Of possible interest ...

This website: https://www.astralcodexten.com/about   is interesting in and of itself, but

I noticed they're having a meetup of people who read it, in Austin. Which I thought you

might like to go along to.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/meetups-everywhere-2025-times-and

Probably won't be elected

is not enough to calm the nerves...

Making Sense of the Conflagration

Making Sense of the Conflagration I tried, as events unfolded tonight, to piece together in the two posts below just what happened tonight and how...

My thoughts exactly

https://medium.com/@kimballmortensen/10-reasons-why-conservatives-should-start-supporting-bernie-sanders-immediately-7eb700302a2a#.rsfdls2su

doug

um, hi?

I think I lost you somehow.  Are you there and/or OK?  I don't respond or chime in to group discussions much, but I miss your voice.  

I had a lovely long talk with Maureen today and asked after you.  She said you're just fine and still out there, so I think it's my bad.  Or maybe not bad, but just who or how I am. Maybe (ugh) I'm more of a consumer than a producer, at least at the internet level.

Anyhow, WTF is wrong with the world these days?!*%?  I surely cannot figure it out, much as I've travelled and hard as I try.  Please put me back on your list!

All best to you & whomever you love, mb

Hillary Clinton

In a speech last night before the Optimist Clubs of America, Hillary Clinton called upon the working class to rise up and seize the means of production...

Guest on Digby's Blog lets us know about the happenings in Brazil and Venezuela...

Well, somebody's taking to the streets

by Tom Sullivan

As we wonder when people will take to the streets in America over growing inequality, they're taking to the streets in Brazil over government efforts at lessening inequality. Aljazeera reports that the center-left Workers' Party (PT) under President Dilma Rousseff saw hundreds of thousands demonstrating on March 15. She faces "the most conservative National Congress since 1964 as well as a decelerating economy, hostile media and a corruption scandal that implicates her party." It doesn't help that her trade unionist and social movement activist base have been alienated by "pro-market political appointments." (Nope. No foreshadowing there.)

The people in the streets, "whiter and wealthier than the typical Brazilian," are part of a growing conservative backlash among the elite and middle class:

Since Rousseff's re-election campaign in 2014, political discourse in Brazil has become more polarized than ever. Legislators elected from historically progressive states openly defended policies such as torture and the extermination of indigenous peoples. Congress now includes a sizable "bullet caucus," which supports militaristic responses to crime, as well as a substantial Christian fundamentalist caucus opposed to gay rights and a very large rural caucus that opposes land reform and indigenous rights. Meanwhile, the PT and parties to its left lost seats, and nearly 30 percent of voters cast blank ballots or abstained — a historic high.

Rousseff's administration has fallen short of expectations on certain scores, including land redistribution and the reform of the political system. But most progressive commentators agree that the PT represents a significant break from the free-market orthodoxy that previously prevailed in Brazil. There are a number of impressive social achievements based on the unapologetic redistribution of resources and opportunity. Extreme poverty has been reduced by 75 percent since the PT came to power, and overall poverty gone down 65 percent, largely by means of direct cash transfers now received by 44 million Brazilians, or nearly 1 in 4. The inflation-adjusted minimum wage has doubled in the last 12 years, and domestic workers have won expanded rights, including paid vacation.

On its own, clearly not a situation the right people can allow to stand. But it's the affirmative action program in the country's public universities that has the elite really riled. Tuition is free, Aljazeera reports, but now future politicians, government ministers, and judges, etc. find themselves having to share those elite educational institutions with working class and lower middle class students and, yes indeed, issues of racial inequality are adding to the political friction. Furthermore, Rousseff's party "has failed to present the redistributive project as one that benefits the entire nation and not just the dispossessed."

The Guardian describes how the Latin American left is seeing pushback elsewhere. The global financial crisis has caught up with the reforms in Venezuela as well, and Argentina's fight with "vulture funds" such as Paul Singer's Elliott Management has dried up its credit:

Many see a conspiracy at work. "The Latin American left is coming up against an enemy that it has never prepared itself for," said Federico Neiburg, an economic anthropologist at the Museu Nacional. "It's an alliance between shifting geopolitical interests, economic and financial elites trying to impose politics that are beneficial to them, and political action on behalf of the media ...

Paging Naomi Klein.

Re: First World Appetitions

Oh, the pain of longing to skip steps!  At the bottom line, we'll all give it up to Maslow's Hierarchy.  According to him, we must meet our human needs in this particular order, with no skipping ahead:  

• food, water, shelter, and I think maybe sex is up there too,
• safety, for yourself and those who feel like future-you,
• relationship, intimate or one step further off, e.g. friends & extended family,
• some kind of sense of self, worthiness, self-confidence + self-respect,
• awareness/sense of the Greater Good, the Big Picture, ability/availability to solve Big Problems.

I guess I would call the first couple of Maslow stages the "meat computer" (excellent phrase!)  I don't think it's in anybody's power to skip them, even if we long to.  How to get beyond that is a whole nother (political) question, of course.  I just think we have to start on the ground.  So yes, "if everyone had adequate food, clothing, shelter & easy access to any desired health and education resources,...,"  who knows what might be possible? 

mb 

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 5:58 PM, Doug <doug1943@gmail.com> wrote:

Not to sound like an old Soviet propaganda film, but the possibilities in front of humanity are unlimited. I think we've got two or three generations of serious unpleasantness to go through, and I worry about the moral disintegration of the US, whose strength has been critical in allowing democracy to flourish, but in the long term, I don't think progress can be stopped. The big task for our generation right now is avoiding a big war, which can be done -- at least an essential component of doing this is -- heeding the slogan 'World Peace through Western Firepower Superiority". But once we've cracked the Fusion Power problem, and have begun to understand how the 'meat computer' inside our skulls works, and have learned how to control the human genome (in future generations) ... it will be a really different world, and a far far better one. What economic arrangements our descendants will make for getting stuff made is anyone's guess -- I doubt that it will look like either capitalism or socialism.

Electric trains, yes -- see 'vacuum trains' on WIki: maglevs in  near-vacuum tunnels running at 2 or 3 thousand miles an hour... the engineering project of the century.

doug

On 5 January 2015 at 21:49, Roy Griffin <rgroygg@gmail.com> wrote:

Sitting around watching *How It's Made* on the TV & witnessing the wonders of robotic manufacture, it occurs to me that at the level of First World consumer items it should be the case that an hybrid electric automobile could be manufactured that would only cost a few hundred dollars and that could likely last decades...I guess one could argue that there might be even more advanced and superior vehicles that need to be made room for...but why?  A 100 years ago it took about half an hour for non-farm workers to get to their jobs.  Today, it takes about the same amount of time.    But maybe that's all the wrong speculation.   How about minimally polluting rail or air travel?  Still should be real cheap. 

And Singapore, a tiny crowded city-state is using the ash from its incinerated trash to expand the size of its territory by building an artificial island offshore that is beautifully landscaped with trees and plants.  Likely it will become an upscale housing development, but it seems like a good idea.   The trash that gets incinerated represents the 54% or so of Singapore's garbage that is NOT otherwise recycled. 

New York City incinerates its non-recyclable trash also, using much the same kind of equipment although I don't know what the City does with its ash. 

Jumping many, many steps ahead in an argument that will never be settled in my lifetime, it seems to me that if everyone had adequate food, clothing, shelter & easy access to any desired health and education resources, humanity could well afford the risk of any "moral hazard" resulting from same.   For none of those things do more than provide a platform for *possible* happiness and none guarantee it. 

R.