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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2023-102
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
> Now the US has abandoned the Washington Consensus and decided to go all in with protectionism and industrial policy. And that’s because we supposedly need to do this to keep from falling behind. But weren’t we told that these policies slow economic development?
It’s annoying when you get lectured to by more successful countries. It’s especially annoying when the lecture comes from self righteous societies that don’t follow their own advice. Is it any wonder that developing countries have lost respect for the US government. <
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Other issues:
Shameful:
Of interest:
Oil thieves:
Use as open (not Ukraine related) thread …
Another oldie but goldie (early April!) from Simplicius:
The video highlights how the CEO of CNN calls into the newsroom each and every morning with a strict guidance of what they will and will not cover for that day; what will be the chief topics and angles, which narratives to run, etc.
From the opening seconds of the leaked call, you can hear Zucker directly tell his editorial staff: “I don’t care about the MSNBC stuff…stay focused on the impeachment.” Further in the video he conveys very specific directions for what to run on air, how to run it, which Republican politicians to ‘call out’. In short, he is laying out the entire game plan of the day to the CNN newsroom, leaving zero possibility for personal ‘journalistic integrity’ or editorial decision-making.
This means there is zero independent editorial freedom or leeway, but rather the CNN newsroom takes direct diktats from the CEO and they run only and exactly what he wants them to run. Every single major newsroom operates the same way.
But then ask yourself: who is giving Jeff Zucker the directives to pass on down the line? At the higher level, we know these CEOs all form a globalist network of hobnobbers at institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, Davos/WEF, etc. There they rub shoulders with other leading colleagues of the ruling class gentry, powerful CEOs like themselves, where they align an coordinate their actions towards society.
And in fact we have evidence of this as well. For instance, when CNN was owned by AT&T TimeWarner several years ago, there were several interviews with each concurrent CEO of AT&T, from Randall Stephenson to John Stankey, where they both heavily implied direct control and oversight of the CNN brand, at one point even stating that AT&T/CNN’s job is to hold people like Trump ‘accountable’, an fully agreeing with an supporting Jeff Zucker’s managerial style an direction, and even their direct working relationship.
Some might have the idea that an umbrella mega-corporation like AT&T simply buys different brands and assets, and lets them independently function in a hands-off fashion; but that’s not the case. The evidence clearly demonstrates that the highest tier globalist/transnational corporations do in fact puppeteer their assets from top to bottom. These megacorps are intrinsically woven into the globalist fabric of the aforementioned institutions, like the Bilderberg Group, etc., where they receive guidance and directives from the true globalist ‘shadow elite’. They then filter it down into the society-influencing brands under their purview, like CNN in this case, creating a chain of command that stretches top to bottom.
And in fact it goes up even higher. For instance, the umbrella corporations that own these umbrella corporations, like Blackrock and Vanguard—the two most powerful groups in the world—also do not stay ‘laissez-faire’, but in fact have been known to micro-manage certain decisions of the major brands under their control. For instance, in the case of Blackrock, the CEO has openly pushed the new ESG climate-change agenda onto the subsidiaries which Blackrock controls, which has created controversy due to the conflict with his actual fiduciary duty to shareholders for maximal profits—something ESG is not concerned with.
And if they can admit to pushing one ‘woke’ agenda, you can be certain they’re strong-arming them all from the very top down. Particularly when the ESG agenda is the clear brainchild of the Davos / Agenda 2030 group, it makes it all the more clear that the highest tier of the corporate pyramid does in fact take orders on their guidance and aligns all the subsidiaries beneath them with the ruling class’s wishes.
In the case of the truly all-encompassing megacorps like Blackrock, those subsidiaries are virtually every corporation in existence.
“BlackRock’s past public commitments indicate that it has used citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements such as the Paris Agreement that force the phase-out of fossil fuels, increase energy prices, drive inflation, and weaken the national security of the United States,” the letter adds.
In short: explosive movements like that of the LGBT/Trans/Identity hypertrophy witnessed during the Obama-era onward, are infact wholly manufactured and engineered from the very top, then passed down to each attendant branch of the globalist media superstructure.
I think it’s important to remember that the meta-narratives are set in a coordinated fashion and that various nations around the world are drinking the same globalist Kool-Aid, some out of desperation, others out of belief in the agenda, and no doubt others as Trojan horses. In any case, many of the same operatives are pushing climate change derived legislation, electric cars, WHO Health Authority to exceed nation state elected official powers whenever they unilaterally decide to declare a Global Emergency, the war of the sexes in developed West and all the other Woke Nonsense. This may also include the entire Ukraine War narrative including the care and feeding of competing narratives such as Red vs Blue, gay vs straight, male vs female, Red-Pilled versus Blue-Pilled, pro Ukraine anti-Russia, anti-Ukraine pro Russia, pro and anti China and so forth. All such things are essentially conceptual overlay distractions and all successfully divide people into various camps fighting about distractions.
And so it goes…
Posted by: Scorpion | Apr 30 2023 21:44 utc | 33
Just stumbled on author Iain McGilchrist past two days. He has a Youtube channel with in-depth interviews about his work. Combining neuroscience, quantum physics, metaphysics and a vast familiarity with religious traditions world wide, this brilliant polymath is also a superlative writer (All Souls, Oxford type). Beginning by explaining in Western terms for Westerners how the brain works (left vs/and right brain), he moves on from there to other things all involving developing ways to both better understand the nature of reality and such but also learn how to view and discuss such tricky subjects whilst then having the depth of skill sets as a writer and thinker to posit any and all left brain style presentations within the larger whole of the right brain synthesizing and over-arching functions, where all true understanding dwells and where also, interestingly, most of the true command and control of the psyche reside when the left is not allowed to run rampant and put up blocks all over the place, which it loves to do, usually in the form of heartless concept-heavy dogmas of all sorts, principal among which is the modern fixation on physical materialism despite all the many ways this has long been debunked, both in antiquity and most recently by quantum (meta)physics.
Anyway, this is arguably one of the most important, well-written dives into philosophy, religion, spirituality and the depths of what constitutes the essential elements of Western civilizational culture, including what ails us now and threatens to destroy it entirely. I have been waiting all my life for this book to be written and greatly look forward to slowly plodding my way through. Each page is rich, but always delightful to read. Indeed, I humbly suggest that the West has been waiting for this book that long for it far eclipses anything put out by Bertrand Russell. He also references Indian, Asian, Buddhist, Kaballistic, Native and other religio-spiritual sources with clear familiarity and deep understanding. With over 1800 pages in two volumes this book is well worth the over $80.00 it costs (in the US; farther afield where I am its a bracing $125.00).
Yet in Eckhart’s words, ‘God is nearer to me than I am to my own self.’ 306 God situates us firmly in the cosmos. Where we have been taught to see human consciousness as ‘an anomaloustenant of an alien universe’, that consciousness is reframed as ‘the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence.’
Alan Watts puts the matter well:
This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves’, the universe ‘peoples’. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
Religion takes seriously both the thisness of the individual, at one extreme of the scale, and the fate of the cosmos at the other, and shows them to be part of one whole. It is the absence of this integrative perspective that Dewey called the ‘deepest problem of modern life’.
This book has had a consistent message: that the right hemisphere is a more reliable guide to reality than the left hemisphere. In Part I, we saw that it has a greater range of attention; greater acuity of perception; makes more reliable judgments; and contributes more to both emotional and cognitive intelligence than the left.
In Part II, we saw that the right hemisphere is responsible for, in every case, the more important part of our ability to come to an understanding of the world, whether that be via intuition and imagination, or, no less, via science and reason.
In Part III, I have suggested that the right hemisphere’s capacity to deal with what we call ‘paradox’ is greater; that its understanding of space, motion, and time is deeper and more resonant with the findings of contemporary physics (and all philosophy other than the purely Anglo-American analytic tradition, itself a left hemisphere venture); and that it contributes more to important aspects of consciousness, including the appreciation of values such as goodness, beauty, and truth.
So the least strong claim one might make is that the spiritual and divine will be misapprehended if one brings to bear on them only the process for which the left hemisphere is best equipped – analysis to parts, following of procedures, and the presentation of results in language: a process that prioritises the known, the certain, the fixed, the partial, the explicit, the abstract, the general, the quantifiable, the inanimate and whatever is ‘re-presented’, over the unknown, the uncertain, the flowing, the living and the implicit, the whole, the contextual, and whatever is of unique quality; and all that ‘presences’ to us, before it has been represented through rationalisations in language. A stronger claim is that, not just here, but in general, we should prefer, wherever possible, an approach that can be identified with the habits of mind of the right hemisphere – a claim which I think, on the evidence I have presented, entirely justified.
One way of thinking about religion is that it instantiates the ‘form of life’, to return to Wittgenstein’s term, of the right hemisphere. In another era there was no way of knowing that
that’s what it was, of course, but it took the form of a deep intuition about the division of the human spirit, one which has a very long history. The reason that so much time, expense and skilled artistry was devoted to religion, from the most ancient, prehistoric epochs, when lives were shorter and resources scarcer, arose from the understanding that what we now know to be the ‘form of life’ of the left hemisphere, though obvious and easily expressible, belongs to the banality of everyday, and is far less important than the realm of what is comparatively hidden, but in which everything that matters to us and that gives meaning to life resides. If we should forget that, we would have forgotten how to be fully human. Without such instantiation in the fabric of a culture, it might easily be forgotten: that, then, was the role of religion.
And now it seems we have forgotten. In the absence of a tradition that embodies the values that the left hemisphere can’t see, we arrive at conclusions about ethical and metaphysical matters of the greatest significance in a manner that might result from putting everything we cared about in the hands of a mediocre bureaucracy, or having to bring it before a law court in a degenerate regime where the art of legal judgment had given way to the slavish following of numbered statutes – or running it through a computer. Meanwhile the very stuff of life ebbs away.
The raison d’être of the left hemisphere is control and calculation. Importantly we are not exempt from being the objects of control and calculation in a culture in which all is controlled and calculated. We have the illusion of being in control, whereas there is in truth very little we can control; rather we are controlled, in what Adorno called die verwaltete Welt, the‘administered world’, one where a new form of total control has taken root in the form of administration – a self-legitimising bureaucracy.
It is not that bureaucrats are our new slave masters; for they are themselves as much enslaved by their bureaucracy as the rest of us. They are, like us, in the grip of the disenchanting drive to control. As Tillich says, we become tools, but when asked for what purpose, there is no reply.
Posted by: Scorpion | May 1 2023 2:06 utc | 47
Thanks for the replies. I decided to not wait for the transcript and listened to the latest Hudson/Desai podcast, which was their last dedollarization installment and built on their previous as one would expect. Desai provided most of the discussion and I highly suggest reviewing what the previous segment said about Keynes’s post-WW2 proposals since some form of them is what’s going to be used in the new system. At the end of the new podcast, Hudson gets to the main underlying point and that’s the need to create a new political-economic philosophy that supports the new system. That is also the main point Alastair Crooke begins to explore in his latest essay, “‘Securing Ourselves Is in Our Hands; and Defeat of the Enemy Lies in His Own Hands’”:
Yet, a significant part to re-appropriating sovereignty requires the shift of Russia’s economic structure out from the grip of the ‘Anglo’ neo-liberal model, to one that provides for greater national self-sufficiency. Hence, the simple questioning of the philosophical underpinnings to the ‘Anglo’ system of politics and economics – which underlie the Rules Order – is as important, in its own way, as the Ukrainian battlefield.
Like any system, the World Order rests on philosophical principles believed to be universal, but which, in truth, are specific to a particular moment in European history.
Today, the West is not ‘what it was’. It is a fractured ideological battlespace. The Rest of World is not ‘what it was’. And today’s ideological western writhings are no longer viewed as being of primary concern to the World.
The point here, however, is about a project designed to bring change to that which has not changed. It is as much a war for global psyche as of attrition on the battlefront (though that, too, is a vital component in shifting the global zeitgeist). If a multi-polar order is to be built based on self-sufficient sovereignty, others should exit the neo-liberal economic system too (if they can). Hence the need for a major diplomatic initiative by Russia and China to build a strategic depth for a new economics.
Then, there are the tactics behind the strategy: How, apart from ‘pathfinding’ a new economics, to help states recover their sovereignty? How to break the ‘with us, or against us’ hegemonic grip? How to facilitate the mutual complementarities that can move a group of states towards a virtuous cycle of self-generating sovereignty – albeit one that is reinforced by transport corridors, and assisted through building autonomous ‘self-security’. China, for example, is building an extensive African network of high-speed trains for inter-African trade.
Currently there are six major documents issued by Russia and China beginning with the 4 Feb 2022 Joint Declaration that contain the basis for the formation of this new philosophical underpinning, while there are some thinkers like Alexander Dugin who are already trying to formulate it. I have yet to watch very much of it, but I’d think that the just completed online multipolarity conference contains some helpful ideas about such a formulation. The primary component of this new philosophy IMO has already been articulated and that’s People-Centered Development which resides within the Chinese mantra of a shared future for humanity and was again repeated by Putin in his Speech to the Council of Legislators on the 28th where he linked today’s philosophy with that which was present when Russia’s legislature was first formed in 1906:
The first Chairman of the Duma, Sergei Andreevich Muromtsev, highly appreciated the potential of institutions of broad popular representation, believed that their main task was to strengthen people’s faith “in statehood as a bulwark of their rights and a source of sincere concerns about the people’s welfare”, and the state as a whole, according to him, should be “the subject of the people’s cause“.
Indeed, many of your predecessors, the first Russian parliamentarians, fervently and sincerely defended the interests of the people, cared about the people’s welfare, sought to benefit their native country, and considered it their highest duty and vocation to live and work for the Motherland.
Such patriotic ideals are important at all times, especially for us, for Russia – a country-civilization, one of the original, sovereign centers of a huge multipolar world.
The values of devotional service to people and their homeland determine the strength and stability of state power, confirm the unity and cohesion of our people, are a key, unshakable guarantee that together we will overcome any challenges, we will consistently and firmly move only forward to the planned high, big goals. [My Emphasis]
After providing a few more references to supporting the people, Putin as he prepares to end his remarks says this:
“And of course, the Parliament’s primary concern should always be to improve the quality of life and incomes of people, to provide tangible, targeted support to our citizens, families with children, and people who find themselves in a difficult and difficult life situation. In general, the growth of the welfare of the people is our common primary task.” [My Emphasis]
Now compare that rationale, that philosophy with what’s happening within the Neoliberal part of the world where the interests of people are last.
Xi and the CPC with their Initiatives share Putin’s rationale, or perhaps it should be said Putin shares China’s rationale. IMO, it doesn’t matter in this case which nation or personage was first (actually in reality it’s very old); what matters is it’s being articulated to the global audience. Hudson rightly observes at the end of the podcast that China hasn’t prosthetalized its system to the world and has instead said each nation must adapt its system to its own conditions as none are the same. However, there are fundamental basics all these non-Neoliberal systems will share and that’s the core philosophy of People Centered Development, for with a strong people the nation will be strong and vibrant with everyone working to advance everyone else–Win-Win ascendent over Zero-sum.
Posted by: karlof1 | May 1 2023 16:08 utc | 80
juliania@81
I have a great deal of sympathy with your point of view. At risk of insulting you I will suggest that we are of, roughly, the same generation. And were brought up in a culture in which ‘liberalism’ was seen as an alternative to the Dulles-McCarthy politics of the Cold War-narrow, harsh, nasty, inhumane and tending always towards state violence and war.
Unfortunately that sort of liberalism evolved into or rather reverted to its original characteristics. Which were the harsh, nasty ideas that justified the rise of capitalism- Locke said, that the sole purpose of government is to protect private property. The sort of liberalism that tolerated the Potato Famine in Ireland, the Bengal Famine(s) and the continental dispossession of indigenous peoples.
Some of the most efective critics of capitalism have been liberals disgusted by the realities their philosophy paved the way for- Hobson the student of Imperialism, the Hammonds, husband and wife, who re-discovered the histories of the Village and Town Labourers, the Celtic politicians (Irish, Scots and Welsh) who fought to reverse the land theft which left the people landless and homeless, driven to seek ‘new’ lives across the Oceans. For a time, especially after political liberalism was overshadowed by socialists and Labour parties, liberalism became an opposition current, a moderate alternative to the harsh realism of the imperialists and the dangerously proscribed socialist and communist ideas that insisted that they were the only alternative. And since the liberals never had a chance of governing they were much indulged by the ruling class.
And then there was the revival of liberalism which we call neo-liberalism, because that is exactly what it is. We live in a world that James Mill or Jeremy Bentham would have recognised, a world run by their ideas, evolved through the passage of time into something quite different, But exactly the same- government as the defence of property, the defence of wealth, the oligarchy, capital. Government which sees the dispossession of imndigenous peoples as a selfless service rescuing them from the ‘idiocy of tribal life.
Neoliberalism, like Koko, has a little list: publicly funded free medical care is on it, unemployment insurance schemes are on it, social security is on it (isn’t it M. Macron?), free quality education is on it, Trade Union union rights are on it, schemes to ensure that all have homes of their own are on, free school meals are on it, public health systems are on it (Covid made that clear), communities and solidarity of any kind are on it (individualism, selfishness and the devil take the hindmost rule), freedom of speech is on it… Just as competition in the economy leads to monopoly, so does individualism lead to regimentation and conformity with neo-liberal rules.
Nothing is more exemplary of the workings of liberalism than the rapid and shocking contemporary denial of freedom of speech and opinion which is justified by the assumption that those who rule society, and decide which ideas and opinions are acceptable, are superior to those who are subject to rule. In the end this is proved by the test that might is right. That the ‘deplorables’ are contemptible because they are not rich, do not have their hands near the levers of power, do not own media or own licenses to teach at Universities.
This has been the justification in every sort of society for ignoring the opinions of the dispossessed. The great flaw in the arguments for it being that the dispossessed are the victims of the propertied: they own nothing because what they did have was taken from them. And they cannot begin to get it back until they agree that only a minority should enjoy the privileges that go with it.
Liberals believe in the rights of individuals so long as the individuals in question can defend them. Most often this has meant defence by law- the smallholders lost their land because they could not afford to defend their rights in court. And, when they managed to do so, they found that the courts were controlled by the very people who wanted their land. How else could it be?
psychohistorian@77
Not me. La lotta continua.
Posted by: bevin | May 1 2023 18:30 utc | 86
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