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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-230
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
Ukraine has lost the drone war against energy facilities. Zelenski is throwing the towel:
> “We need stronger defenses, faster execution of all defense agreements, especially regarding air defense, to render this aerial terror meaningless,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram. “A unilateral ceasefire in the skies is possible, and it may open the way to genuine diplomacy. America and Europe must act to force Putin to stop.” <
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Other issues:
Europe:
Russia:
China:
Others:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
persiflo 2
“While the phenomenologists – Heidegger, Gadamer, and Arendt, in particular – value “tradition,” the critical theorists, inspired by Marx, look for radical social reform or even outright revolution.”
Possibly trying to frame a reality best understood as the spectrum and feedback between polarities as monolithic. Then the polarities polarize. More yin and yang, than God Almighty.
An objective point of view would be an oxymoron. No omniscient omniscience, no “God’s eye view.”
Knowing both the position and momentum of a moving car is contradictory, but it is only s mystery if we assume information to be inherently objective, rather than entirely emergent with the processes generating it.
The big problem is time.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is of the present moving past to future. As the basis of thought, it is foundational civilization.
Yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
No time traveling around the fabric of spacetime, as it is more tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.
Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the present goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past, because energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.
As it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there is this cognitive focus on the patterns, while what observes, creates them is assumed to be emergent from the form, rather than source of it. “It from bit.” Currently going in overdrive with AI.
The signals our minds pick out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with prior knowledge, building on it, like rings of a tree. Which is a centripetal dynamic, as the noise radiates back out.
Galaxies are structure coalescing in, as light radiates out.
This light is then traded around creating overall equilibrium. The light you see reflected off the surfaces around you are the frequencies not absorbed by them.
So the essence of the node is synchronization. everything on the same wavelength, functioning as one. While the essence of the network is harmonization, all the energies traded around creating overall equilibrium.
As organisms, it is our nervous system that coalesces all the cells and organs into one fairly coherent entity. While the circulation system sustains harmony across this internal ecosystem of cells and organs.
In that states function as social super organisms, government, executive and regulatory, is the nervous system, while money and banking are blood and circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as the function of government has to be the health of the entire society, if only because power accrues to those with the most followers, that it has to be a public utility. We have not yet come to see the same principle applies to banking.
When the medium enabling markets is a player in those markets and not a utility, the rest are tenant farmers to the banks.
As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate. Consequently Econ 101 describes money as both medium of exchange and store of value.
In your body, blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over who has the biggest lots.
As a medium, you own money like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It doesn’t have your picture on it, you don’t hold the copyrights and, most importantly, are not directly responsible for its value, like a personal check.
While we might think of money as a commodity to mine from the economy, like we mine gold from the ground, or bitcoin from computer processing, it functions as a social contract, between the holder and the rest of society. So to store the asset side of the ledger requires a debt on the other side.
Consequently much social and economic activity is designed to generate debt, to store the illusion of wealth.
That the flunkies in DC are best at creating debt and the financial sector needs this debt to grow metastatically, is not coincidence. “The real money is in bonds.”
The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Posted by: John Merryman | Oct 5 2025 14:13 utc | 10
With all this “divide and conquer” one should be asking who would be doing the dividing and conquering?
Michael Hudson has made the argument that it goes back to antiquity and the Greeks and Romans adopting interest accruing lending from the Middle East, without the circuit breaker of debt jubilees. That “Forgive them their sins” was originally “Forgive them their debts,” before the Romans co-opted Christianity for the monotheism, as it served to validate top down rule.
Remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. To the Ancients, gods were metaphors, memes, if you like. At this stage of intellectual evolution, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Basically a metaphor for the tribal societies in which humanity originated.
What made the Jewish tribal god a useful cultural locus, was the god were those social rules, not some figurative metaphor. Ancient Israel was also a monarchy. The Big Guy rules. Like the religion.
Yet rules tend to become socially constraining, as they tend to grow like vines. The anarchies of desire versus the tyrannies of judgement.
So Christianity originated as a schism in Judaism, between those pushing the social and cultural bounds and those enforcing them. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
While it was received outside of Judaism as a metaphor for rebirth, as this tension between tradition and renewal is universal. Zeus not giving way to Dionysus. The origins of the Trinity go to fertility rites. The young god born in the spring to the old sky god and earth mother. Oestre was the Anglo Saxon fertility goddess.
While Constantine co-opted it for the monotheism, as he was bringing the sides of the Empire together and burying any reminders of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.
The Catholic Church then served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed. While the origins of the Trinity were shrouded in garble about the three faces of God, as the Church was not actually into renewal, or women, for the matter. The new became the old.
When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.
Having outsourced social evolution to this idealized father figure, as respect for it faded, it left a void, filled by the will to power, rampant greed, or just reversion to ethnocentric tribalism, ie, Nazism/Aryan Nation, or Zionism.
The problem with modern monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every culture are ideals. The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental. So a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which life rises, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.
Morality is not absolute, as it couldn’t be transgressed, if it were. Like a temperature below absolute zero. Morals are those codes, behaviors, relationships, etc. that sustain a healthy and functional society.
Back in those tribal societies, status would be a function of what one added, one’s responsibilities. With these nation states of hundreds of millions of people, status is a function of what one can extract, one’s rights.
Cultures tend to treat good and bad as that cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, because it is the function of culture to coalesce societies as those social super organisms. While the reality is they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.
Often too much of a good thing can have negative consequences and much of our evolution is a response to dealing with problems, than basking in pleasures. “No pain, no gain.” What doesn’t kill us, just makes us stronger.
When we try applying absolutes to this, then the feedback loops don’t have any circuit breakers and it all spirals into the vortex.
Posted by: John Merryman | Oct 5 2025 17:00 utc | 44
Every time you meet a woman worshiping, white worker hating, transvestite that energetically supports Israel and Ukraine, you can thank the Frankfurters.
I get confused, I thought trans were woman hating, plotting to beat them up and rape them in restrooms? Also, pretty sure many trans are white workers, since there are so many white workers. There are of course numerous people who energetically support Israel but it’s because they are Christian Zionists and the Frankfurters aren’t to blame for that. Also, I’m confused about people who lethargically support Ukraine and energetically support Israel, like Trump. Hard to blame that on his study of the Frankfurters. All the jokes aside, the notion trans are energizing the support for Israel really is ridiculous. And trans aren’t energizing the mass support for Ukraine, because there isn’t much mass support for Ukraine, not even among patriots, because foreigners and forever war, i.e, losing. All this appears to be, the writer hates the very idea of such creatures and mentioning their name in connection with something bad provides an occasion to rage. I must confess though that I haven’t actually met but a handful of trans so maybe that keeps me from seeing the threat this deadly mass movement truly poses?
Marcuse famously pointed to the “outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and unemployable” as the potential new revolutionary elements. He argued that, although these groups may lack revolutionary consciousness, “their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not”It’s a pretty short trip from here to the divide and rule idpol we all know and despise.
I do despise some idpol. I’m tempted to re-read the book No Politics But Class Politics by Michaels and Reed. (Yes the infamous Adolph Reed, no apologies from me.) Despite that I can’t endorse this BS. First of all, the employed are working class. And frankly, the so-called unemployable sounds more like a slur than a clearly defined category. As for the notion some malevolent vision of a we who want to exploit and persecute is idpol itself. It’s called solidarity with the ruling class, which also believes in exploitation and persecution. It’s idpol in that it asserts an identity as the virtuous, that crosses class lines.
So, as one can see, it was concluded post WW2 by the Frankfurters that the working class slaves are reactionary, are not the revolutionary class and others “misfits” on the fringes of society are the true revolutionary class. In other words, the very antithesis of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.
It’s true that the Frankfurters have nothing to do with Lenin and merely words in common with Marx. Unlike the wrecker they simply say nothing of Trotsky. They didn’t take Trotsky seriously enough to bother with him? I suppose you could call me an enemy of the Frankfurters, if a nobody can speak of being an enemy to a bunch of dead authors without being silly. But I don’t agree the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Damning the Frankfurters, worthy in itself, doesn’t make nonsense or worse palatable. Elements of the working class become demoralized, criminal, lumpen—they are often the best fighters for reaction. The aristocracy of labor is quite often reactionary, but they are working class nonetheless, God help us all. And broad layers of the working class are in fact a kind of negative reactionary, not revolutionary, not materialist (see: working class people in churches!) The claim that working class homes are being threatened by outcasts and foreigners, who have the power of subversion to make up for their weakness in wealth and numbers, historically was trumpeted by the Klan or the Black Hundreds. And some of the workers listened. I say they were crossing class lines. And I further say that tailing the Black Hundreds is not Marxist and not Leninist! (It may be Trotskyist?)
Posted by: steven t johnson | Oct 5 2025 17:55 utc | 55
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