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Month: June 2021 Page 2 of 3
In my first post on the type of enlightenment where one experiences the world as self I noted that of the types I will cover, this is one I had no taste of. That changed after I wrote it, albeit for only a few hours, so I thought I’d write a follow-up post.
In many spiritual circles there is a distrust for intellectual inquiry. Words, it is true, cannot adequately describe enlightnment states (or much else, really.)
This distrust is not universal, however. There is a role for intellectual understanding when one combines it with meditative investigation. In India this is called Jnani Yoga.
The Jnani Yoga for “world as self” is simple enough, and the basis for statement’s like “the world exists because you exist” from “I Am That.”
- You experience only sense objects in consciousness. You have never, nor will you every experience anything else. These sense objects may reflect something outside of you, or they may not, but what you experience is a sense object.
- A sense object is created out of consciousness.
- No matter how long you look you will never find anything but consciousness. When sense objects change or go, you remain.
- You are consciousness. You are everything you perceive.
- Consciousness can be pretty much anything. If I close my eyes, I still exist. If the objects around me change, I still exist. If my body changes (as it does) I am still me. In dreams, where I may have a different body or no body at all, I am still me.
Since you are, in fact, everything you have ever experienced or ever will experience, dividing the world into outside and inside is insane. It’s delusional. You are as much the sounds, sights, and objects you experience outside the body as you are the body (which you only experience, also, as sense objects.)
When this become “duh” to you: when you believe it implicitly, the mind starts to change how you perceive the world.
Because you have spent your entire life experiencing sense objects one way “I am the body, everything else is outside me and not me” getting here generally requires a lot of meditation, which amounts to re-conditioning yourself.
There are many ways to do this. One is to simply examine each sense object in turn, and ask “is this me? Take your time, don’t force the answer. I usually find the answer is “it’s me” or “I don’t know.” If you think that it’s not you because you can’t control it, remember all the times you can’t control your body, which you think IS you.
Either you’re everything you experience, or you’re none of it. (Which is also a path, and you can meditate on that. “If it went away would I still exist? — Don’t do this on big things, do it on sense objects – feelings in the body, thoughts, sights, sounds, smells, whatever. )
When you do experience the world as yourself it feels really good. It oddly radically reduces the sense of self, and fear, and a sense of well-being and safety arises. Some other realizations occur, almost 180 degrees to how we normally understand the world and the self, but I’ll leave those alone for now until I’ve spent more time in this state and been able to understand its insights better.
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On Hugh Hewitt’s show, McConnell says it’s “highly unlikely” he’d allow Biden to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2024, if he’s majority leader. He also doesn’t commit to allowing a vote on a nominee if a seat opens up in 2023. “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens.”
This is the new normal. Republicans get all of their Supreme Court slots and stop any Democratic slots they can. We should note that McConnell was also keeping most appellate seats open, which is why Trump was able to appoint so many.
Republicans will do virtually anything to win. They will change voting laws. They will put one voting machine in a poor or minority district of a million people. They will forbid voting by mail and then try not to count the votes.
Democrats, with rare exceptions, do not fight back. When they get in power, they do the minimum.
I hear the cries, “But Biden has only 50 people in the Senate!”
Yes, just like Obama had only 60 and somehow couldn’t pass anything, “because Republicans.” There’s always a designated villain, a kabuki vote: These days it is Manchin, with Sinema as backup. But if they weren’t taking the heat, others would step up. Senate Dems are okay with not passing anything on 50 votes, even if they could. They don’t want to.
Biden had a good economic plan, but it has been watered down to basic worthlessness, and certainly won’t do much for the environment.
The test for Biden’s sincerity is simple: The President has vast executive power. Is the President using it? Biden has vast power to forbid fracking; he didn’t. He has allowed vast increases in oil pumping. He could cancel or reduce student loans on his say-so. He has not.
Louis DeJoy deliberately sandbagged the Post Office as part of an attempt to steal the election. He is elected by the post-office board, yes, but Biden can fire him for cause. He hasn’t done so, just as in 2009, Obama could have fired every member of the Federal Reserve except the chairman (who has only one vote anyway.)
Republicans do things Democrats want: They cut taxes for rich people like Nancy Pelosi and most Senators and their families, for example. They bomb brown people. The hurt poor people.
The Democrats who are in power like all these things. They tell you they don’t, then when they have power, they reverse hardly any of it, and indeed, add to the pile of evil.
Anyway: The Republicans already have six seats on the Supreme Court. They’re going to keep them, and may wind up with seven. The appellate courts will continue to trend heavily Republican, and with people appointed by Trump and his successor — radical right-wingers.
The reason I bring this up is to emphasize, again, that while it is possible for the US to turn-around from its current path, the signs are not good. The main chance will come when people like Pelosi resign, too feeble and old to cling to power. But given how hard they are clinging to power and that they will choose the worst people to succeed them if possible, that chance seems dim.
Take this into account as you make your plans. This is as true for non-Americans as it is for Americans, as the US is still the hegemonic power.
And if you are left-wing, remember that multiple states are making it legal to run over protesters. The right-wing wants to kill you. To kill you. To kill you.
Understand that in your bones. They want you dead.
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Ilhan Omar, the most radical of the Squad, gave in and apologized for saying:
“We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,” she wrote. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”
This is, of course, true. In fact, it’s way too mild. But Omar caved.
She said she had never made “a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the US and Israel.”
“I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems,” she added.
House Democratic leaders issued their own statement welcoming Ms. Omar’s clarification, saying that “drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all.”
Now, the problem here is that there is no moral equivalency between Hamas and the US and Israel. Hamas has killed far fewer people, and committed far fewer atrocities. It has not tried to ethnically cleanse an entire people and has not invaded any other countries. Being a “democracy,” which Israel is not, since almost half of the population can’t vote, does not excuse your war crimes. Hamas is, in every way that matters, far less evil than the US or Israel. This isn’t even a question, and anyone who thinks it is has their moral compass so far up their ass it will never again see daylight.
Do remember that the CIA tortured people. This is well established. What did the “well-established judicial system” of the United States do about that?
The only person the “well-established judicial system” of the United States put in jail for CIA torture was the whistleblower who revealed the torture in an attempt to stop it.
Hamas aren’t “good” people, but they are freedom fighters (yeah, sorry) defending their people, who suffer under an apartheid system after having been ethnic cleansed out of most of their homeland. They have killed fewer people than Israel, stolen fewer homes, and not conquered any countries with a native population and shoved the native population into the dirt.
Compared to Israel, or the US (Libya, Iraq, Vietnam, nukes, drone murders, rendition, etc, etc.), Hamas is a moral giant. Perhaps they are only saved by their weakness, and would be as evil if they had more power, but they don’t. They shoot homemade missiles at Israel to try and stop Israel from stealing more Palestinians homes and Israel retaliates with the most advanced bombs and missiles in the world, leveling press offices, hospitals, and apartment blocks.
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)
Most people spend their entire childhoods and adult lives until they are really too old to work, doing shit they don’t want to do and would never do absent coercion.
This is the ur-fact about capitalism. You cannot leave. If you do not submit to slavery, you will wind up homeless and eventually dead, and suffer a lot along the way.
This is built into the system: The “whip of hunger” is used to make people work. The threat of homelessness.
Homelessness, despair, and so on are required; without them people would not bother working at bad jobs. Indeed, without them many people would not work any more than required to feed and house themselves.
Now, understand clearly, rip a hole in your skull, and put this in: There is more food than needed and way more homes than homeless people in all of the developed countries and more food than needed to feed everyone in the world. We could easily feed and house everyone in the world. It is almost a trivial problem. We simply have to do it.
Industrialization, plus modern agriculture, produces easily more than we need. Automation should mean that less and less hours need working. We should be living in a paradise of free-time and choice.
We do not because a small minority has captured power and enslaved the rest of us.
These people are monsters on every possible level, including in their depraved indifference to what will happen to their children and grandchildren under environmental collapse and climate change.
We have a surplus, but it is generated in the stupidest ways possible — with planned obsolesence, soil degradation, and pollution causing environmental collapse.
If we had built everything without planned obsolesence, we wouldn’t be where we are. If we had not degraded the soil and dumped so much pollution into the air we would not be where we are. We made a bunch of choices to do things the fast, “profitable” way that actually led to people being sicker (all that pollution and soil degradation means you are undernourished and full of unhealthy chemicals) and having to work longer.
We had the knowledge to have a manageable, sustainable cornucopia by just looking at the effects on people, animals, and plants, and the environment in general and correcting. We did not.
School, if you will put aside your prejudices for a couple minutes and look at it coldly, is a process whereby you are made to sit still, talk only when teacher allows, piss only when teacher allows, stand only when teacher allows, and do all sorts of things you don’t want in the way that pleases teacher or you get bad grades, and if you get enough bad grades, you will almost certainly never have a good job or any power in society.
You were trained to be a slave by school then you went to work and acted like a good slave. Some few proved themselves psychopathic enough to ascend to the elites (though the few open routes are rapidly closing down), though most elites come from the already-elite (check out who Bill Gates father was).
Since creating a utopia in which people don’t have to obey their masters is no fun for psychopaths or functional psychopaths and narcissists (our ruling class), keeping the majority of the population firmly in a form of slavery they could tell themselves was freedom, “I get to CHOOSE MY MASTER who tells me what to do! I am free!” is what our master-class has done.
We run around on treadmills, working for them to get what we need, and the various drugs (including entertainment) we use to ease ourselves and pretend it’s all worth it. The internet, which looked like it might increase freedom, has simply set up more hedonic treadmills, optimized for us to tell our masters everything about ourselves, so they can sell us our next drug, and continue their removal from us of all real assets. (Private equity is now buying up single family homes, the middle class’s last real asset.)
If you work at a normal job, you are a slave. If you have ascended to the ranks of high executive, CEO, or board member, you are Lord of Hell. There are some other seats, rather nice places: the independent best-selling author or musician, for example. The high paid consultant, the big Twitch streamer and so on. They are rare, and like becoming a pro-sports player, they exist for the majority of the population more as a way to blame themselves for not “making it” than as a real possibility.
This is our society: A society which had the technology to create a near utopia without destroying the world (yes, some people will argue this was always impossible; let us say that we never even tried) and which chooses instead to run a master/slave society which is so advanced it convinces most of the slaves they are free.
You WISH you had “Brave New World” because at least then you’d think you were happy.
It is odd, and sad, that this world will end because the masters, abetted by their slaves (who, remember, have not revolted in any meaningful way and have chosen the master-class through voting), have mismanaged the environment so badly.
When that happens, the powerful are betting they will become even more powerful, so that they can use their resources to be masters in an even greater hell.
Let me suggest, that as you or your children are scrabbling for survival in the world to come, you take the time to ensure that the masters don’t “win” by destroying the environment.
The hell they will create in a collapsing environment will make the present hell look wonderful by comparison, and they will never stop creating hells unless it is made clear to them that their perpetual hell creation will soon become unprofitable for them as well; even if it has to be with their lives.
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 6-11-21]
There is no competing with China without a competent state, and a state that cannot tax its powerful is not a competent state. https://t.co/lJoeLIYkkN
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) June 10, 2021
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Vast Majority of Voters Want Higher Taxes on Wealthy, Corporations
[Americans For Tax Fairness, via Daily Poster 6-12-2021]
Nearly 7 in 10 voters support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, according to a new poll from ALG Research, Hart Research, and Americans for Tax Fairness. Moreover, voters become more supportive of President Joe Biden’s economic plans when they are told they will be funded by taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
The Global South has lost $152 trillion through unequal exchange since 1960
Dylan Sullivan [Progress in Political Economy, via Mike Norman Economics, June 7, 2021]
Dependency and world-systems theorists have long argued that “unequal exchange” is a key driver of global inequality. Since wages and natural resource prices are much lower in the global South than the North, poor countries must export many more units of embodied labour and resources than they import in order to achieve a monetary balance of trade. This creates a constant transfer of labour and ecology from the periphery to the core, developing the latter but impoverishing the former.
In a recent paper in New Political Economy that I co-authored with Jason Hickel from the University of London, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, a data analyst based in Karachi, we quantify the value that has been appropriated from the South through unequal exchange since 1960. To do this, we use a method developed by the economist Gernot Köhler. Köhler proposes that we can use purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rates constructed by the World Bank to value the South’s exports at the North’s price level. By subtracting the actual market price that the South received for its exports from this figure, we can measure the commodities appropriated by the imperialist states, in terms of the Northern price of those commodities.
Using Köhler’s method, we find that in 2017 the ‘emerging and developing economies,’ as defined by the IMF, lost $2.2 trillion worth of goods to the ‘advanced economies.’ This represents an enormous loss for the South. These resources could have ended extreme poverty 15 times over, but instead they were transferred gratis to the core. This windfall is of enormous benefit to the centres of empire. For instance, in 2017 the US gained $2,634 per person through unequal exchange, while the average Australian citizen received $3,116 from the South. Since 1990, the North’s annual gains from unequal exchange have sat at 5.2% of GDP, considerably higher than the North’s annual growth rate. In other words, if not for imperialist plunder, aggregate income in the North would have been declining for decades. The extraordinary levels of material consumption currently enjoyed in the North are predicated upon exploitation and poverty in the periphery.
Figure 1 shows total value transfer since 1960. All up, the South has lost $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), equivalent to 97% of its 2017 GDP. If this surplus had been available to the South, it could have been reinvested in domestic economic development. If we assume this surplus would have grown at the same rate as Southern GDP, it would now be equivalent to $152 trillion.…
And don’t forget the RAND study that found in USA alone, the one percent have taken over $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent since 1975: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.
Global Investable Assets Reach Record $250 Trillion
[Institutional Investor, via The Big Picture 6-10-2021]
Use the comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Might as well send anyone who cares for an itinerary:
While this is for smart-phones, old-style cell phones can also be compromised.
If you have a phone on you, even off, it can be used to track all your movements and listen to what you are saying. Even putting it in a Faraday bag will not stop it from storing tracking movements; the moment you remove it, it will broadcast again, and not all Faraday cages are strong enough to block a phone in any case.
You should not carry a phone, at all, if you are doing anything the State or other large actors dislike. So that it is not obvious when they need to be concerned, you should occasionally not take your phone with you on other trips.
If you need comms, find another way other than cell phones. Even a burner isn’t that great -— the second you contact any other phone, you can be compromised. Old fashioned walkie-talkies with pre-agreed one use codes are better. If you need to record or take pictures, use a device which has no internet connectivity without a cable. Nothing wi-fi or cellular-enabled.
There are NO secure online comms, also. None. Things like Tor and a good (non-Western based) VPN make it a bit harder, but if anyone cares enough, they can find you — plus you don’t know what services has been compromised. Tor is heavily subsidized by the security state, a smart person doesn’t assume it’s reliable for anything the US cares about.
If anything matters, use offline comms. If you must send a message, go yourself, make sure neither you nor the recipient have a phone, and leave out any place you habitually frequent, at the very least. If you’re a messenger, same rules: Write it down, then have it burned (not shredded) after receipt.
If you do not personally control the communications network, you do not know if it has been compromised. In the last Hezbollah-Israel war, Hezbollah won the e-lint war: They had built their own private fiber-optic network underground AND Israeli soldiers carried and used cellphones. Hezbollah knew where Israeli troops were, and Israel only found out where Hezbollah troops were when a bunker opened up on them.
In the early 2000s, the Pentagon ran a war game against Iran. The General running the Iranian side, among other things, used motorcycle messengers. The US expected to have e-lint, didn’t, and that lack was one reason they lost the game.
There’s a vast array of very good surveillance tech now, of course. If someone really wants to track you and listen in on your comms, they can. But they assume e-lint will work and they have less human-intelligence than they did.
Finally, if you are doing something the State REALLY doesn’t approve of (not, of course the wonderful American and Canadian states, who are always good, mind you, but only bad states), remember the first rule of getting away with it.
STOP.
Set a date when you’ll stop and become an ordinary, boring citizen. When the date happens, just stop. Wipe everything and walk away.
Likewise, if you ever think something is OFF, stop immediately.
If you have comrades, once you stop, you never contact them again.
The longer you do whatever it is, the more likely some .01 percent audit or some-such will catch you, no matter how brilliant and careful you’ve been.
Also, don’t keep records, eh?
We’re moving into a very dystopian, surveillance state world. Gait recognition, infrared tracking, mics that can hear through walls, drones, and satellites mean the long game will have pretty much everyone under surveillance all the time, even if you aren’t being watched in particular.
For now, however, don’t make it easy for them, and to start, leave the damn phone at home. (Oh, and don’t assume cryptocurrency is anonymous. Even criminals who really know what they’re doing don’t always get away with that. Cash is still anonymous, given proper safeguards.)
(My writing helps pay my bills. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)