Friends,
I have been considering this overnight and pre-dawn, so as to give my best explanation.
I studied intelligence and national security for a year , my third and final senior year at UT Austin in 1981-1982.
The teacher had worked at the US embassy in Moscow for some years. Interesting guy. Wouldn't spill beans.
Most signals intelligence analyzed is open-source. In those days TV, newspapers, newsletters and books.
Radio feeds from behind enemy lines in a war zone, and hacking the NSA are different; unavailable to me.
Knowing the interests and intentions of "adversaries" or "competitors" is important.
Everything we see was paid for by somebody, for some reason, usually self interest, but not always.
I try to find and post information in the interests of other humans and our living ecosystem (yes, that does serve me, too).
I'm at some disadvantage,
The disadvantages shift with the tides of struggle between powerful parties and factions.
I see the western financial empire as being overdue for a "correction", a correction that will recognize that exponential growth of economy is over, due to planetary limits of all sorts, and that energy inputs into economy will rapidly decrease, then keep decreasing as we go forward into less and less oil, coal and natural gas.
This is not a new story. One counter to it is that it hasn't happened yet.
It is clearly inevitable that fossil fuel use will fall off.
That won't happen for altruistic reasons of saving the planet.
The capitalist economic system cannot act altruistically.
Digging and burning and killing faster wins every time.
I do not have a ready replacement at hand. It has not been worked out at scale, only in much smaller groups of humans.
I took a political self analysis test online a few years ago; I'm not sure how to find it again. A friend sent it. I came out as "Left Libertarian" on left-right, libertarian-authoritarian axes.
That's not a thing these days, is it?
It HAS been a thing in history, and almost certainly still is a thing in a few small rural communities in the world.
The early Christians seem to have practiced left libertarianism, each giving what was possible and each receiving necessities of life. It does not scale up, because the next level of organization up from the proles takes a skim, and every level up from there also skims, and it is the prerogative of the upper levels to skim, which translates to "ownership", which is antithetical to the purpose of the communal organizing system.
One comment I have seen, and I forget who said it, is that the commenter favored socialism/communism in the family, Democracy in the community, Republican government at the state level and Libertarianism at the national level.
The flows of wealth and power work towards the absolute power of elites in the system, the "owners" increasing, until the system breaks from oppression, and there is revolution by the people who feel that the time has come to live free or die.
The owners have a new tool, powered by electricity, connected to humans by laptops and smartphones, and with intelligence of its own. This tool allows the owners to program the system to show each human a certain picture, no matter where the human looks within the vast system. That picture becomes the model of reality for that human.
This tool has extended the current financial and economic regime by a lot, at least since 2008, right?
The initial promise of the internet was that you could find anything you wanted to know, pretty quickly, for free, or the usual monthly subscription fee. A lot of content got uploaded all over the world, and there it was. In 2000 I had a eureka moment when I was able to find the phone number for the Yokosuka , Japan US Naval Hospital, and dial it directly from Austin Texas, when my Dad got admitted there. That had never been possible before. It is mundane now.
Not too long after that my friend Joe's hi-fi hobbyist magazine, Sound Practices went bust. "Nobody wants to pay for content any more; I can't sell subscriptions", quoth Joe. Everybody who knew his mag missed it.
You can find the issues online now, but no new content can be created.
Amazon is booming.Google and Facebook rule.
The internet appeared libertarian at first, but the hierarchy has tamed that impulse so that all information that used to travel laterally now goes to the very top, to be amplified, edited or deleted by artificial intelligence, before it comes back down to peer-to-peer-level. It appears to be a lateral share, but it is edited by AI based on algorithms which serve the top tier owners.
The editing and shaping is invisible, so we assume things are still as they were in the early 2000s.
Everywhere we look we see variations on the same story, so that must be pretty close to what's really happening, right?
That is how I come to be posting news about vote rigging in the 2020 election from various "right wing" sites, some with the look of low production value. All of the money at the top says that there is "nothing to see in this story; Biden won".
To me this looks like 9/11. No story at all, except some rumors at the fringes, the laws of physics suspended for a day, reporting a building fallen while it stood outside the window (WTC-7).
Still, even in the earlier days of creating artificial reality it mostly worked.
By now, everybody has heard some version of the story that the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives in a controlled demolition, and that the attack on the Pentagon, which killed only the people investigating the missing trillions of dollars from the DoD budget was by a cruise missile, not a passenger plane.
But the overarching narrative to justify the "Global War on Terror" had been established and the war had been prosecuted without much political resistance at home. Brown people in countries with easy to pump oil are mostly "terrorists". Their economies have to be destroyed so they won't use up the oil that free enterprise needs to promote democracy.
What I assume about the elite power struggle now underway in the US, the seat of empire (more or less) is that at least two major factions are vying for control of the narrative and the political-economic levers of control as the system careens into collapse.
There are "losses to assign". It's important to all participants how those losses get assigned from the almost-empty cookie jar.
I'm a participant. I know the cookie jar has mostly IOUs in it, and that the youth and economy of 2030 will not be able to supply to me the retirement which my generation has supplied to my parents. Retirement was predicated on something like 7% economic growth every year forever. The lack of growth has long been made up for by cannibalizing savings, and putting more IOUs in the cookie jar as cookies were removed and eaten.
Still, I have a claim on "my" Social Security retirement benefits. I could exercise that option now, and get something today, under the current system, or I can keep working as long as it is possible for me to work.
Jeff Bezos has a lot of claims on global wealth now and going forward. In a reset of political-economy on a global scale, my modest claim competes with the claims of Jeff Bezos.
Jeff directly works the levers of political power. He gets to be at the table which assigns losses in the world. I am not at that table. While I still work, I am a small part of a productive economic system.
When I retire, I become a "useless eater" to Jeff and the others deciders at the table.
I will deplete systemic wealth in my retirement, which will leave less for Jeff's competing claims on real wealth.
It is in the interest of Jeff Bezos to keep his wealth-draw hidden, and point out to younger working people that they are supporting older retirees lavishly, while they, themselves, almost starve, saddled with debt.
I expect Jeff Bezos to be doing exactly what benefits his interests, which is carving out as much of global wealth for himself, for him to control and expand, as possible. I expect him to keep doing this.
I expect Jeff to use the internet to further his interests, and The Washington Post.
I expect Jeff to have AI-driven PR and buy politicians.
I'm a peaceful guy.
What does Jeff expect me to do to further my interests, in competition with his interests, when I am old and can no longer keep a job?
I'm not much of a threat, but Jeff does need the economy to keep going, and recognizing his claims on wealth.
Without the economy, Jeff has no wealth.
Losses still need to be assigned in such a way that there is broad participation in political-economy, or the goose will be dead, and will lay no golden eggs at all.
Those who currently control the workings of western global economy will continue to simulate reality for us through AI, and to limit our unfiltered lateral communications with each other, when AI sees that we are joining together in our own ("populist") interests, against their elite interests.
The flaw in their control strategy is their own compulsive drive to always get more at the expense of every other participant in the system. Their inability to relinquish any personal wealth in the interest of systemic health kills the system, same as last time.
FDR dealt with this. Many of his class (Bushes, Harrimans, Dulles family) saw him as a class traitor. They tried twice to kill him before he was inaugurated. Then there was the military coup that Smedly Butler outed when they asked him to lead it.
Fascism was a right-totalitarian movement of the day and communism was a left totalitarian movement in competition.
Labor unions started as more communitarian, but became more authoritarian as they grew larger and less local.
Is Trump a class-traitor in the same way FDR was?
I can't say whether he is or isn't yet, but I don't see any other candidates auditioning for that role, either.
Bernie Sanders is still trying to play a supporting role, but he has twice accepted DNC vote-rigging without a whimper.
Bernie would have twice been the popular Democratic Party candidate for POTUS, and would likely have won.
Why is Donald Trump still drawing breath? It's pretty easy for the powerful to kill somebody these days, and even make it look like somebody else did the deed.
Does anybody who has studied the "science" believe that Lee Oswald killed JFK with a "magic bullet"?
President Donald must also have powerful backers, with the ability to protect him. That's a lot of power. It has to include some faction within the military industrial (spook) complex. That faction appears to be nationalist, not globalist. We get a lot of propaganda against "nationalism" and "populism", generally calling them "fascism" and "racism".
The "left" was the driving moral force against the Vietnam war, but it lost that energy, lost it somewhere in the 1980s, I think.
Now we have this weird pro-war left that doesn't want to see the burned babies, but will sign off on it as long as they don't see it.
As long as the paychecks keep coming, we will all keep complying with the directives in our inboxes.
We are not prepared at all for anything else. We have no backup plan for economic collapse.
We are well trained to comply.
How will we survive if compliance no longer feeds us?
That's a hypothetical question I've asked myself a lot in recent years.
Maybe you can help.
I'm just trying to get information for us to use, and the most important stuff is often the hardest to get, because it's not "our" internet.
Left Libertarian Gardener
Well that is just perfect. Thank you. I will spread this around as best I can. But there is an implied "other internet". Where do we look? Short wave radio perhaps?
ReplyDeleteMary in Chilliwack BC
Hi Mary,
DeleteThere's not a day that I don't request spiritual guidance. I know I just don't have enough information to do everything right. My friend Joe, the hi fi mag guy was also a HAM Radio guy, but he moved away. The information passed through HAM Radio was not of high density and quality, like we are used to now.
I don't have a physical communications network option for us.
Sorry...
My book ANGRY LOUD AND CLEAR TRUTH shows who is in power, strategies used, propaganda fed, and actions taken. The conclusion also has a solution to civilizations' every problem- a perfect new blueprint for new civilization that should last eons within the paradise paradigm, and is do-able and simple-something to live, and even die for. It is possible if we can take down the establishment.
ReplyDeleteYou might like this essay, Michael, How Debt Conquered America, by Jada Thacker
Deletehttps://consortiumnews.com/2016/01/08/how-debt-conquered-america/
It gave me a lot of very clear insight into the history of this country, driven by people who lost everything due to borrowing at interest, and what they were driven to.
Hey John, I (and many) have been wrestling with these questions. Is puzzle. Hard to find balance in the swirl of fear, good and bad information, and a general collapse of society. Am working on it, will let you know if I come up with something that might be helpful.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking about my time in Hawi. We would surely have met if we'd been there at the same time. I was bouncing around at that time, living two different places in Maine, on the Big Island, Nova Scotia, Dharamsala, and Chiang Mai. Now, thankfully, settled for seven years on a houseboat in Seattle. The years blur. Counting back carefully I realize that I was living in Hawi (just down the road from "Teachers' Hill") fifteen years ago! Amazing.
I don't remember Chris, although I might by sight. One guy I do remember who might have been there when you were is Jonathan Gaines, a tall pleasant haole who had become an unlikely tai chi master. He died a while back. He was the real thing.
Did you get down to Wood Valley, to the Tibetan temple? That was also the real thing. Tiapala (Debbala), the monk there, was marvelous. I drove down there (about 5 miles from Pahala) and poked around the temple looking for him. He appeared from behind a hedge and walked up to me, holding a pair of pliars. He looked at me for a moment and said, "Relax, O.K.?"
We (me & Eleanor, my partner at the time) stayed a month in the little communal building below the temple. On my 64th birthday, he motioned for me to rise from the little group and sit beside him for the morning chanting. It was one of the honors of my life.
So that's how I know it was fifteen years ago. There are a few poems about that time in the book. I have a photo of Debbala near the easel where I am learning to paint. He helps me keep my feet on the ground.
Keep trucking. Brother john
Thanks "Straightwalking" John. I did get down to visit Wood Valley Temple with my wife and some of the kids befoe we repatriated to Texas. Very nice. I recommend Pahala area to folks on a budget, mentioning the higher theft rate in that area. I did not meet the Tai Chi Johnathan.
DeleteChiang Mai is nice...
John, you are a bright guy asking the right questions. I invite you to join the soilandhealth forum which I moderate. Groups.io/ soilandhealth.I authored The Intelligent Gardener. Hope to see you checking in. Meet 280 other folks of similar mind to your own.
ReplyDeleteThanks Steve,
DeleteI'm out of bandwidth already. Thanks for the offer.
You may find this succession-rotation garden protocol for climate zone 8A helpful
https://www.johndayblog.com/2016/07/liberty-garden-central-texas-climate.html