yet: The heart and soul of liberalism is economic egalitarianism. Without it, Wall Street will continue to extract ever vaster sums from the American economy, the middle class will continue to stagnate, and the left will continue to lack the powerful political and cultural energy necessary for a sustained period of liberal reform. For this to change, America needs a countervailing power as big, crude, and uncompromising as organized labor used to be.
But what?
Over the past 40 years, the American left has built an enormous institutional infrastructure dedicated to mobilizing money, votes, and public opinion on social issues, and this has paid off with huge strides in civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmental policy, and more. But the past two years have demonstrated that that isn't enough. If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade.
americancompass | Certainly don’t laze about smoking weed, or even worse, mango Juul
pods, playing that god-forsaken game machine. That PS fucking 4, or
whatever. My generation, we didn’t sit staring at a computer, wasting
our days away. We made things. We worked out our bodies. We built
things. Come on. Make something of yourself. What are you going to do
all your life? Stock shelves during the day, and eat nuggets and play
that game at night? What are you, a loser? Be like Jim. You remember
Jim. He studied hard, went to Harvard, and now works at a big financial
firm. Come on, you lazy loser. Make something of yourself.
It is pretty simple. At the very, very top of our meritocracy is a
big game called Wall Street, that the smartest and cleverest get to
play, and get paid big bucks for it. They get to choose their character:
Trader, Salesperson, Broker, or Lawyer. The traders get to choose their
weapon: Stocks, Bonds, Mortgages, Derivatives. Then they are off,
navigating different levels, slaying this and that company, currency, or
country.
Below that is that vast landscape of losers who spend their days
building roads, growing food, flipping hamburgers, teaching kids,
building small businesses, landscaping yards, and their nights shooting
hoops, or reading books, or caring for kids, or going to church. Or, God
forbid, playing XBOX or PS4. Those are the worst.
A lot of those losers, of every variety but especially the people who
play video games, also spend a lot of time on Reddit, or Discord, or
Twitch, live-streaming, shitposting, and just having fun.
When they were doing this, some of them noticed that Wall Street was
also just a game, and a very profitable one. Sure, it was a little
different than Zelda, or Grand Theft Auto, or Demon Souls, but it was a
game nonetheless. So they started dipping their toes in and learning
this pretty cool and serious game. Then they started telling their
friends about it, who told their friends and so on and so on.
Some made a little money here and there, others got run over, but
hey, it was just another game. Cool. Of course they were the outsiders,
the losers, the clowns fucking around for shits and giggles. They
understood that. They knew nobody treated them seriously. Hell, they had
been called lazy losers all their lives. Might as well embrace that. So
they proudly named themselves “Degenerates” and “Autistic Retards.” Own
the stigma, because you ain’t gonna ever shake it or lose it no matter
how hard you try.
They dabbled here and there, got a little better at it, and soon
attracted a few serious players with serious money into their fold. Wall
Street players, slumming it, who saw a community of misfits they could
lead, teach, or scam, depending on their ethics.
So it went, and their numbers and ability grew, and then this summer
some of the cleverest Wall Street players, who specialized in making big
bets on companies failing, came after GameStop, something they had
personal views on. That perked up their interest. Making it even cooler,
some legitimately skilled Wall Street players who had joined their
island of misfit toys pointed out that GameStop was a good buy, not a
good sell, and convinced some of the degenerates to join them.
WaPo | You might think cracking down on child sex traffickers would be a
legislative layup. You’d be wrong. The bill — authored by Republican
Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), John McCain (Ariz.) and John Cornyn (Tex.) and
Democrats Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Heidi
Heitkamp (N.D.) — was hard to pass. (Full disclosure: My wife works for
Portman.)
The act faced a wall of opposition from Silicon Valley because it amended Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
which gave blanket immunity to online entities that publish third-party
content from civil and criminal prosecution. Big Tech wanted to
preserve that blanket immunity, even if it gave legal cover to websites
that were using it to sell children for sex. When child sex trafficking
survivors tried to sue Backpage, and state attorneys general tried to
prosecute the owners, federal courts ruled against them, specifically
citing Section 230. This did not move Big Tech. Chief among the culprits
was Google, which apparently forgot its old corporate motto of “Don’t
Be Evil” and lobbied fiercely against the bill.
How did the
senators overcome Big Tech’s lobbying campaign? First, Portman and
McCaskill, the chairman and then-ranking minority-party member of the
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, used their subpoena power to
gather corporate files, bank records and other evidence that Backpage
knowingly facilitated criminal sex trafficking of vulnerable women and
children, and then covered up that evidence. They fought Backpage all
the way to the Supreme Court to enforce their subpoenas. The
subcommittee then published a voluminous report detailing the findings
of its 20-month investigation, including evidence that Backpage knew it
was facilitating child sex trafficking and that it was not simply a
passive publisher of third-party content. Instead the company was
automatically editing users’ child sex ads to strip them of words that
might arouse suspicion (such as “lolita,” “teenage,” “rape,” “young,”
“amber alert,” “little girl,” “fresh,” “innocent” and “school girl”)
before publishing them and advised users on how to create “clean”
postings.
Then Portman, McCaskill and their co-authors used the result of their
investigation to craft a narrow legislative fix that would allow bad
actors such as Backpage to be held accountable. The bill they produced
allows sex trafficking victims to sue the websites that facilitated the
crimes against them and allows state law enforcement officials, not just
the Justice Department, to prosecute websites that violate federal sex
trafficking laws. The committee also turned over all its raw documents
to the Justice Department last summer, urging it to undertake a criminal
review, which Justice did.
Despite
all the Silicon Valley money against them, the senators never wavered.
Through the sheer power of the testimony of trafficking survivors; Mary
Mazzio’s documentary “I Am Jane Doe;”
the evidence of crimes committed by Backpage; and the support of law
enforcement, anti-trafficking advocates, 50 state attorneys general, the
civil rights community and faith-based groups — as well as carefully
negotiated language — they wore down most of Big Tech’s opposition. In
November, Facebook finally came on board. But Google shamefully never
relented in its opposition. Despite this, the act overwhelmingly passed
both chambers of Congress.
capitalismwithoutfailure | The first decade of this century was founded on official corruption, control frauds, the madness of a people incited by the propaganda of fear and ideology, leverage, and the conscious mispricing of risk.
Everything else is merely conversation...,
On High-Frequency trading: It's a zero sum game. They are skimming. Mom and pop's pension fund is being ripped off a little bit on every trade. Only shameless whores, that are the publicly traded exchanges, would steal from the public. If the exchanges were not-for-profits no one would ever think of doing this. It is this kind of behavior that makes the public wary of investing in stock markets.
On Rogue Bankers: There is no such thing as rogue traders. There are only rogue banks. If you are that grossly negligent that you have to be rescued by the government, then I guarantee you they are doing lots of other things wrong. If you have an entity that messed up so badly that it can't survive... how are you going to go out and run a marathon? Jamie Dimon is the next CEO who needs a humbling.
On Larry Summers: We now find out that the single biggest asshole in America is Larry Summers, who browbeat Obama into bailing out Citibank. Larry Summers oversaw the repeal of Glass Steagall as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Whitehouse, and oversaw the Commodities Futures Modernization Act which took the entire universe of derivatives and hid them from federal regulators. The Treasury Secretary should have advised Clinton that it was garbage. Then, when he went back to the White House, he wasn't done fucking the country. He gave us one last bend over and grab your ankles.
On Robert Rubin: Another giant asshole - he gave us Geithner and Summers. You don't send the same surgeon in after a botched surgery because the first surgeon is more interested in covering up his work.
On Obama: Putting Rubin, Summers and Geithner in power was the tragedy of the Obama administration. Obama and Bush were both given an opportunity to be transformational - a Churchill, a Roosevelt. Obama's problem was that he sought out the biggest asshole in America - Robert Rubin.
On Credit Rating Agencies: To me, if you give up your virtue for money, you are a prostitute. Credit rating agencies are prostitutes.
On Lobbying: I have libertarian friends who are always bitching about government. I always say to them, when a dog bites you in the ass... that's what dogs do - don't blame the dog. Look up the leash and see who is holding the handle. When you look at Congress - Congress is the snapping dog. But they are somebody's bitch. You have to see who is holding the leash. Very often it is banks and Wall Street and the financial sector having Congress do its bidding. Most of the things that got us into trouble have been done at the bequest of the banks. For example, the 2004 change in leverage ratios... ironically known as the Bear Stearns Act - as in banks larger than Bear Stearns had lower ratio requirements. First of all, why do you change a law for just 5 banks and not for all of them? That shows you how corrupt the system is.
On Congress: I don't want to say Congress are whores, that go to these corporate executives with knee pads and lip-gloss... Congress is corrupt. Politicians in both parties are worthless. Every day I have to get up and prevent myself from releasing my ninja assassins to go pick out some people who are undercutting the Republic here. They don't even hide how corrupt they are anymore. It just came out that one of the new guys had sent out a note to CFO's asking them what legislation they would like to see changed. They will do anything for any kind of campaign contribution.
On Anecdotal Views of the Economy: Depending on who you are and what your circle of friends is, you will experience very different Americas in terms of the economy. If you are a college grad, the unemployment rate is 4.8%. If you are a computer programmer/engineer, the unemployment rate is 0%. The greater the skill set you have, the less employment issues you will see. I always tell people the plural of anecdote is not data. That's why it's so important not to just rely on your own experience.
PLoS |Abstract: Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of religious background on attention. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and controlled for race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual stimuli: Calvinists attend less to global aspects of perceived events, which fits with the idea that people's attentional processing style reflects possible biases rewarded by their religious belief system.So what can we surmise here? Controlled for the factors that would provoke intense excitement in Big Don, investigators have identified qualitative differences in the quality and quantity of human consciousness.
Sciam Digest - Religion might literally influence how you view the world. Scientists in the Netherlands compared Dutch Calvinists with Dutch atheists, looking for any effects potentially imposed on thinking by the neo-Calvinist concept of sphere sovereignty, which emphasizes that each sector of society has its own responsibilities and authorities. The researchers hypothesize that Calvinists might therefore not be as good as atheists at seeing the big picture. Participants were shown images of large rectangles or squares that each consisted of smaller rectangles or squares. In some tests, volunteers had to quickly identify the shapes of the smaller parts; in others, the larger wholes. The Calvinists scored slightly but significantly lower than atheists did in correctly identifying whole images. The investigators plan to study other religions for similar influences.
There's no point in examining other "religions" in search of similar influences. The religion is not in fact influencing the outcomes, the fact that certain individuals are drawn to specific formations, and that they share certain underlying baseline proclivities is what is really in question here. The researchers have finally hit upon my other controversial theory about the organization of the human world. What they've stumbled upon here in Calvinist garb is an underlying human neurotype.
nautilus | In physics, the pressure, temperature, and volume of a gas are known as the state
of a gas. In Boltzmann’s model, any arrangement of atoms or molecules
that produces this state is known as a microstate of the gas. Since the
state of a gas depends on the overall motion of its atoms or molecules,
many microstates can produce the same state. Boltzmann showed that
entropy can be defined as the number of microstates a state has. The
more microstates, the greater the entropy. This explains why the entropy
of a system tends to increase. Over time, a gas is more likely to find
itself in a state with lots of possible microstates than one with few
microstates.
Since entropy increases over time, the early universe must have had much lower entropy. This means the Big Bang
must have had an extraordinarily low entropy. But why would the
primordial state of the universe have such low entropy? Boltzmann’s
theory provides a possible answer. Although higher entropy states are
more likely over time, it is possible for a thermodynamic system to
decrease its entropy. For example, all the air molecules in a room could
just happen to cram together in one corner of the room. It isn’t very
likely, but, statistically, it is possible. The same idea applies
to the universe as a whole: If the primordial cosmos was in
thermodynamic equilibrium, there is a small chance that things came
together to create an extremely low entropy state. That state then
triggered the Big Bang and the universe we see around us.
However,
if the low entropy of the Big Bang was just due to random chance, that
leads to a problem. Infinite monkeys might randomly type out the Complete Works of Shakespeare,
but they would be far more likely to type out the much shorter
Gettysburg Address. Likewise, a low entropy Big Bang could arise out of a
primordial state, but if the universe is a collection of microstates,
then it is more likely to find itself in a conscious state that thinks
it is in a universe rather than the entire physical universe itself.
That is, a Boltzmann brain existing is more probable than a universe
existing. Boltzmann’s theory leads to a paradox, where the very
scientific assumption that we can trust what we observe leads to the
conclusion that we can’t trust what we observe.
Although it’s an
interesting paradox, most astrophysicists don’t think Boltzmann brains
are a real possibility. (Carroll, for instance, mercilessly deems them
“self-undermining and unworthy of serious consideration,” on account of
their cognitive instability.) Instead they look to physical processes
that would solve the paradox. The physical processes that give rise to
the Boltzmann brain possibility are the vacuum energy fluctuations
intrinsic to quantum theory—small energy fluctuations can appear out of
the vacuum. Usually they aren’t noticeable, but under certain conditions
these vacuum fluctuations can lead to things like Hawking radiation and
cosmic inflation in the early universe. These fluctuations were in
thermal equilibrium in the early universe, so they follow the same
random Boltzmann statistics as the primordial cosmos, making them also
more likely to give rise to a Boltzmann brain rather than the universe
we seem to be in.
But it turns out that, since the universe is
expanding, these apparent fluctuations might not be coming from the
vacuum. Instead, as the universe expands, the edge of the observable
universe causes thermal fluctuations to appear, much like the event
horizon of a black hole gives rise to Hawking radiation. This gives the
appearance of vacuum fluctuations, from our point of view. The true
vacuum of space and time isn’t fluctuating, so it cannot create a
Boltzmann brain.
The idea,
from Caltech physicist Kimberly Boddy, and colleagues, is somewhat
speculative, and it has an interesting catch. The argument that the true
vacuum of the universe is stationary relies on a version of quantum
theory known as the many-worlds formulation. In this view, the wave
function of a quantum system doesn’t “collapse” when observed. Rather,
different outcomes of the quantum system “decohere” and simply evolve
along different paths. Where once the universe was a superposition of
different possible outcomes, quantum decoherence creates two definite
outcomes. Of course, if our minds are simply physical states within the
cosmos, our minds are also split into two outcomes, each observing a
particular result.
strategic-culture | Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are
everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to
force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are
coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the
places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020.
This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were
vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this
mRNA ‘surge’.
Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no
panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather
by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in
the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his
‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through
Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation
spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.
Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after
which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too
(by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids
at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma
establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big
jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it
“clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further
waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.
Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and –
eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in
prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.
It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in
full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before
variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and
non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at
Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was
foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even
in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.
The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked
‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism
in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various
‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate,
vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?
Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating
inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst
poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly
discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory
hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.
Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a
hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised,
roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be
voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social
support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is
required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves
without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a
digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ –
inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.
There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do
not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its
‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full
throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no
dissidence.
Why We Started to Fear Extinction
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*Why We Started to Fear Extinction | John McWhorter & Tyler Austin Harper |
The Glenn Show*
Everyone has a theory about how the world will end, but how ...
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...