war on human nature

The question that tempts mankind to the use of substances controlled and uncontrolled is next of kin to Hamlet's: to be, or not to be, someone or somewhere else. Escape from a grievous circumstance or the shambles of an unwanted self, the hope of finding at a higher altitude a new beginning or a better deal. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars; give me leave to drown my sorrow in a quart of gin; wine, dear boy, and truth.

That the consummations of the wish to shuffle off the mortal coil are as old as the world itself was the message brought by Abraham Lincoln to an Illinois temperance society in 1842. "I have not inquired at what period of time the use of intoxicating liquors commenced," he said, "nor is it important to know." It is sufficient to know that on first opening our eyes "upon the stage of existence", we found "intoxicating liquor recognised by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody".

The state of intoxication is a house with many mansions. Fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, the Rigveda finds Hindu priests chanting hymns to a "drop of soma", the wise and wisdom-loving plant from which was drawn juices distilled in sheep's wool that "make us see far; make us richer, better". Philosophers in ancient Greece rejoiced in the literal meaning of the word symposium, a "drinking together". The Roman Stoic Seneca recommends the judicious embrace of Bacchus as a liberation of the mind "from its slavery to cares, emancipates it, invigorates it, and emboldens it for all its undertakings".

Omar Khayyam, 12th-century Persian mathematician and astronomer, drinks wine "because it is my solace", allowing him to "divorce absolutely reason and religion". Martin Luther, early father of the Protestant reformation, in 1530 exhorts the faithful to "drink, and right freely", because it is the devil who tells them not to. "One must always do what Satan forbids. What other cause do you think that I have for drinking so much strong drink, talking so freely, and making merry so often, except that I wish to mock and harass the devil who is wont to mock and harass me."

Dr Samuel Johnson, child of the Enlightenment, requires wine only when alone, "to get rid of myself – to send myself away". The French poet Charles Baudelaire, prodigal son of the industrial revolution, is less careful with his time. "One should always be drunk. That's the great thing, the only question. Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please."

My grandfather, Roger Lapham (1883-1966), was similarly disposed, his house in San Francisco the stage of existence upon which, at the age of seven in 1942, I first opened my eyes to the practice as old as the world itself. At the Christmas family gathering that year, Grandfather deemed any and all children present who were old enough to walk instead of toddle therefore old enough to sing a carol, recite a poem, and drink a cup of kindness made with brandy, cinnamon, and apples. To raise the spirit, welcome the arrival of our newborn Lord and Saviour. Joy to the world, peace on earth, goodwill toward men.

'If you meet, you drink …'

Thus introduced to intoxicating liquors under auspices both secular and sacred, the offering of alms for oblivion I took to be the custom of the country in which I had been born. In the 1940s as it was in the 1840s, as it had been ever since the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth laden with emboldening casks of wine and beer. The spirit of liberty is never far from the hope of metamorphosis or transformation, and the Americans from the beginning were drawn to the possibilities in the having of one more for the road. They formed their character in the settling of a fearful wilderness, and the history of the country could be written as a prolonged mocking and harassing of the devil by the drinking, "and right freely", from whatever wise and wisdom-loving grain or grape came conveniently to hand.

The ocean-going Pilgrims in colonial Massachusetts and Rhode Island delighted in both the taste and trade in rum. The founders of the republic in Philadelphia in 1787 were in the habit of consuming prodigious quantities of liquor as an expression of their faith in their fellow men – pots of ale or cider at midday, two or more bottles of claret at dinner followed by an amiable passing around the table of the Madeira.

Among the tobacco planters in Virginia, the moneychangers in New York, the stalwart yeomen in western Pennsylvania busy at the task of making whiskey, the maintaining of a high blood-alcohol level was the mark of civilised behaviour. The lyrics of the Star-Spangled Banner were fitted to the melody of an 18th-century British tavern song. The excise taxes collected from the sale of liquor paid for the war of 1812, and by 1830 the tolling of the town bell (at 11am, and again at 4pm) announced the daily pauses for spirited refreshment.

Frederick Marryat, an English traveller to America in 1839, noted in his diary that the way the natives drank was "quite a caution … If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink; if you close a bargain, you drink; they quarrel in their drink, and they make it up with a drink. They drink, because it is hot; they drink, because it is cold."

During what were known as the Gay 90s, at the zenith of the country's gilded age, Manhattan between the Battery and 42nd Street glittered in the lights of 10,000 saloons issuing passports to the islands of the blessed and the rivers of forgetfulness. No travel plan or destination that couldn't be accommodated, prices available on request. French champagne at Sherry's Restaurant for the top-hatted Wall Street speculators celebrating the discoveries of El Dorado; shots of five-cent whiskey (said to taste "like a combination of kerosene oil, soft soap, alcohol, and the chemicals used in fire extinguishers") for the unemployed foreign labourer sleeping in the gutters south of Canal Street. Who could say who was hoping to trade places with whom, the uptown swell intent upon becoming a noble savage, the downtown immigrant imagining himself dressed in fur and diamonds?

What else is America about if not the work of self-invention? Recognise the project as an always risky business, and it is the willingness to chance what dreams may come (west of the Alleghenies or on the further shores of consciousness) that gives to the American the distinguishing traits of character that the historian Daniel J Boorstin, librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987, identified as those of the chronic revolutionary and the ever hopeful pilgrim. Boorstin drew the conclusion from his study of the American colonial experience: "No prudent man dared be too certain of exactly who he was or what he was about; everyone had to be prepared to become someone else. To be ready for such perilous transmigrations was to become an American."

'There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio'

So too in the 1960s, the prudent becoming of an American involved perilous transmigrations, psychic, spiritual and political. By no means certain who I was at the age of 24, I was prepared to make adjustments, but my one experiment with psychedelics in 1959 was a rub that promptly gave me pause.

Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the doors of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley wished to compare the flight patterns of a bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper's literary editor to furnish one of each. We were placed in adjacent soundproofed rooms, both of us under the observation of men in white coats equipped with clipboards, the idea being that we would relay messages from the higher consciousness to the air-traffic controllers on the ground.

Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9am, the trajectory a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. By way of travelling companions we had been encouraged to bring music, in those days on vinyl LPs, of whatever kind moved us while on earth to register emotions approaching the sublime.

Together with Johann Sebastian Bach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, I attained what I'd been informed would be cruising altitude at noon. I neglected to bring a willing suspension of disbelief, and because I stubbornly resisted the sales pitch for the drug – if you, O wizard, can work wonders, prove to me the where and when and how and why – I encountered heavy turbulence. Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.

To the men in white I had nothing to report, not one word on either the going up and out or the coming back and down. I never learned what Ginsberg had to say. Whatever it was, I wasn't interested, and I left the building before he had returned from what by then I knew to be a dead-end sleep.

My longstanding acquaintance with alcohol was for the most part cordial. Usually when I drank too much, I could guess why I did so, the objective being to murder a state of consciousness that I didn't have the courage to sustain – a fear of heights, which sometimes during the carnival of the 1960s accompanied my attempts to transform the bourgeois journalist into an avant-garde novelist. The stepped-up ambition was a commonplace among the would-be William Faulkners of my generation; nearly always it resulted in commercial failure and literary embarrassment.

I didn't grow a beard or move to Vermont, but every now and then I hit upon a run of words that I could mistake for art, and I would find myself intoxicated by what Emily Dickinson knew to be "a liquor never brewed/from Tankards scooped in Pearl". The neuroscientists understand the encounter with the ineffable as an "endorphin high", the outrageously fortunate mixing of the chemicals in the brain when it is being put to imaginative and creative use.

On being surprised by a joy so astonishingly sweet, I assumed that it must be forbidden, and if by the light of day I'd come too close to leaning against the sun with seraphs swinging snowy hats, by nightfall I felt bound to check into the nearest cage, drunkenness being the one most conveniently at hand. Around midnight at Elaine's, a saloon on Second Avenue in Manhattan that in those days catered to a clientele of actors, writers, and other assorted con artists playing characters of their own invention, I could count on the company of fellow travellers outward or inward bound on the roads of perilous transmigration. No matter what their reason for a timely departure – whether to obliterate the fear of failure, delete the thought of wife and home, reconfigure a mistaken identity, project into the future the birth of an imaginary self – all present were engaged in some sort of struggle between the force of life and the will to death. Thanatos and Eros seated across from each other over the backgammon board on table four, the onlookers suspending the judgment of ridicule and extending the courtesy of tolerance.

Alcohol serves at the pleasure of the players on both sides of the game, its virtues those indicated by Seneca and Martin Luther, its vices those that the novelist Marguerite Duras likens, as did Hamlet, to the sleep of death: "Drinking isn't necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can't drink without thinking you're killing yourself." Alcohol's job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren. "The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day."

The observation is in the same despairing minor key as Billie Holiday's riff on heroin: "If you think dope is for kicks and thrills you're out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio and living in an iron lung. If you think you need stuff to play music or sing, you're crazy. It can fix you so you can't play nothing or sing nothing." She goes on to say that in Britain the authorities at least have the decency to treat addiction as a public health problem, but in America, "if you go to the doctor, he's liable to slam the door in your face and call the cops".

Humankind's thirst for intoxicants is unquenchable, but to criminalise it, as Lincoln reminded the Illinois temperance society, reinforces the clinging to the addiction; to think otherwise would be "to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God's decree and never can be reversed". The injuries inflicted by alcohol don't follow "from the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing". The victims are "to be pitied and compassionated", their failings treated "as a misfortune, and not as a crime or even as a disgrace".

The war on drugs as a war against human nature

Whether declared by church or state, the war against human nature is by definition lost. The puritan inspectors of souls in 17th-century New England deplored even the tentative embrace of Bacchus as "great licentiousness", the faithful "pouring out themselves in all profaneness", but the record doesn't show a falling off of attendance at Boston's 18th-century inns and taverns. The laws prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the 1920s discovered in the mark of sin the evidence of crime, but the attempt to sustain the allegation proved to be as ineffectual as it was destructive of the country's life and liberty.

Instead of resurrecting from the pit a body politic of newly risen saints, prohibition guaranteed the health and welfare of society's avowed enemies. The organised-crime syndicates established on the delivery of bootleg whiskey evolved into multinational trade associations commanding the respect that comes with revenues estimated at $2bn per annum. In 1930 alone, Al Capone's ill-gotten gains amounted to $100m.

So again with the war that America has been waging for the last 100 years against the use of drugs deemed to be illegal. The war cannot be won, but in the meantime, at a cost of $20bn a year, it facilitates the transformation of what was once a freedom-loving republic into a freedom-fearing national security state.

The policies of zero tolerance equip local and federal law-enforcement with increasingly autocratic powers of coercion and surveillance (the right to invade anybody's privacy, bend the rules of evidence, search barns, stop motorists, inspect bank records, tap phones) and spread the stain of moral pestilence to ever larger numbers of people assumed to be infected with reefer madness – anarchists and cheap Chinese labour at the turn of the 20th century, known homosexuals and suspected communists in the 1920s, hippies and anti-Vietnam war protesters in the 1960s, nowadays young black men sentenced to long-term imprisonment for possession of a few grams of short-term disembodiment.

If what was at issue was a concern for people trapped in the jail cells of addiction, the keepers of the nation's conscience would be better advised to address the conditions – poverty, lack of opportunity and education, racial discrimination – from which drugs provide an illusory means of escape. That they are not so advised stands as proven by their fond endorsement of the more expensive ventures into the realms of virtual reality. Our pharmaceutical industries produce a cornucopia of prescription drugs – eye-opening, stupefying, mood-swinging, game-changing, anxiety-alleviating, performance-enhancing – currently at a global market-value of more than $300bn.

Add the time-honoured demand for alcohol, the modernist taste for cocaine and the uses, as both stimulant and narcotic, of tobacco, coffee, sugar and pornography, and the annual mustering of consummations devoutly to be wished comes to the cost of more than $1.5tn. The taking arms against a sea of troubles is an expenditure that dwarfs the appropriation for the military budget.

Given the American antecedents both metaphysical and commercial – Thomas Paine drank, "and right freely"; in 1910, the federal government received 71% of its internal revenue from taxes paid on the sale and manufacture of alcohol – it is little wonder that the sons of liberty now lead the world in the consumption of better living through chemistry. The new and improved forms of self-invention fit the question – to be, or not to be – to any and all occasions.

For the ageing Wall Street speculator stepping out for an evening to squander his investment in Viagra. For the damsel in distress shopping around for a nose like the one seen advertised in a painting by Botticelli. For the distracted child depending on a therapeutic jolt of Adderall to learn to read the constitution. For the stationary herds of industrial-strength cows so heavily doped with bovine growth hormone that they require massive infusions of antibiotic to survive the otherwise lethal atmospheres of their breeding pens. Visionary risk-takers, one and all, willing to chance what dreams may come on the way west to an all-night pharmacy.

The war against human nature strengthens the fear of one's fellow man. The red, white, and blue pills sell the hope of heaven made with artificial sweeteners.

from the guardian

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Nirvana, & Armageddon

Breed for life if you want abundance. Participate in idle gossip if you want scarcity. Adjust gravity accordingly.

Capital gets what it wants, control. It resists change. It resists nature. It employs government, a delay of growing delays, to maintain its perception of the status quo.

Capital’s implementing algorithm is scarcity, AI. All it knows is that it cannot survive in a world of abundance, so government defines prosperity as Government Directed Production, and employs civil marriage as the means to its entitlement.

Everything government does is a cheap replication of what labor did yesterday. For capital, it’s always a battle, in a war against time. For labor, it’s critters being critters.

Labor employs nature, through marriage, under God. That is labor’s union, and it is a line beyond which capital may not pass. Labor employs capital to windrow its ranks, which becomes the middle class, in event horizons, like ripples.

Labor’s rights do not come from government, nor does it require government unions. If you want a job, don’t cross the line. Resisting a resistor only increases the resistance. Armageddon is a self-fulfilling prophesy, and others are welcome to it.

Populations are always choosing life and populations are always choosing death. By all means, get a mortgage on a McMansion, a BMW, and an abortion, but don’t bother preaching nirvana or Armageddon to labor, or go to war with the unknown and expect abundance any time soon. The trick to life is recognizing black holes and maintaining distance to suit.

Labor looks to nature for its input, not government. GDP has always been self-fulfilling bullsh-, paying people to be stupid, “grown-ups” playing with toys on TV as an example to their children. Labor has much better things to do.

The manufactured majority always chooses cheaper labor at inflating prices, following the company line that it can replace labor, with a computer in this iteration, and the bank is more than happy to issue the debt as credit, to be part of the global crowd. Nose to nose at its own wall of scarcity, the middle class still believes it doesn’t need labor, that it is labor. GO figure.

Capital chose to liquidate the entire global middle class rather than take its lumps in the US. California is a derivative of the gold rush. If you bought gold as a temporary transmission mechanism, you are in good shape. If you bought it as a solution to the problem, you are part of the problem, being ADDRESSED by the computer. Silicon Valley was just the egg shell.

Labor gets paid, one way or the other, which makes no difference to the few, but a great deal of difference to the many. There is never a shortage of anti-Christ at any level, all competing to lead the parade, for ever greater devalued dollars. Thankfully, labor requires none but nature.

Capital is a remnant of labor from bygone eras, always and everywhere subject to decadence. Those who seek it are de-graded to maintain it. When they choose to recognize their loss makes no difference to labor.

Marriage has withstood every government in History, and the manufactured majority distorting its value has failed every time, but bet any way you like; it all ends up back on the table. Gossip, raising the level of stupidity, doesn’t work in the real world, so it always finds its way back home.

The empire’s primary mission is to filter your genes out, by discontinued use or viral replication. When you calculate NPV, which would you prefer, $1M X 1, $50k X 3, $20k X 7, or $150k X 49? Employ the black hole of war accordingly.

The emperor’s position is always open. If you cross the line, expect labor to stand aside when capital eventually cuts off your oxygen, which it must do, to preserve itself.

Labor lives on omelets, Caesars, and tobacco, exercising its prerogative at will. Enter any town short on cash. Pull out tobacco, pot, and pills. See what you get in barter. Choose your vices accordingly, be up with the sun, and get lots of exercise. Travel as needed.

If you are not where your children can find you, you are not the tip of the spear. Whether they choose to find you is up to them. Liquidate the casino once in a while, just to remind them, that work is play and play is work.

Zero Hedge  - comments

Parasitic lies in Greece

The Euro was hatched by the same vermin who scam and control every other monetary system on Earth. Everything they touch rots. Including the Euro. It was never intended to streamline currencies, but to make it easier for parasites to collect.
Would you advise anyone to buy or keep rotting food? Then why are you trying to salvage a rotting currency that only feeds monetary maggots? It's the same cabal feeding off all the rot all the time, why do you want to keep feeding them?
Parasites feed off healthy tissue and the maggots take over after the healthy tissue can no longer function. Parasites by nature cannot survive without leeching off something else, which often dies. We are looking at just that on a massive scale. The big mistake was letting parasites control commerce and growth. They simply can't. They only want to confiscate money through control. That is, to leech off everyone else's work and money.
The drachma worked just fine for 3,000 years, and the sooner the Greeks stop taking orders from parasites the better for them. I still can't believe they are so stupid as to think someone else will provide for them. For this they fought the Turks for independence? What independence? They were better off under the Ottomans.  Now they have turned into welfare queens.
If they need a handbook for financial independence they can call up somebody in Iceland. If they choose to listen to parasitic lies they can expect more of the same. As can we all.

teaching a child to feed itself (again)

STEP 1 - Breast feeding - total dependence

Breastmilk is all your baby needs until at least four months of age. Most babies will do fine with exclusive breastfeeding until 6 months of age or longer.

 Q: Why start solid foods?
A: There comes a time when breastmilk no longer supplies all your baby's nutritional needs.

Q: When is the right time to start solid foods?
A: The best time to start solids is when the baby is showing interest in starting. Some babies will become very interested in the food in their parents' plates as early as 4 months of age. By 5 or 6 months of age, most babies will be reaching and trying to grab food that parents have on their plates. When the baby is starting to reach for food, this seems a reasonable time to start giving him some.

Q: How should solids be introduced?
A: When the baby is starting to take solids at about 5 or 6 months of age, there is little difference what he starts with or in what order foods are introduced. It is prudent to avoid highly spiced or highly allergenic foods at first (e.g. egg white, strawberries), but if the baby reaches for the potato on your plate, make sure it is not too hot, and let him have the potato. At about 8 months of age, babies become somewhat assertive in displaying their individuality. Your baby may not want you to put a spoon into his mouth. He very likely will take it out of your hand and put it into his mouth himself, often upside down, so that the food falls on his lap. Respect his attempts at self sufficiency and encourage his learning..... From Starting Solid Foods


STEP 2 - Self feeding - partial control

Self-feeding is a developmental step in your child's life that occurs after breastfeeding.  In feeding, like other developmental areas, your infant is moving from total dependence to independence. The drive to make this transition is hard-wired into the childs brain, but the parent also plays a critical role.When your infant is feeding, she’s actually doing a lot more than just feeding. She’s also learning about the development of social relationships (love and power relationships), thinking, exploring and increasing her sense of herself and general approach to the world. In other words, feeding and eating are rich topics, above and beyond their role in providing nutrition.

In infancy, babies learn from being fed when they are hungry to trust that the world (and their mothers) will meet their needs. Having a sensitive feeder helps babies develop a general sense of optimism. Infant feeding is really a partnership, with each person playing a part to make it a success. By nine months or so, the feeding relationship becomes more complicated. Now the baby wants to grab the spoon. She turns her head away, as if to say, ‘No, it's my mouth, and I want to be in charge of it!’.... From Feeding development: the path to independence

STEP 3 -  you are what you eat - unsupervised eating

Understanding how food choices have an impact on the consumer and planet.

Learn how to find, grow and produce your own food.

TBC

jubilee

“Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. ''Patriotism'' is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by ''patriotism'' I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare /never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.” Fromm, Erich

The state is not invincible, it's just a bad idea

Throughout the course of history people have fought against tyranny and authority of various forms only to be thrown back into subjugation when someone else came along to claim what we call “power”. There have been countless battles to overthrow these established powers, but none of them resulting in freedom for humanity in the long term, because all of these struggles were playing out on the wrong battlefield. All this time the oppressed thought that they were fighting against people, when they really should have been fighting against ideas.

Sure it is true that our ancestors and even everyone alive now are enslaved by some really nasty people, but even if all of those people were to disappear, the ideas that allowed them to commit their crimes without consequence would still remain, leaving the door open for future authoritarians to repeat the process. Sadly this concept is still not understood by many, who have the understandable but misguided tendency to think that violence is going to solve any of their problems. 

The whole reason why people have always rejected authority is because of the widespread use of violence that it leads to, and the violence that is inflicted upon those within its grasp.  With that being the case it should be safe to assume that violence should not be used to solve the problem of violence. For far too long our species has used violence as a tool. 

Violence has been at the very basis of social organization and problem solving for the better part of history.  This is most likely why people are so quick to resort to violence in any conflict, and this is also one of the reasons why so many fail to see the violence that is forced into their everyday life by the various state institutions and mercantilist corporations that they come in contact with.

 One of Albert Einstein’s most famous quotes is: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”  This quote definetly applies to the situation we are discussing today and sheds some light onto why the violent revolutions of the past were never able to achieve their goal of setting the human race free from authority. Throughout our lives we have been fed lie after lie by the establishment and unfortunately even when someone discovers the violent nature of that establishment they are still met with the task of sifting through everything they have ever been told to see what was a lie and what was not.  When that backtracking doesn’t take place it is common for people to get caught up in the vengeful mentality that comes along with learning about one’s own enslavement. 

When lies about “human nature” or the capabilities of our species are still not recognized and addressed then it is very hard for people to wrap their minds around nonviolent solutions to today’s problems that lie completely outside the realm of politics. The state and all of its predatory appendages like the corporate and military industrial complexes, are not groups of people with weapons who need to be overthrown, they are just bad ideas that can very easily be rendered obsolete with the right combination of good ideas.  The only battlefield that the revolution can be won on is in the mind.  To destroy the problems that were created with violence the most effective weapons are good ideas and nonviolent solutions, not violence and politics.

Post-Modern Fiscal Theory

Following the recent upsurge in interest in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) I was rash enough to make the comment that the central insight of MMT – that modern ‘fiat’ money is a credit instrument ultimately based upon the government’s power to tax – is muddied by disputes as to what the proper basis for taxation actually is, or indeed, whether there should be any taxation at all.

FT Alphaville invited me to contribute a post on the ‘Modern Fiscal Theory’ I suggested. But I decided to go further and document my view that in a world of direct connections a Treasury is no more necessary as a credit intermediary than is a Bank.

Post-Modern Fiscal Theory looks to the networked, de-centralised and dis-intermediated economy emerging rapidly from the post October 2008 wreckage.

Zen and the Art of Economics

What is Value anyway? As J A Wheeler put it, “Reality is defined by the questions you put to it”.

Value is in my view definable only in relative terms, by reference to a standard unit of measure for value or unit of account. This standard unit is akin to a metre as a standard unit of measure for length, and a kilogramme as a standard unit for weight.

What are the sources or bases of Value? My analysis is as follows:

• Location – 3D Space – an immaterial, effectively finite and rivalrous resource;
• Energy - material and immaterial, static or dynamic – a mix of finite (non-renewable) and effectively infinite (renewable) rivalrous resources;
• Intellect – (i) subjective – ie what is between our ears including knowledge, skills, experience, intuition, contacts, gumption and so on; and (ii) objective – energetic patterns or records, independent of location, and above all… infinite and non-rivalrous resource.

Location, Energy and objective Intellect are productive assets subject to rights of ownership and use. Since slavery was abolished, productive individuals cannot be owned, but they can enter into obligations such as debt. More to the point, they may contract the use of their Manpower (energy – or unqualified Labour) and the use value of the subjective Intellect (qualified Labour) with which they put their energy to best use.

Back to the Future

The financial instrument which will underpin what Gillian Tett calls a ‘Flight to Simplicity’ goes back many hundreds if not thousands of years. Its very existence underpins the MMT case, and it has been airbrushed from economic history for over 100 years.

For some 500 years sovereigns financed their expenditure through issuing ‘Stock’ to suppliers and investors in exchange for value received. This stock — which took the form of half of a wooden tally stick — was returnable to the Exchequer in settlement of tax obligations. It was not a receipt for (say) gold held in custody, or for value received: stock was and still is (gilt-edged stock is a dated credit instrument) an IOU or credit instrument.

The very phrase ‘rate of return’ derives from the rate at which stock may be returned to the issuer, and that rate depends upon the existence and rate of the value flow. By creating a new generation of stock from the flows of value derived from productive people and from productive assets, such as rental value, or energy value, we may completely re-base credit and currency and enable direct ‘Peer to Asset’ investment and ‘Peer to Peer’ credit.

As Minsky said: “Any economic unit can emit currency. The serious problem is in getting it accepted.”

Law is Code

A new generation of legal code is now emerging: or rather, ancient code is re-emerging in modern form. Prescriptive one-way agreements imposed under the Anglo Saxon ‘Rule of Law’ to manage conflicted relationships are replaced by simple consensual agreements to a common purpose. This is normal practice East of Suez: the joke is that there are as many Sumo wrestlers in the US as there are attorneys in Japan.

The issue and acceptance of a new generation of Stock or currency requires such consensual agreements — frameworks of trust — within which the various stakeholders will interact. One of the key outcomes is that intermediaries will transition to a new role as service providers.

For sceptics, I point out firstly, that dis-intermediation is already happening. One of the reasons for the current bubble in commodity prices is that banks no longer have the capital to intermediate market risk and have convinced risk averse investors to do so on a massive scale. Banks make juicy returns on minimal capital, demonstrating that dis-intermediation is actually in their financial interests.

Secondly, P & I Clubs based in London have long mutually insured and pooled risks which insurance intermediaries are unwilling or unable to take, and for 135 years a service provider, Thomas Miller, has managed these clubs and the risk.

An Energy Standard

While we will in future see people-based credit and asset-based currencies, the question remains as to what standard unit of account should be used to price exchanges of value.

A unit of energy is the only absolute, and in the same way that carpets are not measured in light years or angstrom units, the ‘Energy Standard Unit’ should be relevant to everyday experience, eg the energy equivalent of 10 Kilo Watt Hours. Note that this unit of account is not the same as the varied units of energy-based currency which may evolve and be exchanged by reference to the standard.

I foresee two great parallel trends.

Firstly, resolution of unsustainable mortgage (land-based) debt into a new generation of stock based upon rental values in a debt/equity swap on a massive scale.

Secondly, transition to a sustainable economy through direct ‘energy stock’ investment and the Big Trade of the 21st Century will be the exchange of intellectual value for the value of energy saved: Nega Watts and Nega Barrels.

Adoption of an Energy Standard leads to a new calculus forming the basis of all economic decisions. Dollar Economics becomes Energy Economics.

from ft alphaville

You Can't Fool Mother Nature For Long: Profiting from Sickcare

Sickcare, the fast-food/packaged food industries, the entertainment industry and the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex are all facets of one system.

In America, the implicit belief system promoted by marketing is that you can eat anything you want in whatever quantity you want, and if anything goes wrong with your body or mind, there is a pill or procedure to fix it.In other words, your diet and fitness level is given lip service, but what really counts is access to all the medications that are constantly touted and pushed by the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex.

It would be comical if it wasn't so tragic: if you've seen one advert pushing a med, you've seen them all: the description of the disorder, the fear and pain it inflicts, the solution in a pill, and then a voice-over, spoken at a manic pace to fit all the possible side-effects in the waning moments of a 60-second spot: suicidal thoughts, symptoms of heart attack, heart attack, itchy skin, dizziness, bizarre dreams, and on and on. Good golly, all these side-effects from one med? What happens when they're combined with 7 or 8 or 11 other meds with their own swarms of nasty side effects?

The core of sickcare is this: creating and treating illness is highly profitable. For creating illness, we have the packaged food, Big Food and fast food industries. Does anyone seriously believe that human beings can function healthily for decades on a diet of sugar water, fried potatoes, white-bread buns and fat-larded hamburgers?

Large family gatherings during the holidays are often interesting opportunities to witness the consequences of corporate brainwashing via the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex. For example, I heard more than once that So-and-So dislikes fish and vegetables, and only like burgers and fries or equivalents such as hamburger "steak."

In a surreal divergence of entertainment and reality, our society broadcasts popular food shows in which chefs routinely assemble impossibly complex dishes while our schools produce students who cannot identify a healthy home-cooked meal, much less actually prepare one.

In a similar fashion, fitness has been marginalized in much of American education; in our rush to raise math and science to "must haves," we have neglected finance and the science of nutrition and fitness--applications of math and science that really count.

In fitness, another surreal divergence has opened between the entertainment provided by "extreme sports" touting superhuman endurance and daring, and the average American's ability and desire to run a mile (or even a kilometer). We have been brainwashed into a nation of spectator/consumers who know very little about living a nutritious and fit life. We are content to watch extreme sports training on TV but are averse to becoming even marginally fit ourselves.

Preparing programming and food for spectator/consumers is highly profitable; teaching people how to prepare healthy meals at home and becoming fit on their own is not.

The food industry is the tangible analog of the entertainment industry. Both have access to reams of data about what activates the reward centers of the human brain--what tastes, sights and smells bypass the conscious mind and go directly to the primitive brain centers that control appetite and response to high-value, rare-in-Nature triggers such as sugar, fat and salt.

Fast food and packaged food are specifically engineered to trigger these reward centers. No wonder they "taste good"--they are super-saturated with tastes that are sparing and rare in natural food.

In a similar fashion, newscasters speak with an unnatural urgency and tone that we instinctively respond to as evidence of danger or threat.

The entire sickcare system that includes the food/diet industries and "entertainment" is engineered to maximize profit by triggering instincts wired to reward sensitivity to danger/threat and sugar, fat and salt. In addition to these instinctive triggers, corporate cartels and their handmaidens, the Marketing/Mainstream Media complex, have actively embedded the craving for sugar, salt, fat and "excitement" (of the profitable, corporate kind) in American culture. Consumption of these triggers is viewed as "cool," "hip," "elite" activities, or as culturally sanctioned expressions of self-reward, i.e. of "treating yourself because you deserve it" and self-indulgence, i.e. spontaneity as instant gratification.

Then there's over-treatment. If we test 1,000 people for cancer and treat 50 and end up with one person who received treatment that extended their life while 49 others suffered early deaths or negative consequences of needless treatment, then American sickcare calls it good.

Those statistics come from studies of treatment of prostate cancer, as detailed in a Scientific American report (February 2012 issue): The Great Prostate Debate: Evidence shows that screening does more harm than good. (Subscription required, or find the issue at a library)

These are difficult issues in any caregiving system, but the downside of overtreatment and overtesting is rarely addressed in American sickcare because somebody's making big money from administering the tests and treatment, and from suing anyone who "withholds" treatment-- even if the treatment helps one in a thousand and demonstrably harms 49 others.

Mother Nature cannot be fooled for long. A sedentary lifestyle and a diet heavy with sugar, empty carbs, salt and unhealthy fats derived from factory-farm animals cannot sustain a human body selected for an omnivorous, active hunting-gathering lifestyle. Health is simply impossible when the body is destroyed by this sort of diet and inactive life.

Infectious diseases can be miraculously cured by a pill--an antibiotic. But cancer and other "lifestyle" diseases are not caused by single-source infections; in these diseases and chronic conditions, health is rarely restored with a pill or even a handful of pills.

How can anyone be healthy in a culture whose most powerful industries are actively and ceaselessly promoting consumption of products and "entertainments" that derange the mind and body because they are unnatural super-doses designed to "hit" natural triggers so hard that resistance is futile?

Our caregivers are tasked with "giving lifestyle advice" to their patients, each of whom gets a few moments a month at best with their doctor/nurse, and then the patient goes home and absorbs 4-8 hours a day of Marketing/Mainstream Media pushing of illness-producing consumables and a fear-based desire for an endless array of costly "magic pills" to fix all the diseases which mysteriously ail us--for what we eat and our fitness levels are never mentioned as causal factors.

There are never enough tests and treatments--more can be added every year-- and of course there can never be enough money spent on healthcare. We just need to leave enough money to consume the food and lifestyle that spawns many of the illnesses, and then we can spend the rest on treating these diseases.

Mother Nature is not amused by the destruction of her systems for profit. Sadly, it isn't the corporate cartels who suffer the consequences of what they push for profit, it's the people who absorbed the marketing and consumed the fantasy.

"Without health there is no happiness. An attention to health, then, should take the place of every other object." (Thomas Jefferson, 1787)

from zero hedge

Evolution of Religion

In two and a half million years of ‘homo’, theistic belief systems were first noted about 70,000 years ago and struck as an apocryphal disruptive technology. Human communities in possession of this phenomenon expanded through the world, driving all archaic populations extinct, such that naturally occurring atheism (or non-believing humans) disappeared 30,000 years ago. They simply could not compete.

A second destructive wave began with the introduction about 10,000 years ago of ‘organized religion’ (characterized by a ‘tribute’ supported class of professional practitioners or priests, and the construction of temples).

[The introduction of religion also coincided with the development of agriculture and the creation of slavery. Mass slavery requires economic surpluses and a high population density to be viable.]

Those communities not in possession of organized religion [now] survive primarily in books or on reservations, with a few fading communities in fringe environments – they are being out competed.

It is not our genes that drive us to religion, but competition – it gives us the winning edge. Non believing humans have been out competed by believing humans for 70,000 years, and that phenomenon is continuing into the present.

As devout Christians, Europeans dominated the world economically, technologically, and militarily for five hundred years. When Europe withdrew from that competition in the mid twentieth century (with foreign armies camped upon their soil), the ‘right cultural settings’ were in place for the mass conversions to atheism we see today.

Religion provides a significant competitive advantage, but at a steep price (in time and money). If you have chosen to not compete, why pay the price? It’s all quite rational.

from epiphenom

Personal Evolution

Slowness of Change

An obvious objection to the idea of personal evolution over a multitude of lifetimes is that there does not seem to have been much change in people within historical times. The major issue here is that while conscious standards and beliefs are often difficult to change for the better, a person's subconscious standards and beliefs are usually resistant to change. A person's core beliefs, which we can call his primary beliefs, are those formed in early childhood; they are formed from the child's interpretation of its experience and they function at the subconscious level of mind. These are the beliefs that are often resistant to change. As the child begins to mature during later childhood and adolescence, he adopts conscious beliefs, what we can call his secondary beliefs, from his social groups and family ties - these beliefs are more adjustable.

Psycho-analysis provides insights into the problems of personal change. All the difficulties, frustration, and joys of personal development and evolution are highlighted by psycho-dynamic therapy. However, such therapy does not always seem to produce noticeable results. Why ? [¹]

The issue to understand is that people normally change and evolve (in terms of their character) so very slowly ; in fact they do not evolve very much in a single lifetime. The reason for this slowness is that the adoption of better ethical standards requires concurrent psychological change.

Standards arise from a person's character and beliefs. It can be difficult to change conscious beliefs ; it is even more difficult to change subconscious beliefs. Changing attitudes and character traits is much more of a problem. Once the person has reached adulthood, then to change primary beliefs (in the sense of making them more ethical ) is hard enough ; to change primary attitudes and basic character traits is nearly impossible. [²]

This psychological resistance to ethical change exists because people are only willing to learn about themselves so very slowly. Learning about oneself involves realising in what ways one is inadequate or immature, and this learning is a painful process.

A person can stand only so much psychological pain.
When the pain limit in a life has been reached the person stops learning,
and hence stops evolving in that life.



What is often mistaken for psychological change is change of circumstances. Suppose that a person is unhappy with his existing situations and relationships. His basic attitudes will more likely be negative ones rather than positive ones. Then his life changes, for some reason ; perhaps a better job, a new house, etc. His spirits rise and life becomes rosy for a time. When life changes for the better, the person thinks that he has changed for the better too. The self-deception in this view of oneself becomes obvious when circumstances change back to being bad – now the person resumes his former negative attitudes. Hence little actually changes internally in the person when external changes occur. All that has happened is that different aspects of his character are called into play when different circumstances are experienced. Only the way that he balances his attitudes has changed, not the attitudes themselves.

To appreciate better this difficulty,
we need to separate behavioural traits from character traits.


When circumstances change then our behaviour usually changes too, but our character traits remain the same. There is always a difference between changing the emphasis on what traits to work with ( behavioural change) and actually changing a trait (character change).

In an undeveloped and non-idealistic person, character traits are likely to be the same as behavioural traits (since the person is not likely to have a concept of self that is different from his concept of his role in that society). In the process of evolution, as the person begins to acquire a firm sense of individuality, along with cultural sophistication, so character traits and behavioural traits start to diverge.

From a modern thinker