Wherein we humbly yield the microphone to the mighty Submariner, promoted from always tasteful and classy oyster perpetual, to now honorary prince of the lost kingdom of Atlantis (that'd be Visioncircle LOL!!!). As I've told my friend Temple3, there is a definite difference between pericarditis, angina, and a heart attack. If you or someone in authority could make a selection, then you would much rather not have a straight up heart attack. This is where we are.Out of the comments and straight to the top. It just doesn't get any better than that on the Soul Conviction tip. As a matter of fact, I did, I did say something to the effect of what the good doctor brother Submariner referred to, the punchline for which was this;
I'm not one of the deluded who calls Barack a prophet. If anything he is a modern day King David. A lowly, goodhearted shepherd who uses superior guile and strategic alliances to usurp the throne.
Barack has a supple feel for power. No one can aspire to enter the political architecture without approval of the American Jewish lobby. That's a major reason why Pat Buchanan will never be down.
"Unless America figures out how to meritocratically embrace the attractions of an unimpeachable black candidate like Oprah Winfrey or Colin Powell, with all the requisite stateswoman/gangsta cred required to silence any and all detractors, AMERICA WILL FAIL!"
When Craig Nulan presciently averred this on 06 February 2005, Barack was a political neonate. Nulan captured what I've been clumsily articulating since Obama's ascendancy. If America has a minimal chance to be redeemed it will be done by black people.
As a physician I see miracles nearly everyday. Two weeks ago I witnessed a ninety-something year old have a cardiac arrest. We did CPR with her family at the bedside who decline having her intubated. We stopped resuscitation efforts after three minutes. She had a thready pulse and I told her son that that she was checking out. An hour later the lady was sitting up talking to her family saing her chest hurt, presumably from us doing CPR.
When you experience things like this nearly every week, like I do, you develop a certain optimism or faith. It is this hope, like that of the African in the bowels of a 18 Century slave ship, that sustains me.
Here's the rub. It's not about what an Oprah or a Colin might personally bring to the office, they're superstars without a doubt. Rather, it's about what the POTUS exemplifies about the collective American unconscious that matters here. Until and unless the American collective unconscious evolves considerably beyond its current state, it's simply not fit to imperially preside over the rest of the world in the manner Cobb describes here.almost makes one nostalgic for the halcyon days of group political commentary....,
In this morning's Guardian commentary, a rhetorical point is raised; How come Zimbabwe and Tibet get all the attention?Nice serendipity given the Engdahl article on Mark Penn's abrupt defection from the Hellury campaign, his history with manipulating elections in client states, and his role in the global illusion making apparatus.
If a government wants to abuse human rights and rig elections, it needs to have the support of - or be - the western powers.
But, on the basis of the scale of violence, repression and election rigging alone, you would be hard put to explain why these conflicts have been singled out for such special attention. In the violence surrounding Zimbabwe's elections, two people are currently reported to have died; in Tibet, numbers estimated to have been killed by protesters and Chinese forces range from 22 to 140. By contrast, in Somalia, where US-backed Ethiopian and Somali troops are fighting forces loyal to the ousted government, several thousand have been killed since the beginning of the year and half the population of the capital, Mogadishu, has been forced to flee the city in what UN officials describe as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.In order to get a grip on TEP bidnis and the machinations of its hegemonic illusion apparatus, the subrealist would have to go all bidnis intel and set up a global dashboard on which we could benchmark and track where the most flagrant economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights violations are occurring inclusive of a backgrounder on the historic links between the current oppressive regime and its historic and continuing TEP sponsorship.
When it comes to rigging elections, countries like Jordan and Egypt have been happy to oblige in recent months - in the Egyptian case, jailing hundreds of opposition activists into the bargain - and almost nobody in the west has batted an eyelid. In Saudi Arabia there are no national elections at all, let alone the opposition MPs and newspapers that exist in Zimbabwe. In Africa, Togo has been a more flagrant rigger, while in Cameroon last week the president was given the job for life. And when it comes to separatist and independence movements, the Turkish Kurds have faced far more violence and a tighter cultural clampdown than the Tibetans.
The crucial difference, of course, and the reason why these conflicts and violations don't get the deluxe media and political treatment offered to the Zimbabwean opposition or Tibetan separatists is that the governments involved are all backed by the west...,
Hillary Rodham Clinton said emphatically last night that Barack Obama can win the White House this fall, undercutting her efforts to deny him the nomination by suggesting he would lead the party to defeat. What does this mean?Mark Penn is exemplary of what US political insiders refer to as a person of the “permanent establishment,” the shadowy institutions and insiders behind the curtains who really determine critical policy issues and shape the choices gullible voters then are given to “democratically choose among.”With the abrupt departure of Hillary Clinton’s main campaign strategist, Mark Penn, have Hellury's backers decided to fold? If so, will they now shift their interests to Baraka or McCain?
It has been referred to by strategists since the time of Edward Bernays as the “illusion of choice.” Penn is above political party, serving the interests of what some call the permanent establishment. As a case in point, he also is CEO of the influential global public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, which includes among clients the largest US mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial and Blackwater Inc. the Republican led mercenary security firm that has been accused of repeated killings of innocent Iraqi civilians.
Penn’s firm was to make sure the “image” of such clients remained positive to the US public. Referring to Mark Penn, the influential Washington Post once referred to him as “the most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of." According to PSB’s website, Penn helped elect 15 overseas Presidents in the Far East, Latin America, and Europe. Clients include heads of state or opposition politicians in Greece, Turkey, Israel, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Bermuda and Yugoslavia.
The other day I asked you to "consider the possibility that nature isn't opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool...," I just received an article from The Scientist that provokes a little further speculation along that line;Jacobs-Wagner's career started off with a bang when, as a graduate student at the University of Liège in the early 1990s, she discovered that some bacteria can induce the enzyme beta-lactamase when exposed to antibiotics such cephalosporin, rendering them resistant to these drugs. "It's the physiology that interested me, the physiology I really wanted to understand," she says. "How do bacteria know they are under attack, and how are they able to respond by making protein that inactivates the antibiotics?"[...]Her pioneering studies on the molecular mechanisms underlying cell shape and cell polarity in Caulobacter crescentus, says Errington, "have helped change the way people think about bacteria. Now there's a whole new field of people who are working on bacterial cell biology using the same sorts of approaches used to study eukaryotes.Can bacteria "know" anything? Is this just an instance of bumping up against the descriptive limitations of the language, or as I suspect, does it point to something rather more fundamental about the inseparable nature of "being" and "knowing"?
A subrealist is first and foremost dedicated to the implementation of practical and scientific solutions to the problems of the collective that it examines. The energy required to maintain our complex society is fairly easily within our reach. It would necessitate the local reuse/recycling of bulk waste as advocated by our brilliant sister Mahndisa, and, it would involve the industrial scale cultivation of hemp as feedstock for the age-old process of pyrolysis.
The Identification and Destruction of False Ideas is a pillar of the subrealist ouevre.In Britain and the US, public health studies suggest that a full-blown pandemic of bird flu or something like the respiratory disease SARS could knock out a critical mass of the working population. Some sixty per cent of the nursing and medical services could be out of action within 10 days, according to a study at the Defence Academy of the UK Staff College. This would mean the armed services would have to be called in to help.It appears that the UK National Security Strategy has pegged pandemics as one of the major threats menacing the civilized world.
The threat to public order - a scenario out of the Day of the Triffids or the Quatermass Experiment - is what really alarms Downing Street. An American study has suggested that in a worst case, half the population would go down with bird flu – roughly the scale of Europe's Black Death of 1348. Half of those would have to go to hospital and millions would die in the first wave.
The government has laid in stocks of 14.6m courses of Tamiflu, one of two known medicines capable of combating H5N1. However, pharmaceutical competitors have claimed that Tamiflu would only be effective for a very short time, and the WHO says the virus appeared to be resistant to Tamiflu in at least two known cases.
The threat to this country from a pandemic caused by bird flu or some such virus is greater than the threat from international terrorism in the view of Gordon Brown and his Downing Street advisors. This is why pandemics are ranked alongside terrorism and other major global ills in the National Security Strategy unveiled last month.Now where is Gordon Brown getting his information from?
The argument is based on a hypothesis, a short-odds scientific bet. Sir David King, who's just stepped down as the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, puts it like this: "It is more a question of when rather than if the H5N1 virus mutates into a virulent human form. So far we have noted more than 20 mutations of the virus in only a few years."Oh Lawd!!!! The sky must indeed be falling, or maybe not. Evidently Sir David King has established track record second only to our own legendary Brownie. According to the warmwell blog, hailed thus; "This website has served as a rapier, puncturing the bladder of Government obfuscation, by publishing a highly informed, topical digest of news..." Sir David King has established a track record of highly dubious provenance and has served as a pseudo-scientific authority co-opted to justify a series of disastrous political agendas, most notably the mass slaughter of British livestock to control an alleged pandemic..
His view is supported by every public health official or doctor I have met in recent months. Only last week, three former heads of the Defence Ministry and the Joint Intelligence Committee told me without hesitation that they thought the PM was right to flag the potential menace.
From The Strange History of Economics;Following WWII, the United States increasingly came to determine (one might say dictate) the shape of economics worldwide, while within the United States the sources of influence became concentrated and circumscribed to an absurd degree. This state of affairs, which persists to the present day, was engineered in significant part by the US Department of Defense, especially its Navy and Air Force. Beginning in the 1950s it lavishly funded university research in mathematical economics. Military planners believed that game theory and linear programming had potential use for national defense. And although now it seems ridiculous, they held out the same hope for mathematical solutions of “general equilibrium”, the theoretical core of Neoclassical economics. In 1954 Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu achieved for this mathematical puzzle a solution of sorts that has been the central show piece of academic economics ever since. Arrow’s early research had been partly, in his words, “carried on at the RAND Corporation, a project of the United States Air Force.” In the 1960s, official publications of the Department of Defense praised the Arrow-Debreu project for its “modeling of conflict and cooperation whether if be [for] combat or procurement contracts or exchange of information among dispersed decision nodes.” In 1965, RAND created a fellowship program for economics graduate students at the Universities of California, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, Columbia and Princeton, and in addition provided postdoctoral funds for those who best fitted the mold. These seven economics departments along with MIT’s, an institution long regarded by many as a branch of the Pentagon, have come to dominate economics globally to an astonishing extent.It's a short read. While you're there, check out the post autistic economics network and get a subscription. The price is right, enjoy....,
What if Stephen King is right? What if human consciousness isn't the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn's clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see things from a plant's-eye view -- to consider the possibility that nature isn't opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool. By merely shifting our perspective, he argues, we can heal the Earth. Who's the more sophisticated species now?
The $109 Million dollar woman seizes the tactical moment;But Clinton struck hard, calling Obama's comments "demeaning." The increased attack showed that Clinton is eager to hold on to her working class support and is looking to open new questions about Obama's judgment that would make voters and Democratic officials reconsider their support for the Illinois senator.On second thought, Big Don is right, and that folks, the fact that she could even go there with a straight face in light of all the skeleton bones that have come tumbling out of her closet the past couple of weeks, perfectly illustrates why America will get EXACTLY the leadership that it deserves.
"I was raised with Midwestern values and an unshakable faith in America and its policies," she said. "Now, Americans who believe in the Second Amendment believe it's a matter of constitutional right. Americans who believe in God believe it's a matter of personal faith.
"I grew up in a church-going family, a family that believed in the importance of living out and expressing our faith. The people of faith I know don't 'cling' to religion because they're bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich.
"Our faith is the faith of our parents and our grandparents. It is a fundamental expression of who we are and what we believe."
I wrote about this a couple years ago at Vision Circle. Baraka has spoken to and will now be compelled to fully engage around one of the most challenging bulwarks of reality evasion in America. Joe Bageant understood it and spoke to it very, very well."But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
I think working class anger is at a more fundamental level and that it is about this: rank and status as citizens in our society. I think it is about the daily insult working class people suffer from employers, government (national, state and local), and from their more educated fellow Americans, the doctors, lawyers, journalists, academicians, and others who quietly disdain working people and their uncultured ways. And I think working class anger is about some other things too:Good luck and godspeed. If he can successfully engage these folks, alay their anger and mistrust, he has a better than even chance of becoming president and potentially even functioning as a catalyst for constructive change. This is easily the most interesting moment thus far in the democrat primary.
Prophecies and warnings regarding fossil fuel depletion. Extracted from the Wikipedia entry on Admiral Hyman Rickover - the visionary "inventor" of compact nuclear reactor technology and the man who handpicked Lt. James Earl Carter to join his superb nuclear naval fleet. 
As early as 1957, Admiral Rickover began urging the development of alternate energy consumption paths to that of fossil fuels as their eventual depletion became evident, noting:Carter was the only president who attempted to take on the single greatest threat to our survival, and to this day, he remains maligned and ignored despite being a visionary many, many years ahead of his time. Not so far ahead as his mentor Admiral Rickover, who was noted for his intolerance of oxygen thievery;
"A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life...Anyone who has watched a sweating Chinese farm worker strain at his heavily laden wheelbarrow, creaking along a cobblestone road, or who has flinched as he drives past an endless procession of human beasts of burden moving to market in Java - the slender women bent under mountainous loads heaped on their heads - anyone who has seen statistics translated into flesh and bone, realizes the degradation of man's stature when his muscle power becomes the only energy source he can afford. Civilization must wither when human beings are so degraded....High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which controls the largest energy resources will become dominant."
Moreover, he had "little tolerance for mediocrity, none for stupidity." "If a man is dumb," said a Chicago friend, "Rickover thinks he ought to be dead." Even while a Captain, Rickover did not conceal his opinions, and many of the officers he regarded as dumb eventually rose in rank to be admirals and were assigned to the Pentagon.Too bad these visionaries weren't able to wake up the masses in their time.
In today's NYTimes;“I consider this the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime,” Mr. Soros said during an interview Monday in his office overlooking Central Park. A “superbubble” that has been swelling for a quarter of a century is finally bursting, he said[...]The market theory he has promoted for two decades and espoused most of his life — something he calls “reflexivity” — is still dismissed by many economists. The idea is that people’s biases and actions can affect the direction of the underlying economy, undermining the conventional theory that markets tend toward some sort of equilibrium.Soros is correct. "Reality" mirrors the contents of the collective unconscious. To change the former requires autonomous access to and some degree of control over the latter. Human beings have engendered a number of such cultures of psychological competence. The currently dominant dopamine hegemony is not such a culture. Instead, it is a culture in which the tendency toward unconscious behaviour is maximized and ruthlessly and habitually exploited. That's why it works. That's why it's universal, and that's why it will be our undoing.
Mr. Soros said all aspects of his life — finance, philanthropy, even politics — are driven by reflexivity, which has to do with the feedback loop between people’s understanding of reality and their own actions. Society as a whole could learn from his theory, he said. “To make a contribution to our understanding of reality would be my greatest accomplishment,” he said.
This sad little nethoax chain letter - urging consumers to boycott Exxon Mobile - is once again making the rounds of the Kwaku Net. Assuming folks deigned to act on what this letter enjoins, their action would prove absolutely meaningless. Instead of engaging in impotent symbolic gestures signifying nothing, the meaningful thing to do is to begin preparing to the best of your ability to hunker down, conserve, and to cooperate with others in your community for the cold, hard rain that is certain to come. This is for your personal and communal benefit no matter what. So do it!It clearly will take outright shortages with lines at the pumps, curtailed deliveries and many other misfortunes before serious measures to deal with declining oil supplies –- speed limits, rationing, mandatory car pools, improved mass transit -- are taken. Thus the question becomes: how soon?So watch what's going on in the diesel and distillates market. Diesel is the lifeblood of our current unsustainable level of consumption. As goes the diesel, so goes our way of life.
Gasoline and diesel are two different animals in America. Most gasoline is used for personal travel and much of that for convenience and, as we shall find out shortly, is not essential to the economy. Diesel in America is, for the most part, an essential fuel in that it is used to perform money-making work or, in its heating oil form, keep us from freezing. If diesel becomes too expensive, and those expenses cannot be passed on, then the consumption of diesel will be cut back. This in fact is already happening -- the government is reporting that distillate consumption of diesel and heating oil currently is down by 3.1 percent as compared to the same four week period last year. This is undoubtedly due to the price of diesel and heating oil which is now around $4 a gallon, an increase of $1.17 a gallon since last year.
The word “distillates” encompasses both diesel and heating oil which are about the same thing; except that the clean air rules in the U.S. require most of the sulfur be removed before burning it in a motor. Currently there is a world-wide shortage of distillates which is most severe in China where long lines of trucks waiting for fuel are appearing across the country.
politico | The Washington Post on Friday announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking decades of tradition in a...
