Workers of the World,
No matter what the machines tell us tomorrow, we have our work to do, going into the huge societal transformation from an economy modeled on "unlimited" resources and growth, to some kind of reality that we have to co-create.
The machines, our life-support system of vast factory farms and refrigerated trucks, with local grocery shelves being restocked day and night, city water, electricity and internet, cannot sustain us the rest of our lives. We see the breakdown around the edges of the global empire, particularly in some of the early homes of civilization, like Mesopotamia, Greece, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.
Wherever the turmoil of restructuring has not happened, or is not happening, it must soon happen.
I see ridiculous costs and waste in medicine, at least a factor of 3 over what resources should be allocated, and most of it has happened in my career.
This has been driven by centralized funding and centralized mandates. Washington DC examines my every keystroke and mouse-click for compliance. The load of electronic compliance, which I do to be able to provide care for poor people (something of a miracle) takes me as long or longer than I spend with my patients, something which is incomprehensible to everybody who doesn't do it. (I used to neatly print my notes in a chart while meeting with patients, and I still do that on scrap paper to keep organized.)
It's like that in every aspect of hierarchically organized complexity. The many layers and pervasiveness of complexity are necessary to maintain a vast system at national and global levels, but they make the actual function of the system terribly inefficient and misguided. All the tasks to be done need to be done locally, by humans who are intimately engaged in the subtleties and nuances, each and every day. What we get is a big hammer instead.
(I voted Green 14 mornings ago, myself.)
Whatever you vote, it's main attribute is what you go through personally in the process. It is mainly to cement your allegiance to the corrupted system, which sees us as livestock to be managed for profit.
That's not how we came to be who we are over the last couple-hundred-thousand years. We worked well together in smallish groups of family, clan and community. We managed our local ecosystems pretty well, or we suffered the consequences. Australians have been there a long time, managing things well. Some of that keeps coming to light, and it keeps implying longer eons of human community effort in farming and ecosystem management. The goalposts get moved, and probably should get moved more than they do, but it's awkward, once science makes a declaration of fact. We really don't know where our species originated, the one branch which still survives. It's murky. It might have been Australia. It was a lot of ice and heat and boats and land bridges ago, and older clues keep messing up our certainties, when we discover them.
Indigenous Australians are the most ancient human civilization, a deeply successful story.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/21/indigenous-australians-most-ancient-civilisation-on-earth-dna-study-confirms
A major earthquake has revealed an ancient Australian city, hundreds of kilometers inland, in the desert, with a big cedar ship. (Rewrite history some more?)
The various artefacts gathered from the site suggest that the city flourished thanks to some form of control over various gold mining operations in Southern Australia. The precious metal was purified and transformed by the hundreds of goldsmiths of the city before being traded for various other goods through an extensive network reaching as far as New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and even China and India.
Professor Reese believes that the city could have been abandoned after some climatic changes in the 9th Century brought a dramatic decrease in the level of rainfall, making the city unsustainable.
50,000 years of continuous habitation of Australia by native Australians has led to vast genetic diversity there, more diversity than anywhere else. There is more genetic difference between north Australian and south Australian peoples, than between Siberians and Native Americans, for instance. This pushed the big-wave-out-of-Africa to 72,000 years ago. (Not stated here, is that it strains that hypothesis, as a result.) This article has illustrative maps.
"They [...] developed steepling thought-structures – intellectual edifices so comprehensive that every creature and plant had its place within it. They traveled light, but they were walking atlases, and walking encyclopedias of natural history. [...] Detailed observations of nature were elevated into drama by the development of multiple and multi-level narratives: narratives which made the intricate relationships between these observed phenomena memorable.These dramatic narratives identified the recurrent and therefore the timeless and the significant within the fleeting and the idiosyncratic. They were also very human, charged with moral significance but with pathos, and with humour, too – after all, the Dreamtime creatures were not austere divinities, but fallible beings who happened to make the world and everything in it while going about their creaturely business. Traditional Aboriginal culture effortlessly fuses areas of understanding which Europeans 'naturally' keep separate: ecology, cosmology, theology, social morality, art, comedy, tragedy – the observed and the richly imagined fused into a seamless whole."[34]
Eleni got me started on the track of our ancient humanity with the Daily Bell link below, advocating the genetic analysis hypothesis that humans originated in Australia, rather than Africa. I don't find academicians embracing that hypothesis much at all. It's presented here, and might get reopened soon. I'm sure not qualified to comment.
“This proves that our prayers are really strong from the Oceti Sakowin camp,” Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network told me. “Our elders told us to focus on praying for the federal agencies and the US government and North Dakota to hear what we were doing and saying: we have to protect the sacredness of the water.”
“What we’re doing now in the camp is responding to the question: How are we going to live through the winter season here. We’re asking our elders, and looking at our oral traditions that teach us how our ancestors survived the harsh winters of the prairie lands.”
Segregated below is the choose-who-flogs-you pre-election news. The global empire is breaking, and whichever (anonymity-preferred) oligarchs hold the most power will rule the first stages of the breakdown, no matter our votes.
America's Ruling Elite has Failed, and Deserves to be Fired (but how?) Charles Hugh Smith
"Can US Elections Really be Stolen?" (well, same as always...)
Latest Wikileaks email dump reveals continuous collusion between Democratic party elites and CNN to manage narratives among Americans. ("Propaganda" is such a negative word.)
"Nothing new here on Clinton" says FBI Director, Comey, after a thorough review of all those emails on Weinre's laptop, and making no mention of the file marked "Life Insurance". Whew! sigh-of-relief... Right?
FBI Clinton-clearance is a (modest) boost to stock markets.
They say the FBI agent who leaked the Clinton emails has killed himself, his wife, and burned their house down upon their bodies. (Arkancide?)
MIT Associate Professor, Cesar Hidalgo works with tools to analyze large sets of electronic data. A tool he has been working on turned out to be very good for analyzing the large email dumps we have seen in this election cycle. He's a green-card holder, a non-voter, who markedly prefers Clinton to Trump, himself. He presented his useful tool at an unacceptable time, and has had a painful week as a result. His personal conclusion from the Podesta email analysis is that politicians have to spend all their time and talent devising the right use of words, and other tools of perception-management. The system is way too big and complex. Greek Democracy cannot scale up. We need to be working in groups where our biological abilities enable us to mesh effectively, the size of groups we evolved with. (Dunbar's Number = 148 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number )
"The allocation of private capital is as inefficient as it was in the Great Depression". This is attributed to weak demand, which is global, and structural and not going away. Lots of fancy words say Reset-is-Inevitable. Great-Depression/WW2 was the last reset.
Poverty returns to the elderly. It's inevitable. Clinton's plans for Social Security are not a secret. Work longer if you can. Our Social Security checks will shrink gradually, and sometimes suddenly for as long as we may live. (Trump won't likely be much different in our brave new world.)
A More Dangerous World is Coming after the Elections"
"80% of the population of the USA do not trust and do not appreciate either of the two candidates."
"Bear in mind that we have been living internationally, especially since the supposed end of the Cold War, in a historic era of deception and virtual realities. And it could not be otherwise. The infinitesimal minorities of power, money and knowledge ruling our world cannot announce their program and the future they are preparing for us."
"In the USA we are following a presidential campaign which is merely the distorted reflection, the tip of the iceberg, of huge battles going on behind the scenes, among the main centres of Imperial Power such as Wall Street, the CIA, the army, the lobbies, etc."
"The USA was built as an empire during the 20th century. Only a very deep social, economic and cultural transformation could change the character and the role of this country."
300,000 NATO ground troops in Europe have just been placed on High Alert, due to danger of Russian invasion before tomorrow's US elections. (Glad we caught them in time!)
Jill Stein MD, Green Party candidate for President summarizes the game most people are watching on TV: "Fascist vs. Warmonger"
Looking at Context
