The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Open Thread

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (No Ukraine.)

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 1, 2022

12 Comments

  1. NR

    I posted this before, but it wasn’t in an open thread, so:

    https://edition.cnn.com/2022/04/25/europe/slovenia-election-environmentalists-beat-populists-intl/index.html

    A pro-democracy/pro-environment party has defeated the ruling populist party in Slovenia. It would be interesting to see how they did it, since it seems to be counter to the worldwide trend right now.

  2. bruce wilder

    What if they gave a COVID wave and no one acknowledged it? Can you have a pandemic where everyone is “on their own”?

  3. Willy

    Saw a 4 YO Democracy Now! video about PTB USA being behind dozens of coups, many of which were aimed to topple pro-democracy/pro-environmental governments.

    Kidding about the pro-environmental part. But the former is probably well known to readers here, with the latter usually left to corporate propagandists to handle.

    Pro-democracy/pro-environment seems to be the natural desire for most, the wanting to create a fertile ground for intelligent discussion towards solutions to solve problems with an eye towards limiting the negative consequences of any mistakes or blowback. At least to me.

    But then there I go again, assuming the mob even knows what “the blob” is. Seems the mob just wants to do what Brian Boytano would do (South Park). Or The Donald, or Elon, or Vladimir…

    On top of learning how to emulate how the Slovenian democracy/environmentalists did it, we’d need to be better at managing the military-industrial-media complex propaganda attacks, and all their other nefarious techniques.

  4. different clue

    People here may remember that I have every now and then offered a link to one particular post or another at the blog Rigorous Intuition 2.0, by the Canadian blogger Jeff Wells.

    One such post I have linked to at least twice over the past some years was titled ” Flight of Capital” and was findable under the ” 9/ll ” category of posts.

    Just recently, I notice that the ” Flight of Capital” post is missing from the Rigorous Intuition blog . . .silently removed. So I went to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and looked up the Rigorous Intuition screenshots that are archived over there at the Wayback Machine, and I note that somebody has reached back into the 2009 screen-capture for Rigorous Intuition 2.0 and removed that very same blogpost ” Flight of Capital” from that archived screenshot as well.

    Somebody decided that that particular blogpost really needs to be removed from public knowledge and public findability and public memory. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is clearly not a reliable record of ” the past” if somebody can reach back into it and retro-erase something which was there until it was silently retro-erased.

    Now all I can do is claim that blogpost did indeed exist. I have no way to prove that. Because it isn’t there anymore, and it isn’t there in such a way as to fabricate the appearance of “never having been there” to begin with.

  5. Jim Harmon

    @dc,

    The “flight of Capital” post is online at https://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/06/flight-of-capital.html

  6. Ché Pasa

    I assume our overclass knows precisely where each and every nuclear-armed missile in the whole wide world is aimed, at least to the extent they are aimed, and their military people know (pretty much) where they would launch from and how to take out most of them. Let’s say 80% or so. That means maybe 20% of those missiles would reach their targets in an all-out apocalyptic scenario, BUT how likely is “all out”? Meaning every possible nuke is detonated. Not very, right?

    In any likely exchange between USandNato vs Russian Federation, we’d prolly see about 20% of the nuclear arsenal used up, and of those, 20% or so would possibly reach their targets. In other words, “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed”, but the cumulative toll of death and destruction would certainly be tolerable to our overclass, no?

    The dead would hardly be missed. Look at the deaths from the pandemic, overdoses, “deaths of despair”, regular suicides, famines and diseases and the many, many wars of aggression launched in the last couple of decades. Millions upon millions dead, whole cities laid waste. entire regions rent asunder and plunged into chaos. Seems to be going well for the overclass, no? As for the rest, well, they’ll (we’ll) just have to get used to it.

    Sad to say, this is how our rulers think about these things. We are on the brink right now, and so far, nobody’s backing down.

  7. different clue

    @Jim Harmon,

    You are correct, and thank you for finding that.

    It seems that there are two different URLs for the Rigorous Intuition content . . .
    a ” jeffwells.com” URL and a “rigint.blogspot.com” URL. And I found my way into the ” “jeffwells.com ” rather than the “rigint.blogspot.com” choice. And the ” jeffwells.com” choice does not have the Flight of Capital post. But the ” rigint. . . etc.” choice does have it.

    So thanks again for showing me that and now I know the proper pathway in. It almost seems as if the ” jeffwells.com” choice is some kind of decoy choice luring people into an incomplete version of Rigorous Intuition 2.0. it certainly functioned that way for me just lately.

  8. different clue

    @ Che Pasa,

    How and why would Our overclass know where Their overclass has Their atom bombs and H bombs targeted? And if Their overclass knows that Our overclass knows where They have targeted Their A & H bombs, why wouldn’t They just retarget Their A & H bombs to spoil Our interceptive planning?

    And if They became afraid that Our overclass has such total view into Their targetting and every change to their targetting, why wouldn’t They just put all their A & H bombs on ” random target shuffle” so that even They themselves wouldn’t know in advance where each particular bomb would fall and therefor We could not possibly know in advance?

  9. Ché Pasa

    Well, dc,

    There are only so many interesting targets for nuclear weapons around the world. It’s not particularly difficult to figure out where they are and what the likely losses and casualties would be should the missiles and bombers and such start flying. Our overclass may not be adept at much, but…they can figure this out, as can the everyone else’s overclass.

    I go back to kid-hood and our calculations of how far from likely targets we were living, no matter where we lived. It was never more than 10 miles and was usually much closer.

    Ah, those were the days!

  10. Z

    The production team of Weekend at Biden’s and the lead stiff himself, who have been sitting on a legal opinion for over a year, that they have completely redacted from public view, on whether they can forgive student debt by executive order, are currently designing some way of forgiving some amount of student debt, with means testing of course, and also likely “cutting the rug “with Let Them Eat Shit Mitch and their other dancing partners across the aisle to close the loophole that it can be done by executive order and hence route any future movements to forgive student debt through our rulers’ rigged obstacle course of Congress.

    Again, student debtors ought to bring their movement to the Federal Reserve, which has printed about 8 trillion dollars since 2008 to keep this debtors’ prison of an economy intact and maintain our rulers’ wealth and power over us by inflating asset prices and providing a cavalcade of EZ money to our financial overlords that was also used for job-killing and rent-raising mergers and placed the cost of rent control via home ownership out of their reach, and demand the Fed dish out a couple of trillion to them to loosen some of their chains. Judging by the amount of money the Fed printed up for Wall Street and the banking system and their regulation thereof the Fed is also much more lenient on means testing.

    Z

  11. Z

    And if they ever hope to confront this ecocidal economic system, which threatens to incinerate us off this planet and is built upon the anti-intellectual idiocy of infinite growth on a finite planet, they better begin to pull back the curtain on the shapeshifters who create capital to defy the physical reality of its contradictions.

    Z

  12. different clue

    A further thought occurred to me about the findability-difference between rigint Intuition and jeffwells intuition . . . . it used to be that search engining took me right to the complete Rigorous Intuition posts. But lately the rigint Rigorous Intuition has been deeply obscurified in order to stop people from being able to find it while pretending that it has not been officially censored. It is now findable only as a tiny little clickline on a screen for the Rigorous Intuition chatboard-usergroup. I would never have noticed it.

    Whereas the search obstruction engines now strictly and only feature and dislead the searcher towards the jeffwells Rigorous Intuition URL with many missing articles.
    I suspect the search obstruction engines are doing and will do a lot of that kind of “plausible deniability” hiding and losing and misdirectioning of things without overtly erasing them so as to claim “no censorship here”.

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