the political economy of dominant ownership

dissidentvoice |  Tim Di Muzio, a senior lecturer in international relations and political economy at Wollongong University in Australia, has written a book – The 1% and the Rest of Us: A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership (Zed Books, 2015) – that answers so many questions and provides so much relevant background to readily understand wealth and its maldistribution.

Who comprise the 1%? Why is there an income and a wealth chasm and why are the chasms widening? What does the existence of a 1% mean for the 99%?

Looking at data from top financial institutions and using the financial nomenclature (high net worth individuals, HNWIs, in place of 1%-ers), Di Muzio reveals that the 12 million HNWIs on a global scale represent 0.2% of the population (p 32). The HNWIs are concentrated on Turtle Island, Europe, and Asia (87%) and are predominantly male.

Di Muzio cites economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler who define capital as power rather than a mode of production: “… commodified differential power expressed in finance and only in finance.” (p 50) The goal of capitalists is differential accumulation – to primarily increase the wealth gap between themselves and others: i.e., they seek greater wealth inequality. (p 49) For this reason, the capitalist system cannot rid wealth inequality or significantly reduce the inequality. (p 48)

Why this pursuit of differential accumulation? Di Muzio writes it is pathological: “this addiction for wealth and power is destroying the planet for future generations.” (p 9)

At the corporate level, the goal is the same: to gain a larger share of the wealth pie than competitors. (p 63)

Chapter 2 provides a solid overview on the capitalist mode of power: commodification, legalizing organizations as firms, and capitalizing income streams; finance: the bond market (of the government bond market, Nitzan and Bichler are quoted: “the first systematic capitalization of power, namely, the power to tax. And since this power is backed by institutionalized force, the government bond represents a share in the organized violence of society.” (p 77); the stock markets that “largely serve as the state-protected markets by which dominant owners organise and redistribute ownership claims to money and power.” (p 81); real estate; commodity and derivatives market; the foreign exchange market whose “gradual emergence … has facilitated the transnationalisation of dominant ownership and the capitalisation of power” (p 85); the money and spot markets; central and commercial banks; tax havens (“the private economy of the 1%, the corporations they own and the illicit traffickers in arms and drugs.” (p 102).

How has this come about? “The market and price system were imposed on humanity not as a matrix of choice but as a mechanism of domination.” (p 134)

having peeped the power game on think tanks - we shift our gaze to schools with students...,

bnarchives |  Building on the definition of critical education residing in the crossroads of cultural politics and political economy, this theoretical article offers an inquiry into the intersection between critical education research and the central ritual of contemporary capitalism – capitalisation. This article outlines four current approaches in education research literature to the corporatisation of education. This article argues that the approaches must rely implicitly on one of the two major theories of capitalism: modern neoclassical economics or Marxist political economy, even when the approaches are built on cultural and sociological arguments. Without an explicit engagement with the concept of capital and capitalisation, the approaches risk appearing theoretically weak and reliant on moral assumptions. In this sense, critical education literature would be strengthened by engagement with international political economy (IPE) literature. This article proposes to redress this lacuna in the literature by mobilising Jonathan Nitzan's and Shimson Bichler's theory of capital as power to better understand the corporatisation of education.

stakes is high and granny the most corrupt psychopath in u.s. political history....,

shtfplan |  On July 12, 2016  DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered while reportedly walking home at 4am. Though robbery was initially suspected, Rich still had his wallet and watch when police arrived. The murder – one of five tied to the Clintons in the last six weeks – came in the midst of a massive email leak scandal involving Wikileaks, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

Within hours of the event alternative media reporters began to suspect something was amiss, as police had no witnesses, no suspects and no motive. This led to theories that Rich, who was in charge of voter expansion data at the DNC, may have been killed to cover something up. Subsequent reports even suggested Rich may have been on his way to speak with special agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding an “ongoing court case.”

Though the reports were initially dismissed as conspiracy theory, perhaps the one person who could confirm that Rich was in fact a whistle blower may have just done so. None other than Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in an interview with Nieuwsurr, said that his organization is investigating the death of Seth Rich and, somewhat cryptically, tied Rich to Wikileaks. And though Assange wouldn’t directly admit Rich was the source, perhaps because he himself didn’t know the true identify of his source until material stopped flowing or contact was lost, he implies that Seth Rich’s murder may have been a politically-motivated assassination:

did granny goodness sell weapons to isis?

thepoliticalinsider |  Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a controversial character. But there’s no denying the emails he has picked up from inside the Democrat Party are real, and he’s willing to expose Hillary Clinton.

Now, he’s announcing that Hillary Clinton and her State Department was actively arming Islamic jihadists, which includes the Islamic State (ISIS) in Syria.

Clinton as repeatedly denied these claims, including during multiple statements while under oath in front of the United States Senate.

WikiLeaks is about to prove Hillary Clinton deserves to be arrested:

The Reagan administration officials hoped to secure the release of several U.S. hostages, and then take proceeds from the arms sales to Iran, to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.

Sounds familiar?

In Obama’s second term, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton authorized the shipment of American-made arms to Qatar, a country beholden to the Muslim Brotherhood, and friendly to the Libyan rebels, in an effort to topple the Libyan/Gaddafi government, and then ship those arms to Syria in order to fund Al Qaeda, and topple Assad in Syria.

Clinton took the lead role in organizing the so-called “Friends of Syria” (aka Al Qaeda/ISIS) to back the CIA-led insurgency for regime change in Syria.

Under oath Hillary Clinton denied she knew about the weapons shipments during public testimony in early 2013 after the Benghazi terrorist attack.

In an interview with Democracy Now, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is now stating that 1,700 emails contained in the Clinton cache directly connect Hillary to Libya to Syria, and directly to Al Qaeda and ISIS.

via The Duran

government is a weapon and those who can use it are the winners...,

libertyblitzkrieg |  Many of you have already read this past Sunday’s excellent and deeply disturbing article published by the New York Times regarding the shady and inappropriate activities regularly conducted by U.S. “think tanks.” If you haven’t read it yet, I highly suggest you take the time to do so.

It’s important to acknowledge that the U.S. economy has morphed into one gigantic lawless crime scene. An environment in which crony insiders who add zero value to society parasitically feast on the country’s treasure. In the case of so-called “think tanks,” we have organizations receiving copious taxpayer subsidies for the privilege of screwing over the American public.

To understand the topic further, I present you with some excerpts from the article titled, Researchers or Corporate Allies? Think Tanks Blur the Line:

Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.

Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,” including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks.

Washington has seen a proliferation of think tanks, particularly small institutions with narrow interests tied to specific industries. At the same time, the brand names of the field have experienced explosive growth. Brookings’s annual budget has doubled in the last decade, to $100 million. The American Enterprise Institute is spending at least $80 million on a new headquarters in Washington, not far from where the Center for Strategic and International Studies built a $100 million office tower.

liminal aspects of living-memory identity-political history...,

hirhome |  Synopsis: It has been difficult to make progress in the study of ethnicity and nationalism because of the multiple confusions of analytic and lay terms, and the sheer lack of terminological standardization (often even within the same article). This makes a conceptual cleaning-up unavoidable, and it is especially salutary to attempt it now that more economists are becoming interested in the effects of identity on behavior, so that they may begin with the best conceptual tools possible. My approach to these questions has been informed by anthropological and evolutionary-psychological questions. I will focus primarily on the terms ‘ethnic group’, ‘nation’, and ‘nationalism’, and I will make the following points: (1) so-called ‘ethnic groups’ are collections of people with a common cultural identity, plus an ideology of membership by descent and normative endogamy; (2) the ‘group’ in ‘ethnic group’ is a misleading misnomer—these are not ‘groups’ but categories , so I propose to call them ‘ethnies’; (3) ‘nationalism’ mostly refers to the recent ideology that ethnies—cultural communities with a self-conscious ideology of self-sufficient reproduction be made politically sovereign; (4) it is very confusing to use ‘nationalism’ also to stand for ‘loyalty to a multi-ethnic state’ because this is the exact opposite; (5) a ‘nation’ truly exists only in a politician’s imagination, so analysts should not pretend that establishing whether some thing ‘really’ is or is not ‘a nation’ matters; (6) a big analytic cost is paid every time an ‘ethnie’ is called a ‘nation’ because this mobilizes the intuition that nationalism is indispensable to ethnic organization (not true), which thereby confuses the very historical process—namely, the recent historical emergence of nationalism that must be explained; (7) another analytical cost is paid when scholars pretend that ethnicity is a form of kinship—it is not.

would classifying antisemitism as mental illness help to curb it?

algemeiner |  In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM.) Aside from defusing the anger and shame of many gays and lesbians — which helped to improve their mental health — the APA shift facilitated great strides in the social, cultural, political, and legal arenas in subsequent decades. As unceremoniously absurd as the overnight change of status was, it remains a stunning model of social engineering, cultural amelioration, and of what grassroots political activism can achieve. As a Jew fighting antisemitism, I find this very instructive.

If the APA has the power to de-stigmatize human behavior by eliminating supposed disorders, might it have the power to stigmatize and shun other behavior by adding previously unlisted ones?

I would like to propose that if renewed research on antisemitism can more forcefully demonstrate its association with psychopathology, its institutional recognition through the APA manual may help to curb it.  

There is indeed a body of literature that makes a good case for antisemitism as a sign or symptom of serious mental illness. To be accurate, antisemitism itself would not be the disorder, but the content of some other structural disorder, such as delusional or narcissistic personality disorder. 

Furthermore, it has been broadly proposed by several prominent researchers that racist and antisemitic feelings, thoughts, and behaviors can be a principal co-occurring symptom of psychopathology.

is racism a psychopathology?

emory |  In the third and final CMBC lunch talk of the 2013 fall semester, Dr. Sander Gilman (Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory) treated participants to an engaging presentation on the interconnected history of racism and mental illness in Europe and America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The topic of the talk grew out of a CMBC-sponsored undergraduate course and graduate seminar offered by Dr. Gilman last fall, titled “Race, Brain, and Psychoanalysis.”

Gilman opened by citing a 2012 study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of scientists at Oxford. Based on clinical experiments, they reported that white subjects who were given doses of the beta-blocker drug Propranolol showed reduced indicators of implicit racial bias. The authors of the paper wrote that their research “raises the tantalizing possibility that our unconscious racial attitudes could be modulated using drugs.” Time Magazine soon thereafter ran a headline story with the title “Is Racism Becoming a Mental Illness?” Dismissing these claims as unscientific, Gilman instead posed a different set of questions: at what point, historically, does racism come to be classified as a form of mental illness? Why? And what are the implications of such a “diagnosis”?

a week's worth of subrealism in a single epic comment...,

anonymny |  The reason why Trump appeals to many Americans is the lack of pomposity. He has the bomp and the pomp but without the pompousness. He comes across as a straight-talker. He’s rich and privileged, and he enjoys luxury. He’s honest about it. He talks and acts like an American in the street. And I think this part of Trump is real. It’s not put-on uh-shucks George H.W. Bush claiming to like pork rinds or Bush II as ‘beer buddy’. Trump is no saint, and I wouldn’t trust him. He may be a phony, but like Holly Golightly, he is a real phony. He plays this brand called ‘Trump’ and really believes in it. 

Also, the paradox of Trump is only a ‘crazy person’ can be sane and sound in today’s politics. Why? Cuz of the power of globo-PC and so many rules on what can be said and cannot be said. To be ‘sane’ and ‘sound’ is to just go by the script.

Now, in a sane world, following the script may be perfectly fine. But in an insane world, the script itself is nuts. So, to be ‘sane’ and ‘sound’ means to go along with the script without missing a beat.

Under communism in the USSR, the party members and bureaucrats all spoke and acted ‘sanely’. 

They didn’t throw fits and didn’t talk like blowhards. They seemed proper and dignified. But they were all speaking from a nutty script of Leninism-Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn, in contrast, seemed like a madman, but he was right. Now, I’m not saying Trump is Solzy. Trump is a blowhard and a narcissist and a fool. But he has balls, and it takes a big pair to do the Randall McMurphy thing in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. US is a funny farm of PC and globalism. And the GLOB has appointed Hillary to be Nurse Ratched. In the movie, most of the patients act proper and sane. They are respectful of authority. They don’t realize that the place that is supposed to cure them is keeping them even more insane through dependence and weakness. This is why so many conservatives responded well to Trump in the GOP debates. It was like watching that scene in CUCKOO’S NEST. 

Propriety and Dignity are good under most circumstances, but there are times when someone has to howl like a wolf. With the likes of Jeb, Kasich, Fiorina, and etc reading from the same script of the Donor Class, someone had to howl and talk big to break through the PC fog. And Trump did that. Style mattered to break the ice.

In a sane world, propriety and dignity is about mutual respect and preservation of just order. But in a insane world, they are tools of corrupt power like in the former Soviet Union where the bureaucrats acted properly but dared not speak the truth that communism was a horror show and a vast prison.
In a crazy world, there has to some passion, some rage, some counter-craziness.

Look at Obama as the perfect specimen of slimeball dignity. He’s a smooth operator. He has this presidential style. He acts sane and sound. White folks were happy to have a Nice Negro with manners and intelligent style than boors like Sharpton and Jackson. But Obama is a total phony, a weasel, a skunk. He’s a globalist tool of Wall Street, open borders, more wars. And he is surely the most pompous president ever. His talk of his ‘profound humility’ or his speeches where everything is about ‘me’, even at the funeral of Daniel Inoue of Hawaii. And his pompous-ass book Dreams of My Father. Pure weasel-talk.

You can’t blame just Hillary for Libya and Syria and Ukraine. Obama totally went along with that stuff. Obama’s style may come across as clean and crisp, but he is just going along with the crazy globalist script. His policies messed up Middle East and set off massive ‘refugee’ problem. And then this jerk pressures EU to take in all these people. And the media just go along with this. And where the anti-war left? It is all but gone. It’s like the dignified and clean-seeming authorities in SANJURO are the real villains while ruffian-seeming hero is closer to the truth.

Now, it’s true that Trump’s style is fresh and boorish. Sometimes, he can be overbearing and even stupid. He made overstatements about Mexicans that was unnecessary. But is it worse than Obama fanning racial flames that burned down entire cities like Ferguson and Baltimore and encouraging a Lie Machine like BLM movement? Didn’t such rhetoric get innocent cops killed? And hasn’t there been increased policing and more tensions between cops and blacks precisely because urban Progs have been trying to revive cities by getting touch on black crime?

Also, if Trump’s side is so crazy, how come virtually all Trump supporters are well-behaved? How come all the violence is from the other side? They stormed a Trump rally in Chicago and aborted it. They physically assaulted Trump supporters. Where is the media on this? Media throw fits about ‘hate hoaxes’ from the Right but overlook ‘leftist’ violence as forgivable or even justified.

At any rate, we must not mistake style with real substance of the Trump Campaign. The idea that Trump is some nutjob who is going to blow the world up as president is pure nonsense. Trump’s style may be brash, but his positions are remarkably sane.

There is a massive immigration and illegal immigration problem in the US. Something must be done about it. Wall or no wall, we cannot let things go on as usual. Forcing Mexico to be responsible with the border is crazy? Only a crazy world would say that is crazy.

Trump also calls for economic policies that produce jobs for the middle class and working class. Why is that crazy? While the upper class are doing so well, middle class and working class are not. Is it so crazy to end the outsourcing of US jobs overseas? Where is insanity in this?

On the Muslim Issue, I think Trump went too far. But he still sounds more sane than Hillary. He is saying we need to stop foreign wars that set off these ‘refugees’ in the first place. Obama and Hillary, weasels that they are, pose as humanitarians with open arms to ‘refugees’, but they(along with media) overlook the fact that the ‘refugees’ are the product of conditions they created in the Middle East and North Africa by direct or indirect intervention. Why are Trump’s views crazy?

Now, it may well be Trump is less well-versed and informed about the details of other nations and crises around the world, but he sees the Big Picture more sanely than others. Stop messing other nations and creating crises that set off tons of refugees and migrants. The fact that Obama and Hillary could destroy so much of the world and then pose as ‘saviors’ goes to show how sick our media really are. It’d be like Hitler invading Poland and then offering aid to Polish rerfugees to show how wonderful he is. It’d be like Stalin displacing entire populations and then offering them food and cloting to show that he is a real humanitarian.

On the NATO and Russian issue, Trump is totally sane. NATO had a necessary purpose during the Cold War. But it has no use today. The idea of EU needing US protection is a joke. The idea of Russian invading the Baltic states, let alone Poland and Hungary and the rest, is complete fantasy, 1000x crazier than anything cooked up by Joe McCarthy. Russia didn’t even take Georgia when Suckassvillain attacked South Ossetia. It is about time Europeans took care of themselves. It is about time US got along with Russia.

The only purpose of NATO since the end of the Cold War has been to fight Wars for Israel. It is just an imperialist organization. It not only keeps EU as a vassal of the US, but it makes EU go along with every cockamamie plot cooked up by Jewish globalists.

So, how is Trump going to drive us ‘over the cliff’ by asking Europeans to build up their own militaries and by making peaceful overtures to Russia?

On every major issue, Trump is calling for sanity and common sense. He is no foreign policy expert, but he knows well enough that the Washington Pros have been in the neo-imperialist globalist game that is doing harm to US and the world.

Trump IS nutty about Iran, but he’s just playing to the Zionist crowd. In the US, you must find some way to appeal to Jewish Power(and now even holy homo power).

To sum up, Trump had to play ‘crazy’ to break through the fog of PC and globo-elite consensus that are suffocating this country. It was this brashness that allowed him to say and get away with what the cuckservatives like Jeb and others were afraid to do.

That said, Trump’s style is not his substance. His substance in terms of his policy proposals are common-sensical, realist, and even moral. A nation must defend its borders and have rule of law. We can’t just let illegals storm in and then reward them with amnesty, thereby encouraging more future invaders. I mean how did Reagan’s amnesty turn out? It only encouraged more for a second round.

Also, the Cold War is long over. There is NO REASON for the US to be enemies of Russia. That is just Jewish supremacist vanity at work. And we need to stop messing up Middle East and Muslim nations. If anything, Trump is really the pro-Muslim candidate. He may not be crazy about Muslims coming over here, but at least he doesn’t want to blow them over there.

He said some brash things about fighting ISIS, but it’s just red meat for the audience. Rambo talk. But the substance of his policy calls for minding our own business and making peace and making deals than invoking ‘human rights’ and other BS to mess up entire nations at the behest of Globalists
.
Also, Trump is right to denounce Wall Street, though being a NY’er, I doubt he will or could do much about the banks. Banks, being ‘too big too fail’, can sink the economy if any politician tries to get tough with them. Also, both banks and media are owned by Jews. So, if any president decided to get tough with Wall Street, WS will set off market tremors and cause panic. And then the Jewish-controlled media will serve Wall Street by blaming the president for causing the crisis. So, WS essentially holds a gun to the head of the president.

Professors are expected to dress, talk, and act in a certain way.

Whatever the ideology, studies, specialty, department, or function, there is the Professional and Professorial style. It is supposed to be objective, intellectual, cerebral, restrained, and cautious. Of course, there are differences. Some professors have pony tails. Some dress loudly. Some talk shit in class. But there is an predominant Academic Culture. It is pervasive and becomes a way of thinking, acting, feeling, and being.

To an academe, Trump’s style is all wrong. Professors are not supposed to talk or even move like him. Serious students are not supposed to see him as model. And with PC dictating college values, no one is supposed to say the sort of things Trump has said. Serious academic types(professors and students) hate the party fraternities, and Trump acts like one-man Animal House. He rubs academes the wrong way like Rodney Dangerfield did in BACK TO SCHOOL. 

Academes are devoted to studying the world, and they become specialists in certain fields. But because they function in a social bubble, they don’t rub up against reality like Trump and the Dangerfield character do in the REAL WORLD. It’s the difference between a boxer who’s been in the ring and the locker room AND the scholar of sports who knows statistics and such but don’t know what it’s like to have a punch in the face and blood spurt out of the nose. 

In the academic world, proper form matters at all times. Professors must dress properly and talk properly. And there is rules of classroom conduct. This is all very good and necessary. But such a culture creates a false impression that the world should be like the school environment, where theory and reality are complementary.

Paradoxically however, it is the very culture of proper form that had led to the takeover of certain colleges by the lunatic fringe of PC-triggered madness. We see how this happens in David Mamet’s OLEANNA. In the film, a Liberal College professor is into being very professional and academic. He is part of that culture, and he lives it, inhales it, exhales it. He probably thinks and acts academic even at home, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in STRAW DOGS.

So, when a crazed feminist wench in OLEANNA makes a crazy accusation against the professor, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s so committed to maintaining the proper form that he hasn’t the guts to get angry and call her a vile, disgusting, stupid, ludicrous, lying, hag bitch. Why, such an emotional response would mean loss of form and dignity. It would seem barbaric in the eyes of academic culture, just like Barry Lyndon’s loss of temper in front of the aristocratic folks.

Professorial dignity is closely tied to proper form. So, even when up against great pressure, one’s respect depends on maintaining that form. Lose it, and you’re seen as a boor. So, rather than risking one’s loss of form and respect, many academics just have let the crazies run rampant on the campus. (This is why British society is so defenseless against PC lunacy. When one see nuttiness, one must show anger and take rough action. But such boorish behavior is beneath the dignity of the preening British elites. So, they just choose to make gentle assurances and accommodate the craziness by offering it a place in the power structure. That way, the British elites get to be ‘good whites’ and the radicals direct their ire at the ‘bad whites’ who aren’t so accommodating and offering of bribes. Social Justice Cult is just an extortion racket. The rich can keep their style of ‘dignity’ by buying off the radicals to attack something else. In the UK, the ‘bad whites’ are the ‘working class racists’ who voted for Brexit.)

Indeed, when the professor finally loses it in OLEANNA and strikes the no-good bitch, he knows he’s lost everything, just like Barry Lyndon. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you must live by the culture of form, you can’t fight back against lunatics who insult and impugn you. You must take the smears and taunts. But if you do lose it and fight back, it will only confirm the taunts and smears that you’re an oppressive brute and barbarian. (It’s like radicals often provoked cops into violent reaction and then cried foul.)

The elite worlds of academia, military, and government all rely on the culture of form, propriety, and dignity. Necessarily so. But such emphasis on form has a constricting effect on the thoughts and emotions of people in it.

This is why academic types usually don’t make great artists. To be an artist, you have to be free, wild, imaginative, and passionate. To be an intellectual, one’s emotions have to be checked and controlled, and the mind has to be focused on critical assessment. If Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Sam Peckinpah, and Elia Kazan had taken an academic course in life, they never would have been artists. On the other hand, intellectuals, scholars, and critics must be more cerebral and objective than passionate and subjective.

Bacevich worked in military, government, and academia. He went from a culture of form to culture of form to culture of form. He is about control, order, system, form, and dryness. His culture is different from the culture that made Trump, the wheeler-dealer who had to be shifty, ‘artful’, bluffy, clever, crafty, bullying, and etc.

Trump is a player in the very game of money and power. Also, Trump had to be more savvy to rise up in his field. If one works in military, government, and academia, there are clearer rules as to what you must do to rise up the ranks. In business, so much depends on the ‘art of the deal’, charisma, handshakes, and instinct.

Trump’s world is about the play. You have to play to win.
Bacevich’s is about the program. You follow the program to rise up.
It’s the difference between Belfort and the Fed in Wolf of Wall Street.

Now, I’m not saying Trump is a douche like Belfort(though he could be, what with the Trump Chump University scandal) but merely making a point about the difference of personalities in different endeavors.

Anyway, people like Bacevich feel somewhat superior to the rest of us. They feel superior to us unschooled dummies because we don’t have Ph.D’s and other credentials. We don’t read books and don’t have access to special information in departments and archives. Also, people like Bacevich are wealthier than we are.

But people like Bacevich also feel superior to rich folks like Trump. They see people like Trump as having hustled and swindled their way to great wealth. Or even if super-rich folks didn’t cheat to rake in the dough, all they ever cared about is money, money, money. It’s like Bill Gates never got much respect as anyone other than a businessman. Even Steve Jobs said Gates got no culture, no taste. He only knows geekery and money and business.

People like Bacevich see themselves as Human Ideals. They are wealthy(or wealthy enough) and deserving of privilege. But they are not all about money. They are about knowledge and truth. They devoted their lives to studying the world and coming up with useful theories. They play the role of scholars and critics of power. And they have mastered a proper form of manners and behavior that epitomize dignity, seriousness, maturity, and integrity.

From their angle, there is nothing lower than someone like roguish Trump. Even if Trump agreed with them 100%, his talk-radio-like populist style would rub them the wrong way. It’d be like Rush Limbaugh coming on NPR. The only kind of conservative that such folks can maybe tolerate is Bill Buckley or some tweedy type with proper manners. Trump is too much like the Wild One in the Brando movie. Or maybe like the Lee Marvin character. It’s like how Jimmy Stewart reacts to the tough guys in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. It’s like how Gregory Peck the Eastern elitist reacts to the boors of Texas in THE BIG COUNTRY. Reagan was more bearable because he was more like John Wayne than Lee Marvin.

But, with all due respect, let us knock people like Bacevich down a few pegs.

For one thing, despite the culture of form, dignity, and propriety — and all those POMPOUS ceremonies with tassels, real and honorary degrees, highfalutin titles in Latin, graduation speeches, and etc — , much of the academia is corrupt, crazy, repressive, dishonest, radical, careerist, opportunistic, privileged, lazy, demented, partisan, nasty, vindictive, backstabbing, tribal, fiendish, scummy, and no good.

Bacevich says Trump is pompous. No, he’s boorish. Pompous would be something like all those graduation speeches where honorary guests make bloated statements about hope and etc. Pompous would be the 2008 election that presented Obama as The One, the messiah, the black jesus, ‘like god’(as one reporter said), the second coming of MLK and Camelot, and etc. Pompous would be all those ‘esteemed’ professors talking like they are philosopher kings. Pompous would be all those armchair revolutionaries with millions of dollars in their bank accounts but yammering about Marx and Social Justice. Consider Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates.

So many academics are actually cowards who don’t want to face the real world. So, they hide in the bubble, in the ivory tower. But they tell themselves that they are committed to studying the real world and critiquing what is wrong with it. But most professors have no idea of human nature since they have no contact with real people. They live with theories of reality. Many of them have no sense of reality beyond what they got from PC from cradle. Many are children of privilege pretending to be fighting privilege. But of course, they need privilege to study and oppose privilege. Just look at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. They are filled with kids of privilege and elitism, but they pose as ‘progressives’ and talk of equality and social justice.

Bacevich assumes that since Trump’s style is wild, his substance must be crazy. But in fact, the substance of Trump’s proposals are some of the most sane we’ve heard in many yrs. Indeed, they may sound crazy precisely because they sound TOO SANE. Fix our borders. No more crazy wars. Favor national interests of American people than globalist interests of elites. Stop with the new cold war business.

In contrast, so many academics have the form of integrity and dignity. They seem and sound so smart, balanced, thoughtful, critical, skeptical, and retrospective.

But, we must judge people by what they do, not what they say.

Weren’t the financial instruments that nearly brought down US finance in 2008 the creation of Ivy League-trained academics, economists, and investors?

Aren’t the people in the US intelligence, US military, and US state department mostly the graduates of top elite universities? Yet, the so-called Best and Brightest gave us stuff like Iraq War, War on Terror that actually aids terrorists, the disaster in Libya and Syria?

Bacevich speaks of Trump’s bad manners. Well, Colin Powell was one of the best-mannered men in government. Yet, he sat before the UN council and lied through his teeth that Hussein had nuclear weapons program using aluminum beer cans. John Yoo, the well-mannered professor from Berkeley argued that US could torture prisoners. The Best and Brightest planned for Iraq War that led to Abu Grahib, endless escalation, the looting of Iraq museum, civil war that no one anticipated(or maybe they did and wanted it), and etc.

And who were the advisers to the privatization in Russia in the 90s? It wasn’t Trump and such boors. No, it was the philosopher kings, the professors of the best schools. Larry Summers. Jeffrey Sachs. It was the Harvard Team. (To Sach’s credit, he must be feeling some remorse since he is opposed to Hillary’s nutty call for New Cold War against Russia.) And what happened to Russia as a result? Didn’t Larry Summers also push deregulation of Wall Street? And Yale-educated Clinton signed on it.

People say Obama is so smart and knowledgeable. But what has he accomplished in office? He didn’t know jack shit about Wall Street and just gave the banks everything they asked for. He got Obamacare only by lying to the public, and we don’t know how it will turn out. Almost surely badly. His foreign policy has been a total mess. Middle East and North Africa got worse than during Bush yrs when only Afghanistan and Iraq were burning. Now it also Libya, Yemen, Syria. And it may well spread to Turkey. And then, there is the massive ‘refugee’ crisis and terror attacks spreading all over.

Crime is up due to Ferguson effect. Whatever economic recovery has been largely due to printing money and borrowing, with debt now at over 20 trillion. Illegal immigration is totally out of control, worse than in Bush yrs. Obama’s SC appointees are PC commissars, not defenders of any Rule of Law based on Constitution. A ‘wise Latina’ and some Jewish lesbian who, in her stint at Harvard, filled the Law school with her tribesmen while bitching about ‘white privilege’.

Obama certainly perfected the academic style, and he became the darling of white/Jewish Libs who want to appear pro-black but had problems finding Negroes of real caliber. But as smart as Obama is, what has he done academically or professionally prior to becoming a politician? Zilch. He got by on style. He didn’t even become a professor at University of Chicago. He just hung around and made connections with the right kind of people who found him useful as ‘our Negro’. Jews went so far as to call him the ‘first Jewish president’. So, even though Obama did absolutely nothing as instructor and politician, he got to be president because he had the right kind of ‘style’ and knew the right kind of people.

So, before Bacevich gets all high and mighty about the academic world and its nice manners of civility and dignity, he should ask himself how so much of the academic style and prestige have been used for some of the most insane, irresponsible, reckless, stupid, vile, hideous, nasty, ugly, sick, and demented policies one can think of.

And look at foreign policy. You’d think academics would be honest and tough critics of power and politics. But we’ve seen so many academics whore themselves out to Republican and Democrat warmongers. There were plenty of academics advising the Bush administration in the reckless Iraq War. And there were plenty of highfalutin academics supporting and making excuses for Obama-Hillary’s war in Libya and subversion in Syria and Ukraine. Victoria Nuland is related to a Yale academic.

So much for honest critics of power. They act so professorial and dignified, but so many are partisan hacks or tribal opportunists(mostly of the Zionist kind). Jewish money and media pressure are so pervasive that Norman Finkelstein was robbed of a job at Depaul(and other universities) because the odious Alan Dershowitz made phone calls. And Steven Salaita couldn’t get a gig at U of I because of impassioned remarks during the Gaza massacre.

And do law schools really teach the law? Just how does law school produce idiots like Sonia Sotomayor the ‘wise Latina’? Just how does the academia justify something so bogus as ‘hate speech’ laws? I mean who decides what is hate and not hate? The powers that be, right? And how can any serious person say stuff like “I believe in free speech but not hate speech”? And how is it that the best law schools produce people who reinterpret and redefine marriage as between a man and man and between woman and woman? How is that the leading academic theories of justice advised NY to fine businesses for $250,000 if they confuse a ‘he’ with ‘she’? What are they teaching at Harvard Law School when they say a guy with a woman’s wig should use a woman’s washroom? What is this, farce?

And if academic life is about truth, dignity, and sanity, how is it that some of the craziest ideas in recent yrs came out of the academia? And if the academia has such high standards, how did it allow so many moronic or crazy lunatics to become tenured professors? How did colleges come up with stuff like ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘micro-aggressions’ and other hysteria? And how do universities react to stuff like false KKK sighting at Oberlin? They treat them as if they’re real. And when the Milo the homo poofter was interrupted and threatened at Depaul, where was the principle of freedom of speech? If anything, the Depaul administration sided with the thugs. How did Emma Sulkowicz get away with such rot. Even after she was exposed as a nut and fraud, NOW gave her the courage award. But this is a nation where Bruce Jenner won both the courage award and woman of the year award. And we live in a world where Obama got the Nobel prize for nothing. Well, how much peace did Obama spread around the world since then?

And look at the media. A massive lie machine. Now, so many journos are products of top journalism schools. So, how come so many are more committed to PC, the Narrative, and BS than to the truth? How come black thugs are called ‘teens’ and ‘youths’? Why did NBC’s Diane Sawyer say bombed out Gaza is Israel. How come Helen Thomas lost her job for saying European Zionists should return to Europe? How come NYT and rest of media cheer-lead the Iraq War? Why have they let Obama get away with so much spying, lack of transparency, and war-mongering? Why did they go easy on Wall Street that fleeced us blind in 2009 with bailouts? How did the whole media fall for the UVA rape hoax? If not for a handful of bloggers who exposed the fraud, the whole world would still be believing the story and the crazy bitch who wrote it probably would have won the Pulitzer.

And as I’ve said before, the academia has been either too cowardly or too complicit in the rise of PC craziness and hysteria in the campuses. The cowards didn’t speak out against the rise of PC lunacy and witch-hunt mentality. The complicit were the very professors — mostly in sociology, humanities, political science, and law — who filled the minds of millennial morons with paranoid lunacy about Evil White Males, Patriarchy, KKK, ‘homophobia’, and etc. If academic environment is so sane and rational, how come some of the most vile, aggressive, hateful, and bilious movements have emerged from the universities?

And what has come of college debates? Now, winners are usually shucking and jiving black wanna-be rappers. This is what US colleges allow, and the likes of Andrew Bacevich never lodged a complaint. Yet, he is bitching about Trump’s ill manners and craziness?

When Bacevich saw PC lunacy on his campus, did he ever speak out? Or did he just keep his head low and walk away because he didn’t want to lose his proper form as a dignified academic? If we want craziness, we don’t need Trump. We only need to look at colleges newspaper to see what the latest hysteria, craze, fad, or nutjobbery is.

But, the crazy stuff in colleges is cloaked with the conceit of intellectualism, rationalism, critical theory, or some such. So, it gets a pass while Trump is said to be crazy, extreme, and nutty because he said… let’s fix our borders(how mad!!!), end the stupid new cold war with Russia(how loony!!!), let’s stop messing up Muslim nations(how ludicrous!!!), let’s be careful about which Muslims we allow into America(how frightening!!!), let’s think about the American worker and not just the globalist urban class(how supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!!!).

What is truly crazy about America is that a NY real estate hustler and blowhard makes more common sense, moral sense, and good sense than all the experts of media, academia, military, and government combined. But in a world where the law of the land says 2 + 2 = 5, someone who insists it is 2 + 2 = 4 must be mad.

Trump is not the emperor who has no clothes. He is one who notices that the Empire has no clothes. Also, unlike the ridiculous expectations of Pompous Hope and Change of Obama that couldn’t be fulfilled(not least because they lacked specificity), what Trump is calling for can be achieved.

They are realistic about the real world. We can fix our borders if we really want to. We can lower immigration to give US workers time to breathe and catch up. We can end the stupid new cold war with Russia. It’s easy cuz Russia doesn’t want it. We can let EU carry a bigger burden with NATO. We need to stop seeing EU as a vassal state of US. We can stop the wars in the Muslim world and let Muslims and Arabs pick up their own pieces. It was US intervention and its collusion with allies that led to hell in Libya and Syria. Dealing with the big banks is a much tougher call.

Despite Trumps overstatements and boorish style, what he is calling for is doable, sensible, and right.
But then, we have too many people feeding on crisis caused by globalist interventions. They don’t want a fix to the problems. They thrive on problems. And that is why they see Trump as a threat.

The remarkable thing about Trump is his style is sometimes over-the-top and ‘crazy’, but he is, at the core, totally sane. He’s not like the man in NETWORK who really loses it and screams ‘I’m mad as hell’.

The way of Trump is to be ‘Sane as Hell’. In a world gone nuts as the new normal, he is wildly… sane.

deep state slice wants no part of granny goodness?

lewrockwell |  On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks — the courageous international organization dedicated to governmental transparency — exposed hundreds of internal emails circulated among senior staff of the Democratic National Committee during the past 18 months.

At a time when Democratic Party officials were publicly professing neutrality during the party’s presidential primaries, the DNC’s internal emails showed a pattern of distinct bias toward the candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a marked prejudice toward the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Some of the emails were raw in their tone, and some could fairly be characterized as failing to respect Sanders’ Jewish heritage.

The revelation caused a public uproar during the weekend preceding the opening of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia last week, and it caused the DNC to ask its own chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. When she declined to do so, President Barack Obama personally intervened and implored her to leave. She submitted to the president’s wishes, gave up her public role as chair of the convention and eventually resigned as chair of the DNC late last week.

In order to take everyone’s eyes off this intrusive and uncomfortable bouncing ball, the leadership of the DNC, in conjunction with officials of the Clinton campaign, blamed the release of the DNC emails on hackers employed by Russian intelligence agents. Many in the media picked up this juicy story and repeated it all last week.

Clinton promptly named Wasserman Schultz as a campaign consultant and complained that the Russians are trying to influence the presidential election. She did not complain about the unfairness manifested in the emails, complete with their religious prejudice; she only complained about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s helping Donald Trump.

deep state kept mum on who hacked the DNC

BI |  When asked about how the administration could be expected to respond to reports that Russia played a role in hacking into DNC computers, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday that "we are not quite ready yet to make a call on attribution."

He noted that he was "taken aback a bit" by the "hyperventilation" over Russia's alleged involvement in the hack.

Clapper was likely referring to the concern expressed in recent days among analysts and high-level officials that the hack was Russia's way of making the Democratic Party look bad in order to garner support for Donald Trump. The Republican presidential nominee has expressed views that largely align with Moscow's vision of the international order.

Earlier this week, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden claimed on Twitter that the US intelligence community — specifically, the NSA — has the technical ability to draw a straight line from the hack on the DNC back to Russia.

He then argued that it should use those capabilities if assertions about the Kremlin's attempts to meddle in the domestic politics of a foreign adversary are to be taken seriously.

Global Beta Test: Multi-Level Nottingham Antics You Could Not Make Up

theintercept |  After a watchdog blog repeatedly linked him and other local officials to  corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.

Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.

The officer, Wayne Anderson, works for the police department of Houma, the county seat of Terrebone Parish — and according to New Orleans’ WWL-TV, formerly worked as a Terrebone Sheriff’s deputy.

Anderson was placed on paid leave about an hour and a half after the raid on his house, Jerri Smitko, one of his attorneys, told The Intercept. She said that he has not yet been officially notified about why.

Smitko said Anderson denies that he is the author of ExposeDat.

But free speech advocates say the blogger — whoever he or she is — is protected by the First Amendment.

“The law is very clear that somebody in their private capacity, on private time, on their own equipment, has a First Amendment right to post about things of public concern,” Marjorie Esman, director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told The Intercept.

Larpenter told WWL: “If you’re gonna lie about me and make it under a fictitious name, I’m gonna come after you.”

Global Beta Test: Anyone Believe There Are No "Stay Behind" Units In The U.S.of A?

paulcraigroberts |  If you have been wondering what all the terror events in France and Germany are about, here is the answer: http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/08/01/french-mps-visit-crimea-suggesting-early-end-sanctions.html

 

Washington has raised the cost of being a member of its Empire too high. Vassals such as France and Germany are beginning to exercise independent policies toward Russia. Observing the cracks in its Empire, Washington has decided to bind its vassals to Washington with terror. Most likely what we are witnessing in the French and German attacks is Operation Gladio.

Washington’s policy toward Russia, which has been imposed by Washington on all of Europe, benefits no one but the handful of American ideologues known as neoconservatives. 

Neoconservatives are crazed psychopaths willing to destroy Earth in behalf of American hegemony.

A delegation of members of the French National Assembly and Senate went to Crimea to participate in Russian Navy Day on July 28. Thierry Mariani, the head of the French delegation, addressed the parliament in Crimea and said that there are no reasons for France to continue to support Washington’s illegal sanctions on Russia. 

As the Strategic Culture Foundation reports, this “is part of a trend taking place in Europe.”

“On June 8, the French Senate voted overwhelmingly to urge the government to gradually reduce economic sanctions on Russia amid growing opposition to the punitive measures across Europe. The French National Assembly voted for lifting the sanctions in late April.”

See: https://www.rt.com/news/345898-french-senate-lifting-sanctions/ 

 

Politicians in Italy, Belgium, and Cyprus are taking the same tack. Politicians in Greece and Hungary have also questioned the sanctions.

So does Donald Trump, and that is why the servile American press is trying to drive him into unacceptability and out of the race.

Global Beta Test: Everyday People Will Gleefully Murder Their Neighbors If Asked By The State

libraryofsocialscience |  Well over 200 million people were killed in the twentieth century as a result of political violence generated by nations. Episodes of mass slaughter are given names like war, genocide, democide, social annihilation and murder by government. It seems as though the world has been living through an epidemic, or malignant disease.

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski states that the 20th century was dominated by the “politics of organized insanity.” Yet nowhere does one find a systematic concept of psychopathology to characterize the monumentally destructive, often bizarre events of political history. 

In the privacy of a movie theater—witnessing the carnage, absurdity and futility of battle—people often think to themselves, “War is insane.” But what happens when people leave the theater? Where are studies of the “war disorder”?

Freud in 1930 proposed a "pathology of cultural communities.” Chapter I of Norman O. Brown’s classic Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) is entitled “The Disease Called Man” and Chapter II, “Neurosis and History.” Neurosis, Brown says, is not an occasional aberration and not just in other people. Rather, neurosis is an “essential consequence of civilization or culture” and therefore is “in us, and in us all the time.”

Roger Griffin, an authority on Fascism, summarizes his conclusions about Nazi destructiveness on his website: “Since so many millions were involved in Nazism and the Holocaust, this can’t be explained in terms of madness or pathology: Something more basic had to be involved.” Why the a priori assumption that just because millions of people are involved, a social movement cannot be characterized as a form of madness or pathology?

In this paper, I discuss the concept of collective psychopathology. I begin by focusing on the case-study of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, specifically the behavior of Hitler and Germany during the final years of the Second World War. I will show how Hitler acted to bring about the destruction of Germany. What occurred may be understood as a form of psychopathology enacted upon the stage of society. 

Hitler fought in the First World War, in which two million German men were killed and millions more maimed. In spite of the immense suffering that he and his comrades endured, Hitler refused to renounce the idea of warfare. Rather, he glorified the death of the German soldier in battle.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that in 1914 his young volunteer regiment had received its baptism of fire. With “Fatherland love in our heart and songs on our lips,” Hitler wrote, they had gone into battle “as to a dance.” The most precious blood, he said, “sacrificed itself joyfully.”

Upon assuming power as Chancellor in 1933, Hitler immediately began fantasizing about the Second World War—which would necessitate the death of millions more German men. In one of a series of conversations with Herman Rauschning in the mid-30s, he stated that he would be prepared for the “blood sacrifice of another German generation;” that he would not hesitate to take the deaths of 2 or 3 million German soldiers on his conscience “fully aware of the heaviness of sacrifice.”

In another conversation with Rauschning, Hitler said, “We all know what world war means. We must shake off sentimentality and be hard.” He declared that when he took Germany to war, he would not hesitate because of the “10 million men I shall be sending to their deaths.” In planning for war, Hitler was preparing for the slaughter of German soldiers.

I am going to cite during the course of this paper an article written by psychiatrist Stuart Twemlow and psychologist George Hough published in the journal Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Looking at group dynamics from a clinical perspective, the authors develop the concept of a “psychotic fantasy of masochistic group death” and show how a leader can be both the “victim and perpetrator of a large group’s masochistic unconscious wishes and yearnings for death and martyrdom.”

gubmint instigated terra plots becoming more ambitious...,

publicintegrity |  The clandestine group’s goal was clear: Obtain the building blocks of a so-called radioactive “dirty bomb” – capable of poisoning a major city for a year or more – by openly purchasing the raw ingredients from authorized sellers inside the United States.

It should have been hard. The purchase of lethal radioactive materials – even modestly dangerous ones – requires a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a measure meant to keep them away from terrorists. Applicants must demonstrate they have a legitimate need and understand the NRC’s safety standards, and pass an on-site inspection of their equipment and storage.

But this secret group of fewer than 10 people – formed in April 2014 in North Dakota, Texas, and Michigan – discovered that getting a license and then ordering enough materials to make a “dirty bomb” was strikingly simple in one of their three tries. Sellers were preparing shipments that together were enough to poison a city center when the operation was shut down.

The team’s members could have been anyone – a terrorist outfit, emissaries of a rival government, domestic extremists. In fact, they were undercover bureaucrats with the investigative arm of Congress. And they’d pulled off the same stunt nine years before. Their fresh success has set off new alarms among some lawmakers and officials in Washington about risks that terrorists inside the United States could undertake a “dirty bomb” attack.

Here’s how they did it: 

Government agents 'directly involved' in most high-profile US terror plots

top people want us very concerned about terrorism, and not other, more serious issues...,

theantimedia |  One astounding aspect of the report is that the lucrative war-profiteering business involves nations the world would not usually regard as overly-interested in war. The countries contributing to the rising terror threat, as identified by the report, are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Romania, among others.

This report adds to the already glaring problem of European countries making billions of dollars off the death and destruction of Middle Eastern civilian life. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found the United Kingdom was second only to the United States in arms sales, making up 10.4 percent of the total $401 billion worth of arms sold around the world for the 2014 period.

Although these figures refer directly to companies selling arms, the fact remains that European governments do nothing to deter this. In fact, former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron insists the U.K. has “one of the strictest regimes anywhere in the world for sales of defence equipment but we do believe that countries have a right to self-defence.”

Shamefully, the United Kingdom’s billion dollar arms sales have been fueling the conflict in Yemen — thepoorest and most disadvantaged country in the Arab region — by arming the aggressive Saudi Arabian regime.Saudi Arabia’s ongoing intervention in Yemen merely benefits al-Qaeda.

Arms sales from Britain to human rights abusers are only increasing. The idea that European governments want to prevent terrorist attacks on the European mainland is ludicrous given the fact European governments continue to directly arm terrorist groups and brutal regimes that export jihadist philosophies.

theory of mind and exploitation of ignorance...,

theatlantic |  You’re holding a surprise party for a friend. The door opens, the lights flick on, everyone leaps out... and your friend stands there silent and unmoved. Now,you’re the one who’s surprised. You assumed she had no idea, and based on that, you made a (wrong) prediction about how she would react. You were counting on her ignorance. This ability to understand that someone else might be missing certain information about the world comes so naturally to us that describing it feels mundane and trite.

And yet, according to two psychologists, it’s a skill that only humans have. “We think monkeys can’t do that,” says Alia Martin from Victoria University of Wellington.

This claim is the latest volley in a long debate about how our fellow primates understand each other. Of particular interest is the question: Do they have a “theory of mind”—an understanding that others have their own mental states, their own beliefs and desires, their own ways of viewing the world?

Yes they do, say Martin and Laurie Santos from Yale University. But it’s different to ours in one crucial respect. The duo argue that other primates “have no concept of information that’s untrue or different [from] what they know.” That means, one, that they can’t conceive of states of the world that are decoupled from their current reality. And so, they can't imagine other individuals thinking about the world in a different way. They can think about the minds of others, but only when those minds have the same contents as theirs.

Put it this way: If a chimp sees other chimps staring at an apple on a ledge, it understands that they’re aware of the apple and might reach across to eat it—a basic theory of mind. But it can’t imagine what would happen if the apple was on the floor, or if the apple was a banana, or if its peers mistook the apple for something else.

“We might be the only species that can think about things that aren’t facts we have about the world, about other possible worlds, about states in the past or future, about counterfactuals,” says Santos. “We can simulate a whole fictional world. And if you’re a species that can get outside your own head, you can apply that to other people.” A chimp won't wonder if it'll be hungry tomorrow. It only cares if it's hungry now. An orangutan isn't going to write a novel, because this is the only reality that it knows.

lazy brains, subjective truth and propaganda...,

monbiot |  It’s not that the media failed to mention what the two platforms said about humanity’s existential crisis. But the coverage was, for the most part, relegated to footnotes, while the evanescent trivia of the conventions led the bulletins and filled the front pages. There are many levels of bias in the media, but the most important is the bias against relevance.

In Britain, the media largely failed to hold David Cameron to account for his extravagant green promises and shocking record. Theresa May has made some terrible appointments, but the new climate change minister, Nick Hurd, is an interesting choice, as he seems to understand the subject. The basic problem, however, is that the political costs of failure are so low.

To pretend that newspapers and television channels are neutral arbiters of such matters is to ignore their place at the corrupt heart of the establishment. At the US conventions, to give one small example, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and Politico were paid by the American Petroleum Institute to host discussions, which provided a platform for climate science deniers. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.

Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational corporations? And if they cannot properly inform us about the power in which they are embedded, how can they properly inform us about anything?

If humanity fails to prevent climate breakdown, the industry that bears the greatest responsibility is not transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All them can behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic collapse, only with a social licence to operate. The problem begins with the industry that, wittingly or otherwise, grants them this licence: the one for which I work.

mr. miracle vs. the nastiest proponent of ruthless democratic militarism

japantimes |  Against the wishes of her New York Democratic constituents, Hillary Clinton voted with Senate Republicans to invade Iraq. (It was a pivotal vote. Without Democratic support, George W. Bush’s request for this war of aggression would have failed.)

Humayun Khan, 27, was an army captain who got killed during that invasion.

Eight years later, the dead soldier’s parents appeared at the 2016 Democratic National Convention — not to protest, but in order to endorse one of the politicians responsible for his death: Hillary Clinton.

Even more strangely, Clinton’s opponent Donald Trump is the one who is in political trouble — not because Trump sent Khan to war, but because Trump committed a relatively minor slight, especially compared to the numerous outrageous utterances to his name. Trump didn’t denigrate the dead Humayun Khan. Nor did he directly insult his parents. Lamely trying to score a feminist point concerning radical Islam, Trump insinuated that Mr. Khan didn’t allow Mrs. Khan to address the crowd because as a Muslim, he doesn’t respect women.

Let us stipulate that no one should impugn the courage of the war dead. (Not that anyone did here.) Let us further concede that Trump is a remarkably tactless individual. Those things said, the Khan controversy is yet another spectacular example of the media distracting us with a relatively minor point in order to make a much bigger issue go away.

A week ago corporate media gatekeepers managed to transform the Democratic National Committee internal emails released by WikiLeaks from what it really was — scandalous proof that Bernie Sanders and his supporters were right when they said the Democratic leadership was biased and had rigged the primaries against them, and that the system is corrupt — into a trivial side issue over who might be responsible for hacking the DNC computers. Who cares if it was Russia? It’s the content that matters, not that it was ever seriously discussed.

Now here we go again.

Clinton’s vote for an illegal war of choice that was sold with lies, was a major contributing factor to the death of Capt. Khan, thousands of his comrades, and over a million Iraqis. Iraq should be a major issue in this campaign — against her.

love edo-era honor culture, but not the shogun's ruthless corporate policy oversight...,

japantimes |  The populist political tendencies among major powers is impeding the appropriate control of market activities, resulting in the creation of excess liquidity. That is making the world economy more speculative and uncertain, while turning the economic policies of the major powers more inward-looking.

Under these circumstances, globalism stands at a crossroads. Globalism is an international regime that was attained with the fall of the Berlin Wall as a turning point, beyond the waves of nationalism that dominated the world from the 19th to the 20th century and the East-West ideological divide in the second half of the last century.

It was widely hoped that the world would maintain peace through cooperation among the major powers while respecting democracy, the rule of law and human rights, promoting economic growth through market mechanism, free trade and liberalized corporate activities, and enhancing human welfare through protection of the environment, improvement in living conditions, propagation of medical care, elimination of poverty and spread of education. Globalism is the ideal of the world.

The survival of Japan, which relies on other countries for resources, food and markets, and depends on collective security for its defense, cannot be ensured without globalism. It’s now time for Japan to make efforts to fortify the foundation of globalism by explaining to the world its significance and presenting a concrete vision.