|
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-039
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Middle East:
To understand how over its head the U.S. is here just read this confused AP summary report:
US, Britain strike Yemen’s Houthis in a new wave, retaliating for attacks by Iran-backed militants – AP, Feb 4 2024
The United States and Britain struck 36 Houthi targets in Yemen on Saturday in a second wave of assaults meant to further disable Iran-backed groups that have relentlessly attacked American and international interests in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. But Washington once more did not directly target Iran as it tries to find a balance between a forceful response and intensifying the conflict.
…
The U.S. warned its response after the soldiers’ deaths at the Tower 22 base in Jordan last Sunday would not be limited to one night, one target or one group. While there has been no suggestion the Houthis were directly responsible, they have been one of the prime U.S. adversaries since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages.
Ukraine:
The mask is coming off:
Ivan Katchanovski @I_Katchanovski – 16:51 UTC · Feb 2, 2024
Zaluzhny on eve of his expected firing by Zelensky shows his backing from far-right, which has power to overthrow Zelensky. Zaluzhny takes selfie with leader of far-right Right Sector & commander of Right Sector brigade of Ukrainian military in front of portrait of Nazi collaborator & far-right OUN leader Bandera & red & black flag of OUN-UPA & Right Sector.
link
bigger—
Kim Dotcom @KimDotcom – 9:15 UTC · Feb 3, 2024
A coup may come in Ukraine. Neither Nuland nor the CIA can protect Zelenskyy if the right-wing takes over. They only tolerated Zelenskyy because of Zaluzhny
Zelenskyy nicknames amongst Ukrainian Nazis: Homo Joker, Stuart Little, Pimple, Frodo, 1.5 meters, Mossad agent, Comedian.
—
Other issues:
Russia:
China:
Random stuff:
Use as open (not Ukraine or Palestine related) thread …
Here are three articles on some aspects of the great unraveling in the US, interconnected by a prime mover, money grabbing.
Beijing Anna’s observation of “decay” in NYC is a snapshot of the ongoing process in the heart of empire…empire exploits and discards its own people, does not invest in “human capital,” but relies on importing people, often illegal but also legal immigrants, as replacement labor, also charging ordinary people exorbitant prices because who’s to stop the thievery in a captured, bought system?
~~
First, Ramin Razaheri:
Talk to honest businessmen and they’ll admit it: charge your customer more than 30% profit and you’re cheating them.
Keep in mind that you can only charge 30% for those few goods/services for which you have a real advantage. You are surely providing some goods/services at perhaps just a 3% markup – or at cost, or even at a loss – just to keep your customer returning/in the door.
So it’s not like you’re charging 30% across the board – if you did, your customer would quickly know that they are being cheated and take their business elsewhere. So your average profit margin isn’t 30% but more like 11%.
And, according to a recent report, for the 40 years prior to Covid corporate profits were responsible for just that: 11% of inflation. That makes sense, as the rule of thumb in business is that the standard profit margin is 10%.
However, per the headline, the same study found that corporate profit-gouging in the United States in the second and third quarters of 2023 were responsible for a stunning 53% of inflation.
The gross numbers show a huge jump in post-pandemic profit-taking: In December the US Bureau of Economic Analysis reported $3.3 trillion in corporate profits in Q3 2023 – that’s 50% more than Q3 2017’s $2.2 trillion in quarterly profits.
11% to 53% – a 382% worsening of societal norms – requires our discussion
https://raminmazaheri.substack.com/p/when-corporate-profits-force-53-of
(Links to source materials in original at sub stack)
~~
Next, from NEO author Simon Chege Ndiritu
US President Joe Biden’s administration’s efforts to stop Texas Governor Gregg Abbott from keeping illegal immigrants away shows that the US Empire is in dire need of foreign workers and talents. Major policy and media outlets including Forbes, (here), Financial Times (here), George Mason University and FWD.us (here), and the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) (here) show that Washington’s empire cannot compete without immigrants ‘top’ global talents. [embedded links in original]…
One thing the US Empire cannot stand doing is training and developing its human resources to get top global talents. It would rather yank them from other places and will keep immigrants coming…
The Biden regime’s move to sue Texas State makes no sense unless the federal government wants more illegal immigrants coming in the US. These intentions are revealed in various studies and media reports (CFR, CIS, CNN, FWD.us), which encourage the US government to bring in immigrants to maintain its global leadership and avoid a demographic crisis, but the empire has been timid to disclose its real intension to the public. [embedded links]
Leading media and policy think tanks (CIS, CNN, FWD.us), show that the US government is determined to allow immigration, to attain skills for its fixation with maintaining technological leadership and competing against China. Washington has not developed the desired skills within its population, despite its implementing deliberate policies to harvest the best skills and talents from across the world over the last century (here). Shockingly, these past skills and talents seem forgotten, underdeveloped, or incapable of raising equally talented offspring, showing a shortfall in the US system…
Is the Empire Complicating Demographics for Better Divide-and-Rule?
There may be efforts to change the US demographics to make it easier to control…
illegal arrivals may never have their legal statuses regularized and will remain as underpaid laborers working for longer hours, beyond what citizens can accept…
https://journal-neo.su/2024/02/01/biden-vs-abbott-us-empires-weakness-is-overreliance-on-immigrants-talents-due-to-elianating-its-citizens/
~~
Last, a report on involuntary servitude and slave labour in the US under the 13th Amendment exception as punishment for crime I n carceral industrial complex, a longish read.
Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
ANGOLA, La. (AP) — A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison….
The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens… They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.
…with about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire…
A SHADOW WORKFORCE WITH FEW PROTECTIONS
In addition to tapping a cheap, reliable workforce, companies sometimes get tax credits and other financial incentives. Incarcerated workers also typically aren’t covered by the most basic protections, including workers’ compensation and federal safety standards. In many cases, they cannot file official complaints about poor working conditions.
These prisoners often work in industries with severe labor shortages, doing some of the country’s dirtiest and most dangerous jobs…
https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-investigation
Posted by: suzan | Feb 5 2024 2:42 utc | 65
[trigger warning. outsized persiflo post ahead] . . .
Today I’d like to tell a little story from my just experience, only moments ago. I’ll read this again before posting, because what occured is absolutely not fact-based in a classic sense; it could be anything, including insomnia-induced halucination. Some will upon reading perceive it as a fairy tale; then so be it.
I also have reasons to lay this out here. First, it illustrates in a specific case the difficulties a variety of fully experience-based empirical sciences, or quasi-sciences if you will, are facing. The german branch of systematic study of paranormal phenomena, one of less than a handful worldwide independent approaches, starts with Arthur Schopenhauer. While he was a naturalist, or metaphysical materialist, to the bone in regards to his system, he had the intellectual magnitude to leave a note to everyone else, in which he lays down some tales of “strange things” that were happening to him, of the type we’d today call manifestation. Arthur explains himself to the reader by stating that he’s not interested in viewing himself as insane, and therefore will now scribe down what he had lived, stating that surely many men* throughout all times had to have made likewise experience of happenstance.
Another, quite sombre reason to come forward on this board is because I think that probably some of the gathered barflies might have had a very similar experience. I’d like to ask those to come forward also, so that we can try and typify this kind of experience, thus building toward actual empirical understanding of the phenomenon in question. – Some folks might want to disqualify this use of empirical here, but I do claim the term, due to my basic rooting of all science in awareness (“opinion”), and not in the realm of outside objects of substance an Sich (as all such notions logically must follow an inquiry by a wondering mind, and hence cannot be claimed to supersede the actual inquiry being minded by – you!).
Let me losely define “science” here quickly also, as an applied methodology, that allows statements – hypothesis, observations, “facts”, but also conjecture – with a truth value function; that is, it proves helpful when properly applied to the things it was originally designed for; as all human endeavour is taking place in the Lebenswelt (E. Husserl).
Note that it follows that maths is an invention, too (mostly created by physicists when in need to describe something new, like when Newton invented calculous to prove his law of gravitation, which took him 20 years to do! or Paul Dirac, when he came up with an object dubbed a “distribution”, which took an effort of fifty years by the mathematicians to finally make sense of), and not, as some claim, the true language of the logos (think of it as the source code of Dasein), or the language in which the creator-God crafted this place we’re currently stuck in for some unknown reason. But I’m digressing here a tad … well!
Aside from undertaking a typifying effort, the reach out to others who may have experienced such things as I just have, is also in line with a central task of parapsychology, as instituted in the Hans Bender Institut in Freiburg (one of just three independently funded institutes worldwide working fully open source, btw). There, they provide counseling to those afflicted with disturbing experiences, as these often are not “integrated” healthily; I assume, for lack of proper means of understanding, i.e. ressources of education that provide access to a concise and enabling language (“science”) that allows to somehow grasp what is happening, so that you can make sense of it, thence being able to cope.
The anecdote I simply cannot withhold from the esteemed barflies at this point relates to an instance of Spuk/spook that took place in Rosenheim in the 1960ies. A lawyer’s bureau was stricken with weird and abnormal malfunctions of phone and electricity lines etc, and the case is somewhat famous because it has been extensively studied by technicians of the utility providers, Deutsche Telekom engineers, the Braunschweig physics departement, and Hans Bender from the institute in Freiburg. The ongoings were measured, documented and witnessed by all those repeatedly; the spook ended when a young woman working at the place was taken out of her surrounding, in which she’d been harassed and probably assaulted (a typical instance where spook phenomena of this sort appear). Then, 4o years later, the Rosenheim Chronicle phoned Walther von Lucadou, then and now head of the Freiburg institute (IGPP), to ask him what he now thinks of the famous tale. Lucadou replies, “for us, it was a normal case of spook, of a kind we get reported hundreds of times in a year. We now usually don’t drive out there anymore, as counseling by telephone is usually sufficient to resolve the problem”. This must be one of the most mind-boggling moments in german newspaper history, methinks …
Alas! So here’s now, finally, my own little story, which I experienced immediately before coming home and starting to type this out.
On a monday morning, or rather a wintery night in Hamburg, at 5am I was walking home through light but still substantial rain and windgusts at temperatures just above freezing, a most common winter weather here in northern Europe. Unpleasant as it was, I still enjoyed walking, and my thoughts went to the poor sods on the battlefields of Ukraine … immediately, my fairly blank and calm field of awareness became vivid and forceful. Concentrating on the images that rose into my consciousness – I liken this to the bubbles in a bottle of champagne after opening it; while at the same time you are giving Gestalt to the notions (Anschauungen) through the basic noetic power of synthesis, or synthetic apperception (the faculty which connects our senses, and generally the preconscious, with the mental images in the mind’s eye) – I quickly had an intense image of a man who’d been badly wounded about now. I saw him shivering, pale, in terror of death, while his buddies were all around him, applying tourniquets etc. — Let’s analyze the image briefly. It’s clear that even for a non-medically experienced person such as me, the scene is readily available for imagination. I of course of knew this, but I stiil allowed myself to get drawn into it. In no time I felt energetically involved, the wounded (and probably dying) man and I were somehow channeled, or so it seemed, and in his clinging to life, I felt as if he was asking for help … sure, why not? I thougt, and began to channel him energy; wondering what his reason might be to cling so starkly to life – of course, a question of no further immediate relevance, but empathising in this moment was quite heavy on me. I broke the lihme connection when I felt my own energy spent; not completely, but down to a level where (as I imagine) some sort of disintegration of my own current self would ensue … an entirely sensible idea, btw, as evidenced quite clearly from the placebo effect (and also theoretically well founded through refute of the naturalist answer/paradigm for the mind-body problem).
It took less than 50m of walking for it to end. My mind returned to the previous state of calm contemplation, and my final thought while being channeled was that, whatever the poor sod’s reason for his will to life may have been, upon his death he would most likely be in a more comforting place than he was now … but what about his loved ones? — And right there, still within seconds of the actual vision, I realized that death and life cannot possibly be seperate states of being! (or existence, if you will)
Their logical incongruence can be readily seen by the opposition of two notions, A – being alive and not knowing about death, and B – being dead and not knowing about life. The moment of death belongs to neither of these notions, and therefore I claim that the whole thing is NOT understod well, when conceptualized thusly. —
Well, that is the bonus level here for the purposes of this comment, but still I feel it somehow belongs to the story. I’ve studied mathematics at the university, and upon showing up for our first lectures, us young folks would be told that “usually, the first idea turns out correct”. This is true, to a startingly degree, especially considering that maths is absolutely clean in all of its deductions. Creativity is a sort of manifestation, too, I guess.
Will you believe me? Either way, I recommend this stunning paper FOIA’d from CIA archives, about the time some US Army command sent one of their staff to Chicago, to experience and then report on the courses Robert Monroe (“binaural meditation”)was giving in his Monroe Institute in the early eighties … authored by one Wayne McDonnell, who did a most brilliant job here. – Does anyone him? I imagine
him as a boots wearing tanker who somehow ended up writing this absolutely mental paper, in which he says, quoting from memory, consciousness is the guarantor of everything. I’m not aware of any english-speaking philosopher who said such a thing. Do you? It would make a worthy quote on his tombstone. If I had any means of moeny, I’d fund this blissfully. I don’t, but still, if anyone knows about him, let me know.
That all being said, finally conclundig this wild one of a post, let me repeat also that I would love to hear from your experiences! I’d wager it has been occuring to some in this bar, simply because many of us will have, at one point in a long wintery dark, lit a candle for the guys in Avdeevka, saying a preayer for their souls, or sipping a glass of your … whatever.
Oh, I’m having spanish Tempranillo — can recommend.
Posted by: persiflo | Feb 5 2024 7:40 utc | 74
On a further note, “not to wank” is not by itself a deed; as such, I cannot recommend it. Enjoy yourselves, people. But spare a thought about presence of others (if only for me, please), however remote they may be. Desire includes lust and intimacy; fullfilment hence necessitates encounter. The transgressive element coming into play here, the Ander-Ich, or Thou, makes things not just more interesting, but actually real in the first place … for most, that is. Perhaps you sport a kink in hiding your emotions, or you are an objectophile, or you have arousing fantasies of flight, or with more abstract encounters – I heard God is a nice fellow in this regard, too. The girl who hinted me this could make her horse go backwards, when plucking from the large blackberry bush.
To mind comes Tom of Finland also. I was a Dj at two expositions of his drawings, in Hamburg-St. GAYorg, and then in Berlin at Salon Dahlmann. One of his drawings [family friendly, slightly cropped version] – to those unaware, he’s famous for his gay pin-ups – made an especially lasting impression on me. I dedicated a mixtape to it that was played in loop at the Hamburg venue. Lennart Münchenhagen, who did the curation, stated that Tom’s men are an emancipative gesture, not merely aestheticized porn, and I believe he has a very good point there. Tom desires a self-ideal, rather than an actual Thou, though the symbology may be useful in this regard too. It adds to the “iconografic vocabulary”, I guess.
The lack of means and avenues for gay men (and assorted other groups) to self-express in public gets me riled up to no end, whenever the topic comes up. I mean, cum on, what the fuck should (and do) I care what other people do with their mates of choice!? When I was at the Berghain Club in Berlin, which is a quite gay/queer venue, I found myself unable to party, because so many folks there obviously were in a very strong need to fill a gap in their means of self-expression, the pumped-up steroid guys (who have their own corner there) being the starkest example. The basic problem is one of civilization, no less, and it afflicts women, too. Their tendency to experience themselves as “beings of love” by gifting their love away to those around them – their kids and family, or the wider community, depending on societal organization – is held to disregard, or even contempt, by the logic of capitalism. It is basically sin to gift oneself away “for free” … perhaps this notion is crude for our Marxist barflies, but it’s how I came to see it for now. I’d be happy to read some further elaboration on the point from the barflies!
On a final note, the lack of means of self-expression is also a huge issue for female sexuality in general. The disregard of the offensively signalling female is not just psychologically brutal, it also shows a remarkable lack of taste, methinks.
Unlike the Tempranillo, which I’m having to restock now. Thanks, Moa. Good night and sweet dreams to all —
Posted by: persiflo | Feb 5 2024 19:02 utc | 98
|
