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

Open Thread

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 21, 2021

22 Comments

  1. Willy

    For the unfamiliar, seems a decent counter to Prager U:

    https://www.gravelinstitute.org/watch

  2. someofparts

    Willy – great link, thanks!

  3. Joseph E. Kelleam

    WT actual F does that video, or the whole Yale Halloween thingie, have to with Zionism?

  4. someofparts

    plague species – another great link, thanks again – I guess it’s great links day at Ian’s house. I am so bookmarking that substack account. Substack rocks!

    Hope you and your family are enjoying this beautiful day. Frolic before the mosquitoes show up is my motto.

    Zionists – oppressed people who liberate themselves and then treat others badly – instead of learning kindness from their own suffering they inflict brutality on their vulnerable neighbors –

    If you want to know how right-wing demagogues will win the immigrant vote following Biden’s reign, take a second look at that video – look at the hatred on the faces of Yale students who consider themselves victims – and imagine what other immigrants think of that – when their businesses are burned down in riots led by those “victims” and they are told to suck it up and get over it in the name of a perverted parody of justice

    On a different topic, here’s another great link –

    https://tomdispatch.com/on-january-6th-the-u-s-became-a-foreign-country/

    This is Pat Tillman’s brother spelling out the connection between the events of Jan 6 and our tradition of attacking the governments of our neighbors overseas.

  5. Willy

    @someofparts, I got tired of having to search around for Prager debunkers, to fill in all the gaping gaps and obvious questions regarding Prager ideology. Of course the billionaire Wilks brothers of fracking fame funds Prager. Gravel is grass roots funded.

    Zionists – oppressed people who liberate themselves and then treat others badly – instead of learning kindness from their own suffering they inflict brutality on their vulnerable neighbors

    My wife’s 12 siblings were abused by their mean drunk of a father. Some liberated themselves by leaving home early, and others were liberated after their mother left to move in with her sister living out-of-state.

    Yet, in adulthood all of the kids own 1-4 children seem quite functional and normal, with no outward signs of abuse or stories of abuse whatsoever. And some of the adults are even alcoholics themselves. Could there be another causal factor involved with this Zionism of which you speak?

  6. S Brennan

    Donald Trump, Jim Bridenstine, John Culberson, Mike Pence deserve a lot of credit pushing for budgets reviving NASA from it’s mothballed state under Obama/Biden’s miserly requests. Luckily, it looks like Biden, as Prez, for now, isn’t going to repeat his/Obama’s earlier foolishness vis a vi NASA and that’s a good thing if it holds.

    NASA has done more with less for decades, is there waste, I sure there is but, nobody ever joined the space program public/private to get rich, we do it because, in the long run, it’s our only option. And by that, I don’t mean to imply we “abandon” earth, quite the contrary, to save earth, we must advance in space technology across the board.

    All Americans can be proud of this NASA accomplishment, it’s a big step.

    https://www.americaspace.com/2021/03/18/nasa-conducts-successful-second-test-fire-of-sls-moon-rocket-core-stage/#more-164118

  7. Hugh

    I favor doing away with the filibuster. McConnell talks about scorched earth and the end of the Senate. I say good riddance. A majority of Americans live in 9 states. They have just 18 Senators. The less than 50% of Americans have the other 82. This is crazy. And the filibuster makes that lack of representation even worse. Getting rid of the filibuster would return accountability to parties. They wouldn’t be able to hide behind “Gee, we really wanted to do a bunch of stuff but couldn’t because the filibuster.” What McConnell doesn’t like is that ending the filibuster would further consolidate the Republican party as a minority party. My view is that parties should be held responsible for their policies. They deliver or else, which is another reason that McConnell really, really hates the idea of no more filibuster. And it doesn’t let the Democrats off the hook either. They use the power for us or lose it.

  8. someofparts

    “Could there be another causal factor involved with this Zionism of which you speak?”

    I don’t know. This is a case where it would be great if others who know more about the history of these situations, i.e. Zionism in Israel or civil rights in the U.S., wanted to join the chat and add nuance that I don’t know enough to provide.

    Mainly it just puzzled me that people with a history of being severely mistreated could be cruel to others after they survived the horrors others inflicted on them. I am not surprised by it anymore, but I still don’t understand it.

    I’m pleased to hear that the children of your wife and her many siblings are all doing well. It would be interesting to figure out how that happened.

  9. Ché Pasa

    There can be no Revolution until it comes. Many years ago, I pointed out the Revolution came and we missed it. It was the rightist reactionary Revolution we’re still living through and subject to. No, voting is not going to change that fundamental. As theater, perhaps, Election Day is something worthwhile, but in the end, by now we know we’ll get more of the same old same old no matter who sits in the big chair. Right?

    I think the Biden people are trying to throw out some of those rules and expectations, not unlike the disruption the Trumpists engaged in. Progressives (quien es?) are getting a lot of what they said they wanted right out of the gate, much like the rightists did back in the day, and of course they’re not satisfied, gratified or even objectively pleased enough to smile. No, it’s not enough, not even close, it’s not even a down payment, it’s table scraps at best, and after all, if in the end the rules change so much that the entrenched oligarchy no longer need even listen to the Rabble, we’re done for.

    There is no Rebel Alliance, and the Empire is not about to collapse. The struggle is over who is to rule it, not whether it is to be. And rebellion is mostly commentary.

    Jerry Rubin told me a long time ago that you shake and move the status quo, the immovable, with Theater. You make a scene like none that’s gone before, disorient, disrupt, and who knows, disable the ability of the rulers to rule. He could do it, and he did it, over and over again. But in 1972, with the staggering loss of McGovern to Nixon, he said it was over, there would be no going back, no real forward movement again, we would have to learn to make the best of it, come what may.

    1972.

    Almost 50 years.

    Not the 30 or 40 we keep hearing about. And these days, even Theater is dark.

  10. Willy

    someofparts, I don’t get it either. I used to hear that abuse perpetuates with the generations, but that particular family breaks the paradigm. Could economics be a factor? The men all lucked into reasonably decent paying jobs so low stress there. Half the women are divorced and struggling a bit, but somehow their kids aren’t nuts.

    Sure, Israeli Jews came from less but they did seem to have received substantial aid money, enough to kickstart a decent economy. And of course the USA backs whatever BS they pull on the natives, so taking over some Palestinians land seems rationalized. I don’t know how many are Zionists. Sometimes it seems like more of an American Evangelical thing than it is for the more secular typical Israeli. The payot and shtreimel bunch seems a small minority.

    I worked on the USA west coast with a Palestinian and a Greek-Israeli who were traveling buddies. They’d met at an office in Tel Aviv. I figured out the Israeli Arab (Palestinian) origins of “Dave” and by request only discussed such things in private for obvious reasons. He made it sound a little like the million plus “Arabs” living in Israel are doing better than their brothers in Jordan and Lebanon, and far better than those in the Gaza. Maybe there’s some kind of pecking order dynamic there where remaining Arabs know they’re relatively privileged and mind their own business lest they run afoul of ‘the system”. I’m certainly no expert and can only speculate.

  11. Willy

    A revolution might need a foundation first.

    I think of westernization in Japan. Sure there’s a few kimono and sumo clubs and all that bowing politeness left over from days long gone. But it’s a western nation now, as in, westernization meaning “consumerist capitalism”. There are convenience stores and trinket shops everywhere selling stuff that’s Japanese in look and feel, and a whole lot of it. In the culture of old Japan women cared for and kept a few kimonos for generations. Today they’re even faddier than westerners, with outfits constantly coming and going in and out of their closets.

    What I’m saying is that too many people, ex hippies included, want the latest in stuff. Until the brainwashy consumerist capitalism addictions end, it’ll be hard to get a decent revolution going because we won’t just be fighting The Man, but all those ladies who don’t want a revolution to get in the way of their fashion addictions. And don’t get me started on most men and their toys.

    I’m one of the few who admires the quiet revolutionary, who live their own way and build most of their own stuff out in nature. There’s a guy in Northern California who’d been living in houses he dug into the ground, materials cost bare minimal, for decades. And another around there who somehow bought hundreds of acres of Redwood forest in the ‘70s and has kept it all pristine, except for the Christmas tree farm he earned his living with. At a very fit 80-something he now wants to run it as a vacation getaway (with little tent cabins) for bay area software types wanting to take a break from all that tech. And stuff. I hope he succeeds.

    It’s hard to imagine how people will voluntarily want to move away from all their trendy lifestyle stuff, outside of catastrophic economic collapse that is. Somehow we have to convince the ones who haven’t gotten to that point yet.

  12. someofparts

    China has covid under control. They can open for business again.

    In the United States, vaccine manufacturers are reassuring their investors that a year from now when everyone will need boosters, they will be raising their prices 900%.

    Our economy is never coming back, we will never have access to healthcare, and our passports will never be welcome in the rest of the world again.

    Young libertarian technocrats took over Mexico starting in the 80s. They plunged the country into such poverty that the nutritional quality people could afford dropped drastically. Now the country has sky-high levels of obesity and diabetes. This created a hideous vulnerability to covid and the rate of people under 65 who die from it has been extreme as a result. So Mexico finally gave the libertarians the boot and elected somebody who has started reversing the destruction caused by the neoliberals.

    China has the pandemic under control and even Mexico has stopped circling the drain.

    The U.S. has sky-high levels of obesity and diabetes too of course, but instead of making it easier for people to afford healthy food, our rulers realized that just jacking up the cost of insulin would be better for them.

    Also like Mexico, people in the U.S. have organized and pushed to change our rulers through elections. Unlike Mexico, it doesn’t seem to be possible here. Our elections are too dishonest and our media are too good at keeping us clueless.

    Our rulers are expanding death and destitution for the majority of us to facilitate an exponential accumulation of wealth for themselves. For the majority of us, the pandemic will never be controlled and our passports will be worthless for the rest of our lives.

    Large parts of the rest of the world will get back to normal economic life and freedom to travel. The U.S. wealthy will be able to buy their way into that, but our domestic population at large will not.

    Now China tells us to our face, in front of the world, that we are not qualified to talk to them from a position of strength.

    The failure of the state has already happened here. No matter what happens next, we are trapped.

  13. The gateway pundit (right wing) website is letting severe (but reasonable) criticism of Trump through, even as they also censor serious comments – including my own. My latest comment that got censored regarded General Flynn, who I am suspicious of, though I appreciate his role in trying to stop the election steal

    I just posted a comment to a gateway pundit article, “URGENT: US Veteran and Activist Joe Biggs Needs Help Fighting Trumped Up Charges Over Capitol Protest” about a guy that trespassed on Capitol Hill on January 6. The article states:

    However, due to the charges and the media frothing at the mouth to demonize him, Biggs has lost his job. Sun Trust also decided that he could no longer bank with them. He has been banned from GoFundMe, Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, and nearly every other service you could think of for people who need to fundraise for a little help.

    It seems, almost, that the media and their cancel campaign is designed to make life unlivable.

    My comment:

    According to Mike Cernovich, who was interviewed on March 10 on the Viva Frei youtube channel,

    from the transcript @ 49:59

    so why in the world would i devote my spiritual and psychological energy for donald j trump who raised 260 million dollars to investigate the election after the election and nobody knows where that money is. but it’s not going to defense fund for the people charged with uh trespassing. it’s not going to help any maga grandmas. everybody else is on their own. we don’t know where that money went. so get real right. get get real
    (emphasis mine)

    Here’s another recent comment of mine, that has not been censored:

    Trump is is a consequential enough backstabber that I think there should be organized, funded efforts to educate both his uncritical fanboys, as well as the public, as a whole, that Trump betrayed MAGA, and the correct response is to double down, with new leaders. We need a “MAGA, not Trump” movement and educational campaign. We apparently disagree that secession should be a primary focus, though I’m not opposed to that, on principle. (The Constitution is a wonderful, but flawed document, which doesn’t make a legal secession process explicit. If it had, we never would have had a Civil War. If Texas is a treaty exception, well and good for Texas.)
    The primary focus should be on national populists taking over the Republican Party (as has been discussed on War Room Pandemic), as well as closing legal loopholes at the state level that allows for fraudulent voting (as has been discussed by Robert Barnes on Viva Frei yt channel) . Also, left leaning populists should take over the Democratic Party. There had been movement in this vein in recent years, but apparently (following Jimmy Dore) they’ve all been co-opted by Democratic Party insiders.

    So here is what did get censored:

    You seem curiously unable to think outside of the box. Here we are on the intertube discussing not just any topic, but topics spun out of an interview of Mike Flynn.
    Not Mike Flynn the active, current general, but Mike Flynn the private citizen.
    How is this possible? Because of the 1st Amendment, and the nice fact that Mike Flynn has a mouth, and working vocal chords.
    Likewise, he could have REQUESTED interviews here, at War Room Pandemic, breitbart, yadda yadda, and said “based on my experience, a false flag event at the Capitol would be easily accomplished, and I’m aware of no interdiction efforts (plus the FBI is corrupt as hell). I tried telling Trump to do something but he a) wouldn’t listen b) didn’t understand c) feels helpless against the Deep State, d) FILL IN THE BLANK. Patriots need to keep alert to any setups, at the very least.”
    Of course, this in no way guarantees an interdiction; and, in fact, given how corrupt the Deep State and more visible parts of the US government are, it seems almost unlikely. (Plus feckless, bizarro Trump can’t be relied on to to the right thing. ) However, given enough media attention, it would have increased the chance of the false flag being abandoned, before January 6; furthermore, it would have made the persecution of MAGA types, who at worst trespassed on the Capitol, causing no violence or property damage, more difficult, even with a failed or non-existent interdiction.
    AND FURTHERMORE, even at this late date, after the fact, it would would increase the political pressure on not just the Deep State, but also weak or corrupt Democrats and yes Republicans (like Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson) to focus on the collusion.
    You seem quite the defender of Flynn, even if you failed to understand or address my points. Do you think that, in Flynn’s eyes, General Honore’s declaration of likely Capitol Hill police collusion is wrong? Do you think he has some moral obligation to keep his mouth shut about this, no matter what his opinion on the matter is? General Honore wasn’t afraid to speak to this. Why is Flynn, who you say is “a great patriot”?
    What about you? You are presumably a patriot. How do you feel about the sincere, patriotic MAGA types being hung out to dry? Are you also keeping silent about the false flag elements? Do you think I should shut up about it?
    Please note: I have no problem with Flynn’s attempt to stop the steal. In fact, I admire him for that. But I see nothing to admire in anybody of consequence who turns a blind eye to the false flag evidence. And Flynn, as somebody who can get the President’s ear (even if he has to turn to conservative media, like the gateway pundit, to do so) and furthermore has an IC background, is certainly a “person of consequence”. AFAICT, Flynn has failed, and is failing, to do anything to negate the false flag, with ruinous consequences for patriots that showed up on Jan 6.

    I welcome you to show me facts indicating that I’ve got things wrong.

    No explanation is given for what is censored, and what is not. As I’ve also called Trump a “pig” (as in self-centered) in a recent comment that didn’t get censored, it’s allowable to be a bit rude. Possibly loyalty by the censor to Flynn is the difference. But I am also wondering if the intention of the censoring is to tamp down awareness of the false flag aspects of Jan 6, in general; or else, to tamp down awareness of (possible) Flynn complicity.

  14. Plague Species

    Thanks, someofparts. In our neck of the woods, it’s tick season. We found one on the dog yesterday after a long hike. It was a Lone Star tick. Like a good Texan, it wasn’t wearing a mask despite Biden’s “warning.”

  15. Bridget

    This is a case where it would be great if others who know more about the history of these situations, i.e. Zionism in Israel or civil rights in the U.S., wanted to join the chat and add nuance that I don’t know enough to provide.

    There was excellent commentary of this type on the Mondoweiss website years ago. There were some people commenting at Mondoweiss who grew up and lived in Israel, saw through the ocean of Zionist propaganda they were swimming in, and wanted to help others see and understand. They referred to it as “ziocaine” to illustrate the effects it has on people subjected to it.

    Unfortunately, the comments section at Mondoweiss gradually went from a venue that fostered open thought, investigation and discussion to one much more amenable to the Zionist narrative of events.

  16. Plague Species

    metamars, I’m of the disposition that when retired military higher-ups retire, they should be exterminated (one would hope voluntarily), not revered and certainly not allowed to have any influence in anything whatsoever. If they won’t go out to pasture entirely and willingly and humbly and graciously, well, they should be forcefully pasturized. Far too many are meddlesome and dangerous actually. Flynn is an example and so is Lang. But they are myriad and we need to put a check on them because they’re off-the-hook and out-of-control like so many others and so many other things.

  17. Hugh

    metamars, all that incoherent screed of yours lacked was a few UFOs flying around in it.

  18. Stirling S Newberry

    Sent to students of what ostensibly is a class on D&D:

    I know that you are not going to read this. But here it is anyway. In the 1930s the was an idea: the play of a game could be the model to sort alternative results. Thus was born “the theory of games.”

    So:
    Theory of Games and Economic Behavior mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern which was partially published in 1928 with the final published in 1944.

    This led to the theory of Computing by Turing and the Turing Test, originally called the “imitation game.” He’s is important.

    It gradually filtered out partially because other people had been working on similar ideas. In theatre, Samuel Beckett wrote “Waiting for Godot” was the two main characters are not characters with a life but players in a game. The advertisement became the production. This means Bertolt Brecht.

    Eventually, game playing was all in government and corporations.

    For example, to games on nuclear war: Thomas Schelling with Arms and Influence in 1966. (He died in 2016. Kubrick consulted on him for Dr. Strangelove.)

    Criticism of literature came under this influence with Derrida and Foucault: history and literature were about power. Derrida wrote Dissemination which is a good place to start because it the idea that a dialog was a game and pharmakeus was “the game” that was known to the players.

    So what does this have to do with D&D? Think about computer programming: each question has known answers or it is a “bug.” This means it is a series of games chosen by the programmer. Lots of the people who played D&D (and similar sorts of games) were in comp sci. Not an accident. That why I recommend Playing at the World by Jon Peterson for an overview of no only game playing but the meta of game playing. (You should learn “C” by K&R but that another discussion…)

    Does this mean “the game” is it? No, we have moved beyond that to simulation, which is different in a number of ways. But Roleplaying Games are looking beyond. As genetics is to games epigenetic is to simulations. This is where we are now.

  19. someofparts

    Bridget – Sorry to hear about Mondoweiss. Someone at the Agonist recommended it years ago. The Agonist is gone now and it sounds like Mondoweiss is too, in any sense that matters. Damn shame. Finding solid sources that cut through mainstream media nonsense is to pursue a moving target in my experience. Thanks for the tip though.

  20. my comment mentioning Cernovich got a (seemingly) informative answer:

    Very true. And Christopher Miller was brought in specifically for that task – wife noted he took an “overnight bag” to work that day. He was going to be BUSY, see.

    In a January 4 memo,Miller (not the DC Mayor) prohibited deploying D.C. Guard members with weapons, helmets, body armor or riot control agents without his personal approval.

    On January 5, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy issued a memo placing limits on the District of Columbia National Guard.

    Maj. Gen. William J. Walker, the commanding general of the DC National Guard, later explained: “All military commanders normally have immediate response authority to protect property, life, and in my case, federal functions – federal property and life. But in this instance I did not have that authority.”

    IT WAS A SET-UP. Trump was a Pied Piper – why he didn’t hire MAGAs, or keep the promises that would have saved the country, using the court-cleared laws already on the books.

    We can lay blame for lack of Capitol Hill police coverage on Jan. 6 as high as Pelosi. But it looks like the military is definitely in on it.

    Does this mean that Honore, if he starts getting too much of the truth out, is liable to be fired by Pelosi, AND also ordered by the military to cover things up? Wikipedia lists him as “retired”, so I think that means the military can’t order him to do anything.

    I just looked over his latest tweets. He’s a frequent re-tweeter. Not much about Jan 6, but he did retweet a Mar 15 post with a CNN link, smearing “at worst” Sen Ron Johnson as a racist. They article says,

    Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is very good at one thing: Making comments that are, at best, ill-informed and at worst, racist and/or dangerous.

    He’s suggested Speaker Nancy Pelosi was somehow behind the January 6 riot at the US Capitol. He’s said the riot wasn’t actually an “armed insurrection.” He’s suggested that there were professional protesters stirring up the problems that day and that they might have been affiliated with radical leftist groups. …

    So Honore retweets an article quoting a US Senator suggesting Pelosi, who had ultimate authority over the Capitol Police, was complicit. And Honore thinks Capitol Hill police were complicit.

    But apparently Honore can’t fathom that the complicity just might rise from the Capitol Hill police rank and file level to the Pelosi level. Or, am I judging prematurely?

    Well, won’t be holding my breath that Honore will get to the bottom of things. I still have more hope in him than, say, a Tucker Carlson. But that’s not saying much.

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