Listen to a reading of this article: It's funny to think about how all our abusive, oppressive systems are only there because the people who benefit from them are able to keep everyone else too divided and distracted to notice that we vastly outnumber them and could literally just force change to happen anytime we want.
I don't see Russia as the aggressor in this war, but the US, and it has been every since it supported the coup in 2014. I believe what we are experiencing now was very predictable. Had Clinton won it would have occurred during her reign, but she didn't, so she and the democrats created a bridge with the lie of Russia-gate tied to Trump which was nothing more then propaganda created in great part by the democrats and media including too many on the left. So it's no surprise that under Biden, very much involved in the 2014 coup, he just picked it up were he left off. As recently revealed by Merkel the Minsk accords were never meant to go forth, but only provide time for Ukraine to prepare for war.
So many great quotes to choose from this time! (I tweeted a half dozen or so.)
I think you've hit the nail on the head when you say, "Nobody actually believes western proxy warfare in Ukraine is about saving Ukrainian lives. You don't save lives by ramping up escalations, you save lives by negotiating peace, which would require concessions from the US empire. Empire simps just don't want those concessions to be made." Some recent polls have shown this to be true. Even Americans aren't supportive of this continued bloodshed. But when will Americans rise up and march in the streets like the French have this past week? Time will tell, but I hope it's soon. Power to the people!
Synchronicity! I had just written elsewhere that as long as the system rewards ruthlessness, the most ruthless will be in power. To be replaced by someone more ruthless when they falter.
And I'm so glad you're making it known that Abstract Expressionism was a CIA psy-ops.
Ultimate, most people buy into the bullshit of one of the two parties of the US empire and are loyalty to it because the oppose the other side. Yet the thing is the loyalty is blind and they won't dare be independent in terms of thought. That's why there is no real antiwar position because both sides propagandize the Ukrainian war as good, ironic? Just like they did with the Iraq war, the Gulf war, and many others.
We could make up any system we wanted and it could work if people wanted. Yet in the US everyone is essentially raised to think our country is the best and that our economic system is the best. If you disagree you are wrong or an enemy. This despite massive evidence proving otherwise.
I was lucky, having the opportunity to interact with people from other countries, that expanded my world view. Then eventually learning about other countries, how some do things, like the Nordic theory, I was intrigued. Then I saw the political parties do things against their ideology, rather frequently. I rejected the mainstream political positions, because I saw that they weren't working.
I am glad you speak out against the United States empire, people defend the wealthy and the politicians when they cause death and suffering, nothing good comes of it and our political systems merely gives us the choice between two assholes. Choosing either changes nothing, because as you said, the asshole system benefits the assholes.
Caitlin I wish I were in a finacial position to spot you a few bucks. Sadly I am under the heel of the lap of luxury but ... I can send you my love and admiration. Which is worth more far more than mere filthy lucre. I love it that you are probably Australian and from your husbands accent I am guessing Melbourne.
"A healthy human is one who has shifted into a functional relationship with mental narrative where thoughts are experienced as tools to be picked up when they are useful and set down when they are not, instead of being believed and clung to and dominating our lives. A healthy humanity will look much the same."
Some good lines; some bad lines. Helping people realize that the Ukrainian war is just a sham to help Biden, Romney, and other deep staters launder money for themselves, and impoverish the rest of us, and keep us living in fear, is excellent.
Advocating that we cut off little boys scrotums and chop off teenager girls breasts because they have predictable teenage identity angst (see the story of Chloe Cole and Kristen Bell) might be well meaning, but it is sadistic, sick, and goes against 2,000,000 years of evolutionary biology. Hard sell. How do you know "gender affirming" mutilation isn't just another psy-op to destabilize people's humanity, and their families, so our sociopathic overlords like at the WEF can't just force you to obey? If they can disfigure and sterilize your children, what can't they do?
I think we need a human alternative to the current system, not vague words about how we're all transitioning and evolving. Here are some proposals from a world-famous clinical psychologist who is creating an alternative institution. That's what we want, right? An alternative?
How to get “energy and resources at the lowest possible cost, as rapidly as possible, to the largest number of people around the world.”
Engaging in a “pro-human view” of earth stewardship.
Putting forward a “vision on the family policy front to facilitate the encouragement of and the maintenance of long-term, monogamous couples who are child-centered.”
And discovering our “story,” specifically as it relates to “voluntary play” rather than “the spirit of power” ruling.
There is more, but the key aspect is a human future, not one ruled by propaganda, fear, and fascist overlords.
True: first comes the asshole system put in place by a minority of greedy rich or alternately, sadistic assholes, and then all the assholes come out of the woodwork. I'm not sure about the abstract expressionist theory: It isn't vapid sterile and empty like Nazi art, and Nazis hated the genre - which says something good about it - but the rule is, you can't define art, it is what it is, but whatever lasts through generations is true art, and Pollack lasts. Art is intimately entwined with the time it is created, and you can't extract it from it's time. It's like fashions: wearing silk leggings or hoop skirts is just- not there. Ukraine and the demonization of Russia boils down to the biggest and cruellest con game ever perpetrated -since the last not so Great War - in favour of the filthy rich. Money is accumulating faster in dirty hands than Ukrainians are leaving Ukraine - or would like to.
I only found this BB a few minutes ago. It reminds me of what the Internet was like when it first emerged. They cant shut us down because we are everywhere. Or so we thought. But the power will come back to us once the youngsters learn to code. Decentralize.
Hitler loved dogs, was a vegetarian, and built Autobahns. If I advocated that and admitted I loved speeding on those fine roads - would I be "repeating Hitler's talking points"?
Another boring anecdote; ... I remember with horror a WWII vet that used to go to the local pub every day and even if he wasnt "pie eyed pissed" could be found starfished in the car park screaming in terror as he was hallucinating about being bayonetted by Japs. Folks just left him to it. After he had hung himself those same folks were all" We didnt need trauma councelling back in our day ... we just Got on with it"
An now he is a War Hero...
Yes you stinking cunts just let some other poor bastard do all your self righteous News Paper politics and philosophy..."another cup of Tea My Dear?" and all your dieing for you whilst you cheerfully ignored the consequences of your smugness..
“What we call here a White Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is ex-stasis, as it begins within the realm of regular expectations, because something in the timestream – past, present and future - convincingly points to its possibility. Second, it carries an unconditional holistic resonance; it thrills the soul. Third, in spite of its ecstatic status, human nature makes us aware of its occurrence as a foreshadowing, making it intrinsic and desirable.”
~JSI
“For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
~ William Blake
William of Ockham is said to have written “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, or, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”, although the actual phrase has never been discovered in his writings. This has been used as an epigraph by thinkers since as a dictate to use the one to quantify the multitude rather than the multitude affirming the one. It is the basis of all modern scientific thought and, as such, the basis of Western culture.
It is estimated that about one hundred billion neurons of several differing varieties and their accompanying axons, dendrites and synapses coexist in the human brain - an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension – and that each neuron is capable of firing every five milliseconds, also an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension. These numbers beggar any concept of plurality that we think we are capable of, yet . . . . it is indisputable that they are present inside the vaults of our skulls and account, as an example, for the writing of this sentence.
This leads me to deduce that we self-censor or redact very nearly all that we are aware of, or at least it would appear that way, until I think about Aldo Leopold and his critique of flood control with respect to the natural rhythms of any given ecology. He wrote of the insanity (I use this word literally) of the Army Corps of Engineers and their program of straightening the sinuous curves of natural river channels to greatly improve the flow of – in the Corps’ opinion – an unneeded and unwanted abundance of water, then putting dams on those ruler straight channels to “control” the flow they just had created. “Flood Control”, they called it. “Prevents Erosion”, they intoned. That a river should be allowed to “flood” and run outside its banks was a very bad thing; a “good” river flowed exactly where the Corps told it to run, and when, and how. Leopold pointed out the obvious; that the Corps’ efforts did neither, and that they actually damaged the geomorphology and hydrology of the living organism of the land. In short, this infliction disrupted the land, the watershed, and the communities of life that lived there, sometimes terminally.
As above, so below: the vault of our skull contains the watershed of awareness and the cognitive rivers that flow from it. To put it another way, the net of interactions of billions of neurons – if perceived as the billions of molecules of water residing in a geological watershed - becomes the cognitive watershed, and its resultant rivers of awareness, each singular as a sentence. That these rivers will flood and run outside their banks is the condition of ex-stasis, and, as I stated in the definition of a White Swan event, beginning “within the realm of regular expectations”.
The cognitive discontinuity introduced during the Neolithic was the beginning of straightening the channels of our perception and as time went on, placing the dams of hierarchical thought along these new, linear constrictions. The monoliths of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare were imbedded in these straightened channels to control the flow even further. Perceptual stagnation set in – not only unnoticed for what it was, but pursued as a charismatic ideal of perfection – becoming the sine qua non of the human species. I recognize these forms of thought as the type specimens of what I’ll call Homo sapiens sapiens novus. Man had shuttered the doors of perception. Awareness had been civilized; all that remained were the narrowing “chinks of his cavern”. The rivers had been channeled, the flow multiply dammed.
The celebration of pluralities, the seeing of one/ness in all/ness and all/ness in one/ness, and the renewal cycle of ex-stasis intrinsic to the previous two hundred thousand years of human cognition was deemed unnecessary. What was necessary was to straighten ever more cognitive channels, build more cognitive dams. Those populations of humans who persisted in the primal, unregulated cycle of cognition, and the renewal of ex-stasis, were driven out, marginalized or killed.
This is nowhere more evident than in the contrast between the Neolithic extractive economies and the Shamanic symbiotic economies and the history of the Neolithic rise to dominance. Neolithic man, Homo sapiens sapiens novus became the apex predator of the entire planet in a geological nanosecond, the most successful invasive species we know of. What he did with his cognition, so did he to his physical environment. In human time, this did not take overnight but, as I said, over a dozen or so millennia; now, the last remnant fragments of the aboriginal Shamanic populations persist as a curiosity, an exhibit, on reservations set up for them by their keepers. Equally, the last remnant fragments of the uncut, unmined, unbulldozed, undammed, unharvested, unoccupied original landscape are set aside as “wilderness”, whether as a signal reminder – as decapitated heads of the enemy were impaled on pikes and displayed on castle walls – or as a bittersweet nostalgia, I do not know.
And so we come to the forty third Hexagram of the I-Ching, Kuai (break-through or resoluteness), as expressed in the Wilhelm-Baynes translation of the I-Ching:
The Image
The lake has risen up to heaven:
The image of BREAK-THROUGH.
Thus the superior man
Dispenses riches downward
And refrains from resting on his virtue.
Wilhelm and Baynes write, “The hexagram Kuai actually means a break-through as when a river bursts its dams in seasons of flood. The five strong lines are thought of as mounting from below, resolutely forcing the weak upper line out of the hexagram.”
For all the channeling and dam building done to our awareness and cognitive process, it must be realized that the original perceptual landscape is the bedrock of mythos upon which the Neolithic constructed its artifices of logos. An irrevocable result of the straightened channels and dams of rivers subjected to flood control is that the water’s impoundments silt up until the channel is no longer a channel and the dam is no longer a dam. The water then finds its own way again, true to its nature no matter how long previously confined.
This is true . . . . whether we speak of the watersheds and rivers of the planet or the watersheds and rivers within the vault of our skull, the cognitive universe; partly planet and partly person.
In precisely this sense, the White Swan events of our lives herald the bursting of the dams erected to constrain our actual, original cognitive gifts and the recognition of the return of the Shamanic river of perpetual return.
The One is forever the Other: As above, so below.
Or, as William Blake put it: “Energy is eternal delight.”
We're Ruled By Assholes Because We Have Asshole Systems: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
We are ruled by sociopaths, just as every system eventually comes to be ruled by sociopaths.
This is because sociopaths are the people who will do whatever it takes to get power.
I don't see Russia as the aggressor in this war, but the US, and it has been every since it supported the coup in 2014. I believe what we are experiencing now was very predictable. Had Clinton won it would have occurred during her reign, but she didn't, so she and the democrats created a bridge with the lie of Russia-gate tied to Trump which was nothing more then propaganda created in great part by the democrats and media including too many on the left. So it's no surprise that under Biden, very much involved in the 2014 coup, he just picked it up were he left off. As recently revealed by Merkel the Minsk accords were never meant to go forth, but only provide time for Ukraine to prepare for war.
So many great quotes to choose from this time! (I tweeted a half dozen or so.)
I think you've hit the nail on the head when you say, "Nobody actually believes western proxy warfare in Ukraine is about saving Ukrainian lives. You don't save lives by ramping up escalations, you save lives by negotiating peace, which would require concessions from the US empire. Empire simps just don't want those concessions to be made." Some recent polls have shown this to be true. Even Americans aren't supportive of this continued bloodshed. But when will Americans rise up and march in the streets like the French have this past week? Time will tell, but I hope it's soon. Power to the people!
Synchronicity! I had just written elsewhere that as long as the system rewards ruthlessness, the most ruthless will be in power. To be replaced by someone more ruthless when they falter.
And I'm so glad you're making it known that Abstract Expressionism was a CIA psy-ops.
Ultimate, most people buy into the bullshit of one of the two parties of the US empire and are loyalty to it because the oppose the other side. Yet the thing is the loyalty is blind and they won't dare be independent in terms of thought. That's why there is no real antiwar position because both sides propagandize the Ukrainian war as good, ironic? Just like they did with the Iraq war, the Gulf war, and many others.
We could make up any system we wanted and it could work if people wanted. Yet in the US everyone is essentially raised to think our country is the best and that our economic system is the best. If you disagree you are wrong or an enemy. This despite massive evidence proving otherwise.
I was lucky, having the opportunity to interact with people from other countries, that expanded my world view. Then eventually learning about other countries, how some do things, like the Nordic theory, I was intrigued. Then I saw the political parties do things against their ideology, rather frequently. I rejected the mainstream political positions, because I saw that they weren't working.
I am glad you speak out against the United States empire, people defend the wealthy and the politicians when they cause death and suffering, nothing good comes of it and our political systems merely gives us the choice between two assholes. Choosing either changes nothing, because as you said, the asshole system benefits the assholes.
Caitlin I wish I were in a finacial position to spot you a few bucks. Sadly I am under the heel of the lap of luxury but ... I can send you my love and admiration. Which is worth more far more than mere filthy lucre. I love it that you are probably Australian and from your husbands accent I am guessing Melbourne.
We will win this... !!
War is good for ESG! It reduces carbon emissions by killing people. Send $100 billion more to Ukraine! https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
"A healthy human is one who has shifted into a functional relationship with mental narrative where thoughts are experienced as tools to be picked up when they are useful and set down when they are not, instead of being believed and clung to and dominating our lives. A healthy humanity will look much the same."
thank you
for Locating
the tool shed.
Some good lines; some bad lines. Helping people realize that the Ukrainian war is just a sham to help Biden, Romney, and other deep staters launder money for themselves, and impoverish the rest of us, and keep us living in fear, is excellent.
Advocating that we cut off little boys scrotums and chop off teenager girls breasts because they have predictable teenage identity angst (see the story of Chloe Cole and Kristen Bell) might be well meaning, but it is sadistic, sick, and goes against 2,000,000 years of evolutionary biology. Hard sell. How do you know "gender affirming" mutilation isn't just another psy-op to destabilize people's humanity, and their families, so our sociopathic overlords like at the WEF can't just force you to obey? If they can disfigure and sterilize your children, what can't they do?
I think we need a human alternative to the current system, not vague words about how we're all transitioning and evolving. Here are some proposals from a world-famous clinical psychologist who is creating an alternative institution. That's what we want, right? An alternative?
How to get “energy and resources at the lowest possible cost, as rapidly as possible, to the largest number of people around the world.”
Engaging in a “pro-human view” of earth stewardship.
Putting forward a “vision on the family policy front to facilitate the encouragement of and the maintenance of long-term, monogamous couples who are child-centered.”
And discovering our “story,” specifically as it relates to “voluntary play” rather than “the spirit of power” ruling.
There is more, but the key aspect is a human future, not one ruled by propaganda, fear, and fascist overlords.
This post = not brought to you by Pfizer.
True: first comes the asshole system put in place by a minority of greedy rich or alternately, sadistic assholes, and then all the assholes come out of the woodwork. I'm not sure about the abstract expressionist theory: It isn't vapid sterile and empty like Nazi art, and Nazis hated the genre - which says something good about it - but the rule is, you can't define art, it is what it is, but whatever lasts through generations is true art, and Pollack lasts. Art is intimately entwined with the time it is created, and you can't extract it from it's time. It's like fashions: wearing silk leggings or hoop skirts is just- not there. Ukraine and the demonization of Russia boils down to the biggest and cruellest con game ever perpetrated -since the last not so Great War - in favour of the filthy rich. Money is accumulating faster in dirty hands than Ukrainians are leaving Ukraine - or would like to.
I only found this BB a few minutes ago. It reminds me of what the Internet was like when it first emerged. They cant shut us down because we are everywhere. Or so we thought. But the power will come back to us once the youngsters learn to code. Decentralize.
Hitler loved dogs, was a vegetarian, and built Autobahns. If I advocated that and admitted I loved speeding on those fine roads - would I be "repeating Hitler's talking points"?
It's easy to say "Those assholes at the top need to go." It's much harder to say "Everything I'm familiar with needs to go."
Anyone who is waiting for the current assholes to disappear so that decent and humane people can replace them are what I call hopium addicts.
The system we are living under now is getting worse and more intolerable every day. It needs to be destroyed.
The answer is here: https://www.corbettreport.com/qfc095-voluntaryism/
Another boring anecdote; ... I remember with horror a WWII vet that used to go to the local pub every day and even if he wasnt "pie eyed pissed" could be found starfished in the car park screaming in terror as he was hallucinating about being bayonetted by Japs. Folks just left him to it. After he had hung himself those same folks were all" We didnt need trauma councelling back in our day ... we just Got on with it"
An now he is a War Hero...
Yes you stinking cunts just let some other poor bastard do all your self righteous News Paper politics and philosophy..."another cup of Tea My Dear?" and all your dieing for you whilst you cheerfully ignored the consequences of your smugness..
Oh Fuck I hate those people !!
The White Swan - Beyond Occam’s Razor
Part II.
“What we call here a White Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is ex-stasis, as it begins within the realm of regular expectations, because something in the timestream – past, present and future - convincingly points to its possibility. Second, it carries an unconditional holistic resonance; it thrills the soul. Third, in spite of its ecstatic status, human nature makes us aware of its occurrence as a foreshadowing, making it intrinsic and desirable.”
~JSI
“For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
~ William Blake
William of Ockham is said to have written “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”, or, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”, although the actual phrase has never been discovered in his writings. This has been used as an epigraph by thinkers since as a dictate to use the one to quantify the multitude rather than the multitude affirming the one. It is the basis of all modern scientific thought and, as such, the basis of Western culture.
It is estimated that about one hundred billion neurons of several differing varieties and their accompanying axons, dendrites and synapses coexist in the human brain - an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension – and that each neuron is capable of firing every five milliseconds, also an order of magnitude beyond our comprehension. These numbers beggar any concept of plurality that we think we are capable of, yet . . . . it is indisputable that they are present inside the vaults of our skulls and account, as an example, for the writing of this sentence.
This leads me to deduce that we self-censor or redact very nearly all that we are aware of, or at least it would appear that way, until I think about Aldo Leopold and his critique of flood control with respect to the natural rhythms of any given ecology. He wrote of the insanity (I use this word literally) of the Army Corps of Engineers and their program of straightening the sinuous curves of natural river channels to greatly improve the flow of – in the Corps’ opinion – an unneeded and unwanted abundance of water, then putting dams on those ruler straight channels to “control” the flow they just had created. “Flood Control”, they called it. “Prevents Erosion”, they intoned. That a river should be allowed to “flood” and run outside its banks was a very bad thing; a “good” river flowed exactly where the Corps told it to run, and when, and how. Leopold pointed out the obvious; that the Corps’ efforts did neither, and that they actually damaged the geomorphology and hydrology of the living organism of the land. In short, this infliction disrupted the land, the watershed, and the communities of life that lived there, sometimes terminally.
As above, so below: the vault of our skull contains the watershed of awareness and the cognitive rivers that flow from it. To put it another way, the net of interactions of billions of neurons – if perceived as the billions of molecules of water residing in a geological watershed - becomes the cognitive watershed, and its resultant rivers of awareness, each singular as a sentence. That these rivers will flood and run outside their banks is the condition of ex-stasis, and, as I stated in the definition of a White Swan event, beginning “within the realm of regular expectations”.
The cognitive discontinuity introduced during the Neolithic was the beginning of straightening the channels of our perception and as time went on, placing the dams of hierarchical thought along these new, linear constrictions. The monoliths of politics, economics, organized religion and warfare were imbedded in these straightened channels to control the flow even further. Perceptual stagnation set in – not only unnoticed for what it was, but pursued as a charismatic ideal of perfection – becoming the sine qua non of the human species. I recognize these forms of thought as the type specimens of what I’ll call Homo sapiens sapiens novus. Man had shuttered the doors of perception. Awareness had been civilized; all that remained were the narrowing “chinks of his cavern”. The rivers had been channeled, the flow multiply dammed.
The celebration of pluralities, the seeing of one/ness in all/ness and all/ness in one/ness, and the renewal cycle of ex-stasis intrinsic to the previous two hundred thousand years of human cognition was deemed unnecessary. What was necessary was to straighten ever more cognitive channels, build more cognitive dams. Those populations of humans who persisted in the primal, unregulated cycle of cognition, and the renewal of ex-stasis, were driven out, marginalized or killed.
This is nowhere more evident than in the contrast between the Neolithic extractive economies and the Shamanic symbiotic economies and the history of the Neolithic rise to dominance. Neolithic man, Homo sapiens sapiens novus became the apex predator of the entire planet in a geological nanosecond, the most successful invasive species we know of. What he did with his cognition, so did he to his physical environment. In human time, this did not take overnight but, as I said, over a dozen or so millennia; now, the last remnant fragments of the aboriginal Shamanic populations persist as a curiosity, an exhibit, on reservations set up for them by their keepers. Equally, the last remnant fragments of the uncut, unmined, unbulldozed, undammed, unharvested, unoccupied original landscape are set aside as “wilderness”, whether as a signal reminder – as decapitated heads of the enemy were impaled on pikes and displayed on castle walls – or as a bittersweet nostalgia, I do not know.
And so we come to the forty third Hexagram of the I-Ching, Kuai (break-through or resoluteness), as expressed in the Wilhelm-Baynes translation of the I-Ching:
The Image
The lake has risen up to heaven:
The image of BREAK-THROUGH.
Thus the superior man
Dispenses riches downward
And refrains from resting on his virtue.
Wilhelm and Baynes write, “The hexagram Kuai actually means a break-through as when a river bursts its dams in seasons of flood. The five strong lines are thought of as mounting from below, resolutely forcing the weak upper line out of the hexagram.”
For all the channeling and dam building done to our awareness and cognitive process, it must be realized that the original perceptual landscape is the bedrock of mythos upon which the Neolithic constructed its artifices of logos. An irrevocable result of the straightened channels and dams of rivers subjected to flood control is that the water’s impoundments silt up until the channel is no longer a channel and the dam is no longer a dam. The water then finds its own way again, true to its nature no matter how long previously confined.
This is true . . . . whether we speak of the watersheds and rivers of the planet or the watersheds and rivers within the vault of our skull, the cognitive universe; partly planet and partly person.
In precisely this sense, the White Swan events of our lives herald the bursting of the dams erected to constrain our actual, original cognitive gifts and the recognition of the return of the Shamanic river of perpetual return.
The One is forever the Other: As above, so below.
Or, as William Blake put it: “Energy is eternal delight.”
© Salskov Iversen
3 December 2011
JFK – 1963: I Will Splinter the CIA into a Thousand of Pieces.
https://i0.wp.com/www.elliswashingtonreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jfk-vs-cia-quote.jpg?w=624&ssl=1