awwww. can't comment in the big box.
Shall I just take this one down?
well it does look a bit daft..
what's going on with the on-topic box?
mt-comments.cgi file is missing.
If anyone with the power (ahem, sd, Tachi ...) wants to delete it do so, I'm going to be stuck at work for hours and I can't do anything serious from here ...
is this what they call 'the singularity'?
nope. just disintegrating social reality.
R. James Woolsey on Wahhabism. Superb:
www.nationalreview.com/comment/
woolsey200512140823.asp
Also from National Review:
Derbyshire on Bloom (on religion):
www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/
derbyshire200512140817.asp
Observes in passing - religion has no (positive) ethical consequences, as any visitor to East Asia (full of hypercivilized atheists) immediately discovers.
Or taking the opposite empirical tack and glancing at foam-flecked monotheism ...
"Unless and until we radically change our nature, we are stuck with God ..."
Time to haul out the gene-splicing kit.
sd - did you see this Kaplan interview?
www.theamericanenterprise.com/issues/
articleID.18884/article_detail.asp
??
(know you're reading him at the moment)
hmm, ISLAMONAZI = WMD (Woolsey strikes a nerve).
k-punk's The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape re: Zizek's discussion of reality & fantasy in New Orleans, (how the blank slate is filled in by the [________] imagination; [___this___] can be racist, fascist, whatever):
In an uncanny way, some beliefs always seem to function “at a distance.” In order for the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, and yet this guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present in persona. The point, of course, is that this other subject who directly believes does not need to actually exist for the belief to be operative: It is enough precisely to presuppose his existence, i.e. to believe in it, either in the guise of the primitive Other or in the guise of the impersonal “one” (“one believes…”).
Lenin quoting Alenka Zupancic:
The most pointed example would be that of fetishism: a certain object, for instance, may leave person A completely cold, whereas in person B it can incite a whole series of actions, procedures and rituals, without person B being able to do anything about it. This is because the object at stake does not play the same part in the libidinal economy of the two people ... the subject has to be considered as playing a part in this. We must attribute to the subject the decision involved in incorporation of this drive or incentive into her maxim, even though this decision is neither experiential or temporal ... The decision in question is, of course, to be situated on the level of the unconscious or, in Kantian terms, on the level of the Gesinnung, the 'disposition' of the subject which is, according to Kant, the ultimate foundation of the incorporation of incentives into maxims.
Medvedev's The_Blank_Space: Glenn Gould, Russia, Finland And The North:
The North is textual per se; it is, in a sense, an Urtext, a white field, a blank space, a one-sided sheet of paper, a non-referential sign, a quintessential periphery questioning the dominant narratives of modernity. The North is an abode of schizophrenic solitude and unimpeded creativity. It is all about imagination and invention, a mischievous and playful blizzard, a creative lie.
reza says here:
But wahabbism is somehow an effective operation shield, a distraction from what really Islam is up to: Double Death.
- - - - - - - - - -
On the other hand, these Islamic movements (terror-populations) are covertly carrying hyperstitional protocols of Shia for an ultimate WAR (and not just a conflict) or Qiyamah to the heart of the Western Crusade...[They] try to map these sorcerous / hyperstitional protocols of Islamic Apocalypticism as revenge / avenge formulae or simply irrelevant ideological back-ups on the Islamic front; therefore, they are assisting islamic movements to remotely smuggle hyperstitional triggers to the heart of their civilization and activate the GAS plague, awakening the double-death process.
certainly matches up with Woolsey's comments on Wahhabistic "hate literature". more Hyperstitional comments on double death:
• Islamic Apocalypticism as Ghiamat (or Double-Death).
• ISLAM = 99 (unsurpassable terminus of intelligible history, also interpretable as 'double death' - emphatic finality) - the Apocalyptic Imperative 'entrusted' to Islam by Abrahamic escalation / history cannot be shrugged off, reformed, or rationalized because it is inherited from the germ of monotheistic eschatology itself.
• on the other hand, the rise to prominence of Wahhab, Qutb, and the Sunni chauvenist crew clearly not accidental - from out PoV this surely has interrelated petropolical and theomorphic aspects (the Wahhabis capture the twin "crude-currents": oil-flow and theological minimization to "One God, kill the infidels" (Shia very much included) - I'm qabbalistically constrained here by the rather compelling equation SAUDI = 99, which puts Mecca and Medina right in the heart of the Double Death zone ... think this whole issue v. important, we probably need to wander around it with some patience because I strongly suspect it's a topic where we definitely 'ain't seen anything yet'
• Jihad strategy / Oil - Totally Axial - you have it in a nutshell: "... in a secret twist, they rush toward ‘double death? or Islamic apocalypse by fusing with the Islamic warmachines running through oil."
• Wahhabism axial role in the petropolitical process of smuggling the double-death Toxin into the American empire. However, as I mentioned Wahhabistic petropolitical aggression in WoTerror hardly diagrams the ENTIRE Islamic panorama of petropolitical Apocalypse which tends to secretly bring the west into its burning fold (The Gog-Magog Axis). Once again, the strategic lines of Islam (spread through Shia and non-Salafi / Wahhabi Sunni sects) regard wahabbism as a highly exploitable Outsider: I’m sure you know that moderate Sunni and Shia sects consider the Wahhabis as Khawarij, a term defining those who left Ali’s cause .. according to Hadith, Mohammad predicted the emergence of Khawarij as Muslims who leave Islam and become infidel (Kafir). However, both Shia and Sunni sects tend to keep this Outsider as an operation shield under whose exotic petropolitical tacticity they can easily work on their double-death project … besides, the presence of Wahhabism is very crucial in Islamic Apocalypticism since with its definitely significant but distractingly exotic role for the US, the rest of Islam can safely and efficiently dissipates its petropolitical network of Apocalypticism across the Europe, poisoning it slowly to utter nervous system shutdown (letting loose a continental Zombie Flood) … then we will see that we haven’t seen anything yet.
• As far as integral politics is concerned, Islamism OWNS Cyberspace right now, although in the name of a political unit that can only exist as both virtual presupposition and actual conclusion of an apocalyptic (total) confrontation - which brings us back to the analytical nexus Reza is introducing: Petropolical teleonomy, Gog-Magog double-death and surreptitious Tellurian Omega ...
The Double Death of Islamic Fundamentalism discussing Olivier Roy's The Failure of Political Islam (the, "‘self-consuming loop’ of Islamist ideology" & the assimilation of the Islamic clergy, the ulema).
several links to Gilles Kepel's double-death comments:
{In Today's Feuilletons} In Le Figaro, Middle Eastern expert Gilles Kepel endorses an interesting theory about the role the Internet plays for Islamists. "Because radical Islamists will never gain the support of the majority in their own countries, they seize upon the Internet as a sort of virtual Umma, which they can dominate without any form of censorship. "In the galaxy of Jihad, the Internet has replaced the Ulemas of yesteryear with bearded cyber-Salafists, who offer a purely literal interpretation of the holy texts. For them transcendence is digital, the afterlife and the virtual combine in their fantasy world to form a unity which is set apart from the real world and which follows their rules. The interaction between these two worlds leads to a double death: to the suicide of the 'martyr' which frees him from the schizophrenic tension between the two worlds, and to a bloodbath of the "unbelievers". (see link here to The war for Muslim minds: an interview with Gilles Kepel).
{Jihadists, Internet, and Secondary Reality} Noted Arabist Gilles Kepel [Le quitte ou double d'al-Qaida] makes an interesting observation on how the Internet affects the beliefs of jihadists (via and translated by Pieter Dorman at Peaktalk):
If you interpret the Islamic scripture – or that of any other religion – literally, then it contains an abundance of laws, but in the fourteen centuries of Islamic civilization prior to the introduction of the internet, the critical interpretation of these texts was the exclusive domain of the ulamas. Thanks to the internet we now have bearded cyber-salafists who have taken the place of the ulamas and they know only one interpretation: the literal one. To them everything that is digital is transcendental which creates a blur between the virtual and the afterlife in one separate world, disconnected entirely from the real world with its own laws. At the juncture of these two universes we can find a double death: the suicide of the martyr which relieves him from the tension - which is considered schizophrenic – between those two worlds and the slaughter of infidels.
Woolsey:
... it is difficult for Americans to bring themselves to draw distinctions among those who claim they are following the requirements of their religion — we generally do not want to quarrel with others' religious beliefs even if they seem very strange to us. But we must realize that murderous totalitarianism that claims religious sanction is different. We have defeated four major totalitarian movements in the last six and a half decades: German Nazism, Italian Fascism, Japanese Imperialism, and Soviet Communism. Only Japanese Imperialism had a major religious element. Communism however was secular, so our current generation of leaders has little experience with a totalitarian ideology that seeks to hide behind one of the world's great religions the way Torquemada cloaked his murderousness in claims to represent Christianity. This makes it difficult for most Americans to understand IslamoNazism. We tend to regard each person's religious beliefs as a private matter. But we must learn to make an exception for theocratic totalitarianism masquerading as religion.
- - - - - - - -
But it is harder for us to bring ourselves to distinguish between those who follow the Wahhabi party line on the one hand and, on the other, brave and decent individuals such the American Sufi leader Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, who has been warning Americans of the danger of Islamist terror since well before 9/11. We must get over this reluctance to challenge the perpetrators of and apologists for theocratic totalitarianism.
nick. increasingly difficult reading Derbyshire with his lolita-perky-breasts fetish & barna updates.
nick, yes, Kaplan lucid, as usual.
this is worth a look too:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/2...aplan-
interview
'Imperial Grunts' seems intersting as a war on the media. Still savouring 'Warrior Politics' at the moment tho.
cyberian punk - great stimulation, can feel the sludgy neuronal mess slowly animating ... must re-animate this material
northanger - don't be put off by the perky-breasts - he wrote a book about prime numbers :)
sd - The Atlantic has lost its way (maybe its beginning to re-find it) - used to be defined by Kaplan, but slowly the Chicken Littles took over ...
'animate, animate must animate' - definitely indicates lack of animation ...
http://sociologyesoscience.com/blow.html
wordup.
if you wanna really be down these days you gotta start spittin' about spinoza and radikal enlightenment and kold rationality and the geometrik method and the infinity and abstraction and exkarnation and the gnostics man ... 'let no-one who is ignorant of non-euklidean geometry enter here' ... yeah, yeah ... big up pythagoras, big up plato, big up euklid, big up riemann, big up gauss, big up kantor, big up hilbert, big up goedel ... i don't understand any of them but i rekkon they is the truly radikal biskitts these days man
http://sociologyesoscience.com/imag.html real or hypers tit ious? .. . . I guess a sculpture .. .
piet. hyperstitious. related to Parsani's illegal excavations in Kerman (Jebalbarez is 193kms SE of Kerman). he's the one that discovered the Cross of Akht.
cyberian punk - LOL^127
piet - first link - v. interesting, processing (care to add a layer of commentary?)
second link - not sure what the hell you think that thing is ... (definitely isn't a shoggoth)
piet - first link - v. interesting, processing
ditto
btw, piet. that "thing" probably unearthed by Bam Earthquake:
Magnitude 6.6 - SOUTHEASTERN IRAN 2003 December 26 01:56:52 UTC
maybe not . ..
http://
viralsxposed.blogspot.com...ed_archive.html
piet, hyperstition is dead. we need another place to hang out.
deadish
understatement.
undertaker
frankenstein.
Isn't that exactly what the situation requires?
indeed. a very hideous idea.
just twiddle your thumbs a little longer and you'll be truly astounded by the wonders that surge forth ...
(I've been studying PRC public communication techniques - how am I doing?)
(that depends ... what's a fanged noumenon?)
Schroeder captured exactly:
www.brusselsjournal.com/node/568
"Apart from Adolf Hitler, Gerhard Schröder is Germany’s most repulsive chancellor ever ..." as is demonstrated with exemplary lucidity.
post coming soon, debilitating bacteria permitting...
any news on the missing mt-comments.cgi file?
management here appears totally unaware the fanged reißwolf has munched away many hyperstitional pages from this site.
Now watch Morales destroy Bolivia [sigh]
{Quote of the Day} I prefer to argue with the owner of the circus, not the clowns. —Evo Morales
Morales wins Bolivian election
you could cross fingers, nick.
Lee Harris on the Morales calamity:
www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121905F
"Señor Morales, who used to lead a coca-growers’ union, has promised to legalise the cultivation of coca, the primary ingredient in cocaine — to the horror of the US, which has pursued a big coca eradication effort in Bolivia in recent years. Bolivia is the world’s third largest producer of cocaine."
www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-
1943771,00.html
sd - as far as the coca angle is concerned, I blame the insanity of the (unwinnable antimarket) US 'war on drugs' - it's all the rest of Morales' loony soci*list agenda that will sink the country (as the Leninology moonbats cheer from the sidelines)
nick - obviously the 'new economic models' of the anti-American 'soci*list' agenda are a recipe for disaster, but it is interesting what a central role coca is going to play. This website suggests it is quite high up on the agenda:
www.evomorales.net/
from The Economist:
"Ironically, if Mr Morales really wants to break Bolivia's dependence on commodity exports, his best bet may be the United States. Its trade preferences in labour-intensive industries like clothing and jewellery are worth $150m a year in exports and 100,000 jobs, many in El Alto, a restive city perched above La Paz. These expire at the end of 2006—a prospect that prompted a rare pro-American march last week.
On December 7th, Peru signed a free-trade deal with the United States; Colombia may follow. The United States wants to negotiate a similar agreement with Bolivia, rather than extend its trade preferences. It is also dangling $593m in aid to finance urgently needed infrastructure.
But these offers come with conditions. Foremost among them is a renewed effort to contain the growth of coca. That clashes with Mr Morales's pledge to “depenalise” the leaf (but not the drug). Many Bolivians are fed up with the United States' bullying drug “war”. But aid accounts for a tenth of Bolivia's GDP. Much of it is subject to American approval. If the United States “decertifies” Bolivia on drugs, markets and chequebooks could slam shut.
That would risk driving Mr Morales further into the arms of Venezuela and his own, impatient radical left. On December 10th a group of trade unions and social movements announced that he would have 90 days to “eliminate” the neo-liberal economy. Says Mr Montesinos, “if Evo lets us down, we'll throw him out, too.”"
www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?
story_id=5300873
Boliviana negra, the evolution of cocaine.
The herbicide resistance of this strain has at least two possible explanations: that a 'peer-to-peer' network of coca farmers used selective breeding to enhance this trait through tireless effort, or the plant was genetically modified in a laboratory. In 1996, a patented Roundup Ready or glyphosate-resistant soybean was marketed by Monsanto, suggesting that it would be possible to genetic modify coca in an analogous manner. Spraying Boliviana negra with glyphosate would serve to strengthen its growth by eliminating the nonresistant weeds surrounding it. Joshua Davis, in the Wired article cited below, found no evidence of CP4, a protein produced by the Roundup Ready soybean, suggesting Bolivana negra was not created in a laboratory but by selective breeding in the fields.
northanger - v. interesting (yet another excellent 'why the "war on drugs" bashes uselessly against nature' example)
sd - not meaning in any way to dismiss this topic (coca) - it's absolutely crucial to the Andean states, as you clarify.
Chance of US returning to its senses on this is about the same as the EU becoming an engine of economic liberty
It's kind of cozy in this cupboard ...
northanger - great text. It could be part of a Darwinian sci-fi blockbuster. The supposedly 'dumb farmers' have particularly powerful narrative potential - escaping from the confines of imposed leftoid victimhood, they emerge as adept, free-trading bio-engineers who take on the anti-market repression of the big ol' mean US of A. The hard left find themselves supporting free trade and DIY genetics at the coke-rush edge of capitalism...
the best bit of the text, IMHO:
"Which points back to selective breeding. The implication is that the farmers' decentralized system of disseminating coca cuttings has been amazingly effective - more so than genetic engineering could hope to be. When one plant somewhere in the country demonstrated tolerance to glyphosate, cuttings were made and passed on to dealers and farmers, who could sell them quickly to farmers hoping to withstand the spraying. The best of the next generation was once again used for cuttings and distributed.
This technique - applied over four years - is now the most likely explanation for the arrival of Boliviana negra. By spraying so much territory, the US significantly increased the odds of generating beneficial mutations. There are numerous species of coca, further increasing the diversity of possible mutations. And in the Amazonian region, nature is particularly adaptive and resilient.
"I thought it was unlikely," says Gressel, the plant scientist at the Weizmann Institute. "But farmers aren't dumb. They obviously spotted a lucky mutation and propagated the hell out of it."
The effects of this are far-reaching for American policymakers: A new herbicide would work only for a limited time against such a simple but effective ad hoc network. The coca-growing community is clearly primed to take advantage of any mutations."
[P.S. on a tangent within tangents, there are some great texts on evolution and human history in the current issue of the neo-liberal Bible:
www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?
story_id=5299220
some of the most interesting stuff is subscription only (can send by mail if interested), but there are some audio files etc.]
"the neo-liberal Bible" - there's a discussion about The Economist up the road. While realizing that a lot of lefties treat it as Raw Capital Ideology, it's actually fairly mid-Atlantic and extremely restrained compared to Wall Street Journal Op-eds or NRO economic opinion. The Economist drawbacks:
1) Way too Keynesian, hasn't really learnt the lesson of the supply-side revolution, doesn't seem to know Laffer ever existed.
2) Very Euroweenie on foreign policy, knocking down rogue states and killing terrorists. Seems to think the EU and UN deserve sympathy of some kind.
3) Absurdly complacent about big government as long as deficits are modest (i.e. taxes high, see #1 above).
4) Culture pages are simply a disgrace (pompous left-elitist opinion gone wild).
but of course it's basically pro-market and good on the war-on-drugs idiocy
excerpt: "The Chinese government wants it both ways. On the one hand, it does not want unrest among farmers. On the other hand, the Communist Party elite in Beijing live by patronage. They have risen through the system because of the web of relationships that makes Chinese industrialization possible. They can, in very specific cases, take action against cases of corruption. However, a systematic attack on the causes of corruption is impossible, without a systematic attack on their own infrastructure.
This is particularly true in rapidly developing provinces like Guangdong. The interface between the new economy and the old has become a battlefield. The old economy was land-based: Mao created a peasant economy that was overlaid by attempts to industrialize. The new economy regards land as an input into the industrial machine. However, given the nature of the Chinese political system, the farmers are not simply bought out -- they are forced off the land. And that can lead to social explosions.
China is a mass of dispossessed farmers, urban workers forced into unemployment by the failure of state-owned enterprises, and party officials who are urgently working to cash in on their position. It is a country where the banking system has been saved from collapse by spinning off bad debts -- at least $600 billion worth, or nearly half the GDP of China -- into holding companies. This maneuver cleaned up the banks' books and allowed Western banks to purchase shares in them, shoring them up. But it also left a huge amount of debt that is owed internally to people who will never see the funds. Imagine the U.S. savings-and-loan scandal growing to a size that was nearly half of the national GDP. As it happened, in the United States the federal government swallowed a great deal of the S&L bad loans -- but in China, these bad loans would just about wipe out the country's currency reserves, assuming that the numbers provided by the government are valid."
Piet: It seems the old Eric is harder on the Chines hoi poloi that he is on the Euro/USian counterparts. He is totally mum about Palestine in a long and detailed look at Al Qaeda. Doubly a shame about someone who writes so clearly on such a spread of issues.
piet - China just upped its GDP figures by 16.8% - the place is obviously a total mess.
nick - 'the neo-liberal Bible' is quote from a certain moonbatologist.
WSJ is a bit inaccessible (i.e. pricey susbscription, not much available free online) and the National Review is rather narrow in focus (some excellent columnists though). For all its faults, The Economist can't be beaten for quick, wide-ranging data sweep, which is all I've got time for at the mo. Who in their right mind would ever bother with The Economist's culture pages? - LOL
Supply-side economics is a v. interesting topic, especially in connection with the gold standard and the flat tax. [I'm massively muddled in these regions.] To what extent has supply-side been 'accepted'/'proven'?
[pardon the clumsiness - wrestling with nasty bugs and Burke]
nick. two problems with Socialism Reborn. first, Harris says democratic nations share the same values and the same ethos; they are not out to hurt one another. however, imho, he doesn't go far enough with the capitalistic angle. would Harris also agree economic policies should not hurt democratic nations? in Bolivia's case, the coca leaf is criminalized & cocaleros are viewed as cocaineros [highly recommended reading].
additionally, the war on drugs targets supply & not demand — i'd like to know how many cocaine users & how many rich cocaleros there are in Bolivia. why isn't the coca leaf on the same economic model as coffee & cocoa?
second problem involves Morales as "Nightmare". apparently, what's getting regurgitated is an AP story from 12-Dec by Fiona Smith. first paragraph states: Now, holding the lead ahead of Sunday's presidential election, he's threatening to be "a nightmare for the government of the United States." deeper into the story Smith reports Morales statement more clearly: The Movement Toward Socialism "represents not only hope for the Bolivian people, but also a nightmare for the government of the United States," Morales told the supporters.
it's interesting we're dealing with a new strain of glyphosate-resistant coca & capitalist-resistant politics. forgive me if i think Bolivia's indigenous population is giving the U.S. its collective (soci*list) finger. imho, the real "nightmare" for the U.S. is sharing Bolivia's value of the coca leaf.
highly recommended: State, Drug Policy, and Democracy in the Andes (PDF).
Oxymorons: the coming death of globalization
from Morales' site: When the alcaloid cocaine was extracted from the leaf in the middle of the 19th century, white men grasped its invigorating properties, oblivious of the warnings against abuse of Andean tradition.
after 5000 years of cultivating coca it's clear the cocaleros know the seed & the soil. unfortunately, only drug traffickers have realized its capitalistic value.
oops. meant to address that one for sd.
{four basic routes to coca intoxication} chewing the leaves, cocaine sulphate, cocaine hydrochloride & freebase/crack cocaine.
{Debunking the Drug Legalization Myth} DEA enforces the "Controlled Substances Act" but it is a fact that drugs are the most out-of-control substances in our society. That law is an oxymoron. A humane society demands control of drugs. Perhaps our failure to control drugs is due to our prohibition-based strategy. Legal regulation has given us an enormous range of tools to control the commerce and use of everything in our economy, except drugs.
{Demonizing Morales, Jeopardizing Stability} The greater danger, however, is that by broadly characterizing the people protesting in the streets of Bolivia as products of Cuban or Venezuelan provocateurs (AFP 8/16/05), U.S. officials misinterpret a diverse and complex political landscape, and vastly underestimate the systemic causes of popular dissent within the country. Members of the traditional Bolivian political elite characterize the forces clamoring for change in Bolivia as factions of radical extremists seeking to destroy the nation’s democracy, an analysis that dovetails neatly with Bush Administration officials’ objectives. In reality, the voices of dissent in Bolivia include diverse union, civic, professional, and indigenous groups as well as regional elites with varied interests.
It's kind of cozy in this cupboard ...
A Grossraum is an area dominated by a power representing a distinct political idea. This idea was always formulated with a specific opponent in mind; in essence ,the distinction between friend and enemy would be determined by this particular political idea. As an example Carl Schmitt cited the American Monroe Doctrine and its concept of non-intervention by foreign powers in the American Raum. "This is the core of the original Monroe Doctrine, a genuine Grossraum principle, namely the union of politically awakened people, a political idea and, on the basis of this idea, a politically dominant Grossraum excluding foreign intervention."
northanger - the text on cocaineros and the State, Drug Policy and Democracy in the Andes PDF are sharp and fascinating. The plot thickens...
"Second, short-term successes are followed by long-term processes of coping with their effects. This is particularly true in Bolivia. Eradicating coca without a serious plan to substitute for the coca-cocaine economy results in a remedy that may be worse than the illness."
Sound familiar? - this would seem to be THE US problem. This is self-defeating, nightmare hyperstition, in which the more you try to prevent a reality from emerging, the more it emerges - a pitilessly vindictive metaphysical process.
and it's just a matter of strategy
Another computer transplant in process - normal (excellent) service will resume presently :)
Great points and links - still wading through them.
northanger - don't think i really disagree, it's just that Morales is going to trash the country (whatever the 'root causes' of his ascendence)
sd - know i'm building up a backlog on unanswered queries - will definitely try to make some coherent remarks on supply-side economics soon (don't think many people anywhere - especially outside US - really get it)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ij...r/messages/
4746 (same message in 10 languages)
Title: Chávez to issue regional social currencies if
reelected
From: Miguel Yasuyuki Hirota
Hello all, I've just received a surprising news. Hugo
Chávez, president of Venezuela, is thinking of issuing new
regional social currencies in parallel with the conventional
Bolivar for actors of social economy if he is to be
reelected in the next election. I'm quite eager to have more
information about this...
http://english.eluniversal.com/
2...pol_art_19A6458
25.shtml
I wish you a Merry Christmas if you're Christian, Miguel
'social currencies'??
"To what extent has supply-side been 'accepted'/'proven'?"
- evidence always dirty and controversialized in matters economical. It basically comes down to this sort of thing:
www.nationalreview.com/kudlow/
kudlow200503041510.asp
The mantra:
"Growth is never inflationary."
Another key piece of the supply-side jigsaw (chill on deficits):
www.nationalreview.com/nrof_comment/
tamny200504150850.asp
much obliged. also interesting on deficits:
www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/crisis/tradedeficit/
2005/0103laffer.htm
[post nearly ready, honest, btw]
sd - seems to be some problem with that link
sd. yes, balloon effect caught my attention also. maybe nick can say how it's related to D&G's holey spaces (bolivia's smooth, striated & holey spaces — funny, Butch Cassidy & the Whole in the Wall gang could be buried in Bolivia). while coca leaves don't travel very well, cocaine is coca's robust carrier — US paper currency is cocaine's. because of contaminated paper money US federal courts have ruled K9 sniffers detecting cocaine isn't necessary "probable cause". (have not confirmed yet whether Janet Reno stopped by doggy drug sniffer).
situation cries out for a good Bolivian stand-up comedian understanding the delicate art of viral hyperstitional transformation.
nick. reports whether Morales is a card-carrying member of the Let's Trash Bolivia club remain unconfirmed. time will tell.
this seems to work:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/soce.../
0103laffer.htm
On Morales, Michael Radu gets it:
www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?
ID=20657
sd - excellent article.
Unusually rigorous piece of research on political bias in the social sciences:
www.sofi.su.se/wp/WP05-8.pdf
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Arti...le.asp?
ID=20657
see, that's so simple. just put the link with the http:// part (don't add any spaces) & there you go. instant link.
More magic from northanger ... [neural-sludging] 'gotta try and work out how that's possible'
... probably just the notorious 'haloscan effect' ...
yup, it's the haloscany thingy. because when you put a link in the big comment box (& BIG IF) it ever starts working again, you must eliminate the http:// for it to be accepted. probably coz of anti-spamming filters.
congratulations! that wins you empiricist of the week award northanger (unless you discovered it non-empirically of course)
anybody Yuling it up at all? if so - enjoy.
(I'll probably be mostly grinching with Hitchens etc., bah humbug and all that ...)
This is pretty funny (via Glenn R
Reynolds):
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/fun...ws-p1.php?
emf=1
satanick. most comment boxes automate linking if properly inputted. you can even make links like this — you really do need to learn the art of linking.
You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch.
You really are a heel.
You're as cuddly as a cactus,
You're as charming as an eel.
Mr. Grinch.
You're a bad banana
With a greasy black peel.
You're a monster, Mr. Grinch.
Your heart's an empty hole.
Your brain is full of spiders,
You've got garlic in your soul.
Mr. Grinch.
I wouldn't touch you, with a
thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.
You're a vile one, Mr. Grinch.
You have termites in your smile.
You have all the tender sweetness
Of a seasick crocodile.
Mr. Grinch.
Given the choice between the two of you
I'd take the seasick crockodile.
You're a foul one, Mr. Grinch.
You're a nasty, wasty skunk.
Your heart is full of unwashed socks
Your soul is full of gunk.
Mr. Grinch.
The three words that best describe you,
are, and I quote: "Stink. Stank. Stunk."
You're a rotter, Mr. Grinch.
You're the king of sinful sots.
Your heart's a dead tomato splot
With moldy purple spots,
Mr. Grinch.
Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable
rubbish imaginable,
Mangled up in tangled up knots.
You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch.
With a nauseaus super-naus.
You're a crooked jerky jockey
And you drive a crooked horse.
Mr. Grinch.
You're a three decker saurkraut and toadstool sandwich with arsenic sauce.
Mr. Grinch.
a little meta on war- and peace fare
I wrote about dictatorial pounce vs coalition strategies as described in review of Frans de Waal's latest. Looking at butch policies with high 'make it on your own', individualistic freedom and low social safety netting factors vs the feminine ones with reversed emphases we see the former able to recruit (creepily cajole and jar the door make the poor feel a draft) and herd those really hurtin into war preparation. A good illustration is penned by LBO lister Jenny in the course of a draft thread:
Daniel, the problem here is not the facts or their interpretation. Clearly, few people from the top income quintile enroll in the service, albeit not everyone from the bottom quintile enrolls either. We can, of course, analyze reasons why some people join whileother do not - but that would not convince th epoverty draft crown even a bit. This crowd is a small part of a much bigger problem of the intellectual poverty of the left nowadays that seems incapable of making any political argument without having a victim do defend. If they cannot find any, they will manufacture one. They seem to have given up on the idea of presenting an argumewnt capable of competing with the neo-liberal alternative for the "hearts and minds" of themaionstream population, but instead resigned themselves to appeals to pity - and for that they need victims. Wojtek ------
Beg to disagree. Victim rhetoric is pretty much universal by now -- successfully used by the Right, beginning with Bakke and ending with Iraq war, which had to be entirely cast in victim rather than imperial rhetoric. We're not there the way the Brits were there at the end of the nineteenth century -- to sieze what rightfully belonged to the empire. We're there to protect the U.S. and the world from terrorism and WMD. Victim rhetoric is the foundation of every right-wing rant and every "Xtian" reaction. Though I agree that the Left would win hearts and minds if it gave it up first. Joanna
------You certainly have a point here. But in addition to victim rhetoric, the right also have other things in its arsenal, something that offers a positive vision, a warped one if you look underneath, but a positive vision that appeals to the mainstream and is capable of captivating its hearts and minds of the mainstream. That something is the ideology of freedom and personal "salvation" through the market. The left does not have anything of that sort. Nothing, nil, nada - just a bunch of look-what-they-are-doing-to-us rants. Several years ago I did some work as a data analyst on a project studying Nazi propaganda between 1925 and 1933. Basically the investigators scanned the German press from that period for any mention of the Nazis, content-coded the article and then analyzed the data for patterns (pretty standard stuff in this kind of research). One of the interesting findings was a very visible change in the pattern of their rhetoric ca. 1930. Before that, it was m
I'll post the rest in next door tangent
persuasive demonstration
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