RACE COLOR AND CIVILIZATION

"If slavery was accepted, there was a general feeling against enslaving Greeks, and most slaves were obtained, by war or raids, fron non-Greek countries. In this way the question of slavery was connected in the Greek mind, as in the American, with that of racial inferiority." Guthrie, III, p 156

 

There are several things about this passage, and about this account, to note.

 

One thing to note is that the Greeks tended to equate nationalism, or civilizationalism, not just city-statism, with race, although it seems that Greeks could and did enslave other Greeks, I guess. It was frowned upon.

 

Another thing to note is that the concept of race itself, for the ancient Greeks, had nothing to do with skin color, much less physical differences which modern people also consider racial characteristics.

Guthrie's comparison, between ancient Greeks amd modern Americans' views of the meaning of race, is troubling, because although as he means that slaves were also mostly foreigners among Americans, they were also identified, most crucially, by the skin color and physical features, criteria absent from the ancient Greeks' criteria:

"The complaint of the Old Oligarch is well known: slaves at Athens are an insolent lot who will not get out of your way in the street, and you are not allowed to strike them for the simple reason that there is nothing in their dress and general appearance to deistinguish them from free Athenians." Guthrie, III p. 156  

 

For the Greeks, race was a civilizational criterion, since they considered even white non-Greeks as members of a different race, as barbarians. Non-Greek whites were a different race because they were barbarians, not because their skin color was different, or because their physical features differed from Greek ones. 

 

Language, customs, dress, and religion presumably identified someone, racially, as Greek or non-Greek, not skin color or physical features, but the slaves in Athens apparently dressed and looked like Greeks.

 

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION WHERE DID NORTH KOREA'S CAPABILITY COME FROM

If you look at this topic, Wikipedia does not even get into the prior history. I am not an authority on this highly involved and technical subject.

See Time article referred to in DK article:
http://time.com/4692045/north-korea-nuclear-weapons-history/

Wikipedia starts out with Bernard Baruch, and trying to dismantle all nuclear weapons capability, in the name of a liberal international economic order.
 

The Time article on Korean nuclear history, even though it refers to 1848, the year the russians finally made a bomb, also, utterly fails to discuss how the liberal West originally had allowed Russia to not only get but keep nuclear weapons technology, and to develop it, unhindered, behind the iron curtain after WWII.

 

That really is the big big story about Korean nuclear history, but so embarrassing that no American historian, it seems, certainly no one at Time, will touch it.

 

A journalist and a spy wrote a good book about the espionage background, The Haunted Wood, and a CIA book review exists, of which this is the last paragraph:

"Postmodernists will reject the very idea of truth, but new generations of historians may discover that its pursuit and even its imperfect image have value beyond the nihilism current in so much contemporary historical typing. When that generational change occurs, Allen Weinstein will be recognized as a hero of his profession, pursuing its highest standards with tenacity, integrity, and courage. Readers will find this a haunting book, evoking still-painful memories of controversies imbedded in basic moral issues, truth and loyalty prominent among them. In the end, it is truth that sets us free of the dualism that has clouded American discussion of these issues for so much of this century. For too long, the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy has been used to argue the innocence of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. The truth, in the end, is more complex and even more interesting: McCarthy was a demagogue, and Hiss and his colleagues were traitors." CIA book review

but that is all I know about in print. Maybe someone can enlighten me...

If you read The Haunted Wood, it seems that the OSS was a sort of very liberal branch of the KGB, or whatever it had been called back then.

If one believes the Target Patton account, they cooperated with them in Europe, even more fully than Eisenhower and co did on the ground, during WWII.  Maybe I exaggerate here, but that is how the account read to me.

Of course, the CIA position had to change, with the late 40s situation. Call it the great awakening....

AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

I don't frequent zombie malls.

I go straight for bonobos!

Terms search: bonobos

RE NUCLEAR WEAPONS KOREA ETC LOOSE CANNON BLIND SQUIRREL

There are a lot of things one could say. There will be counter assertions for all of them no doubt.

 

We were in a position to prevent Russia from getting the bomb, as well as getting Eastern and Central Europe. We failed.

 

We hated Japan and promoted China relentlessly until it suddenly turned Communist on us. Surprise.

 

Now N Korea is said to threaten Korea and Japan. Wonder why they don't say threatening China too?

 

North Korea has been a client state of Russia and of China for a very long time. North Korea cannot take a crap wrong if China is watching. N Korea is what is called a vassal state.

 

This crisis is manufactured by China, and by us, pretending otherwise. Don't kid yourself. If it ends up as a war, it will be because it has been agreed, gentleman's agreement, to fight such a proxy war in Korea, not elsewhere. That might then give China an opening to come in later and annex the remains, a thing it had long had on the drawing board I suppose anyway. The better to then go down and menace Japan, Philippines,  next.

 

Read Professor Kaiser's article, but what about these things?

He writes like N Korea acts in a sort of political and civilizational vacuum. That has never been the case. That is how our pundits have been trained to think, or at least to talk out of school. 'N Korea is sui generis', to read their stuff...

In his defense, I suspect Professor Kaiser may also know relevant things which he can't discuss, even if he wanted to. I sympathize deeply with that.

I, on the other hand, know nothing I can't discuss, and so am rather a loose cannon on such topics.

However, even a loose cannon, similarly to a blind squirrel, may occasionally find a nut.

Terms search: Playing Three Sides, fattening things up, Nixon Shock, yuan trading, poker, etc.

RE SDW COMMENT ON DK'S SITE

SDW:

"Theodore Postol, emeritus Prof at MIT and an expert on military rocketry shows convincing evidence that sarin was spread by an explosion originating on the ground, not by an air to ground device. He believes this was a false flag operation. There is a link on following post to addendum by Postol giving further evidence."
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-13/top-missile-and-chemical-weapons-expert-debunks-trump’s-claims-about-syrian-chemic-0

 

So, who has a motive to do a false flag chemical weapon attack in Syria to pin it on Assad? Take some guesses.

LAW HUMAN RIGHTS CIVILIZATION

It required nothing less than a certain distinctive kind of civilization, Western Civiization, (not a Western European village, or a town, or even a nation state, alone) to even so much as conceive of or imagine or bring into being such a notion, and a corresponding state of affairs, as the rule of law; or of such a notion as human rights, right or wrong, and aside from what else, positive or negative, one might say about such terms.

THE MENU THE HAMBURGER

I tried to replicate the McDonald burger recently.

 

This is merely a version of the American hamburger. It is better than McDonalds.

 

Use organic and grassfed ground beef. Drain it, since most of this somehow now contains a large quantity of water!

 

Knead into the drained ground beef some minced raw cooking onion. I use rather a lot. Add rendered room temp bacon fat or other fatty pan drippings, to taste. Add a piece of stale white sourdough or French or Italian type bread. Mush all this together. 

 

I leave out garlic for this. The American hamburger seems not to emphasize garlic, but rather onion. Of course, you can daub it with garlic flavored mayonnaise later.

 

Lightly brown the flat side of hamburger buns, sized for the size burgers you are planning, in a skillet. I suggest substituting high quality rolls, French, Italian, or healthfood store ones, or even a good quality bagel, plain, onion, rye, pumpernickel,  etc. You can use various oils for this. Set them aside.

 

Shape the meat mixture into patties however thick or large you want. Cook, timing them accordingly, in a skillet or in a hot roasting oven. You could also broil them.

 

Serve these with whatever condiments you favor. The traditional American hamburger usually included lettuce tomato, mustard, catsup, and dill pickle on the side. I like mustard, and mayonnaise rather than catsup.

RE LAW SOCIAL COMPACT MORALS AND CIVILIZATION

Discussing the perennial question of the relation between law and morals, he (Aristotle) claims that the end and aim of a state is to promote the good life and therefore it has a right and a duty to concern itself with the moral goodness of its citizens. 'Otherwise the political society becomes a mere alliance, differing only in respect of locality from alliances between distant countries; and law becomes a compact, and as Lycophron the Sophist said, a guarantor of men's rights against one another, not a means of making the citizens good and just.' Aristotle, Politics (1280b 10)

All modern thinkers, of whatever stripe, tend to think of the social contract as a solution to a problem. The problems can vary. Historically they were either Locke's or Hobbes' state of nature that the contract was ultimately solving.

They tended to think of the social contract, and of the rule of law, as strictly political or legal, and often failed to see the other dimensions of societies within which law and politics subsist. This was common both at and after the Age of the Democratic Revolution.

Democracy could be generalized, in the manner of the old European alliance system, to the entire brotherhood of man, a globalized social contract among common men everywhere, regardless of their cultural, racial, religious, or civilizational associations.

It was a rather stupendous example of a sort of fallacy, perhaps not strictly of logic but certainly of reasoning of some kind, of what Wittgenstein in his later work called 'mistaken analogies'.

They seldom think, nowadays, of the social contract concept itself as a problem; and of the concept of a state of nature itself, as well, as a bewilderment.

Talleyrand's espousal at Vienna of the rule of law, as against the divine right of kings on the one hand, and Jacobin democracy on the other, was, I think, at least in important senses, also an expression of Aristotle's ideal of the state, for Europe, rather than an example of Lycophron's compact.

It had a moral, and social structural, dimension, call it a Western Civilizational dimension, which pervaded and underpinned the thinking of the representatives of the society of Western states at the Congress of Vienna, even though it was often in practice overidden.

It represented the expression of a self awareness of Europe as an integral civilization as distinct from a welter of Lycophronian balance of power alliances.

RE LAW MORALS LAW RELIGION RACE AND CIVILIZATION

See prior post: THE RULE OF LAW AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Also this prior post, excerpt:

"Let's look at an example from the time of the Congress of Vienna, and look at Talleyrand, the most outspoken opponent of Russia and Prussia, and the first of his three arguments there: "...this era could only be ended and peace established by restoring law as the basis of international life; that the balance of Europe could not rest solely or mainly on power, but depended on mutual trust among states and nations arising from mutual respect for everyone's rights; and that all rights and titles to all kinds of possession and good, including those of individuals, nations, and states, were vitally connected with the rights of rulers to their thrones....", Schroeder, p. 530. 

 

Thus the rule of law was finally counterposed to the divine right of kings, on the one hand, and to Jacobinism on the other.

 

But that is not the only point I want to make regarding this development." (end excerpt, prior post)

 

One gets the impression, nowadays, that the concept of the rule of law is, among Western intellectuals, a concept intellectually isolable, like a chemical element, and then fungibly distributable, or imposable, across and into all civilizations.

 

I am skeptical that that is the case. My skepticism relates to the relationships I have been discussing between law and other features of societies, such as customs, language, racial characteristics, traditions of various kinds, class structures, religious institutions and practices, and other things.

Certainly what Talleyrand had meant, in the squib above, at Vienna, by 'the rule of law' was not a concept which might be exported anywhere else but within Western Europe, and perhaps Russia, around 1815. 

 

RE BRUCE WILDER

Very astute thinker. I have posted here several of his comments on DK's site.

 

I believe he is Nora Roberts' husband. Maybe I am wrong.

 

I don't read much fiction, but she has certainly figured strongly in the Western cultural imagination.

BBC TRUMPBACKS

Trump: China not a currency manipulator.

 

'Dollar too strong because Americans have confidence in me.'

 

Your currency, and your wealth, now, is literally defined in terms of Presidential confidence or lack thereof.

 

How is that better than a gold standard? Gold, after all, is just gold. You don't have confidence or lack of confidence in it. Of course you have to test it, measure it, or know it, physically, but at least it is not a personality trait, or a function of printing press activity.

Fractional reserve banking was an evil of banking under a gold standard. It wasn't the gold that was evil.

When you had bank failures, under a gold standard, it wasn't gold that failed. Fractional reserve banking practices failed. Gold was what it was.

When you have bank failures now, or currency devaluations, or currency strengthenings, what has failed, devalued, or strengthened?

If banks failed, why? If currency devalued or strengthened, by how much, why, how would you ever know? 
 

How does it feel to have your wealth in something I will call Trumpbacks! Others call them dollars, or greenbacks, but these even are misnomers now.

What are they backed by? Trump! nothing more. They are actually a federal debt you could never collect. Trump is borrowing wealth from you, not you from him.

How much are they worth? Some fractional share of Trump.

To say that Trumpbacks trump other currencies is to engage in a species of bluff. Central banking as a card game.

I say put his face on the dollar bill during his presidency!

This post dedicated to James Grant.

CONGRESS OF VIENNA RUSSIA AND EUROPE FALLOUT FROM THE AGE OF THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

"What had the crisis and its resolution accomplished?  In some respects, little or nothing. It certainly had not ended the Russian strategic and political threat to Central Europe; that would persist down to the First World War." Schroeder, p. 536.

 

Schroeder, writing in 1994, might perhaps more accurately have said, 'down to the present moment, and into the foreseeable future'....

This is why I have talked about a counterfactual, bringing down the Bolshevik Regime after 1917, and then partitioning Russia into at least several different monarchies or protectorates. That was a good time to do it, as even Schroeder's erroneous remark seems to acknowledge chronologically.

Schroeder implies the threat of Russia to Central Europe ended at the First World War.

That was emphatically not the case, as subsequent history has amply shown, especially the outcome of WWII and its aftermath, for Central Europe, and the rest of the world. That is why I advocated, counterfactually, the Patton solution in 1945.

The military commanders on the ground saw clearly the problem, and the solution, even if at that late date only a defensive one, pushing Russia back to its place on the edge of Eastern Europe. 1919 would have been a much better time to address permanently the Problem of Russia than 1945. It had been inconceivable in 1814, 1815, when Czar Alexander actually came to Paris in triumph after Napoleon's defeat.

THE RULE OF LAW AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

See this and related posts: NATURE AND CONVENTION LAW CUSTOM AND CIVILIZATION

I want to pursue further the threads of a thesis about culture, civilization, and law.

 

Let's look at an example from the time of the Congress of Vienna, and look at Talleyrand, the most outspoken opponent of Russia and Prussia, and the first of his three arguments there: "...this era could only be ended and peace established by restoring law as the basis of international life; that the balance of Europe could not rest solely or mainly on power, but depended on mutual trust among states and nations arising from mutual respect for everyone's rights; and that all rights and titles to all kinds of possession and good, including those of individuals, nations, and states, were vitally connected with the rights of rulers to their thrones....", Schroeder, p. 530. 

 

Thus the rule of law was finally counterposed to the divine right of kings, on the one hand, and to Jacobinism on the other.

 

But that is not the only point I want to make regarding this development.

IF YOU WANT TO MAKE A COMMENT NOT TO BE POSTED JUST LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENT

I know there are some regular readers of this rather personal journal. Statistics.

I comment on some topics, and authors, who have a public presence. I do not.

RE BROOKS THE COMING INCOMPETENCE CRISIS

This is how our system has always operated, was designed to operate. Very amateurish. Very ingenue.

There is nothing new about this situation whatsoever.

Think spoils system. Bring in the next 'quote' team.

Same thing in the Congress...

Forget about it. You are not going to change anything much about it.

RE PALESTINE ANCIENT CLUSTER OF BUFFER STATES

So the G7 says oppose Assad. What then happens there? Who steps in?

 

Same story, going down the coast of Palestine, buffer states to shake a stick at...

 

Which one is next to fall, like a domino, and to whom?

Israel, a festering cancer in Palestine.

 

Kind of ridiculous to get involved with this on the ground.

 

No 1815 Congress of Vienna really in sight.

 

We would have been better off had the British Empire kept this whole area as a quote protectorate. Who cares what they think.

 

The graveyard of empires anyway.....

 

A lot less bother. What.

It was our fault to let it happen, after WWII. We insisted on it. See for example The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire. I just started it.

Kennan had said The Austro Hungarian Empire had been better than anything that has come after. Amen.

So now, in a real sense, it is our insoluble problem! It was at least partially preventable.

You may cry: 'The British Empire would have committed human rights violations, violated democracy, all over the Middle East.'

Well....

RE MORE DEMOCRACY

"Al Smith liked to say that the only cure for the ills of democracy was more democracy, and I still agree." DK

 

I think he must really mean a certain kind of better democracy, not just more.

 

Let me give you an example of more:

 

Cities are usually now governed by a city council. This is a very small group of elected officials. They wear more than one hat: they are both the executive and the legislative branches, as well as a quasi judicial branch to boot! They draft and decide on ordinances governing local affairs, they sit in a judicial capacity on certain matters, they are executives as a collegial deliberative body.

 

Now the constitutionalists out there will immediately upprick their ears, and note a blatant violation of the sacred separation of powers doctrine here in these little urban rascals.

 

What to do about it? More democracy!

 

Why not a full blow legislature for these old darlings, complete with upper and lower houses, to bring ordinances out? Why not refer all judicial matters to the local judicial branch, ab initio, for resolution?

 

That is what you call ' more democracy '. Some might even call it better! Not me.

 

The local legislature might be elected based on voting districts of say 1 square mile each, or some other measure.

 

Grass roots democracy at work!

EVEN IF OUR COUNTRY WORKED PERFECTLY POLITICALLY

whatever you think that means, and these concepts can be radically different, no nation in another civilization is or will ever be in a position to closely emulate it.

 

Many people rightly detest the concept of foreign nation building, and see that human rights is also a way of attacking other regimes for other political reasons. They believe that if we only got our own house in order, that that would be the best thing we could do for the world, to be a shining example for all others everywhere. I think Professor Kaiser tends in this direction; maybe I am wrong.

 

Unfortunately, even this more moderate ideal is doomed to abject failure, both because it is utopian with regard to our real possibilities domestically, and because it ignores cultural and civilizational differences which cannot be overcome by trying to set an example of that kind.

QUESTION RE GLOBAL BUILDING

If you are a liberal globalist, and the nation state itself has been an abomination for you since the late 18th century, why try to

' quote ' nation build anywhere (not that you aren't the last country ideologically to be in a good position to try to do such a thing anywhere)?

 

What you may really mean, but you don't know it, is what one might call Global Design Build. That is what you are really trying to do.

As Samantha Power expostulated, as Professor Kaiser mentioned some time ago, as a role for State abroad, you need to globalize by protesting from the grass roots, everywhere anyone is trying to keep in place an oppressive nation state of any kind except a liberal voter democracy.

NATURE AND CONVENTION LAW CUSTOM AND CIVILIZATION

For the early Greeks, law and custom, both nomoi, were not sharply or clearly distinguished.

 

If they were identified with the gods' laws, they were in effect laws by nature, physis, to which human law and custom, written and unwritten, conformed.

 

With the distinction and opposition between the concepts of nature and convention, in the Enlightenment Age, the distinction between written and unwritten laws took on different senses, which I have referred to elsewhere here.

 

Human laws and orders, as in the case of Antigone, could be viewed as opposed to ancient custom, unwritten, the gods', law. 

 

Unwritten law could be viewed as better, as well as more just, rather than unjust, than written law or orders of the king. Divine law came to be seen as capable of contradicting laws and orders made by man.

 

The point I want to make here is that there were elements of distinctive customs within a cultural tradition in the establishment of written laws for a place, including the concept of a constitution.

 

In spite of what most Western intellectuals have been brought up to think, within their own generalizing, Western culture, post Enlightenment, tradition, written laws, and associated rights and responsibilities, travel much less well across civilizational lines than they would like.

TRADE

Advice for 60 years ago, when it might have made a difference, and been feasible:

The best reasons to engage in trade with them are that it retards your trading partners' industrial and technological development, and that it is less advantageous for, or even harms, those others who also trade with them in competition with you.

 

Whether it actually benefits you in terms of providing a market for your goods, or makes a short term profit, or whether it is a strategic partner today, or is a friend of a friend, are irrelevant.

THE RADICAL GLOBALIZER WANTS RACIAL CONVERGENCE AS MUCH AS ECONOMIC AND RELIGIOUS CONVERGENCE

He, already, sees these things, as essentially connected.

He is rather like the immediate abolitionists of the late 18th and 19th Centuries, which wrought so much havoc wherever they were in the West and the US.

That's a dirty little secret. Keep it just between us. It has been driven by liberal, religious, and utopian, ideologies, and mainly by big globalist business interests, as well as so called conservative Western religious interests, especially in the 20th century.

 

Low level Western adherents, liberal or conservative, don't really appreciate the full horrific implications of their ad hoc globalist views, zealots seldom do, but I can spell them out for you: 

Every person in the world should have no religion,  consider every other person in the world his brother, be dark tan in color, make about $400 a year, and be happy with this utopian state of affairs.

WHO IS STANDING UP FOR COPTS RADICAL GLOBALIZATION

Most of them, Egyptians, are Orthodox, so Putin can step up....?

 

The rest, small minorities mostly elsewhere, are sort of Catholic, so the US can step in...?

 

Question: Why step in on that? Well then, why step in anywhere?

 

Well then:  The true globalizer has no distinct religious preference except no religion, frankly; so presumably has no axe to grind except to grind down antagonistic religious beliefs everywhere. 

 

Wherever radical religious violence on both sides, or on many sides at once, is occurring, say in Egypt, Syria, Western China, parts of Russia, India and Pakistan, we should go in and kill both sides; so the anti religion globalization subtext must read.

Call it Radical Globalization: Rousseau, cum Robespierre, cum Jefferson, run amok.

Globalization Terror, not Terror and Consent

If it is race rather than religion, the Radical Globalizer has something to contribute.

If it is whites killing blacks, or blacks killing whites, or yellow killing both, or tan killing any other, or any colors killing any other, the Radical Globalizer has a solution: he kills both sides.

His favorite, and only, racial color: light brown, or dark tan, depending on the light.

Those colors who don't fight, he leaves alone, for now.

THE MENU MAYONNAISE IMPROV WORK IN PROGRESS

My goal here here is to set out a notion I have long had: to make mayonnaise in a wider variety of ways.

 

I plan to make it now using only some leftover pickle juice on hand, mixed with the yolk.

 

The plan as it now stands is to mix the yolk with several tablespoons of pickle vinegar juice. I think a good Provencal one might involve say two tbs of nonpareil caper juice, and one or two tbs of mild Greek pepperoncini juice. I plan to mash through a garlic press a couple of tsps of the capers, in this one, for good measure. 

 

I am also toying with the idea of  mashing in an anchovy filet, the kind that come in olive oil.

 

One can also drip some of this leftover anchovy oil into such a mayonnaise without regret.

 

That is next, either today or tomorrow.

Bad news, this menu a failure. Don't use just pickle juice. I still find that a heaping teaspoon of good mustard with an egg yolk works best for a mayonnaise emulsifier. 

If you do this anyway, you can still salvage it for use in a nice meat pate! That is what I am going to do.

WWII SOVIET DIPLOMACY TWO KEY ELEMENTS TRUMP PUTIN DEJA VU

WWII: Germany and Japan
Today: US and China


A. Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 1939: This pact sent Hitler at the throats of the West, its future faux allies, as Stalin had hoped. Of course Hitler later turned on Russia, too.

B. Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact 1941: This pact sent Japan at the throats of the West in Asia and the Pacific, rather than against Russia in mainland Asia,  making possible Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific, for which Russia remained neutral.

A. Trump Putin

B. Putin Xi

It was a winning strategy in WWII. It is a winning strategy today.

THESE PRINCIPLES ARE RIGHT FOR ALL MEN EVERYWHERE

You might say this globalist idea began with Paul of Tarsus.

Maybe there were earlier proselytes, across civilizations and religions, than he. But he was certainly big.

NATURE AND CONVENTION TRUMP'S PHYSICS AND MORALITY SIMON SAYS

For sophists, physics and morality are both conventional:
Global warming is real, no.
Poison gas outrage, yes.

Just one little related point: Morality is conventional, but of course that does not make it consistent.

Neither drone strikes nor poison gas are WMD, in fact the opposite.

Neither is related to physis, global warming issue, etc., but rather are moral, tactical, political, or strategic matters.
Drone strike civilian casualties outrage: no.
Poison gas civilian casualties outrage: yes.

'Doubts about the order and stability of the physical world as a whole, and the dethronement of divinity in favor of chance and natural necessity as causes, were seized upon by upholders of the relativity of ethical conceptions and became part of the basis of their case.'

 

The Sophists considered both physics and morality to be by nomos, by convention.

Terms search: physics

WHAT IF XI SAID OUR PEOPLE ARE TIRED OF INDUSTRIALIZATION AND POLLUTION

"We are going back to an agrarian based Chinese economy." Think of it as a voluntary Morgenthau Plan for China.

Not to say that that is likely, but it certainly is politically possible.

What would you do? Declare this to be against America's vital interests, and attack?

You cannot argue that it is against human rights, for example.

And China is not attacking anyone.

What?

RE THE OTHER AVALON ET IN ARCADIA EGO ALLEGORY OF UTOPIAN GLOBALIZATION

SEE prior post: THE OTHER AVALON

 

Let's analogize the systems failure on the car, between its cooling system 'systems', to globalized industry.

 

You have a an IT part made in X, other moving parts made in Y and another IT part made in Z, and the car assembled in Omega.

 

What happens when you have a little political instability here and there?

 

What about just logistical dilemmas cropping up?

 

How about a major war?

 

What if the water pump now has to come from Asia, as they usually do now originally, say either Japan or China nowadays, and China is asserting hegemony over the whole Pacific and gets into a little sticky wicket with its neighbors, especially Japan?

Guess what? The water pump itself is made of parts that come from say 3 countries, assembled in a 4th. What happens if trade goes south? Plan B?

There is no Plan B for globalized industrial outsourcing.

If you can't use WMD yourself for prudential reasons, or prevent others from doing so due to allowing proliferation, and you can't keep the sources of your conventional military equipment within your borders, then you are not a super power. The term super power was a misnomer, and then became obsolete, almost at the time that it was coined...

 

No water pumps are made in Syria, or much of anything else in the whole rest of the Middle East for that matter, so it's ok to bomb them back to the stone age without interfering with housewives here getting to the beauty parlor in their Avalon.

 

Asia, little different story... 

RUSSIA AND THE US THEN AND NOW

Why you might ask have I talked here and there about the prospect of partitioning Russia after the Russian Revolution and WWI? It sounds to almost all Americans like it would have been a crazy idea. We thought Russia, especially Bolshevik Russia rather than Czarist Russia, was great.

 

Everyone in Europe had known for a couple of hundred years by then the threat Russia had posed and would pose to the West.

 

Only states like the US were innocent of such insights. They thought it was great that their new friend Lenin was threatening to eliminate all the detested Western Imperialist empires once and for all!

THE DUPES OF WAR SYRIA

Trump or clinton, either way it would have been the same. Even Professor Kaiser commented that had she won, we would have been fighting in Syria within a month...

We have a long history of being duped into war. The War of 1812 is a classic example.

 

Usually, we fought them for only the wrong reasons, because wrong reasons have been all we have known and adhered to  ideologically.

If we got pulled into a good, or at least necessary, war, it was more or less unwillingly at first, and later only by appeal to the wrong reasons we favored. WWI and WWI are classic examples, maybe I exaggerate...

 

The old chanceries of Europe have always known this. We are a byword for both fragmented yet utopian, anti West, globalist foolishness.

I WROTE THIS 2016 POST WELL BEFORE DISCOVERING ROBIN ELLIS SITE

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

THE MENU

This reference is dedicated to him. One has to have a sense of humor. 

THE OTHER AVALON

The water pump finally failed Tuesday, after 250,000 miles. The system to warn of temperature change failed, because it was connected to the suddenly failed water pump itself which recorded the change but failed to send it to the dash gauge.

 

Thus, when the pump failed, the gauge on the dash did not register it, except that then the check engine light came on, since it senses other symptoms of engine failure.

 

It was in the shop for 2 days. $2,000 later, we are back in business, now, with both. Luckily the motor was OK, did not overly over heat. It has been a bad two weeks for the cars.

COMBINE ENLIGHTENED GLOBALISM WITH ENLIGHTENMENT SKEPTICISM (HUME)

What do you get, in the end?

Nihilism, in Hobbes' State of Nature,

where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

All men were created equal in Hobbes' ' original position ' too, not just in Locke's, Rousseau's, Jefferson's, or Rawls'!

Terms search: Hobbes

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGION ETHNICITY GENDER CIVILIZATION

See: LET ME EXPLAIN THIS FURTHER RACE RELIGION CIVILIZATION

See also: Saturday, December 10, 2016

RACIST UNIRACIALISM UNIRELIGIONISM GLOBALISM MELTINGPOTISM

So, after reviewing the above posts, where to go from there? '...The implications for religion'.

 

Because religion, across the broad distinctions of world faiths, not of Protestant versus Catholic in the West, or of Shiite versus Sunni in Islam, or of types of various sects within Buddhism or Hinduism, has normally had at least a strong racial dimension, has been based on broad and general racial distinctions throughout the world, and also has been associated with societies in which religion and government have often been closely identified if not identical, the emergence of a globalist ideology which cuts across these distinctions renders religion itself an abomination.

For the globalist, all religions, including any sectarian creed within any particular religion, however so called moderate, are as contrary to globalism as the concepts of distinctions of race, of ethnicity, and the existence of the long detested nation state.

Distinctions of gender follow in train, of course. The thoroughgoing globalist must look past not only actual racial differences, but also declare gender ones contrary to idealized universal human rights.

He must, furthemore, declare all religions, of whatever kind or degree, contrary to human rights and to the rights of man.

The distinction of a separation of church and state is obsolete because both the church, any church, and the (nation) state, are obsolete for the thoroughgoing globalist, and frankly inimical to globalism.

LET ME EXPLAIN THIS FURTHER RACE RELIGION CIVILIZATION

See this prior post:

RACIST UNIRACIALISM UNIRELIGIONISM GLOBALISM MELTINGPOTISM

Also terms search: race , nation, religion, civilization

Where to begin? Once you challenge the very notion of racial differences being a natural, or neutral, even an inherently good thing,  you come up against other related organizing principles for societies, such as religion, government, and civilization.

 

Separating church from state, fallout from The Reformation Fallacy, has turned out to be another thin wedge of a broader Western assault on social and political reality as it had always been.

 

Separating church from state, was then, eventually, only in the later 19th Century and only in the West, combined with a completely new, and quite radical, uniracialism, call it the racial and political brotherhood of man, so to speak, into a powerful new multidimensional globalist vision, quite apart from the economic globalism of Smithist laissez faire, already taking over in the West since the late 18th Century, which also played right into globalism.

 

I want to get to the implications, for religion, in a subsequent post.

RE BUILD THE WALL OR GLOBALIZE THEM HUMAN RIGHTS INITIATIVE

Rather than build the wall, why not do something radical, build a New Israel, for Mexicans and Centrals, in , say, Africa?

They could be turned over to the Chinese there for indentured servitude: plenty of construction work there going on right now. 

Why risk a boomerang effect by returning them to Mexico or Central America?

Advertising exporting illegals to Africa would reduce the illegal immigration here to a trickle, overnight.

They can call it a globalization initiative!

They can call it anti racist global human rights public policy!

RE CNBC WWIII BREWING EAST CHINA SEA

This is of course much bigger than the Middle East, but the Middle East has been the sideshow among the liberals.

 

Our policies toward China and Japan since the 19th Century have been disastrous.

 

We should have smelled the coffee when Japan suddenly industrialized, then defeated Russia in 1905.

 

The Taiwan card...what do you think that means, when China intends to take over the Pacific (and the world) anyway? So Trump plays ' the Taiwan card ', thinking to get something permanent and tangible for it. Forget about it. It is appeasement all over again.

 

Rather like NAFTA, give them a permanent trade advantage and the immigrants will somehow stop coming over here.

RE SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS OF GLOBALIZATION

Lower labor costs predations, the many headed monster of lower labor costs, Scylla, on the cliff on the one side,

matched only by global average or median income convergence, the chute of Charybdis, the whirlpool, down to the bottom of the ocean, on the other.

 

An enormous pincer movement.....

 

Forget about wealth disparities, divergence, the top 1% versus the 99%, stuff like that,  among Western elite populations: that is the trivial side show they want you to focus on.

Terms search: divergence

 

GLOBALIST POLICIES HAVE BASICALLY SLOWLY BLOWN YOUR COUNTRY UP

We have, here, a hollowed out shell of a national economy, and a flat globalist politics and popular culture.

 

Trump cannot solve that. It is systemic. The urge to globalize, and ignore domestic political economic and social issues and people, is written into our founding docs by the internationalist Jacobin American rebels.

 

They thought that the whole world would go their way eventually. It certainly seemed so with the onset of the French Revolution.

 

They thought that men of good will in all civilizations would eventually live in peace prosperity and harmony under the enlightened principles which they then espoused and disseminated.

 

None of that has happened, or will ever happen.

 

What has happened is that these Western ideas gradually blew up Western Civilization itself, and created adverse civilizational powers to rival ours at the same time.

The founding fathers thought that all people could have the American Dream of prosperity.

Prosperity is certainly what they want, but without Western culture attached. Most of them want prosperity, but also require an end to Western hegemony, and perhaps even an end to Western Civilization itself.

How else can their rising nations and civilizations prosper in a world of cutthroat scarcity and environmental degradation?

Most countries' governments, everywhere, have their backs to the wall. I would suggest that that has been the Wests' most important political legacy since 1760.

THE RHODES MILNER GROUP CONSPIRACY BECAME TRANSFORMED AND LIVED ON UNTIL NOW

"...Many hollywood disaster films like 'Deep Impact' or ' Inddependence Day' have as their basis the hope that humanity could somehow unite against something, always of course led by the USA. This messianic fervor is what is globalism today. This is led by an elite which uses this ideology as an excuse for any behaviour, regime change, war on terror, etc...." Ed Boyle

 

Ed is onto something here. It goes back to the 19th Century, and then of course on back to the later 18th, back when the plot of Poldark began, after Britain lost the American Rebellion.

 

Rhodes himself was something of a conservative, a conservative imperialist in the late 19th Century. He believed in the British Empire as the only civilization worthy of the name.

Most other Europeans, while hardly Anglophiles generally, considered Europeans, as against non Europeans, in a similar way, civilized versus uncivilized.

Americans of course had the theory that all men in all civilizations were created equal with equal rights, but this theory was not actually put into practice that much over here, and there were other countervailing theories about racial differences, levels of enlightenment, and other aspects of human societies,  which cut against this view as well.

 

The Rhodes successor organizations, Milner Group, post Milner Group entities, were transformed, over the decades, into an elite liberal coterie of blind globalizationists.

  

The liberal democracies of Western Europe had dated only to after 1760.

Before that, if you were liberal, you were either an enlightened despot, a liberal aristocrat, or a bourgeoise climber, either government bureaucrat, or business man,  into aristocratic circles.

THE MENU ROAST CHICKEN

I do these Provencal style, have done for 40 years.

There is a temptation to just suddenly mash some of the pork chicken gizzard pate into some crumbled stale toasted bread, and a few other things, and make stuffing...

I have to resist this temptation, as my wife refuses, for whatever reason to eat pork, unless it is a nice occasional piece of smoked bacon, or bacon fat sauteed in her organic greens. This is an inconsistency I do not harp on.

FOX NEWS RATHER LIKE J R EWING ANTICS DALLAS SAME POLITICS MONEY CULTURE

30 OR 40 YEARS LATER

Rumpole, "The Learned Friends",  re Dirty Dickerson, "I trust this is not an isolated occurrence...."

Judge Bullingham, siding with DD, "Mr Rumpole, if criminals never made mistakes, we would never have trials at the Old Bailey!"

FUNNY ST PETERSBURG RUSSIA BOMBER WAS ALSO FROM CENTRAL ASIA

Funny, little coincidences like that...

 

No real deeper meaning there, just one of those little things!

 

Funny, that is also one of the best places I suggested China should send its West China Uighurs back to!

 

Recent post re China:

BANNING BEARDS AND TURBANS

 

Maybe the US can further arm these Central Asian Muslim tribesmen, just as it had armed and trained Osama against Russia, and then launch them at the throats of both China and Russia at the same time!

After all, Lincoln had armed a bunch of ex slave negroes, and then was terrified that they would engage in guerilla race war throughout the South thereafter. Great job!
 

That sounds a rather fun pastime.

 

Smell out human rights violations in the vicinity...

Say, maybe Xi cut a back door deal with Central Asian Muslims, not Uighurs, to screw Russia! Even after Russia has obviously cut a deal with them to screw the West in the Pacific... What a deal.

Stranger things have happened. How would the Rooskies ever know? Read my blog...

SEE DAVID KAISER'S CURRENT POST AND MY COMMENT

Bravo!

THE MENU MAKING IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE IRKSOME

See this prior post: MAYONNAISE RECIPE , from 2010.

Properly done, one doesn't need or want a power tool.

Here is a special tip: if you use a 16 oz wide mouth glass jar, you can even make a one egg yolk mayonnaise in the same jar you then store it in! Use either a very small whisk, or even a fork (!), to make the mayonnaise. It will be about 8 ozs without other additions. If properly proportioned, egg yolk to acid, it really wants to make itself. I have done this several times this way. It takes only a few minutes. Use a goodly tsp of mustard with the yolk, whisking them together before adding any oil.

Terms search also this blog, for other related posts: mayonnaise 

THE MENU PORK CHICKEN GIZZARD PATE IMPROV

Made this last night; roast flat side down potato, diced onion, and cut carrot, on the side.

 

This is wonderful. You need to prepare the gizzards, braise first with onion, then scrape the meat from the gristle. Roll this into ground pork, with bacon fat, capers, a little caper juice, thyme, rosemary, crushed (not sliced) garlic. You decide the proportion of pork to gizzard.

 

I should have thrown in a bunch of basil leaves, the garden is full of it! Roast the pate and vegetables in a large skillet in a little olive oil and mild Greek pepperoncinis, splash white wine on the bottom to deglaze and flip the potato on its side before the flat bottoms stick, part way through roasting. Add olive oil for juice at the end, if needed. Olive oil is best uncooked at all!

You could do this just with gizzards, but it is work to scrape them. Then you need to grind them after scraping. One could also mix them with other mild ground meat, like veal. If you mix them, then just scraping them is enough; if gizzards alone, then perhaps grind gizzards, otherwise it might be a too lumpy pate.

RE KRUGMAN TRUMP LINCOLN RE WIMPING OUT ON TRADE COLONIZATION

The Kennedy Fallacy all over again....

 

Trump is as little capable of doing anything about trade as Lincoln was of doing anything about colonization.

 

The Civil War itself was an enormous shooting of oneself in the foot, on this issue, for Lincoln.

 

Of course, Krugman now tries to make NAFTA sound like it had been a good deal at the time, different so called favorable tariff rates, etc. What a lot of bullshit.

 

Think about the predatory labor cost discrepancy, the 800 pound gorilla in the room, compared to chicken shit tariff rates differences.

 

The Mexicans had said to Clinton: If you sign it, we'll stop exporting Mexicans! 

 

Guess what, Clinton signed it, and then the Mexicans exported even more Mexicans, and in recent years, anyone from South or Central America going that way!

 

Krugman remains the quintessential economists' Mr Globalization.

 

Brooks' associate... Brooks and Krugman: You got a problem with globalization? More free trade, and even more cheap labor immigration, unlimited really, will solve it!

MY ONLY BUT CONSIDERABLE ACTING EXPERIENCE WAS LIMITED TO THE COURTROOM AND CHAMBERS

I was a government trial lawyer for most of my career.

Terms search: public defender, Rumpole, team play, rum, etc.

 

We had a guy in our office, Richard Kiley, rather like Rumpole, older, a little plump, cigarette smoking, New York New Jersey area accent, irreverent, very smart, very funny, very dry, always getting into trouble with the judge, it seemed.

I called him Kiley Baby, a term of endearment. After Doug Roberts ascended to Division Chief, tantamount to taking silk in the British system, and was limited to capital cases, (and later ascended to the Bench), I became the undisputed chief of felony jury trial Not Guilty Land, for almost 5 years...

It was widely admitted within the office, and also in that of the State Attorney, that there was perhaps not a hopeless case which I might not, somehow, miraculously, win.  After all, there were examples....

The State Attorney Division Chief, running our court, acknowledged that I fashioned defenses at times out of whole cloth (a high compliment, from the head of the other side), a terrifying prospect to confront for a prosecutor...

Later, while doing jury trials for the government on the civil side, I was the only person in my office who predicted that OJ would be found Not Guilty.

All the others in my office were, justifiably, appalled at my outrageous view and opinion...I had especially watched Johnny Cochran... What an incredible orator, for that venue. (The State's investigation had, of course, also, been bungled. But still.)

 

Rumpole never retired, as he liked to claim others had, and he well might, to the Costa Brava... I, by contrast, already lived in a semi tropical resort town, with all the modern amenities, and so have mostly stayed here, all these years....although the lure of a culturally highly cosmopolitan setting, which I have known intermittently, has been almost constant.

RE ACADEMIC-INDUSTRIAL SIMPLETONEX OLD DARLINGS

READING ROBIN ELLIS SITE

My wife has always been a great fan of Marcella Hazan.

 

I confess, I have liked other Italian cook books more.

 

One thing that always irked me was her insistence that one must slice rather than press garlic...

 

Perhaps it is was a Northern Italian predilection of hers...

BANNING BEARDS AND TURBANS

China needs to export them to the Middle East and Africa, so they can be with other Muslims.

Send them into Central Asia? That, after all, is where they came from.

Hire mostly Uighurs to go to Chinese Africa projects. They can take their families with them.....

NEW YORK CITY DRAFT RIOTS

Look it up.

LINCOLN, ALSO JEFFERSON MADISON CLAY, WAS AND REMAINED A COLONIZATIONIST

'In fact colonizationism took precedence over emancipation.'  Gideon Welles on Lincoln, see Magness  Page, p 108, 109.

As I have pointed out here, his whole political career resonated with this colonization theme. 

Emancipation during the Civil War, without having first placed immediate colonization plans on a firm and agreed political footing, especially within his own party, was Lincoln's own special personal blunder, among other really big ones.

My suspicion is that the only way he might have gotten cooperation for such plans in our fragmented system, was to have threatened to halt the war, in its very midst, declare an armistice, treaty agreeing to secession, or something else,  unless an agreed, firmly established, and multi year plan for colonization were first hammered out by Congress and agreed by him.

The other huge point to make (Clausewitz or whatever):

Why even embark on a war which, even if you quote ' win ', you cannot then achieve the outcome (colonization) which you most intended to achieve? See George Julian's remark, Magness and Page, p 109, re if he had known colonization would not work whether his preliminary notice to the rebels would have been given.  

After all, Lincoln had won the war, before he was killed, yet no colonization plan, whatsoever, worthy of the name had ever been firmly put in place and agreed by Congress.

In fact, the opposite was where it stood when he died.

Further, the decision to recruit blacks as Union soldiers violated Lincoln's own principles, and made the whole project for colonization difficult to carry forward. By the end of the war, there were about 100,000 of these, who had been armed.

Lincoln expressed concern that these freed trained and armed ex slaves might then go back into the south and commence a race war there. One wonders why he didn't think of these things before that time.

Nevertheless the Civil War outcome was nothing whatever like what he had hoped for:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,-- that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifyling them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Abraham Lincoln, 4th Debate.

GRANT'S SANTO DOMINGO ANNEXATION PLAN 1871

Intended in part as a home for ex slaves...

BOOP COUNTER OFFER

I've got an offer for you....

If you agree to invite me to the wedding, I agree not to come!

How's that for a special Boop Counter Offer?

1865

The Republican Party in Congress had moved beyond its Whiggish origins, now augmented by Radicals.

 

Legislators who had once viewed colonization as a way to keep the slave population from moving north after emancipation, now found a party use for a southern black voting bloc.

 

This was generally neither what they, nor Lincoln, had been elected to do.

 

It was certainly not what Lincoln had run on, and been elected President by white voters in the Northern states, to do:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,-- that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifyling them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Abraham Lincoln, 4th Debate.

 

 

 

 

But that is American politics for ya.

SOMEONE SAW THIS OLD POST BIG PICTURE

E H CARR WHAT IS HISTORY LINEAR VERSUS CYCLICAL PASSAGE