Reality Based Community

Life in the Empire

Note this started out as comments on an article by Ellen Brown about beneficial uses of credit, but segueyed into discussion (possibly) about mitigating some of the worst aspects of decline, like uncontrolled brutality. The hippie culture was an economic decline, and if left un-harassed probably could have survived, but its all about resources in the end, especially property and human resources:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/PLAYING-THE-BANKING-GAME--by-Ellen...

This was my response:

Again a very nice article. It blends well with an idea I just had and fielded on Facebook for opinions: a loose US confederacy. Many respondents actually think we are headed for a financial meltdown that may decay into Armageddon. So to them a break-up sounded like a way to beat the devil to the punch.

I experienced Armageddon first hand on Sept 11, 2001 and survived, so I am not that concerned. My motivation is my Empathy Model that says that the height of the pyramid is somewhat geometrically proportional to chaos caused by communication inefficiency, over-pay at the top, excessive levels of mid-management, and a lack of emotional communication (as opposed to digital communication) between the top and foundation allowing for a lack of empathy (Moore's Roger and Me).

Lets see... NE SE MW SW Cali NW, that's 6 regions. Instant 600% improvement (except possibly in Texas).

The "beauty part" of this idea is that the South will definitely support it. And would require the US Military to stay intact, again a Southern-friendly idea, and the rest of the red states will follow the South.

Your concern that "today we are in a dangerous deflationary spiral" I still think is unwarranted.

The US is historically the greatest charity nation, and we might actually apply charity at home. I cannot see the prison population rising, as that would be impossible. And 90% of the crime problem is the cocaine (and methadrine) problem.

If the US experiences deflation, things get cheaper, evening out the effects of depression. We would need to outlaw eviction, so that people can maintain their communities, start to provide public transportation because much of our expenses are for transportation, allow for Internet "mesh grids" to allow for free communication, and open all the closed factories.

School districts would have be dismantled allowing a restoration of the community school, eliminating many highly-paid but otherwise psychotic administrators (I have met them). Government could be fired by the bucket-load taking with them all the fantasy rules they create; self-determination would be applied to every community, another important component of the Empathy Model.

Who would lose? Well, the rich of course--but we never needed the anyway, and a lot of other empathic defectives such as plastic surgeons. I estimate that 90% of the human effort is wasted supporting the obsessive desires of this gambling, drinking, lying, whoring class, so in theory we have an allowable 90% wiggle space for deflation.

That would meet the 90% possible savings in energy we can create by taxing the parallel waste that the luxury class creates in their typical industries, such as advertising, and sub-division, shopping mall, and destination recreational development. Maybe even 95% wiggle room. You DO know that the bad debts were for sub-division housing and malls, don't you? (Say "yes")

Well, with a decline in waste like facilitated by allowing the majority of the money (and not capital) to remain in the bank accounts of the working class, who would then invest in sane production strategies, instead of monstrosities such as the previously mentioned and places like Dubai. We already have the instrument: the 401K plan.

And speaking of oil-producing monstrosities... no more terror funding!

Woo hoo, a perfect world, and its not just me, John Wesley proposed this, so it is actually conservative in nature.

He would probably be upset to know that ex-pres George "Trickle Down Theory" Bush is a Methodist, though.

~~John

Views: 112

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Great ideas.

But we've got to end tyranny before we can enter a new age of enlightenment.

It's too late to fix. It needs to be completely destroyed before it can be rebuilt.
BTW, John, you might want to take a gander at Stonefruit's latest blog post.

International legal education for the coming paradigm shift

"The nation-state and corporation are historically contingent forms. Something came before them and something will come after them."

In other words...first, we've got to kill all the lawyers. Who said that, anyways? Oh yeah, Shakespeare.

Damn, I hate lawyers.
Ellen Brown is a JD (legal PhD, fyi in case), and she kinda shows it in a previous email transaction.

I looked up the two first links (at 4am--I did a little panic-ed editing), and actually learned that Adam Smith was socially advanced. He wrote a the Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments about natural sympathies, but he failed to link his ideas with collaborative production, in other words he confused sympathy, a purely selfish construct (Caruso), with empathy, which is public action based on emotional communication, and the basis for technological development, and other beneficial traits (Empathy Model).

Smith is considered to be part of the Age of Enlightenment, which makes me wonder why that age is called by that name.

The Wikipedia is purely capitally-oriented, so beware. "Jimbo" Wales got his money in Chicago in what is admitted by Capital to be the useless form of capital: pit-traded resource exploitation contracts, or commodities. The guilty credit default swaps of our present crisis, bad insurance (mostly by AIG) for bad loans, are traded as commodities. (I wrote tech docs for CDS, not knowing what the acronym means.)

Wikiversity, where I am doing the Empathy Model (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Empathy_Model) is the opposite. The difference is what the Wikipedia (or Jimbo) calls "original research" but is really new information, information that attacks cult misinformation (capital as Roman is the ultimate cult, superstcicio). Forbidden on Wikipedia the policy is used nearly purely as a weapon against critical analysis of capital, and its off-shoot exploitations, such as the myth of Nativism, "proof" that natives are necessarily racists, and that bias against them can be rationalized (convenient huh?).

Wikiversity is a virtual school where research is allowed and protected: instant tenure. It is still embryonic so I am spending time helping assure academic freedom there.
You wrote that Capital is the big American bug-a-boo that everybody respects out of fear. Capital is 50% down now, and still dropping.

Think of this proportion in military terms then, if an army is 50% down it is probably defeated... or planning a scorched Earth policy. Oh I get it now, the capital poison pill of property decay. "If I can't have it, they can't have it" school of immature selfishness.

I really think there is a strong case for the hospitalization of Capital: rubber rooms. That's a lot less bloody than a French revolution!
I can grok this, stonefruit sees things the way I do, but I think he needs to flesh out the "moral self-righteousness" of the topic: governance.

Lack of governance is what is being blamed for the CDS component of the present crash, yet he correctly shows how governance is "the conspiracy" d' jour.

The key component of global governance is global citizenship, a purely Roman definition of citizenship: the corporate, or captial, family. Bureaucracy was a Roman liberal creation to gum-up the capital works to prevent the capital families (think Bush) from swallowing the Roman empire. So when you are harassed with fantasy rules by bureaucrats, think of it historically: they are treating you as a wealthy Roman citizen, or perhaps even a corporate global citizen. This may help you refrain from a violent reaction to being robbed.

In my surfing searching I next found that Action Research had been co-opted by global capital to increase its efficiency in growing the global economy by allowing natives of the lands being exploited to engage in the research necessary to create the legal mechanisms to defraud them of their land.

Action Research was initially invented in MIT to allow the sub-terra to engage in the research necessary to create the therapy used to help sub-terrans boot-strap into normal society, initially prostitutes. That participation happened to be therapy in of itself, allowing the sub-terrans to create the "community of knowledge" which is the emotional and factual layer that gives humans the will to live under such horrendous conditions of obviously planned destruction.

I first leaned the word governace when I was a systems adminsitrator for the trading desks of Barings, which is now part of ING. ING got Barings because of the "Leason Singapore" trade, which was a derivatives contract (technically a commodity) that bet heavily on a rise in Japanese capital. Oops, the Kobe earthquake disaster hit and the contract went south so fast that it threated to hand over all global wealth to the Leason's contract counter-party.

This is how I remember the Leason trade happening as I was standing, jaw-dropped, on Baring's boutiquey trading floor. (ING has since dumped the name Barings.) Oddly this trade has been so forgotten that Google assumes a misspelling, perhaps it was eclipsed by Greenspan's US tech market crash, and then this, the sub-division/mortgage crash.

Back then it could be argued that global capital was a good thing. As the director, a nice guy, pointed out, "we give a million to factory in Southern Chile, and the immediately start producing." There turned out to be so many problems with this scenario, such as the fact that Latin America has a perennial habit of canceling debt, and that foreign investors tend to be as sadistic as colonials, not to mention the trade imbalances that are contributing to the harvest of the cow, our nation, so many problems that I think we can easily blame the entire problem on mental illness.

Stonefruit pretty well calls it psychosis, and psychosis may play a part, but I am certain that the key disease is a void of empathy, specifically dis-functioning emotional communication neurons and neural constructs: Darwin would agree that the problem is a departure from nature and all its emotional support. Capital, as sick as it is, loves a pretty beach, and hates an industrial yard (I like both as a photographer, I like it all!)
Shit, John, I'm 6'3'' and that went right over my head.

"a departure from nature" fer sher. That part, I can dig + understand.
good nuf
I have been at this too long, maybe I need a break

but to make it short, since the mid-90s all the economic problems, including the present one, are blamed on a lack of governance, which means global self-policing by the banks themselves

that should sound a lot like a new world order to you, because there is no local government input anywhere, as with the WTO and World Bank

GoldmanSacs names WTO and World Bank executives, and while I was on Wall Street, was very close to the Federal Reserve, in fact Greenspan warned a GS executive that he was going to assassinate the tech economy with a final and ruinous interest hike, and she instructed GS investors to dump technology. Technology went into its final dive, and Greenspan replied to criticism that "investment is risk." He also blamed "over exhurberance" and oversaw the shipping of technology to Bhopal a year later; just as he organized the Japanese take-over of the American auto industry years before.

So the global banking industry is making the rules and doing the enforcement while opposing the rules. Since they are bigger than any nation, they are without accountability, perhaps until now with the US buying of their stock. But has the US bought GoldmanSacs stock? I don't think so, and anyway, what power to stock holders have anyway, not very much from my experience.

The moral self-righteousness is probably more in flavor than substance. For one thing, global capital is still supported by feminists as jobs have opened up for women in banks in nations where women are still suppressed. In the past decade and a half, clearly a period of globalism, women's average salaries have passed men's, and women far outnumber men in colleges and universities.

Feminism gives us political correctness, the words sh*t and f*ck are long gone from the trading environments, while dishonesty in equity and derivative trading has increased exponentially, leading to the CDS problem.

During a visit to the UN recently, I saw exhibits celebrating Jewish Feminism, but no mention of the Palestinian plight, and I know that Palestine has begged for UN intervention for decades.

If you search on global citizenship you will see examples of how corporations benefit others who are in need, by shipping jobs to their countries. Those in need are not really in need; they are the elite where they live and are as guilty of economic repression as the elite is here.

But the wording of global citizenship defines responsibility in terms of involuntary generosity, and and those who resist are racist. Most of the documents have been written by women, and my experience on Wall Street tells me that these corporate activist women are nearly entirely feminist. Their goals include the betterment of women, but the women they seek to better, already have it pretty good, they are not in control just yet. Banking is their path of choice, as banking defines dominance. These women can display their triumph in terms of fine homes and cars, jewerly: all good things.

Homes: mortgage crisis
Jewels: blood of Africans
Cars: fuel consumption causing global warming

Of course men are involved, but from my experience with them on the "street" they are not really men, not in the sense of "stand-up guys." They will stick you in the back in a nano-second simply for joy: purely cowardly guys.

Whether or not these women can maintain their positions during this crashing economy is doubtful, recession tends to regression. Because there is a desire for economic "sectors to advance" (as we hear it on NPR's market report) and since the central sector is energy, then there is desire to advance regions that repress women, such as Saudi Arabia and Texas.

These women may not survive within the corporations, but their moral self-righteousness will. The new world order will be gentile and correct as it attempts to dominate the much lower and undeserving non-global citizens, who quite foolishly display their own weak self-esteem by not joining the inevitable final levels of exploitation that will raise the Earth's temperature the necessary few degrees to create the scenario that the National Geographic Society shows us on TV.

Obama can instantly stop this by allowing America's people to keep their accounts, and allowing them to invest locally for the security of their own jobs, rather than being forced to give their money who promise to be generous with their money to the rich of other nations.
"the key disease is a void of empathy, specifically dis-functioning emotional communication neurons and neural constructs: Darwin would agree that the problem is a departure from nature and all its emotional support."

I think we agree here. Not sure what a neuron construct is, but seeing as empathy is brain-based, I'll give you that one. ;-)

Note that Adam Smith disagreed that man has a built-in capacity for empathy...

"Smith rejected the idea that Man was capable of forming moral judgements beyond a limited sphere of activity, again centered around his own self-interest: The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man."

I disagree with Smith's point of view. I do think it was in nature's best interest to implant a sense of community within man in order for us humans to form tribes.

But it's not surprising to me that Smith would say that such matters of right vs. wrong should be left up to God, as God has become the great 'rationalization construct' of those who disavow we have an inherent gene that drives us to treat our fellow man with compassion. Paradoxically, I think this is the nature of evil itself--or some would say psychopathy. The ability to rationalize predatory acts based on delusional thinking.

As long as we have have God around to change our diapers, I'm afraid there is little hope for the evolution of the species. Darwin's voice is simply drowned out by the choir.

Da choir that sings on Sunday and carries a rifle on Monday.
God may be evolving. Or the conception at least, because it is difficult to explain compassion without evolution, and most religious people I know are compassion-junkies.

I know that Carl Rogers, the all-loving self-actualizing humanist therapist, was taken in by the Catholics who were really spooked by BF Skinner's pseudo-sadism.

I actually go to church after nearly 50 years of pseudo-atheism. I have been strongly influenced by Buddhism, especially Japan's, because I had to fight my way out of elementary school nearly every day. I leaned Judo, which is basically about getting the idiot attacker in a head lock and cutting off his circulation to get a surrender. Judo in NYC at the time was inspired by a Buddhist sect, that also had the beautiful archery and sword fighting, tempered with flower arranging and the tea ceremony.

The archery master told me to come back when I was 16, and when I did, I found he had died a few days before :(

Atheism came to me because my father's side is Dutch Deformed, and obscenely biased against anything and everything.

But recently when I was studying constructivism, my then g/f dragged me into a tiny back-woods church that instantly recognized as text book constructivism, and very heavy on the compassion. Obviously I find the rituals a little silly, but I have been learning a lot about the way Christianity is supposed to be, and specifically the improvements it made over its predecessor, Judaism.

I have found for the most part you can substitute "single phenomena" for God and get the scientific method. There is of course no apologizing for Christian activity such as the Spanish Inquisition, but I really doubt that that is Christianity, and I think that that sect is keeping the Roman empire's superstitio alive, with all its violence. The Anglicans broke away from the Roman Church, but worked in parallel with it. I like to use the Irish as an example: the English forced them into the arms of the Romans, from one slavery force to another. Darwin was racist against the Irish, so I am a self-appointed Darwin apologist, and wear a fighting Irish baseball cap.

Other Christian improvements were the reduction of 700-800 Jewish laws into two Christian laws: love everyone as yourself, and love God. But the big improvement was forgiveness, and that I believe was the genius of Christ, why he is the single best known human.

This goes to the nature of hate; real haters know no better and cannot help but hurting people, and they know it. So they get paranoid that pay back may be around the corner, and the paranoia from that can raise their level of hate exponentially, and that is when things get really dangerous. Hate is caused by a lack of empathy, and empathy disorders are caused by broken empathic neurons, specifically mirror and spindle cells. This means that they are emotionally isolated, like being on cocaine. Coke users, you may or may not know are narcissists, and so were Hitler and Saddam Hussein according to experts.

So mental isolation, paranoia, and narcissism go together. Let me give you another example: Nixon. We know Nixon so well we know we can predict evil events based on paranoia, so in Christ's view the first step to diffusing paranoia is to forgive the actions caused by it. As amazingly unlikely as that sounds as a strategy, I believe it is correct, and this is what JC preached over everything else. Forgive those who trespass against you, and love your enemy as yourself.

And that's a lot, and that is why I think so many people "accept" Christ, because he developed an unlikely but completely workable strategy, and then accept the rest just to get along.

And also interesting is the beginning of Science that I see in the purest forms of Christianity, the focus on a single creation, and the unity of humanity w/o bias. Theologians are now promoting "all those doing God's work" approach, which includes doing good things in the scope of prayer to end bias and hate in the world. The rest can be heaved.

I keep going to church because this old church, way out in the woods between a beaver swamp and equally old farm buildings, is a pure community specifically as a human community was meant to be according to the constructivists. There is lots of hugging and singing, and the singing is always a little off-key. I immediately felt that I would be biased to reject this community for a few small things they that embarrass me, when everything they do is right on. So I call myself a "Method-o-buddhist."

My support for John Wesley's economics is purely coincidental. I developed a plan while I was a trucker called the "Rattlesnake Manifesto" that calls for anti-gouging taxes and a single tax on spending that only hits the very rich and wasteful, or 95% of waste. My present g/f's father who is a Methodist ThD gave me a magazine that had and article on Wesley's tax ideas in it, where I saw my own.

My Empathy Model page on Wikiveristy gets a lot of hits, but it is still under construction. My Spiritual Darwinism site gets less hits but is complete, and it has both the neural story, the natural affection from Darwin, and the native tribal relationship with the environment that capital purposefully destroys. It was part of my degree work.
Georges Bataille's Theory of Religion and The Accursed Share form the cornerstone of his "new Copernican project" in which he outlines a new economics based in waste of precious goods (including lives) in order to transgress taboo and enter into the sacred and become "like water in water".

He demonstrates that capitalism was only possible within a Protestant society that, unlike Catholicism which valued good works, valued working - which led to the accumulation of capital. And, in a Protestant, Capitalist society the primary taboo is waste - the biggest waste is war - so the act of war is a transgression of taboo on monumental scale which, according to Bataille, leads to the sacred (or rather, the parody of sacred) in consumer society.

"According to Bataille, religion is the search for a lost intimacy.' Bataille's discussion of this claim moves from the complete immanence of animality to the shattered world of objects and then to the partial recovery of intimacy and immanence through sacrifice. More ominous, Bataille argues that not only was the archaic festival an affirmation of life through destructive consumption, but it also sowed the seeds of war. The book concludes with a discussion of the rise of the modern military order and the origins of modern capitalism. The argument here is wide-ranging and significant."
—Ethics
a new economics based in waste of precious goods (including lives) in order to transgress taboo and enter into the sacred

WTF??

It only gets weirder!

immanence of animality to the shattered world of objects and then to the partial recovery of intimacy and immanence through sacrifice

I an not sure how to respond. It is difficult to separate the Roman Catholic church from capital, as capital is the Roman perfection of economics -- actually Marx perfected capital theory by eliminating the expensive capital families replacing them with bureaucracy, and Stalin and Mao put this idea into effect killing millions upon millions.

The idea that constructing good things to build capital, or perhaps a capital is excellent, but I am not sure that is capital, that is more like well-constructed community. Capital, especially global capital is about accumlating other people's wealth, and the pattern has been universal. I have diffuculty defining mega-religions as religion, but just meta-cultures built from dominated cultures. Islam comes to mind--how do you reconcile the beautiful art with 9/11? The art is captive culture to foreign domination, just as New York City is captive to foreign predatory control, all of them: Israel, Latin America, Saudi Arabia!

(I just got attacked yesterday by a Latin American and purely predatory store worker who thought my camera was shop-lifted goods, so I am not in the mood for Liberal denial today.)

But there is the Catholic Worker, which is a legitimate and purely giving part of the RC church, and the Eastern Catholics are rebels against Roman Catholic control.

From what little contact I have had with RC members, I know they are forbidden from taking communion at other churches, which is straight-out bias, bias being the biggest social problem facing humanity, a problem that always leads to hate.

I feel that sacrifice comes from the difficult relationship of the forest dweller with the animals that are actually his family that he has to eat. Forest children keep the orphaned animals from the hunt as pets.This is he basis of the now-dead ritual that North American natives used in the hunt, which was a sacrifice. English hunger for the beaver hat ended this relationship.

And then there is early innocent village man whose animals evolved with him and are his friends, and he has to eat them. You will find that it is very difficult for many dairy farmers to part with their cows knowing that they will be slaughtered. I know such a family.

Human sacrifice has to be something different, perhaps psychological degeneration of this relationship as a vehicle for pure malice (as we see in the American hunte--many of whom we know would rather hunt humans), or a perversion of it to facilitate war to get resources, or a combination of the two as we see in the Aztecs who killed ritually for protein. (Not typical of the native model.)

I will have to look this up, there are a lot of interesting sub-topics that I have found so far, even if the big picture is difficult to reconcile with experience.

RSS

© 2024   Created by waldopaper.   Powered by

Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service