Ready to Snap,
Editorial Preface:
I’m a sensitive, entitled, 60 year old white male vegetable-gardening fixie-rider who grew up on Marine Corps bases during the Vietnam war and is no stranger to fist-fighting, or meditations on universal compassion. My patients range from PCP-using black male schizophrenic gang members with 3 little teardrop (murder) tattoos, to white women with PTSD from guys like that.
There is a disturbance in the force. Everybody is feeling it. Everybody feels tense. Hell, drivers are almost hitting me several times on one commute, due to an urgency, coupled with a blindness. People are feeling the stress of the impact coming and looking at their smart-phone porn, shouting “LA-LA-La-lalalalalaaaa!”
The last time the Zeitgeist awoke was 1967, and it was the left that jumped the social consciousness, Walter Cronkite, Jim Morrison and The Grateful Dead. BAM! Oil peaked in the US after that, but not the world. The zeitgeist slept, and was carried on as a fake ghost, like Marx is carried by Marxists, Keynes by Keynesians, and Jesus by Christian hierarchies.
Things being cyclic, the Zeitgeist is at the extreme of a Yang swing, and about to turn hard Yin, so it is appropriate that the political right, out of left-field, become filled with the Holy Spirit and start emanating the light of universal loving-oneness out of their entire beings.
I’ve read about this kind of esoteric stuff, but at 9 years old in 1967, I was like the little lame boy who couldn’t follow the pied piper into the mountain.
We’ve all heard for years that we, as a species, need to evolve from materialism to spiritualism, or die, and we’ve all examined things pretty closely and figured we’re doomed.
The Way of the Tao is Reversal.
There is a disturbance in the force. Everybody is feeling it. Everybody feels tense. Hell, drivers are almost hitting me several times on one commute, due to an urgency, coupled with a blindness. People are feeling the stress of the impact coming and looking at their smart-phone porn, shouting “LA-LA-La-lalalalalaaaa!”
The last time the Zeitgeist awoke was 1967, and it was the left that jumped the social consciousness, Walter Cronkite, Jim Morrison and The Grateful Dead. BAM! Oil peaked in the US after that, but not the world. The zeitgeist slept, and was carried on as a fake ghost, like Marx is carried by Marxists, Keynes by Keynesians, and Jesus by Christian hierarchies.
Things being cyclic, the Zeitgeist is at the extreme of a Yang swing, and about to turn hard Yin, so it is appropriate that the political right, out of left-field, become filled with the Holy Spirit and start emanating the light of universal loving-oneness out of their entire beings.
I’ve read about this kind of esoteric stuff, but at 9 years old in 1967, I was like the little lame boy who couldn’t follow the pied piper into the mountain.
We’ve all heard for years that we, as a species, need to evolve from materialism to spiritualism, or die, and we’ve all examined things pretty closely and figured we’re doomed.
The Way of the Tao is Reversal.
Caitlin Johnstone points out that everybody is feeling "something different" in recent weeks. Caitlin points out that Nancy Pelosi, commenting on Steny Hoyer recording, says, "yeah, duh, of course we tell people to stop running for office if we've decided against them, everybody does". In 1967, the left got the tap-on-the-shoulder from Universal Consciousness, then eventually forgot... Now it's the right's turn.
"If humanity is going to take a last-ditch, evolve-or-die leap into the unknown and unprecedented, now would surely be the time to do it. If a bunch of right-wingers get it into their heads that humanity is undergoing a spiritual transformation, that certainty could be all it takes to tip us into the shift we all know we need to make anyway."
"The End of Our Empire Approaches", Chris Martenson
We now live in a world of, by and for bankers, and other financial elites. Where once it was your royal lineage, or direct connection to the sun god Ra that assured your place at the top, today it's your proximity to the temples of money... As we progress from here, the disparity between the haves and have-nots is only going to intensify, with debt (and our debt-based money system) being used as the primary weapon for controlling an increasingly dispossessed public.
Michael Hudson interview here represents over 24 years of intensive and brilliant research into the ubiquitous practice of ancient Sumer, Egypt, Babylon Greece, and Jewish tribes. Debt forgiveness is essential to avoid societal collapse. Jesus said so, but was later misinterpreted. The Roman Church made sure he stayed misinterpreted. the Orthodox church protected his meaning as long as Byzantium stood.
"What I realized is that when Luke 4 reports the first speech of Jesus, when he goes to the temple and gives a speech, his first sermon, he unrolls the Scroll of Isaiah, and said he has come to essentially proclaim the Jubilee year …. The word he used, and that Isaiah used, the deror, was this Babylonian, Near Eastern long tradition that was common throughout the whole Near East... So what Jesus was referring to was a very tangible fight. And in his time, this was the fight throughout Greece, it was the fight throughout the whole ancient world, the fight to promote debt cancellation. And the Dead Sea Scrolls show this. For instance, Melchizedek 12 is a huge Dead Sea Midrash of all of the Biblical citations of the jubilee year, tying them together. And we now understand that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not a sectarian Essene product, but they were basically the library of the Temple of Jerusalem, that was sent and put in these caves for safe-keeping during the civil wars... So what Jesus was referring to was a very widespread argument in what was really a class war between creditors and debtors that swept throughout the whole period, including Rome itself. And this has not been clear to most people who think they’re taking a literal version of the Bible. And it’s very funny that the people who call themselves fundamentalist Christians will have dioramas of dinosaurs and human beings all sharing the same landscape, literally. But what they ignore is, if you take the Bible literally, it’s the fight in almost all of the early books of the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, all about the fight over indebtedness and debt cancellation."
Kim Jung Un and Moon Jae-in did a little back and forth across the DMZ, Moon hopping to the North side was not in the original script, which makes an important point (I think...)
BBC has two and a half minutes of the beautiful and deeply symbolic pageantry of the day of Korean reconciliation. (It's worth more than words in this case.)
Moon of Alabama looks at the hopes for the Korean reconciliation, and also the impediments to consummation, and concludes that it won't actually happen. For one thing, each government claims ALL of Korea...
Do you see how easy that part is? The trick is for the two Koreas to declare themselves "Korea" in principle very quickly, and that all of the details for merging back together will take awhile, and will include the elimination of all foreign troops on the peninsula concurrent with the handing over of nuclear warheads to some reliable third party (Clinton Foundation, maybe?)
Postal Banking has been a big success for working people everywhere that it has been tried. It's not parasitic. (Next cue Ellen Brown explaining the Bank of North Dakota.)
But Kirsten Gillibrand’s new plan to establish a public option for banking is an exception to the rule: By requiring the post office to provide basic financial services, Gillibrand’s bill would significantly mitigate the economic exploitation of America’s most vulnerable people, punish predatory lenders — and increase federal revenue — all without requiring policy wonks to navigate uncharted territory, or even break a sweat.
The Federal Job Guarantee is not just better than Universal Basic Income, it’s the only good option. The UBI is a Trojan Horse for the reduction and elimination of wages and safety net programs for the powerless. UBI is sinister.
Yes, Solar and Wind Really Do Increase Electricity Prices, and For Inherently Physical Reasons (The prices of storage of electricity from wind and sun, or keeping a gas power plant on standby are part. The long and numerous power transmission lines to so many distant deserts, not just a big plant near the city, are another.)
Hawaii takes that Indiana Jones step off the ledge... Hawaii is in a unique situation for electrical generation in the US. It is all generated at high cost, largely from diesel fuel, on Islands that can't really share a grid. Individuals have a moderate cost incentive to make their own, modest off grid systems, without air conditioning or electric clothes dryers. The current pricing structure for electrical utilities is one of cost-plus-a-profit. That's going away, to be replaced by... something. Stay tuned.
Leaping Lizard