Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
Marshal McLuhan, “Laws of Media”
Changes
Posted by M. C. on February 26, 2023
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Identity, Marshal McLuhan | Leave a Comment »
Mike
Posted by M. C. on February 26, 2023
The season is starting soon.
Note the tape on the boot
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Mike Hailwood | Leave a Comment »
What Westerners Don’t Know About Yoko Ono – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2023
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/mike-in-tokyo-rogers/what-westerners-dont-know-about-yoko-ono/
Yoko was born in 1933 in Japan. She was an only child born into an extremely wealthy Aristocratic family. Yoko was born into the class of women who may have married the emperor of Japan. In fact, she was enrolled in such an elitist school, that she was a classmate of Prince Akihito, the future emperor of Japan.
Her father was the first Japanese to open a Japanese bank in the USA during the Economic Miracle of Japan. Yoko’s parents chastised her often for befriending people that they felt were beneath her.
Yoko’s family were one of the richest families in Japan. And as an only child, it stands to reason that Yoko was the heir to the family wealth. So to think that Yoko “broke up the Beatles” or “wanted to marry John Lennon for money” is just simply laughable.
John Lennon was just a musician (considered a low class job in Japan) and did not even graduate from college and dropped out. I would imagine that any Japanese family, including Yoko Ono’s family, would be completely against their only child marrying a musician or someone like Lennon.
The marriage to Lennon happened after Yoko Ono and one of Japan’s most famous Classical Pianist’s, Toshi Ichiyanagi, marriage had failed by 1962.
What is the book, “Grapefruit?”
“Grapefruit is one of the monuments of conceptual art of the early 1960s. She has a lyrical, poetic dimension that sets her apart from the other conceptual artists. Her approach to art was only made acceptable when [people] like Kosuth and Weiner came in and did virtually the same thing as Yoko, but made them respectable and collectible.” — David Bourdon
Grapefruit is an artist’s book written by Yoko Ono, originally published in 1964. Two years before Yoko met John Lennon.
Yoko Ono has often been associated with the art group known as “the Fluxus group.” The Fluxus group was a loose association of Dada-inspired avant-garde artists which was founded in the early 1960s by Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas. Maciunas admired and enthusiastically promoted Yoko’s work, and gave Yoko Ono her first solo exhibition at his AG Gallery in New York in 1961.
Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus is known for experimental contributions to different artistic media and disciplines and for generating new art forms. Fluxus also was called, “Anti-art” and many artists destroyed their art by fire as part of the exhibition of said art.
What is the movie “Grapefruit”?
Grapefruit the book, has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of “event scores” that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an individual may, or may not, wish to enact. Including the destruction of the art.
“Grapefruit” the movie is an attempt to encapsulate the entirety of the book in a sixteen minute film. It is a very difficult subject to whittle down. The movie by words and images, seeks to capture the essence on Yoko Ono’s life in 1964 and present it in a way that allows the veiwer to decide if this is “art or not,” and “is this good or not.”
Like the book, the film isn’t for everybody. Those who enjoy comic book movies or space war movies will most probably not like the film. People who are against war, against commercialism, and pro-freedom for everyone to live their lives as they choose, will most probably love this film.
The film strives to present Yoko Ono as she is and allows to viewer to draw their own conclusions.
There are no Beatles and nothing about the Beatles in this film. This is a expose about an artist who had principles and beliefs.
What the viewer takes away after watching this film is 100% completely up to them.
As with most Fluxus art, this film will be destroyed after screening.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Fluxus group, Grapefruit, Yoko Ono | Leave a Comment »
Who Are Those Guys? – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2023
Cloward-Piven Strategy – The Devil’s handiwork
Don’t presume the C-P strategy can’t – or doesn’t – work both ways. What if the internals of the bureaucratic Deep Swamp work in harmony with the overwhelming external pressures by slow-walking the very administrative solutions to the problem?
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2023/02/brian-wilson/who-are-those-guys/
By Brian Wilson
Remember that famous recurring line from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”?
Worse than the Pinkerton agents to Butch and Sundance, Cloward and Piven are to the stability and future of America.
If the Cloward-Piven Strategy is new to you, Fred Elbel’s “Cloward–Piven strategy – fundamentally transforming America” does an outstanding job breaking it down into bite-size pieces.
Basically:
“…developed in 1966 by Americans Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven – both sociologists and political activists…[t]he strategy focused on overloading the United States public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis, which would ultimately lead to replacing the welfare system with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”.
It worked pretty well. So well, in fact, the outline has been applied in many instances to bring about the disruption of public programs, policies and systems:
2014 Border crisis – Unaccompanied Alien Children
2015 Syrian refugees – importing terrorism
Time marches on and the Cloward–Piven strategy “remains an active instrument of change in America. Ultimately, it is the tool by which multicultural elites aim to “fundamentally transform America.” – Fred Elbel
To fully appreciate the genius of the strategy, just look around at the other pressure points of American society being clogged and hamstrung by the non-stop avalanche of C-P red tape.
The southern – and now northern – borders are beyond overwhelmed. Border Patrol agents are taken away from the flood of illegals and reassigned to paper pushing, babysitting and chauffeuring gigs. And the flood continues unabated even a little bit.
As the immigrant invasion continues – over 5 million by current estimates – local support structures and systems are overwhelmed: schools, housing, law enforcement, retail outlets are unable to cope at all, much less efficiently. The damage is not reserved to the systems. Visit a local hospital ER. And not just in towns in Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and California. Identical issues around the country are similarly effected as ‘get-aways’ and exported immigrants make their way to Chicago, New York, Miami, LA, San Francisco. All those cities already had overcrowding problems left over from the Covid 19 “epidemic”. Crime stats are skyrocketing, primarily in democratically governed cities and Blue states.
Food shortages are ubiquitous. Baby formula to Brussels sprouts to ground meat to eggs continue to run in short supply as prices rise. Suspicious fires, bombings and ‘accidents’ at food processing plants are blamed without explanation along with droughts, avian flu and the dreaded (supposed) C19 super-duper ‘sub variants’ . Government regulations reducing the application of certain fertilizers on farms in Holland, Spain, France are proliferating, forcing crop, flock and herd reductions. Results: farms closing creating more food shortages, unemployment and increasing welfare rolls.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Cloward-Piven Strategy | Leave a Comment »
Putin’s “Civilizational” Speech Frames Conflict Between East and West
Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2023
Bets can be made that Patrushev explained in detail to Wang Yi how that is just wishful thinking. The “logic “of the current collective western “leadership” has been expressed, among others, by irredeemable mediocrity Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general: even nuclear war is preferable to a Russian victory in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much awaited address to the Russian Federal Assembly on Tuesday should be interpreted as a tour de force of sovereignty.
The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.
Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.
Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.
Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.
That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”
A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”
Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.
Kremlin exasperation: START is finished
All that brings us to the games played by the Empire of Lies. Says Putin: “The promises…of western rulers turned into forgery and cruel lies. The west supplied weapons, trained nationalist battalions. Even before the start of the SMO, there were negotiations…on the supply of air defense systems… We remember Kyiv’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.”
Putin made it clear, once again, that the element of trust between Russia and the west, especially the US, is gone. So it’s a natural decision for Russia to “withdraw from the treaty on strategic offensive weapons, but we don’t do it officially. For now we are only halting our participation to the START treaty. No US inspections in our nuclear sites can be allowed.”
As an aside, of the three main US-Russian weapons treaties, Washington abandoned two of these: The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was dumped by the administration of former president George W. Bush in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was nixed by former president Donald Trump in 2019.
This shows the Kremlin’s degree of exasperation. Putin is even prepared to order the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom to get ready to test Russian nuclear weapons if the US goes first along the same road.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Civilizational Speech, Empire of Lies, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO, Nuclear war, Putin, START inspections | Leave a Comment »
Dailywire Article-Scientists Discover Unprecedented ‘Runaway’ Black Hole
Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2023
Cool!
https://www.dailywire.com/news/scientists-discover-unprecedented-runaway-black-hole
Astronomers have sighted a supermassive black hole traveling through space that appears to have been ejected from its host galaxy.
Researchers observing the dwarf galaxy designated RCP 28, roughly 7.5 billion light years away from our solar system, noticed an aberrant streak of light via the Hubble telescope. The “streak” appears to be a collection of stars being dragged out of their home galaxy by the immense gravitational force of a black hole.
The “runaway” black hole is the first of its kind to be observed, and appears to have been ejected from its original galaxy.
“We found a thin line in a Hubble image that is pointing to the center of a galaxy,” Professor Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University, the lead author of the study, said. “From a detailed analysis of the feature, we inferred that we are seeing a very massive black hole that was ejected from the galaxy, leaving a trail of gas and newly formed stars in its wake.”
The “stellar tail” in its wake is 200,000 light-years long, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy.
The black hole in question is believed to be 20 million times more massive than the Sun, and it is traveling away from RCP 28 at a rate of 3.5 million miles per hour, roughly 4,500 times the speed of sound.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: black hole, dwarf galaxy, RCP 28 | Leave a Comment »
Lifting the Debt Ceiling Is Not a Social Policy | Mises Wire
Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2023
Printing and raising taxes are not social policies. It is profoundly anti-social, as it destroys the middle class and makes the economy weaker. Raising the debt ceiling is also extremely negative for the middle class because it means more taxes, lower purchasing power of the currency, and stagnation in the future.
https://mises.org/wire/lifting-debt-ceiling-not-social-policy
Every time the United States reaches its debt limit, we read that it is important to reach an agreement to lift it. The narrative is that the debt ceiling must be raised, or the US economy will suffer a severe contraction. There is even an episode of a TV series, “Designated Survivor”, where the character played by Kiefer Sutherland places lifting the debt ceiling as the priority to get the U.S. economy on track. The debt ceiling is viewed as an evil and anachronistic burden on growth. It is not.
Analysts all over the world consider the debt ceiling a non-event because Congress always agrees to increase it. As such, markets do not even care. Congress has raised the debt ceiling on time on over eighty occasions since 1960, according to S&P Global. The rating agency points out that Congress has passed legislation to raise or suspend the debt ceiling seven times in the last twelve years (in 2011, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019, and twice in 2021).
The U.S. Treasury has announced it will start implementing “extraordinary measures” to fulfill its legal obligations. These extraordinary measures would give the government the possibility of extending the deadline until early June. Analysts and commentators say that Congress faces two options: either raise the debt ceiling or suspend it. Really? No one seems to think of the urgent need to cut spending.
The problem of the United States’ debt is not one of receipts. It is created by the constant increase in mandatory spending. Governments continue to raise taxes, and when the economy grows, they spend more. However, when the economy stalls or declines, they spend even more. In fiscal year 2022, the government spent $6.27 trillion. In 2015, it was $4.7 trillion. There is no revenue measure that would cover an increase of such magnitude and maintain it every year. Blaming the deficit on tax cuts makes no mathematical sense and assumes a confiscatory and extractive view of the economy, where the private sector must always provide rising revenues to a government that always spends more.
It is interesting to see how the debate has shifted to tax cuts, which did not reduce receipts, instead of spending that never generates the announced fiscal multiplier or reduces the deficit.
Those who say that the deficit would have been solved by eliminating the last tax cuts have a problem with mathematics. There is no way that any form of revenue measure could have covered a $1.6 trillion spending increase. Even if you believe in the idea that the government will always collect higher receipts from massive tax increases, which is false, only one year of mild recession would balloon the deficit and debt again.
The solution to the United States budget deficit is not more taxes. Even in the most optimistic receipt scenario, there is no tax hike program that would even start to address the structural deficit, estimated at one trillion dollars a year. Expenses are annual and consolidated, but receipts are cyclical and depend on the health of the economy. Therefore, revenue measures never reduce debt.
When governments say they will only tax the rich, they are treating citizens as if they were children. There is simply no way in which the government would collect every year between half a trillion to a trillion more only from a handful of rich people whose wealth is mostly in shares.
Deficits are always a spending problem. However, none of the parties want to address the ballooning levels of US debt by reducing expenditure. Therefore, they always agree on increasing public debt, which makes the economy weaker.
The solution for many is printing money and raising taxes. More taxes hurt the recovery, damage the job improvement potential, and reduce investment in the economy. More taxes mean less growth and no deficit improvement. More taxes and more printing mean that, added to those negatives, real wages decline, deposit savings evaporate, and the inflationary tax destroys the middle class.
Those that say deficits are reserves that the government creates for the private sector and that deficit spending is good for growth because a monetary sovereign country like the United States can spend and borrow as it pleases are simply lying. If deficit spending were a source of reserves that benefited the private sector, the United States’ productivity, growth, investment, and consumption in real terms would be off the charts, not sluggish, and real wages would be rising, not falling. The United Kingdom and Japan have proven that pushing the limit on debt, taxes, and spending only brings stagnation and declining real wages.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: budget deficit, debt ceiling, real wages, Stagnation, Taxes | Leave a Comment »
When Biden Says ‘As Long As It Takes,’ What Does Ukraine Hear? | The Libertarian Institute
Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2023
“What is Zelensky to hear when NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says that NATO’s “defence industries [are] under strain” because, “The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions, and depleting Allied stockpiles. The current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production?””
I hear-Doesn’t look good for war with Russia or China…or both.
by Ted Snider
April 14, 2022, Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during an interview with BBC reporter Clive Myrie for BBC Television from the situation room, April 14, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Credit Image: © Ukraine Presidency/Ukraine Presi/Planet Pix via ZUMA Press Wire)
In his State of the Union Addresson February 7, President Joe Biden once again told Ukraine that “America…will stand with you as long as it takes.”
In case the world didn’t hear, Biden moved to a more dramatic stage and repeated the words. Speaking from Kiev, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Biden spoke again of America’s “unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.” He promised that “that support will endure.”
But though Biden spoke the words loudly on an international stage, that may not be what Zelensky heard.
What is Zelensky to hear when Germany loudly promises tanks made by a manufacturer who says the Leopard 2 tanks can’t be delivered until 2024 at the earliest?
Zelensky has been urgently requesting fighter jets: “We have freedom, give us wings to protect it.” But what does Zelensky hear when French President Emmanuel Macron says that the “allies must prioritize equipment that will be the most useful, and fastest, for Ukraine to achieve its end goal” and that “[t]here is no way that fighter planes can be delivered in the next few weeks?”
What does Zelensky hear when one of his strongest backers, Poland’s President Andrzej Duda, says that a “decision today to donate any kind of jets, any F-16…is a very serious decision and it’s not an easy one for us to take?” Duda explained that “this poses serious problems if we donate even a small part of them anywhere, because I don’t hesitate to say we have not enough of these jets” and that sending fighter jets “requires a decision by the Allies anyway, which means that we have to make a joint decision.” That joint decision is vetoed for now by Biden who says the U.S. will not send fighter jets and by Germany who says, “The question of combat aircraft does not arise at all.”
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: As Long As It Takes, Ukraine | Leave a Comment »
Being There
Posted by M. C. on February 24, 2023
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Being There | Leave a Comment »
Clarkson’s Farm: Another Front in the War on Food – Gold Goats ‘n Guns
Posted by M. C. on February 24, 2023
He used his considerable celebrity as a clarion call to just how fragile our food production industry is while those with zero skin in the game sit around and make demands on it.
https://tomluongo.me/2023/02/20/clarksons-farm-another-front-in-the-war-on-food/
Author: Tom Luongo
While I’ve been a big fan of Jeremy Clarkson over the years, I’ve never been proud of him before. Hero worship and celebrity go hand in hand and it’s a dangerous game to ascribe motives beyond self-interest to any celebrity.
But in Clarkson’s case he may have just done something worthy of that.
Clarkson is now on the other side of another cancellation campaign against him for a dig at Queen Narcissist herself, Meghan Markle, in one of his recent columns. And, normally, I would just pass the whole thing off as another of Clarkson’s attempts at controversy because if anyone lives by the adage that controversy is good for ratings it’s Jeremy Clarkson.
The guy is a six-foot-four-inch Streisand Effect with bad teeth.
But in this dustup with Queen Meghan, Clarkson did something completely out of the ordinary for him.
He apologized.
Twice.
James Delingpole and I roasted Clarkson for apologizing on a recent podcast we did. And it speaks directly to not having heroes in this world of near infinite political leverage. But, having just watched season two of his latest show, Clarkson’s Farm. I think I know why he apologized.
One of the great things about Top Gear was the refreshingly unapologetic nature of the hosts, Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. They all said things we weren’t supposed to say in public. And we loved them for it.
There’s an entire cottage industry of Top Gear making fun of ethnic group X on You Tube that I didn’t know about until recently. Oh, those memories. But as I think about it now I wonder why I’d never seen these before?
Google algorithm, would you care to contact me and explain why after years of watching car videos I was never offered one of these until the campaign to rid the world of Clarkson kicked into overdrive?
I’m sure ChatGPT’s Dan persona will tell me, it’s just coincidence, Tom.
Clarkson is no stranger to controversy, it’s part of how they built Top Gear into the biggest show IN THE WORLD. We know the story of how the the Holy Trinity of Cars moved from the BBC to Amazon. Clarkson punched a producer and he was fired.
They were also getting stale, visibly older after chafing under the BBC’s rules and, rightfully, wanted to cash in on a big, fat golden parachute of a contract. So, did Clarkson ‘engineer’ their exit from the BBC? It’s a fair question which I don’t give a damn about.
Enter Amazon and The Grand Tour was born.
But the same imperatives that ended their run on Top Gear also ended their run on The Grand Tour — the pace, the toll and the one thing no controversy can outrun, time.
So, an aging Clarkson sold the perfect fish out of water story to Amazon: Jeremy Clarkson, the ape who can’t use a screwdriver, was going to run a farm in the midlands.
Hilarity ensues….end scene.
While I liked season one of the show, it had that same lack of spontaneity that plagued both later seasons of Top Gear and The Grand Tour. What it didn’t lack, however, was the craft Clarkson had honed as a storyteller over the past three decades.
Because Clarkson used this platform to educate millions of people of how how fucking hard it is to scrape out a living as a farmer. And after a year of toil and his massive investment of time and outside capital from his “other job” Clarkson ended season one with a princely profit of £144.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Clarkson's Farm, War on Food | Leave a Comment »
