Wednesday 24th of April 2024
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times of crisis...

crisis

In his book “Times of Crisis” (2009 — published 2014 in English/US), on the GFC (Global Financial Crisis, with a punny reference to a French song “Le temps des Cerises”), Michel Serres tells us:

We also need to leave our emotions behind. The poor, you and me, urgently had to rescue the rich, through the intermediary of the state. The rich must have become so stupendously rich they seemed as necessary to our survival as the world [nature/planet/universe] itself.

 

Michel Serres invites us to a rethink, something that we have done here on this site since its inception in 2005 and since Gus first political cartoons of 1951. Serres takes on the great rise of the metropolises, as well as many other concepts and invite us to contemplate the evolution of mankind, in terms of invention, ability and choices. In the past, young men were destined to go to war and fight for the rich kings’s robbery of others kingdoms. Unfortunately we still do, but fighting has become so specialised with techno-stuff that only the “professional” soldiers will do. No more peasants with pitchforks fighting for god and country — and loot.

 

Here is a letter in this morning SMH (1/8/17) that sums up a little something:

 

I visit Russia regularly and have many Russian friends. (“Russian villages are disappearing”, July 31). Yes village life is dying there as it is also dying in most of the “Western” world. In Britain, where I grew up, the villages are still there as it is a much smaller country than Russia and a denser population, but they are now full of rich commuters and have none of their former soul. In Australia, which is more like Russia in population density, regional life can hardly be said to be flourishing. On the other hand, cultural life in centres like St Petersburg is flourishing. Every day there are lists of cultural events to attend – plays, concerts, opera, ballet, art galleries – all world class. I wish I could say the same for Sydney.

Veronica Paul Katoomba

 

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-letters/scott-morrison-lashes-labors-t...

 

Michel Serres gives us the statistics that since the beginning of the 20th Century (some of us were born back then in these nebulous times, before WWII) the percentage of farmers dropped from more than 50 percent to below 2 percent now. The more massive drop happened during the 1960s. Country towns are barely surviving in Europe, were it not be for the commutation to the big cities where work is basically derivative of useless and non-productive dancing: accounting, law, entertainment...

Mechanisation has accelerated our production of salads. 

Meanwhile the convenience of containers, from the Tupperware tubs to the huge steel boxes on container ship has revolutionised our sense of portions and of transportation thereof. We have changed the psyche of humans to the point that homo sapiens of Neolithic times was very different of that of today. Welcome to homo dumbo mechanicus electronicalii.

The human machine has changed through democratisation, purpose and philosophy. A philosopher would take several years of research to express and verify what I can find in ten minutes on the internet. This speed and ease of processes, comes from a long evolution of thinkers, some of whom sued god for embezzlement. 

Enter Liebniz. Mostly forgotten by the English hegemony, this great most important philosopher, the recipient of much intellectual deliberation from forbidden scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo, was at the source of our modern thinking: Mathematics, binary computing and intellectual revolutions. 

 

Mind you, unfortunately, our political systems are still lingering in the Neolithic. One could ask the question: why? We have made so much intellectual and technological progress, how come our politics still stink like shit? The answer is both simple and complex. Greed. 

Going back to the poor helping the rich to survive during the GFC, explains a lot. We value the greedy people more than we value our struggling honest selves. This contradiction is cultivated by the mediocre mass media de shittus and Hollywood, that both sleep cosily with the political elites, all designed to make sure that we get swindled as painlessly as possible through illusion of hope and heavenly transport. 

 

Luckily, in Orstralya, the government was Labor during the GFC. Through various mechanisms, it helped the poor instead of the rich. The rich and the media went up in arms like crazy hyenas. This was treason to the god of greed. The Labor government was eventually shut down in flame and was replaced rightfully by a turd. Things went back to normal and the exploitation of the poor became again the norm, with the destruction of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) to boot.

 

It has been calculated that for every tyre produced in the early 20th century, four black people died in the Congo as slaves to the rubber industry. 20 black people died for each set of tyres for a car, including the spare. Presently the resource is oil. All the wars and conflict in the Middle East and northern Africa are due to this black gold: oil (via petrodollars). Business and war go hand in hand. The "sanctions" against Russia have nothing to do with "democracy" or "choice of the leading loony" but the business. If oil is king of business, gas is the new queen. The Russians are making a mint selling gas to Europe and "we"(the Yanks) cannot allow this. And what's wrong with a bit of biffo for profit?

 

Beforehand, we must look at another resource: Guano. The 19th century king of guano, William Gibbs (1790–1875), was an English businessman, one of three founding partners in Antony Gibbs & Sons. A “religious philanthropist”, he build his own church on his estate, Tyntesfield in Wraxall, North Somerset and helped restore a lot of decrepit churches around the area, as religious fervour had become the exclusivity of old women, while the young people preferred frolics in haystacks.

 

In 1806, religious William was apprentice-clerk in his uncle George Gibbs firm, Gibbs, Bright and Gibbs. Based in the Port of Bristol, this firm acted as an agent for various shipping operators of the West African slave trade, until slavery was “abolished”.

With his brother Henry, William rebuilt his father’s business after the death of their father in 1815. The two vowed to repay their father and grandfather’s debts from bankruptcies, and had fully done so by 1840. Henry died in 1842.

Antony Gibbs & Sons, “the firm”, had opened an agents office in Lima in 1822. In 1841, the agent announced he was signing contracts with the Peruvian and Bolivian governments to purchase consignments of guano. William was reluctant at first about the value of bird shit. Imports of guano started slowly, with 182 tonnes in 1842 but grew rapidly after 1847, when Peru granted “the firm” a monopoly on trade with Europe and North America. It reached 211,000 tonnes in 1856 and 435,000 tonnes in 1862.

Science tells us that guano is a powerful fertiliser. It’s full of phosphate and nitrogen. Our “own” infamous Nauru Island — of the languishing dead “illegals” escapees from conflicts due to the petrodollar wars— was one of these guano paradise before we, Orstralyan dug it up and it became a hole. 

Far better than practicing the rotating crop with a rest every three years, with guano’s help, one could grow anything year in year out, while doubling/tripling the yields. Magic stuff. Now we make artificial guano because the birds can’t keep up with the demand. This is called super phosphate and ammonium nitrate from which we can make explosives as well. 

In the early 1850s reports began to reach Europe and Asia that the mining of guano on the Chincha Islands was reproducing the evils of slavery. In 1854 the Superintendent of British trade in China forbade British subjects or vessels from transporting indentured Chinese labour to the Chinchas and this was confirmed in the UK Parliament in 1855 with the passing of the Chinese Passengers Act. 

The Peruvian government conducted its own investigation, which told of frequent whippings and attempted suicides. As a result, it transferred the contract for the extraction of the guano to Antony Gibbs & Sons, which already was making a killing on selling the stuff. Despite this, abuse continued and in 1856 further import of Chinese labour was banned. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 Chinese labourers who had been consigned to the guano pits of Peru, not one had survived. The church “philanthropist” prayed to god that those Chinese would have reached the guano paradise in the big sky full of shitting birds...

The firm’s profits from the guano trade were between £80,000 and £100,000 a year in the 1850s and 1860s with William receiving between 50% and 70% of this shitfall, until 1864, when he began to withdraw his capital. William became the richest non-noble man in England, remembered in the Victorian music hall ditty:


William Gibbs

made his dibs, 

Selling the turds

of foreign birds

 

So, politics deliberately failed to protect the poor. And politics still do fail at this game of knaves. This is why Michel Serres demands a complete overall of our political systems in line with modernism. And this is what we’ve done since time immemorial on this site as well. “Democracy isn’t a spectator sport” is our motto. We don’t read the democratic sports pages that have been duly redacted to suit the couch potato of democracy. 

Back to the great philosophical journal of our times, Mad magazine, that tells us sadly with irony the size of a lobbyist backhander to a politician:

 

mad politics

 

 

As the cleaning lady used to say:

"Politics have been created to give our lies currency of power. Religions have been created to give our lies value to our useless death. Religious lies and political lies go hand in hand, the sons of which are business and war."

 

Gus Leonisky

Local pollie shooter...

 

 

sputnik deserves to be spanked...

Today, Sputnik tells us about a new scientific discovery about the great extinction of the Permian/Triassic interface. The science is good but the image of dinosaurs used at the top of the article is crap. Dinosaurs only appeared in the second half of the Triassic and, though Sputnik does not suggest it, it implies they went with this extinction event. Dinosaurs were "victims" of the next great extinction event, 65 million years ago. 

 

Read more: 

https://sputniknews.com/science/201707311056051737-great-permian-extinct...

Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz...

 

Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz (/ˈlaɪbnɪts/;[8] German: [ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈvɪlhɛlm fɔn ˈlaɪbnɪts][9] or [ˈlaɪpnɪts];[10] French: Godefroi Guillaume Leibnitz;[11] 1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath and philosopher who occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy, having developed differential and integral calculus independently of Isaac Newton.[12] Leibniz's notation has been widely used ever since it was published. It was only in the 20th century that his Law of Continuity and Transcendental Law of Homogeneity found mathematical implementation (by means of non-standard analysis). He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685[13] and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is the foundation of virtually all digital computers.

In philosophy, Leibniz is most noted for his optimism, i.e. his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created, an idea that was often lampooned by others such as Voltaire. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th-century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or prior definitions rather than to empirical evidence.

Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in philosophy, probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. He wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology. Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, but primarily in Latin, French, and German.[14] There is no complete gathering of the writings of Leibniz in English.[15]

...

Leibniz never married. He complained on occasion about money, but the fair sum he left to his sole heir, his sister's stepson, proved that the Brunswicks had, by and large, paid him well. In his diplomatic endeavors, he at times verged on the unscrupulous, as was all too often the case with professional diplomats of his day. On several occasions, Leibniz backdated and altered personal manuscripts, actions which put him in a bad light during the calculus controversy. On the other hand, he was charming, well-mannered, and not without humor and imagination.[41] He had many friends and admirers all over Europe. On Leibniz's religious views, although he is considered by some biographers as a deist, he has also been claimed as a philosophical theist

read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz

 

Even the eighteenth-century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, (1713- 1784) whose views were very often at odds with those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, writing in his entry on Leibniz in the Encyclopedia, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What he has composed on the world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 709)

Read more:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/

 

Gus is an atheist... Meanwhile at the political front:

 

There’s something different about the crop of Democrats running for Congress in 2018. As in previous years, the party has recruited a small army of veterans in high-profile races and in Republican-held districts. There are loads of state legislators, business owners, and government officials.

But the candidates also include a volcanologist who’s worried that her favorite research spot will be opened up for development; an aerospace engineer who’s running against the climate-denying head of the House Science Committee; a pediatrician who spends part of the year treating leprosy patients in Vietnam; and a physicist who worries what budget cuts would mean to the federal research facility where she spent her career.

All told, more than a dozen Democratic candidates with science backgrounds have announced their candidacies for Congress or are expected to in the coming months. The boomlet of STEM-based candidates amounts to a minor seismic event in a community where politics and research have traditionally gone together like sodium and water. Trump has been in office just six months, but he’s already done something remarkable—he’s gotten scientists to run for office.

The surge of science-based candidates has been aided by a new political outfit called 314 Action, launched last summer by Shaughnessy Naughton, a breast cancer researcher from Pennsylvania who ran for Congress in 2014 and 2016 . The group, named for the first three digits of Pi, aims to do for candidates with scientific backgrounds what EMILY’s List has done for pro-choice women—funding, recruiting, and training candidates at every level of government. So far 6,000 scientists have reached out to the group about running for federal, state, and local offices; and 314 plans to also back candidates in three dozen school board races this fall. Washington has plenty of lawyers; maybe it’s time for a fresh experiment.

read more:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/donald-trumps-war-on-scienti...

 

the trick of the trade...

In a worrying article, the New York Times shouts with a headline:

 

Russia’s Military Drills Near NATO Border Raise Fears of Aggression

 

One could start to tighten one's butt and smack this naughty Russia... But hang on a minute, we have to understand a few things: first, NATO has no "borders". Only countries have borders. Second, these Russian army drills are ONLY a mirror response to NATO having done "military exercises", "war games" "war simulation" "biological warfare laboratories development" on the border of Russia for a few years by now. Third in the article the New York Times says with the assurance of a lying salesman that: ... "Beyond Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election in support of the Trump campaign"... Wait! There has been NO PROOF showing that Russia interfered in the US Presidential elections. NONE. ZERO. The fact that some of Trump's troops had relations with some "Russian people" is not a proof on how the Russians, especially Putin, "interfered" with the elections, which to say the least should be annulled should this have been the case. 

Fourth, The NYT is still harping on about Russia "has in recent years deployed forces to Syria, seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine, rattled the Baltic States with snap exercises and buzzed NATO planes and ships."  Hello? Crimea is populated by 90 per cent Russians, has held a democratic vote to rejoin Russia, like Scotland decided to stay in the UK instead of going it alone a couple of years ago. Ukraine is divided with the Donbass area being populated by ... Russians mostly, who want nothing to do with Ukrainian Nazi dictatorship as installed by the west with the help of the IMF, Soros disinformation channels (mostly supported by the CIA) and $5 billion of US cash to finance thugs to create a "coup" in Ukraine. As well the US (NATO) has been doing military exercises in the Baltic and the Black Seas with the intent to "rattle" Russia. Russia is not idle and feels the US threat to its own sovereignty. Imagine Russia or China doing naval war games in the Gulf of Mexico for crissake!

The Syrian crime rests with the US that had decided to do a "regime change" (without doing one officially) by supporting terrorists in Syria to oust Assad who did not want anything to do with a Saudi pipeline.

99 per cent of terrorism (Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Nusra) in the world is coming from a Wahabbi supported Sunni extremist religious branch of the Saudi house of shit. The US supports the Saudi house of shit. What do you expect? The smell of roses? Are the USA supporting terrorism by default? One should wonder...

The NYT still promotes shit interpretation of "news" whatever that is — on and on and on...

Russia is not going to aggress. The USA have been, are and will be aggressing...

now — telling the truth...

 

US State Department considers dropping 'democracy' from its mission statement


Change, if it becomes permanent, would sow confusion throughout the ranks of civil and foreign service


 The mission statement is important because it sends a signal about American priorities and intentions to foreign governments and people around the world EPA

The US State Department is considering dropping "democracy" from its key mission statement as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson orders his department to redefine its purpose to the world.

The draft statements under review right now are similar to the old mission statement, except for one thing - any mention of promoting democracy is being eliminated.

According to an internal email that went out on Friday, the State Department's Executive Steering Committee convened a meeting of leaders to draft new statements on the department's purpose, mission and ambition, as part of the overall reorganisation of the State Department and USAID. (The draft statements were being circulated for comment on Friday and could change before being finalised.)

read more:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-state-de...

 

This is an improvement. In the past, Us methods of imposing democracy on some countries meant annihilation of the people in favour of big business. Now the State Department is calling the process under a different more truthful name: profitocracy.

 

from colorful hot dog to chief sausage...

 

A prominent US Republican says President Donald Trump is struggling with the limitations of a job he never expected to get.

Michael Steele, a former chairman of the powerful Republican National Committee, told ABC News Mr Trump was still grappling with the transition from colourful businessman and reality-TV star to Commander in Chief.

"Not everyone listens to you just because you're president," Mr Steele said.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-07/donald-trump-obsessed-by-his-own-s...

 

Every media and its dog is trying to make him fall of his perch. No-one likes him. Many people though he got the job by default. But one thing is clear, he might have said some awful things during his campaign, he did not lie. Now everyone is trying to make sure he can't do what he said he was going to do especially be friend with Russia. On this subject alone, the entire USA establishment has gone completely bonkers...

 

See also:

http://rall.com/comic/scaramucci-fired

 

next !...

“White House chief of staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” it read. “We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”

Reports on Friday had stated that Donald Trump had decided to remove his chief strategist, but that the White House was trying to work out the details.

A Trump ally told the Guardian that the leaks about Bannon’s fate were part of an effort to pressure the White House aide to step down. “They are trying to get him to quit,” the source said.

Minutes later, the Guardian learned that Bannon was out.

One source told the Guardian that Bannon had officially resigned weeks ago, before the furore over Trump’s remarks equating neo-Nazis and leftwing protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/18/steve-bannon-white-house...