Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Waiting For It

Stalwarts,

There has been a lot of fearful name calling in political circles in recent years.
"FASCIST!"
""COMMUNIST!"
There are others, but those hit the buttons pretty well.
What are the components that make up a political movement? Let's call them "Axes" for this exercise, please.
 There's Left and Right, which are mostly feelings and patterns of social engagement. 
Lefties tend to be more spontaneous, take superficial risks more, engage socially in a "lefty" kind of way. 
Morality may be perceived as more situational than absolute.
Rightists tend to be more concerned with consequences, and more formal. 
Morality is not a casual thing to rightists, but a serious concern for society, and when it is abandoned, some very bad things happen, especially to children. That's certainly true.
I adjust my presentations to people based on whether I'm with lefties or rightists. It's all valid and useful. 
I seek to avoid offense. It's possible. It's more productive. We all have to work together.

 There is Liberal, or Free, vs Illiberal, or Totalitarian.
I'm kind of bent-outta'-shape about how many ways the term "liberal" is used and misused recently, so I'd prefer "free" and "totalitarian" as an axis. Fascism and Soviet Communism, as Americans know them were both totalitarian, illiberal.
I might make the argument that Teddy Roosevelt was a right liberal populaist and Franklin Roosevelt was a left liberal populist. Some might well disagree, but I just want to show that such things have existed.

  The next axis, and Americans have a hard time seeing it as independent, is Private vs Social dominant values.
It's never one or the other, and we are at the extreme of a swing to private-ownership, including means of production, money creation, and credit-taking. If you own the media, you get the credit for whatever good happens, but not the blame for bad stuff. We admire groups of pioneers, settlers, who raised barns together, and cleared fields to grow crops together. We encourage children to cooperate. Most of what we have accomplished as a species has come from our stellar ability to cooperate. 
Right now the wealth disparity is as high in the US as it has ever been in our history, maybe a tad higher, and it's absolutely high by the standards of world history.

 Let me argue at this point, that the only way for society to go is to more socialism/populism. The elite owner class absolutely hates this fact, but they also see it. they just want as little safety net action as possible, and they want assurances that they will still get the first drink of all the fresh money that is created, before they pass it through their systems to the rest of us. I don't think it's possible for wealth to remain this concentrated without breaking the social order, and I think it is actually broken, and denial won't be sustainable, even for the elites. I don't know what will burst that bubble for them, but it will be most unpleasant for you and me, too.

 What about Left and Right? America seems stuck at an impasse between left and right dominant values. It was Left in the "Roaring 20s", and swung to Right during the "Great Depression". 
It swung to the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and it seems sort of that way now, but it doesn't feel real. I think "Limousine Left" is not "left".  I seem to know more and more people who were moral-left in 1960s and 1970s, anti-war, and are now moral-conservative, anti-war.
The pro-war-left is now a thing that bombs babies to protect them. Weird. 
Clinton did that in Bosnia. It worked for team Clinton-Bush.

 It could/should be that moral-right is the next swing. I'm ready for some real morality in politics. It has been such a looong time... 

 We could also get totalitarian-right, which is what a lot of people are afraid of. We call that Fascism, and lack of freedom of speech is a big part of totalitarian-subjugation. Hard totalitarianism is not open to debate. Obey or be branded for prison, torture and death. This is what the American military and covert mercenary armies have been doing throughout the world since 9/11. 
The public was against this immorality in Vietnam, but has been neutered since 9/11. 
No draft. No TV news showing horrors of war, not lately.

 I look around and see a subtle slide into immoral-left already underway. There is no longer full support for freedom of speech. Standing up for freedom of speech is "hate speech", now, and gets professors fired without recourse. This seems like the early days of the Cultural-Revolution we are seeing. 
People were really hungry, starving and desperate in China's Cultural Revolution. We are not... Yet. 

 We should best pick a healthy path before things get really bad. 
Left and Right are matters of style, and will decide themselves. 
I suspect a swing to the Right will happen as history tightens up, and social leftist identity-politics has played some pretty impractical cards recently.

 Individual is at an extreme swing, and absolutely must give way to Social. We have tremendous changes to make, to recreate a living, working economy, as energy supplies delete, the globe heats up, and the consequences and failures of a system based on infinite growth crash all around us and on our heads. 
Let's just help each other and be seen doing it. Grow vegetables together. That's our basic successful social function. 
It's nice. It feels good, once you get in the groove. 

 The threat to us all, including our selfish, parasitic, sociopathic elite owners (no offense intended) is totalitarian SUBJUGATION
 The efforts to extend the current private-ownership-of-the-world paradigm can only be totalitarian-subjugation efforts, because the system has gotten too inefficient and bureaucratic for anything but threats of pin and violence to extend it. Threats of pain and violence are comparatively cheap. They force the systemic costs onto the people complying with the threats. That arrangement is inherently unstable. Working people are already cracking from the stress.
 The last cards of make-believe are being played right now, with the Fed and high-frequency trading manipulating equity markets and bond markets to higher and higher nominal valuations. All investors are getting rich as the real economy simultaneously evaporates. This is the final, manic, fear-of-missing-out phase of financial bubbleism.
It's all police state when the happy-lies go POOF!
Unless we chose FREEDOM.
 The last Moral Candidate for POTUS, that I saw was US Army Reserve Major and Congresswoman , Tulsi Gabbard. 
I would categorize Congresswoman Gabbard as Freedom-loving, Right, Populist/Socialist. You might disagree.
Bernie Sanders has always been left, "mostly-Socialist" and Freedom-propounding, though he plays-well-with-capitalists, Bernie did accidentally become a "millionaire" through the wonders of inflation and old-age. 
Bernie Sanders would do, but it's a bit late in the life-cycle for him. Times like this call out for youthful vigor.
  I see the need for a national leader with an independent moral compass as the highest priority. 
The current political system has not let any candidate advance without being controllable by the current elite oligarchs, except for this orange haired Tasmanian Devil accident that happened 4 years ago. 
Weird fluke. It was supposed to be Clinton or Bush again...
  The "You're-Fired" guy is trying to look moral, but he accidentally held the Bible upside down in that photo-op the Army cleared the crowd for last month. "Grab-em-by-the-....."  He sued the porn-queen-for-snitching-after-he-paid-her-off.
Donald Trump is none of the categories above. He's Left-right, Billionaire-populist, too-erratic-to-be-a-hypocrite.

Trump And Biden Should Debate While Attached To A Lie Detector
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rabo-trump-and-biden-should-debate-while-attached-lie-detector  

Charles Hugh Smith: Inequality Is America's Monster Id
  The only possible result of this system is that the wealth of the nation is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few with access to the Fed's nearly free money, and so the unearned income (interest, dividends, rents, etc.) all flow to them--not because they created value or goods and services, but because they were closest to the Fed's money spigot.
  The political game is to obscure this source of inequality and distract the unprivileged many with bread and circuses: an extra $600 tossed to the restive crowd of unemployed, $1,200 to the fitful audience, and eventually, some monthly amount of Universal Basic Income (UBI) calibrated to be just enough to get by but not enough to ever own any productive assets.
  As I often point out, the real goal of UBI is to ensure debtors can make their credit card / student loan / auto loan payments, as these monthly payments by the masses are the interest income of the super-wealthy with the privileged position by the Fed's money spigot.
  The privileged super-wealthy also own the media, of course, and so they're delighted to virtue-signal their support of purely symbolic actions such as toppling statues and occupying worthless chunks of cities. None of these symbolic actions threaten their privileged position by the Fed's money spigot, and even better, they distract and divide the exploited populace.
  For if the people never catch on to the source of inequality, that ignorance is all the protection the privileged super-wealthy need.
  The privileged super-wealthy are feeling very confident in their control of the financial system, the source of inequality. They own the wealth, the income streams, the media, Big Tech, and the machinery of political power.
  What they don't understand is inequality is America's Monster Id: the more you try to suppress it, the more powerful it becomes. The Monster Id of inequality is already rampaging through the social and political orders, and eventually it will burn through the Fed's free-money vault with a white-hot intensity that will surprise the privileged super-wealthy and their armies of self-serving toadies, lackeys, apparatchiks and technocrat flunkies.

  Several people sent me these stories about Portland. Is this ham-handed incompetence, or a test of how Americans will react to police-state actions against citizens. Our oligarchic owners watched how people reacted indecisively to Antifa taking BLM protests as a chance to destroy things and beat people up. The oligarchics can use either a left or right totalitarian angle if Americans will just show a clear preference and take sides against each other. 
  With so much doom to scroll through, it’s hard to know when to stop and pay attention, but one story that jumped out at me – and, I hope, at many others – is the account of how demonstrators in Portland, Oregon, protesting racism and police brutality earlier in July, were tear-gassed, beaten, seized off the street by unidentified, masked federal agents in camouflage and fatigues, hustled into unmarked vans and detained for hours. The agents were reported to work with the US Marshals Special Operations Group and Bortac, the Border Patrol Tactical Unit.
   Government-funded thugs, assaulting citizens, still conjure up repellent images of Hitler’s Brownshirts stomping their fellow Germans, and the street kidnapping of civilians has been the hallmark of authoritarian dictatorships. That was how you wound up in one of Stalin’s labor gulags, in the helicopter from which the Argentinian junta dropped its critics into the sea, or in a CIA black site.

Ray and Marjorie sent me these videos/stories about US military veterans being gassed and beat up when they ask the federal-thugs about their oaths to uphold the constitution. (Maybe this branch doesn' take that oath?)

This has the look of an overt threat to federal judges, a really high level threat signal. Dead hit man is not talking.
Alleged Salas Family Assailant Previously Worked for US/Israeli Intelligence-Linked Firm
The alleged gunmen who killed the son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to the Epstein-Deutsche Bank case, worked for a company of corporate spies and mercenaries with ties to intelligence and also to Deutsche Bank.

Europe has been preparing for a global gold standard since the 1970s
Europe appears to be ready to drop the $US global reserve currency and switch to $10.000/oz gold. It looks like this has always been Europe's preference, since Nixon had to default on the gold-window after DeGaulle sent the destroyer over to take delivery of France's gold-purchased-for-dollars. This is long and very well researched.

The numbers on the graph are all more than 7 weeks old. The current COVID seroprevalence numbers are secret.
As scientists get a better grasp on the coronavirus and how it has spread across the US, a new survey from the CDC purports to show that the true number of coronavirus cases is between 2x and 13x the official count, varying from state to state.
 Data released by the CDC suggest that large numbers of asymptomatic people may have kept the virus spreading in their communities, directly contradicting the findings of another study cited by the WHO last month.
Following a similar finding by scientists in Sweden, the researchers working with the CDC found that even the hardest-hit area in the study - ie NYC, where 1 in 4 people have been exposed according to antibody surveillance studies - isn't anywhere near achieve herd immunity, which scientists believe will require 60% infection rate.
If these seroprevalence rates are accurate, then Missouri is suffering from an outbreak that is 13x its reported rate.


​In No Hurry​

2 comments:

  1. "The threat to us all, including our selfish, parasitic, sociopathic elite owners (no offense intended) is totalitarian SUBJUGATION"

    Seems that any time we try to make major fundamental chan ges we first have to tear everything up followed by a period of total subjugation to local war lords and such. How total and how subject varies but it seems to be the pattern. Only mjor civilization I know of that didn't follow this primary model is the ancient civilization that formed on the Peruvian coastline long ago. No evidence of fortification, etc., as essential components of civilization. Their cities were designed around mutual benefits of intra-cooperation among citizens and inter-cooperation between cities.

    There was still plenty of subjugation but without the need of a Great Enemy, defense against which serves as primary justificatin for almost all civilizations. INteresting, too, that Andean civilization in general was based on tensile strength pulling technology (rope, nets, etc.) rather than compressive pushing technology (concrete, battering rams, beasts of burden being pushed to pull).

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    1. Yeah, I agree that the Incas had a good thing going. When you were starving, they would give you potatoes up front, but you had to become part of the Inca Empire thenceforth. That seemed to work pretty well until the Spaniards arrived with different technologies.

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