thanks for an excellent week of news coverage bernhard.. and thanks for the additional links here.. i recommend the thomas fazi article which you’ve again shared here this week..
@ tom..
it’s gotten more clear over the years, so maybe that’s it.. i think people want to have a positive image of the country they have grown up in and the actions there gov’t take.. and of course the media always presents what the gov’t is doing in the most favourable of light.. so, i think it takes a while for people to come around to seeing how something is very wrong in the picture.. my own awakening was in the early 70’s when as a teenager i was confronted with the vietnam war and the draft dodgers coming to vancouver where i lived.. i knew on some basic level that what was happening in vietnam was really wrong.. ever since then i have looked at these foreign adventures into other parts of the world as wrong.. it took me a long time to put much of it together..

Posted by: james | Oct 6 2024 14:54 utc | 4

Thanks for another week of the bar b
I live in America and am ashamed of what it is being used for.
Blinken is beyond delusional b. He is a war criminal of the highest degree. Patriarchal barbarism as a form of leadership is coming to a very necessary end and examples of our species like Blinken show clearly what humanity needs to exclude from our new form of social organization sausage.
The God Of Mammon has not found a new host for its private finance cult in China and it can no longer expand or control the same areas of the world as in the past. It is forced to do Shock Doctrine on America and its entourage to maintain the face of dying empire. Think about the head of the US military being in Occupied Palestine currently instead of helping manage the human and ecological catastrophe on its East Coast.
America has not been that shining light on the hill since changing its motto in the 1950’s from E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One) to In God We Trust……don’t tell any but that is the God Of Mammon cult, not the monotheists.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Oct 6 2024 14:57 utc | 6

It’s a shame how rude this bar has become. Only a few years ago, folks used to be much more polite, and exchanged thoughts mostly in a civil way. It seems every second insight or opinion has to be couched in an insult, and hammered home with rudeness.
B used to include « do not attack other commenters » but not anymore. Is it because it’s no longer a requirement, or cause he gave up ?

Posted by: Featherless | Oct 6 2024 15:16 utc | 8

I guess the new thread is where to post todays sermon, be standing or seated or whatever.
Inspired the continuous burble of Marxism on other threads and biblical eschatology manifested upon tens of millions already every year.
It is a part of the religious pseudo science Economics.
A religion Created, superimposed upon ‘thinking’ European slaves and subjects ,who can’t accept the bs of the imposed slave religion upon the rest of the world as they went and enslaved it.
European Christianity which with its various sects was used to harvest the wealth creating human muscles through insane self sacrifice; uprooting masses to colonise the far off parts of the World through brutal genocide of natives; at the behest of the representatives of mass brainwashing from birth to death.
‘You will go to Hell in an afterlife if you fail to follow orders to visit such hell upon your fellow Man as directed by your Lords and Masters – your betters. ‘
Heaven is not anywhere near ‘described’, ‘imagined’ and made into art and architecture as Hell is – now you know why.
Heaven and Hell belief sets as precursor to Capitalism/AntiCapitalism paradigms.
Hey they even made a melting pot ,geographic country from the left overs of ancient European chronology to make everyone have that Disconnect American Dream as more important than ancient Civilisational bedrocks.
That’s also why the ancient history is being bombed to rubble by the weapons and hands of the new mindless humans our 5Eyed myopia – and why Americans are used as the for prosletysing the pseudo science new religion for all such colonial invaders to fall behind or be invaded or bombed. That is the dogmatic ‘Teachings’ invented for the modern priests, popes and Kings of Capitalism and AntiCapitalism- aka the Roman Empire mark 3.
Anti Capitalism versus Capitalism
The tenets of the Religion of Economics
Created in the image of Scientific Method.
Taking the sheepskin of that Method to cover up its naked arsed Flat Earth, the Jealous One And Only God fallacies. Now replaced by Football, TeeVee and cultural hegemony.
Woke ! Green! Malthusian bs… the new Saviour Complex.
That transition from the Roman Empire of Wolf Children Myth
To the Holy Roman Empire whilst still keeping the Oligarch dynasties of these distant centuries in place – finding new ways to Own The Whole World. Knowledge of which they had gleaned from the real ancient civilisations- which after Millenia still had no need to invent ‘Economics’ to replace basic human spirituality passed down through history , via family and village and Peace and Prosperity that gave us real things – like languages, foods, culture and inventive daily technology to collectively improve the Human Condition – not enslave it with fake Gods of Money.
That’ll do – mine will be a large Bloody Mary as my first one of the day. Burp!
Amen.

Posted by: DunGroanin | Oct 6 2024 15:24 utc | 10

FWIW: America First Means Hawaii, Iowa, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina Before Ukraine and Gaza.
https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/america-first-means-hawaii-iowa-texas

Posted by: Dogon Priest | Oct 6 2024 15:32 utc | 12

This is a short clip, Finkelstein makes an excellent point about Trump and fascism, history, capitalism and democracy, and Trump not being a threat to democracy, because there is no socialist threat to capitalism like there was in the last century, and not much democracy. It’s a dead on analysis. Doesn’t make Trump any less a threat to mankind, but no more than western hegemony is a threat to mankind, it nulls out, those are my words. He also does a fine take down of Harris and the DNC.
Norman Finkelstein “lashes out” Harris, Trump, Noam Chomsky, Democratic Party and Republican Party

Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Oct 6 2024 15:38 utc | 14

i recommend the thomas fazi article which you’ve again shared here this week..
Posted by: james | Oct 6 2024 14:54 utc | 4
James, hope you had a good vacation.
Just a note here without saying anything about something I have not checked out.
Thomas Fazi is a co-author with William Mitchell.
Bill Mitchell is the economist that Derek Henry/Echo Chamber raves (correct word, btw) about.
That’s the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) stuff. Just so you know. If I read Fazi it will be with care.
I don’t pretend to understand economics well enough to debate or argue theory, but here’s a
link to a substack that is critical of Mitchell.
a reply to Bill Mitchell
Maybe psychohistorian can make some sense of it.

Posted by: waynorinorway | Oct 6 2024 15:47 utc | 16

canuck@17
Hear HEAR!! (sound of fist pounding a table)

Posted by: bisfugged | Oct 6 2024 15:59 utc | 18

I am wondering. Russia is a huge country, spanning Europe and Asia. The ties with America and Europe are becoming fewer and weaker, the ties with Asia are becoming more and stronger. Does this mean the industrial capital of Russia will move east, with Vladivostok prospering and Saint Petersburg becoming less important? As industry moves towards Asia, is it thinkable in the long run the political capital ends up moving east, too?
Posted by: Passerby | Oct 6 2024 14:55 utc | 5
This is already happening. Has been for years, the most prominent element being the development of energy and rail transport directed toward China. This doesn’t happen by itself, though- it implies considerable infrastructure development in the regions that support those structures, but this is less visible from outside.

Posted by: Honzo | Oct 6 2024 16:03 utc | 20

Breaking . . . Headlines! (From: beforeitsnews.com)
Presidential candidate Kamela Harris has pledged her supporters to launch a Venus mission during her term. The announcement comes on the heels of Trump’s claim that he will send people to Mars with the help of SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk, who stated that government regulations are all that stand in the way which Trump will remove. While Trump and Musk claim that they will send a manned mission to the red planet, something that has never been done, for her part Harris made no such claims about her Venus mission merely stating, “It will be great. We will go there, it will be a truly great first for our America, a real win-win. Venus we love you!” Apparently unaware that the Soviets sent a dozen prior missions to Venus as part of the Vénéra mission, Harris further went on to claim her space mission would be truly groundbreaking unlike Trump’s Mars idea, which as she sais, “Has already been done. And no one wants to go there.” Since her announcement and follow up statements some social media users have claimed that Harris has confused a fictions Hollywood movie starring Matt Damon with an actual manned Mars mission causing a number of new memes to appear.

Posted by: Nothingburgers | Oct 6 2024 16:15 utc | 22

Nothingburgers | Oct 6 2024 16:15 utc | 22
Attention! I just factchecked the above article suspecting it could be “fake news”, and it turns out there were actually 13 probes to Venus, not 12 as the article states, this immediately raises a red flag FYI.

Posted by: Nothingburgers | Oct 6 2024 16:31 utc | 24

climate change keeps moving into the more dangerous area
Posted by: Roger | Oct 6 2024 16:28 utc | 23
—
In addition to what might be record loss of life, according to many estimates Helene and Milton are looking like a $500B uninsured loss. That hurts.

Posted by: too scents | Oct 6 2024 16:37 utc | 26

Of course, there is no such thing as a single “chosen people”. We are all created equal.
Everyone, is created by the same route; Your parents got together, had a good time and “you” were conceived. (or a variation of that). Now, “you” are neither a clone of your mother, and you are not a clone of your father. “You” are an individual. Unique. The evidence of God’s hand is that a new individual is created from nothing and nowhere. The “spark” of individual life, which cannot be recreated by humans, is given to you. The first miracle.
This is identical for anyone, man or women. At the beginning we are born without religion,
whatever the religion or race we may follow later, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Confucian, Buddhist, atheist, or whatever.
**
This is not a “new” idea, but formed the basis of the teachings of Maître Eckhart
(Eckhart von Hochheim, known as Maître Eckhart, born around 1260 in Hochheim in the landgraviate of Thuringia and died on January 28, 1328, probably in Avignon, is a German theologian and philosopher, mystic, Dominican, main representative of a Catholic spiritual movement.)
Whose sermons incorporated the idea that all of us have the same “spark” of life given by God. Whether men or women. He was instrumental in the creation of the “Beguines”. Places where women could live, and prosper without being under the “thumb” of men.
Women being considered the equal of Men! Sacrilege! This brought the wrath of the church misogynists down on him, and he was finally forced to renounce his work and ideas (the Beguines were dissolved and women sent to monasteries), or face the “question” (Inquisition). Same thing as a Zionist concentration prison with the added prospect of arms or legs being ripped off and being burnt at the stake as a heretic.
However, I think that Maître Eckhart did not go far enough, as ALL people at the beginning are the same. Not just Christians. Everyone. All religions. No exceptions.
**
Nine months after conception comes birth. The Brain continues to develop physically for several months even after birth. The inverted pyramid of data, experience and education that one builds up during a lifetime, expands from a beginning, and this is the first information upon which everything that follows later, is based.
BUT the Rabbis, on the eighth day, destroy the love and the psychological link between the mother and the child, by a barbaric custom.
Thus ALL subsequent information /data, that is learnt or experienced by the jewish child is based on that first pain and alienation, followed by a very early indoctrination. Well before the brain’s basic capacity to assimilate information is complete. The claim that some are “chosen”, is made by Rabbi’s and other people, but not by God.
Other religions have customs and practices, but they do not start indoctrination eight days after birth.
***
Your life then follows its course. You learn or don’t learn, miss or take opportunities as your life unfolds. You follow a path, making choices at pivotal points in time.
***
We all live our allotted period, and then die. However, JUST before dying, in the last seconds of life, we now know what happens thanks to “science”: A man was under a brain scanner at the moment of death. The Doctors were surprised to see massive brain activity in the last seconds. Whole areas were being “lit-up”. We cannot know what the person sees or experiences during those moments, but we do know that the only source must be the data (Synapses and neurons) acquired during their lifetime.
Then the person dies.
*********
But even then the mystery continues;
Christians go and sit on a cloud to learn to play the Harp. (The Irish have a special aptitude there.)
The male Muslims go to meet 72 virgins, and for the sake of equality, the female Muslims get given 72 virgin men.
The Jews, go to the Sho’ah (limbo) to await the Messiah, rather like waiting for a train that has already left the station.
Buddhists plan their return again, again.
Papou tribesmen go around as “ancestors”, troubling the living, before returning as a pikinini.
Atheists, who don’t believe in anything, don’t “get” anything.
***
Some of us may finally accede to the light, the glory and love, that is the true heaven. Those who do not, and are not recycled for another attempt, will see the hell of being excluded from God’s love – for eternity.
***
“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Posted by: Stonebird | Oct 6 2024 16:40 utc | 28

@Roger | Oct 6 2024 16:28 utc | 23

I will of course not be responding to the usual BS “climate change is natural”, “CO2 is plant food” and “we have always had hurricanes” etc. comments.

Sure. You are sensible on geopolitical issues, but in science you are off and you make it a political issue. The climate is controlled by the Sun and we are now moving into an extended minimum with colder winters for the rest of this century, comparable to the Maunder Minimum that lasted for 70 years after 1645.

Posted by: Norwegian | Oct 6 2024 16:51 utc | 30

Posted by: Stonebird | Oct 6 2024 16:40 utc | 28
Believing in a god and that that entity commands you
to do her bidding and following that terrible demand
for personal bliss is an untoppable abomination.
Actually the majority of these persons sublimate
minor personal discomfort into making life unbearable for others.
Netanjahu: brother killed in military encounter -> exterminating all palestinensians
Hitler: deemed unfit by character for anything beyond rank of Private -> forcing destruction on various nations and ethnicities.
Madeleine Albright ne Körbelová: allegedly the communists prevented her piano lessons -> kill a million kids is a good thing.
Blinken, Nudelmann, Kagan: relatives in the Russian Empire … -> turning the world inside out just to stick it to the slavs ( or whatever )

Posted by: MAKK | Oct 6 2024 17:00 utc | 32

Used properly, without fluoridated water, & not ingested, it strengthens tooth enamel.
Posted by: Mary | Oct 6 2024 17:02 utc | 33

Overdoing it produces these white specs on teeth.
see https://www.google.com/search?q=fluorid+white+specs
( usually on girls, good girls brush more :-), probably less seen in the US as most anybody seems to have
bleached or veneer capped teeth.)

Posted by: MAKK | Oct 6 2024 17:09 utc | 34

Stonebird | Oct 6 2024 16:40 utc | 28
“Believing in a god and that that entity commands you
to do her bidding and following that terrible demand
for personal bliss is an untoppable abomination.”
Why think you are commanded? You choose. (or are “educated” or taught to think so). You are personally responsible for your actions – not God.

Posted by: Stonebird | Oct 6 2024 17:12 utc | 36

Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 6 2024 16:52 utc | 31
Thanks for that!
Worth repeating is this from the Open Thread 2024-234 earlier today:

It’s quite the spectacle, now that our host seems to be more or less back in the saddle, to watch every single thread derail when a marxist analysis is provided. As it begets for the western world, there is not a single proper argument against Marxism to be found. More infuriating, there is not even an optional framework for analysis proposed. Thus, always implicit is the ever present liberal propaganda, mindlessly repeated by the downtrodden, that Marx was a jew hating slacker who leeched off Engels and is responsible for every bad thing that occures anywhere in the world.
Posted by: kspr | Oct 6 2024 6:34 utc | 173 [my emphasis]

Posted by: waynorinorway | Oct 6 2024 17:39 utc | 38

Trump courts disaster by underestimating Iranian death threats – Ignatius / Washington Post
This is one of the creepiest articles I’ve seen in some time. When he goes off about a possible Iranian assassination of Trump and a resulting war with Iran, it’s like you’re hearing the fantasy of a powerful section of the Imperialist RC.
Trump really should be very careful, not so much of Iranians, but rather of his “friends” in the FBI and secret service.
If he had half a brain he’d reject the Iranian plot BD and tell the world: the FBI and intelligence agencies have moved from Russiagate smears to simply trying to murder me.

Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Oct 6 2024 17:47 utc | 40

working hard to stay above this problem by increasing rates and refusing coverage
Posted by: Roger | Oct 6 2024 17:57 utc | 41
—
Apparently the denial trick is a flavor of the bait and switch fraud. If you have flood insurance your house was destroyed by the wind. Alternatively, if you have hurricane insurance your house was destroyed by the flood.

Posted by: too scents | Oct 6 2024 18:06 utc | 42

@Passerby #5
I don’t think so.
St. Petersburg and Moscow are not just industrial centers in the past, they are also social, arts, government, financial and other centers.
Even the rise of oblasts in the East that are large population and GDP centers will not change this quickly, if ever. Look at California in the US as an example: while California’s resource dependent economy is large and powerful (think petro-state but with tech), California cannot be said to be an exceptional driver of national agendas even despite Hollywood and what not.
Certainly not obviously more so than Washington DC or New York, for example.

Posted by: c1ue | Oct 6 2024 18:14 utc | 44

Vladivostok … new shipyards
Posted by: karlof1 | Oct 6 2024 16:37 utc | 25
Thanks. Shipyards – sounds like Peter the Great 🙂

Posted by: Passerby | Oct 6 2024 18:41 utc | 46

” Anyone got any good news?”
Don Firineach@11
An Empire more than half a millenium old is imploding before our eyes. It would be nice if there were fewer casualties but, as in the demolition of NATO in The Ukraine, so long as the imperialists continue to feed the meatgrinders it is going to continue until they no longer have the power to demolish nations and reduce cities to rubble.
As to Canadian politics- Poilevre is a proto-fascist and barely pretends to be anything other. Trudeau is a gamer tempted into politics which he regards as a trivial pursuit in which he mouths platitudes and follows orders from the very people who are now replacing him with a fresher face.
Anyone who believes that a renewed Harper government, another revival of the Manning clan’s old political project, inspired by Mussolini and Ayn Rand, needs to join a lending library.

Posted by: bevin | Oct 6 2024 18:48 utc | 48

Nothingburgers @ 22
Women are from Venus, men are from Mars, very traditional, too traditional and not woke at all. Is it too close to the election to replace Harris?

Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Oct 6 2024 18:57 utc | 50

The normalisation of genocide began in the 17th century, with Puritan settlers in Massachussetts attempting to send “the devil’s children” to Hell.

Posted by: lester | Oct 6 2024 19:02 utc | 52

@bevin #48
” Anyone got any good news?”
Don Firineach@11
An Empire more than half a millenium old is imploding before our eyes.
Thank you. Big picture. Agree.
On Canada and ‘canuck’ – I’m no expert but from what I do know – I don’t expect any significant change. [pity you mentioned that vile Ayn woman – I’ll shrug it off ….
Some music – from well before the Empire and not destroyed by it …
Celtic Music – Wolf Blood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06H_6oI4EK4&list=RDQMhiYBrDMT32Y&start_radio=1

Posted by: I | Oct 6 2024 19:20 utc | 54

Nothingburgers | Oct 6 2024 16:15 utc | 22
I assume this is all a piss-take, but according to one NASA engineer Venus is the best place in the solar system for a human settlement.

Posted by: S.P. Korolev | Oct 6 2024 19:27 utc | 56

Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Oct 6 2024 15:38 utc | 14 Followed the link, tried to listen to the whole video. I can only conclude that as is so common, whenever an expert speaks out of their field, they simply cannot be presumed to be more authoritative than any random speaker. Finkelstein’s area of expertise is Israel/Palestine.
Thus it is unsurprising he spouts nonsense. For one, primaries are not the essence of democracy, elections are. The US was a democracy (for what it’s worth) long before the primaries were enshrined into the legal system. If anything, the current primary system is an essential mechanism by which the oligarchs corrupt the elections! What he says is the opposite of the truth! (The critical role of big money in waging a prolonged primary campaign hugely amplifies ruling class influence.)
Another thing, everybody understood Biden would have Harris as his VP and therefore every vote for Biden was a vote for his replacement-in-waiting. And the ones who didn’t get to vote, whether because the other candidates couldn’t get enough seed money or because the professionals didn’t want to waste their time running against Biden or because a primary was canceled to save time and money, simply doesn’t count. There is no voting against, all non-votes are votes for. That’s why the duopoly system is so undemocratic in essence while being totally legal in form. What’s truly undemocratic is that the presidential candidate gets to personally pick the VP, but thats on everybody. If Crooks had killed Trump, or if Trump stroked out tomorrow, what would be “undemocratic” in form is denying Vance, Trump’s replacement in waiting, the nomination. So that’s another thing Finkelstein get wrong.
Last thing, Finkelstein’s belief that fascism is a rational response to a socialist threat is simply incorrect. Mussolini didn’t come to power in the Red Summer when the socialist upsurge threatened the foundations of the Italian state, but after. Hitler himself was also given power after the socialist upsurge from 1918 to 1923 had long been defeated. The Social Democrats were not going to ally with the Communists to oppose capitalism, something they proved not just in their support for the Freikorps but reinforced in the Blutmai of 1929. There was barely a Communist Party in Spain, the Socialists were not very revolutionary and the Anarchists, who were probably even more influential as well as larger weren’t for socialist revolution, apologetics for anarchism notwithstanding. The socialist threat in Austria was crushed by violence in assault in 1927 and 1934. There was no socialist threat in Hungary, that was crushed in 1919 with French assistance. There was no socialist threat in Croatia or Solvenia or Romania. There was no socialist threat in Japan. Again, Finkelstein is just wrong. Three strikes, he’s out.
Fascism is a consolidation of a dictatorial rule by means of both legal and illegal violence in the aims of mobilizing the “nation” for war and conquest. The US is a relatively declining imperialist power. Forcibly mobilizing the nation, whether for Making America Great Again (aka Fortress America?) or some other crusade against Communism or Islam or whatever imaginary threat, would be fascist. Having the fascist sympathizers in the police and army do the violence “legally” would be fascism. (Cops kill enough people “illegally” after all.) Really why would you rely on street mobs when you can just tell your acting secretary of defense to stand down the troops? Most of all, the notion that American fascism wouldn’t have its own national characteristics is merely stupid. Of course it would, it has to.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Oct 6 2024 19:38 utc | 58

James ( Oct 6 2024 15:01 utc | 7 ) wrote:

Understanding Israel’s Growing Conflict With Iran with Matthew Hoh
56 minute video that i thought was quite good, especially the last half from about 30 minutes on..

Thank you James! That was a very good interview/conversation and Matthew Hoh makes a convincing appraisal of the validity of both the not-so-conflicting viewpoints.
Nice to see someone saying the circle is round and that all parts of the circle are round! 🙂 (I sort of tried).
And yes it is not monolithic neither in purpose or anything else except perhaps that it is monolithic in its multiple disastrous consequences but not in its parts. Sorry to haters of ambiguity 😉
It is not even truly monolithic when it comes to “control” because chaos and causing chaos is not really control.
And to segue into something else I wanted to write about yesterday and before I saw this interview (but didn’t get around to) it is not all about oil either. Just an ingredient in the soup that’s all.
Put too much focus on any single thing and one risks looking stupid or at least unconvincing and alienating any curious outsiders.
Anyway back to the video:
There are people like Matthew Hoh in the US, relatively young, sensible, rational, reasoning, human, “educated”/informed, reasonably successful (compared to a large amount of people), and healthy, yet still the clowns are in control. Such a state of things on its own is proof of the utter insanity going on 🙁
And if as if to hammer that home there is the ending video of Eisenhower. Such sentiments is what, a long time ago, people thought the US represented, somehow, and through that door all the shit crept in because all sorts of excuses were made for decades upon decades and here we are.
(If it hits closer to home then feel free to instead/also compare it with what started as local actual soviets (small capital) in Russia before things “grew”/devolved/corrupted into the USSR and its end).
[ Phew I managed to whittle this comment down to a reasonable size! 😀 ]

Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Oct 6 2024 19:46 utc | 60

Suddenly out of nowhere I now embark on a personal ranting on a scientific topic. The trajectories familiar from astrophysics in the case of simple central force systems are known to be conic sections. Ellipsis Hyperbolas and parabolas and occationally nearly straight lines.
But the common thing happens to be the invariance of the so called equiaffine curvature=Keq.
One may get that by studying transforms between two coordinate systems using arbitrary coefficients except for the condition that the transformation doesnt alter the total area of a local surface element but otherwise may skew and distort what is being transformed.
Then one differentiates the coordinates being connected by the transfornation a couple of times to obtain a number of derivatives so one may combine those results to eliminate all the coefficients of the transformations. This enables the mathematician to deduce a differential formula that is an invariant independent of whatever coefficients are used.
The simplest invariant in this case is the equiaffine curvature.
When it has constant value it also turns out that this corresponds to precisely those conic sections.
Thus a simple 2D method actually captures the main features of Newtonian mechanics and it happens without any need for making any hypothesis about any central force. It just provides the information that constant Keq covers all the conic sections.
So despite that no physics idea has been introduced we still get the trajectories.
It is no mystery because there are always implicit mathematical circumstances.
But now the question arises: what more may be obtained by studying other choices of Keq when it isnt constant? Could there be more things hidden with a bearing on reality?
I tried the simple case of an exponential function
f(x)=Aexp(ikx) like that. I wont dwell on it here but I did find something interesting when I tried to match f(x) with its resulting Keq. It resulted in a very slight but unavoidable mismatch between the two sides.
The example of the conic sections encourages me to believe that there might be more physics hiding in that kind of invariance context. So I now wonder whether the small numbers like finestructure coefficient and electron to proton mass ratio might emerge from pure math because our reality is determined by an invariance that eliminates uncertanties depending on arbitrary coordinates.
I assume not many of the followers of the blog appreciated this 🙂 I apologise. Bernard is a great investigative journo and brings high quality to the table for us. I feel like one is being spoiled with this excellent service not to be found in many places.
I just cant stop myself sometimes…

Posted by: petergrfstrm | Oct 6 2024 20:01 utc | 62

William Gruff | Oct 6 2024 16:52 utc | 31

It is like trying to develop the life sciences while denying the work of Charles Darwin. Try to imagine what the study of biology would be today if the main thrust of its development had for almost two centuries been the attempt to refute the ideas of natural selection and speciation.

Exactly! But we really should’ve come up with a better term than Marxism for our science by now. The only people people who call biology ‘Darwinism’ are American God-botherers and ‘Historical Materialism’ or ‘Dialectical Materialism’ are a bit clunky.

…the Empire’s “color revolutions” are largely an application of Trotsky’s refinement of Marxist theory.

Could you expand on this a bit? I know sometimes Trotsky’s theory of ‘Permanent Revolution’ gets misunderstood as meaning “all revolution, all the time!”, when it just refers to pushing through the ‘democratic’ phase of the revolution in feudal or colonized countries directly to socialist revolution, considering socialists are almost always the ones fighting for democracy and national liberation in those countries anyway. But I don’t think this is what you mean?

Posted by: S.P. Korolev | Oct 6 2024 20:48 utc | 64

LightYearsFromHome ( Oct 6 2024 15:38 utc | 14 ) who linked to “Norman Finkelstein “lashes out” Harris, Trump, Noam Chomsky, Democratic Party and Republican Party”
Just want to say I really like Norman Finkelsteins’s sarcastic laugh 😀
Balm for the soul, we all need that 🙂

Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Oct 6 2024 21:06 utc | 66

@Don Firineach | Oct 6 2024 15:30 utc., who asked “any good news to report?”
Well, yes, Don: I read persiflo’s remarks @ Oct 6 2024 19:29 utc and that was good for a laugh.
In other good news, I just finished mowing and tedding hay field number 1 (of 2). Only 5 more days of effort to go, and I’ve done this year’s heavy-lifting and mindless scut-work.
Furthermore, if you weren’t already ecstatic with that news, my first batch of blackberry-elderberry wine is now on its 5th day of fermentation, and while it was expressly forbidden by the recipe author, samples were taken and … sampled.
It’s delicious.

Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Oct 6 2024 21:15 utc | 68

S.P. Korolev @64: “But we really should’ve come up with a better term than Marxism”
Had the social sciences (including economics) developed in a healthy way, then they would now encompass Marxism, and there would be no distinction between the two. It would just be various specializations of sociology, with Marx being one of their common foundational individuals. There would be no such thing as “Marxism” today, as the term would be as redundant and silly as calling modern physics “Newtonism”.
As for the Empire’s “color revolutions”, these exploit the understanding that colonized societies exist in a latent revolutionary state. They only lack a revolutionary vanguard and sufficient “division of the bourgeoisie”. The latter is easily simulated when it is the bourgeoisie itself that wants the revolution (directed against a government that is not in compliance with imperial dictat rather than the bourgeoisie themselves), and the former through marketing and redirection of working class revolutionary aspirations into manageable dead-ends like identity politics. If the revolution’s “vanguard” is just middle class Ivy League kids in imperial NGOs, led by the State Department/CIA, and built up by big business mass media to be the “real” force for progress, then there is little worry of the revolution getting out of control and threatening the bourgeoisie. Just withdraw the “vanguard” and the revolution collapses back into latent revolution. The key here is to hand everything to the protesters on a silver platter so they never have the need/opportunity to develop their own independent leadership. Keep them dependent upon the Ivy League kids in the NGOs and hired professional “event organizers” so that when these are withdrawn, the revolution dissipates.
Note: Are the people of the Ukraine more or less dissatisfied with current conditions than they were in 2013-2014 during the maidan disturbances? Obviously, they are much more dissatisfied now, so then why no maidan II? Because there is no vanguard to lead it.
But this is all dependent upon Trotsky’s observation of latent revolution in colonized societies and what is necessary to move from a pre-revolutionary society to a revolutionary one.

Posted by: William Gruff | Oct 6 2024 21:41 utc | 70

Isn’t the real truth that nobody actually understands “economics” (a fata morgana of human activity being given solely monetary (or similar) value or at least some monetary equivalence, sometimes entirely arbitrarily) —or at least not to a sufficient degree to not devolve into quests for profit and power and excuses thereof— and that “social sciences” are so steeped in shoddy methodology, confirmation bias, and ulterior motives including political ones (but not exclusively), such that the vast majority of people stay far away from it except as a potentially easy job prospect?
I think a lot of people are barking up the wrong tree. I don’t sit in that tree but I can still hear it if I want to (and sometime when I don’t want to).
Imagine a dog barking continuously for decades and even centuries, people will move away 😛
Examples would/could be the success of China and Russia, both of which seem to me at least to be based more on direct political control of and interference in the economy and profits and not at all on any economic theory alone.
In other words the interference and making good calls on when to interfere and what to prioritize seems proven to be far more important than any economics.
At which point one can move the goalposts of “economics” to include the political and such decisions, but that is nothing but stirring up sediment in a puddle. Isn’t it?
Doesn’t this apply to all proposed kinds of “economics”?
Moreover (I’m chucking those goalposts back in the other direction) doesn’t it also apply to all political systems and societies?.
Good decisions by good/well-intending people combined with at least some fortune/luck or otherwise benevolent circumstances, and then everything else is nothing but ad hoc and/or post hoc and/or historical rationalizations?

Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Oct 6 2024 22:11 utc | 72

Posted by: Patroklos | Oct 6 2024 22:09 utc | 72
Posterity has been good for that clever devil Bruno. I’ve always wanted to see his essay, the one Marx was responding to in The Jewish Question. Some kind barfly shared a copy with me but it’s in German. Someone should republish the JQ in English with both essays side by side. It would sell well imo.
Read Bruno’s Christ and the Caesars. Highly rewarding read especially for those from a Christian background.

Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Oct 6 2024 22:28 utc | 74

Those of you disgusted with the west? Maybe you just haven’t paid attention for the last 500 years or you’re just easily propagandized.
Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Oct 6 2024 14:34 utc | 1
To be fair, Tom, things have qualitatively changed in the west in the last 15 years or so. In that time we have been dealing with something much more openly unstable, sick and hideous.

Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Oct 6 2024 22:39 utc | 76

I finally got it. For those who say the empire is in the driver seat: Yes, the driver is a demented zombie – with many roadkills – and road map on the dashboard is GPS blocked. It all makes sense now.

Posted by: Sakineh Bagoom | Oct 6 2024 22:50 utc | 78

Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Oct 6 2024 22:16 utc | 74
“He wasn’t making a technical point, he didn’t say the primaries are the foundation of actual democracy, he said ‘bourgeois’ democracy, the key word being bourgeois, which is about superficiality and appearance, his point being the DNC s topped bothering with appearances, not even the traditional bedrock format used to transfer credence to the appearance, the primary.”
Sorry, factually wrong. Primaries was not even the key marker the through the whole twentieth century. Even today, Iowa and Nevada are caucus states, not primary states. Here’s a quick review: https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/a-brief-history-of-presidential-primaries
It is perfectly natural to try to save an authority who deserves respect in their field (Zionism/Palestine in Finkelstein’s case) from looking stupid. The problem is that bourgeois democracy, not even in the US, is not traditionally founded on primaries. The purpose of a primary system is for the oligarchs to vet the candidates and make sure an acceptable candidate arrives with enough delegates committed to make sure there is no factionalizing (much less God forbid rank and file discontent among party members) and the conventions are basically coronations. The modern, not traditional primary system, was sold as a way to get out of the smoke-filled backrooms where party kingmakers sold votes to the highest bidder. It was when the primaries did become more important that they did things like invent Super Tuesday. That’s where a bunch of widely dispersed primaries are held simultaneously, so that no unfunded candidate could campaign retail and upset. Instead they would have to mass buy media and jets for what little in person campaigning they could do, putting a premium on seed money. (And by the way someone like Sanders could get as little news coverage as possible while a Trump would get billions in air time, as happened in 2016.) Finkelstein was just mindlessly copying Trumper propaganda.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Oct 6 2024 23:07 utc | 80

Liar Blinken rubbed it in, where every State news outlet included “unprovoked” in front of “Russia aggression.” Blinken ‘forgot’ about the 2021 Biden/Blinken meeting with Russia which re-affirmed NATO movement eastward, right into Russia’s knickers.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Oct 6 2024 23:10 utc | 82

@Posted by: Patroklos | Oct 6 2024 22:09, who said, in part:

Part of antisemitism (the genuinely non-Nazi part) asks ‘by what right do a tiny group in any society demand that the whole of society be determined by their interests and worldview’? To abolish antisemitism one must critique any and all claims to specific privilege based on mystified ideas about race, ethnicity, religion, class, etc.

Patroklos: That was a sledge-hammer. Lucid, eloquent, insightful, excellent logic. A piece of work few people could have put on the table.
Now riddle me this:
There are several players, notably the remainder-royalties of one stripe or another, that hold dear the notion of their divine right of kings. The Zionists make common cause with these people, and to Snake’s points, have evolved a trans-national political force dedicated to the continuation of their depredations upon all-others.
Can you tell a … related, if not similar story about these people (I almost used the term “predators”)?
We occasionally label them “sociopaths” – but it seems like this sociopathy has been around a great long time, and Zionism – and its fellow-travelers – is just the latest, very-effective instance of this … what? Phenomenon?. Do you have insights into this behavior-set?
All others, feel free to jump in. I’d like to hear your perspectives.

Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Oct 6 2024 23:15 utc | 84

@ steven t johnson @ 58
primaries are not the essence of democracy, elections are.
@ LightYearsFromHome | Oct 6 2024 22:16 utc | 74
Posted by: Don Bacon | Oct 6 2024 23:05 utc | 80
Aristotle, who knew more about real politics and civic organization than most alive, considered election to be the mode of appointment typical of aristocracies. The appointment of magistrates in the Roman Republic confirms this. Elections are popularity contests among pre-selected candidates. Oligarchies maintain solidarity by periodically using election to circulate power and honours among its cohort.
Sortition, according to the great philosopher, is the truly democratic mode of selection. It implicitly recognises and trusts that the citizen knows how to act in the best interests of the political community. I would like to see it used more often. The only part of my polity to use it is in jury selection, where it works, on the whole, very well. Jurors, whoever they are, largely take their responsibility very seriously.

Posted by: Patroklos | Oct 6 2024 23:35 utc | 86

@ jinn | 88
Come on, now you are being intentionally obtuse about US primaries.
Funnily enough most ‘Muricans would not call Iran a democracy. You might ask them why, because there are actually multiple different candidates for the presidency, and they are actually on a spectrum of being more of a “hardliner” or more of a “moderate”. Then they say that this might be the case, but it still cannot be a true democracy, because a small group of “special people”, the clerical elites, choose who is even supposed to be eligible for the presidency. Which is of course a joke, because the thoroughly corrupt DNC and RNC are doing exactly that. They are small groups of elite wankers “choosing” who is eligible to even run for the presidency.
When multiple irregularities occured as the DNC was ousting Bernie Sanders as a candidate the DNC argued in court (!) that they are just a private organisation and election laws should not be applied to their primaries. The courts – having to respect laws which are still significantly configured by a 18th century oligarchy – of course acquiesced to that. All of this is simply a mockery of actual representation.

Posted by: Roland | Oct 6 2024 23:55 utc | 88

Posted by: Tom Pfotzer | Oct 6 2024 23:15 utc | 85
Thanks for your generous remarks, and a good question. Ahenobarbus made some excellent observations too about the changed circumstances which require Marx’s observations to be updated. When you live in a social form whose central tenet is the rejection of human sociality and the hyper-exaltation of the individual (let’s call it Muskism) then one of the major contradictions is the promotion of the sociopath. The sociopath is an ethical and moral black hole. But in our current neo-liberal form of late capitalism the rejection of regulations on sociopathic behaviour is considered virtuous. The lesson of antiquity is that the solitary man who imagines himself to be the sole source of his success and power, and who believes he owes nothing to his fellow human beings, is one of the most dangerous and pernicious enemies to human flourishing. The Greeks gave him a name: tyrannos. Only ritual expulsion cleanses a community of this toxicity. Those royalty remainder types you speak of must be dealt with in a similar way: Robespierre showed us how.

Posted by: Patroklos | Oct 6 2024 23:57 utc | 90

Re: Marxism and Christianity
Why does the Pope, much to the chagrin of conservative Catholics, court the left?
Is it not because the left and Catholics are natural allies with a few minor misunderstandings about each other?
I am not saying that conservative Catholics are further away from God than the liberal-minded, only that the lost sheep of the modern left is much more in need of the medicine that will guide them back.
To put it another way: the conservative Catholic is like the brother of the Prodigal Son, upset that the Father is willing to go to such extremes to welcome his other strayed son back to the family estate.
How are the left and Catholicism like out-of-touch family? It is because they both have their feet in universalism and also resentment.
Resentment is the backbone of Christianity as Nietzsche properly understood. And so is resentment for those that control the means of production the driving-force of the left, as understood by Marx.
The idea is to subvert the order of the world. Faith does this through spirit. The left chooses this through the measurable material.
How can these two be reconciled?
For the left, this is reconciled by understanding that humanism is just Catholicism minus the sacred.
Everything that the modern left espouses as its own accomplishment: care for the poor, the sick, suffrage, a more equitable distribution of wealth and political power, was first properly grasped by the Institution of the Catholic Church.
Before this and most clearly embodied by the Roman Empire, was the belief in the fates and the power structures that were held up by ritual sacrifice. If you did not end up rich or privileged in life, this was a result of past transgressions, perhaps from your family, perhaps in another life. Blood sacrifices made to the myriad Gods rectified this.
And for an illustration as to how absurd the list of Gods and their attributes and specific rituals were, please remember that St. Augustine addressed this in his time City of God, which was written in response to the bitter cries of the Roman elite who wanted to return to Pagan worship because their lot had diminished in the age after Constantine had adopted Christianity.
The criticism that Christianity was just another iteration of the Roman Empire to prolong the hold of the elite there is thus understood as bogus according to Augustine.
To reiterate, Humanism is everything Christianity did before but without an acknowledgement of the need for the sacred.
And the sacred, as understood by Nietzsche, is the grasping of human culture through an initial act of violence or murder of a victim who is divinized at the moment the murder is complete.
The guilt of killing an innocent victim is thus completely buried by the immediate divinization of the victim.
Christianity, through the revealing of this innocence of the victim, completely subverts the original Pagan culture of sacrifice, but it does recognize the need that is intrinsic in the formation of culture for sacrifice.
Thus, Christianity provides the means to understand how culture is formed, by ritual sacrifice of an original victim, and also provides the necessary bloodless sacrifice of Jesus Christ during Holy Mass to maintain culture while keeping the understanding of victimhood unconcealed.
Humanism does not acknowledge the sacred and so laughs mockingly at Christianity. But it does this in dark ignorance of the need for the sacred. An ignorance that can not help but fall prey again to the allure of bloody violence and its cycle of false transcendence.

Posted by: NemesisCalling | Oct 7 2024 0:08 utc | 92

BTW Finkelstein wasn’t asked so I don’t know but he misses the reason the DNC skipped the primary and didn’t bother to strengthen the appearance of democracy, reinforce the system, add legitimacy this time around, to field the best wrestler in the kayfabe, something that was paramount historically. Finkelstein appears to think the election will play out honestly, or there was no time in the interview to delve deeper, but for myself I think they reason they didn’t bother with the traditional dog an pony show is because there is no need, the fix is in.

Posted by: LightYearsFromHome | Oct 7 2024 0:12 utc | 94

Patroklos | Oct 6 2024 23:57 utc | 91 ….
Real line all became clear towards the end of the posted item.
So the typically Jewish solution to their own fanatical, introspective and narcissistic obsession … is to abolish the identities of everyone else.

Posted by: Cynic | Oct 7 2024 0:30 utc | 96

(something went wrong with time and numbering when previously posted)
Posted by: Patroklos | Oct 6 2024 22:09 utc | 72 …..
Real line all became clear towards the end of the posted item.
So the typically Jewish solution to their own fanatical, introspective and narcissistic obsession … is to abolish the identities of everyone else.
Posted by: Cynic | Oct 7 2024 0:30 utc | 97

Posted by: Cynic | Oct 7 2024 0:41 utc | 98

If you want to understand the workings of Western “democracy”, read “Democracy or Bonapartism” by Dominic Losurdo. You wont find a better historical exposition on the creation of the purely performative things called “liberal democracy”.

Posted by: Roger | Oct 7 2024 0:43 utc | 100