The Evangelical Liberal | Reclaiming and re-imagining …

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Well, I meant to post this at Christmas, but Christmas got in the way.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. (Luke 2:13-14 KJV)

Its such a familiar passage, and such a beloved one the first Christmas angels wonderful, universal message of Gods peace for all people. For many its a timeless source of hope and comfort in a troubled world.

But Im always here to complicate the simple and cast doubt on the blatantly obvious

I really love this passage, but it raises some difficult questions for me. Where is this long-promised peace? Is it really for everyone? And does the peace Jesus brings look anything like the kind we expect and want?

So my initial and somewhat cynical reaction to the angels message is Peace on earth? Fat chance. Looking around at the world, the ancient promise of peace can seem pretty hollow at best an idealistic pipe-dream that can never become reality.

Right now I see the unending tragic bloodbath of Syrias civil war, in turn helping fuel an ever-worsening refugee crisis as well as terrible terrorist atrocities, in turn encouraging the rise of right-wing extremist parties in Europe. I see a divided UK post-Brexit, a divided US post-election, an unravelling Europe, a terrifyingly unstable Middle East, and a frighteningly autocratic and aggressive Russia.

And looking inward at my own heart and life I often see precious little peace there either. I see a legion of anxieties, fears, stresses, guilt and countless other things that make for un-peace.

So, over two thousand years since the Christmas angels first brought their words of hope, why are we still not seeing the peace they promised?

Of course, the promise could just be a lie, or perhaps a mistake but I dont really believe that.

It could be merely a salutation or greeting the heavenly equivalent of Hello or Happy Christmas! Thats more plausible, but I still dont quite buy it.

Perhaps were simply still waiting for the promised peace to come.

Or perhaps and I think this is most likely weve simply misunderstood the peace the angels are promising and how to enter into it. Perhaps Gods peace has already come to us, but its not how we imagined so we miss it.

In the King James translation its on earth peace, goodwill toward men unequivocal, universal and inclusive. But have a look at the New International Version (henceforth the Not Inclusive Version):

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace to all on whom his favour rests.

Looking at this youd hardly know it was the same verse of Scripture in the NIV it has become a limited and exclusive peace only for those whom God specially favours. How do we make any sense of this?

Im not a Greek scholar, but looking at other versions you get the impression the translators are struggling to make sense of an unclear clause which can be read in various ways. Some have a half-way version: Peace to all men of goodwill (or men of favour).

So its either Gods peace and goodwill (favour) to all men, or its Gods peace to all men of goodwill (favour). And if its the latter, it could either be peace to the people whom he favours, or to those who embody goodwill.

This highlights to me one of the problems of relying on the Bible as our sole source of truth, because in some key places like this its meaning is unclear and ambiguous.

So which version is true? I think this is where you have to decide what kind of God you believe in. Is he a God who only cares for a limited few, perhaps only those who believe in him or follow his ways? Or is he a God whose mercy and grace are unbounded and for all?

For me it has to be the latter. It must be peace and goodwill for all, not merely a few. Perhaps not all will want it or accept it, but it is freely offered and available to all, always.

Ive said that maybe we dont see the angels promised peace because it isnt the kind we expect.

Perhaps the peace Jesus brings is not an overwhelming peace that forces itself on our notice, a peace that everyone can see and that we cannot help but receive. Perhaps it is rather a quiet, hidden, even shy peace which we have to discover and nurture for ourselves, and within ourselves.

A little paradoxically, I also believe that Gods peace shalom is an active, living thing, the vibrant presence of his life and love and hope. Gods peace is not merely a passive or empty thing, an absence of conflict and strife.

Indeed, Gods peace is most present and active in the midst of our troubles. It does not take away the turbulence and turmoil of life on this earth but transforms and redeems it from within. In this world you will have trouble, says Jesus (none too comfortingly), But take heart I have overcome the world.

I also suspect that Gods peace may be something we have to welcome actively it doesnt always occur in us automatically.

But this can be hard. The path to healing and so to true peace often requires us first to open ourselves up to pain, perhaps the pain of acknowledging things about ourselves and our lives that wed do almost anything to avoid facing. So we too often lock ourselves away in refuges which become prisons. God calls to us to come out, anduntil we do we are not truly at peace.

The other thing is that Jesus peace is not always obviously desirable. It can be deeply troublesome to any who have a vested interest in the current world order, the status quo. Perhaps this is how Jesus, the promised Prince of Peace, can proclaim I have not come to bring peace but a sword. His peace is paradoxical, sometimes problematic and even divisive.

Gods peace is available to all, but not all wantit. I believe God is seeking people of peace, or people of goodwill; people who truly desire the kind of life and world that God offers and are prepared to work with him to bring it about. God excludes no-one, but perhaps we may exclude ourselves if we wish.

So in response to the angels message, I acknowledge that all too often Im not a person of peace, and that too often I do shut myself out of the peace God wants to bring to the world. I pray that I thatwe all will be able truly to welcome Gods active, living, surprising peace within our hearts, our homes, our work, our worries, our weaknesses and problems, the whole messy reality of our lives.

And I wish you all a truly peaceful and happy New Year.

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The Evangelical Liberal | Reclaiming and re-imagining ...

The Philippines: Underdeveloped, but not Overpopulated …

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UPDATE: It has come to my attention that, almost a year and a half after its publication, this essay sill remains the most popular entry on Out of Purgatory, and, as such,its link is still being widely circulated. If any readers are interested in a printer-friendly, PDF version, it is available upon request. Please email me at tasio@mail2philippines.com.

September 1, 2012

The Philippines:Underdeveloped, but NotOverpopulated

March 18, 20111

CONTENTS:

Part I, The Philippines Reproductive Health Bill: Rooted in Pseudo-Economics and Neo-Colonialism

The Problems with the Bill

Overpopulated?

The World Bank Report is Wrong

Population and Economics

Save the Nation!

When the U.S. Opposed Imperialism

A More Just Global Financial System

Part II, Environmentalism as Neo-Eugenics

The Infamous NSSM 200

What is a Natural Resource?

The Climate Change Hoax

The WWF: Enemies of Progress

Epilogue: Reproductive Health Revisted

Notes

__________

Introduction

A great deal of controversy has been made of the proposed reproductive health legislation that is currently being debated in the Philippine Congress. The general argument is usually portrayed as such: those representing the Catholic Church are fighting against the bill because of their opposition to artificial contraception; they are concerned that a government initiative to promote the usage of such devices will lead to an acceptance of a sexually immoral culture. Conversely, those individuals and groups supporting such legislation claim that it will alleviate problems such as the increase in illegal abortions, and the rapid growth in the numbers of poor Filipinos. This unbridled population boom, they allege, mainly stems from the fact that these unfortunate and uneducated people are simply having too much unprotected sex. The pro-RH camp sees the Churchs stance as not only archaic, but also overreaching into the state affairs of the only major nation in an overpopulated East Asia where she has considerable social and political influence.

This political cartoon depicts well the heated debate over the RH Bill.

This political cartoon depicts the heated debate over the RH Bill.

I have no intention at this time to entertain a theological debate about the immorality of artificial contraception, to investigate the charges that some types can be used as abortifacients, or to discourse on whether or not the Church is justified in her attempts to influence government policy regarding this issue. Those legitimate concerns about the providing of adequate health care for women or aiding them in dealing with unintended pregnancies, about fighting infant mortality and caring for abandoned babies and homeless children, about the eradication of sexually transmitted diseases, and about all other societal ills related to sex and pregnancyall of these should be seriously addressed and dealt with by state, church, and citizenry. But the firm stance I do wish to take in regards to the RH Bill and related matters is that the Filipino people should not tolerate, under any circumstances, any sort of government policy for population reduction.

I. The Philippines Reproductive Health Bill: Rooted in Pseudo-Economics and Neo-Colonialism

The Problems with the Bill

Take note of the two following excerpts:

The State shall promote programs thatenable couples, [et.al.] to have the numberof children they desire with due consideration to the health of women and resources available[and] analyze demographic trends towards sustainable human development

[T]he mitigation of the population growth rate is incidental to the promotion of reproductive health and sustainable human development

The limited resources of the country cannot be suffered to be spread so thinly to service a burgeoning multitude that makes the allocations grossly inadequate and effectively meaningless

[E]ducation shall be integrated in all relevant subjects and shall includepopulation and development [and] family planning methods

The State shallencourage [parents, et.al.] to have two children as the ideal family size

[State agencies] shall initiate and sustain a heightened nationwide multimedia campaign to raise the level of public awareness of the protection and promotion of reproductive health and rights including family planning and population and development,[and f]acilitate reproductive health care service delivery andthe production, distribution and delivery of quality reproductive health and family planning supplies and commodities to make them accessible and affordable to ordinary citizens.

The Population Commissionshall[c]onduct sustained and effective information drives on sustainable human development and on all methods of family planning to prevent unintended, unplanned and mistimed pregnancies.

______________________________

[B]y means of the press,[electronic media], cinema, handbills, short brochures, educational statements, and the like, the population must be convinced over and over again how harmful it is to have a lot of children. The costs ought to be cited, and then what could have been bought instead. The great dangers to womens health that can arise in childbearing could be spelled out, and so forth [A]dvocacy and dissemination of contraceptives[should not] be illegal It is obvious that by systematic application of the above measures, considerable success can be achieved

When we have converted the mass ofpeople to belief in the one- or two-child system, we shall have arrived at the goal we stipulated.

The authors of those excerpts take a somewhat similar approach in addressing what they obviously recognize as a population problem. Both recognize that mass media and educational forums are indispensable tools for making the public realize that population growth is a problem. Both look at the solutions to that population problem in utilitarian economic terms. Both agree that two children per couple is the most preferable family size. And both advocate that contraceptives should be made as widely available as possible. The first quote is a composite of various passages from the consolidated version of the The Responsible Parenthood, Reproductive Health and Population and Development Act of 2011.2 I will reveal the source of the second quote later, by which the reasons for its inclusion will be made more clear.

Some voices of opposition to the bill have indeed already cited the fact that population control seems to be its driving intention. And conversely, supporters have cited that the bill does clearly state that [a]ttaining the ideal family size [of two children] is neither mandatory nor compulsory. Furthermore, a Senate version, SB 2378, states in its explanatory note that the bill does not dictate any form of population control.

However, such reassurances seem to be classic cases where the legislators and those working with them do protest too much, since the inclusion of such language only rules out overt methods of population control. At this point in time, the legalization of abortion or compulsory sterilization would be politically impossible in a principled republic like the Philippines.3 Thus, a subtler and more appealing approach to the issue is of course needed. And, lo and behold, here we have a bill being promoted as pro-poor and pro-womens rights.

Although the issue of population control has already been raised by others, what I find necessary in making a case against the bill, but lacking amongst those who oppose it, however, is a more thorough analysis of the proper relationship between population and economics. To launch an effective attack on the forces pushing for population control, we must strike at the underlying assumptions that are upheld in the legislation.

Overpopulated?

Whenever the rapid population growth of not only the Philippines, but the rest of the underdeveloped world in general, is addressed in most public forums, there tend to be not only many misconceptions, but even views rooted in outright, malicious fabrications about the interrelated subjects of population growth, economics, and human civilizations impact on the so-called natural environment. Worse still, there is the appearance of a consensus among those who exert the greatest influence on public opinionpoliticians, academics, and a purportedly truth-seeking pressthat human population growth is the dominant threat to our economic and ecological stability. It is also apparent that the advocates for a population control policy, along with those who campaign for environmental issues like curbing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting sustainable development, are fond of insisting that such policy changes are looking out for the best interests of the worlds poorsince they will be the ones to suffer the most from these alleged social and environmental crises. These axioms are indeed embedded in the RH legislation, which implies that sustainable human development is contingent on reducing population growth and essential to protect[ing] the life opportunities of future generations and the natural ecosystem on which all life depends because resources are limited and cannot support a burgeoning multitude.

The thinking behind RH Bill lazily assumes that poor Filipinos are victims of overpopulation, rather than severe failures in economic policy.

Perhaps to most readers, such assertions do not sound as if they are rooted in an explicitly sinister and fascist intent. Thus, we will have to examine the origins of these concepts, and the motive for pushing them on the people of the Philippines.

The World Bank Report is Wrong

Let us begin with investigating an argument for aggressive population control by citing the evidence from the World Banks recent report, The Philippines: Fostering More Inclusive Growth, which was summarized in a recent series of newspaper editorials.4 Citations from this report claim that population growth contributes to a vicious cycle of impoverishment by creating a surplus in the younger strata of working-age Filipinos. Thus, since there are not enough employment opportunities for that age group in the Philippines, that younger generation becomes a burden on the older strata of the working-age population. The youth, in turn, tend to produce offspring of their own and thus create a new generation of useless eaters that the Philippine economy cannot support. Therefore, the report apparently concludes, solutions to the Philippines economic woes include instituting measures for checking population growth.

But the report also implicitly contradicts itself, since it cites that the highest concentration of poor Filipinos live in rural areas. Other economists and demographerswho are perhaps more competent than those at the World Bankhave already pointed out that if overpopulation leads to impoverishment, then why do the people of the more sparsely-populated, rural areas tend to suffer from worse living conditions than those in the more developed, densely-populated, urbanized areas? Is it not true that urban areas tend to have lower poverty rates because cities are designed to support larger and denser populations? Should not the solutions therefore focus on incorporating the urban and rural areas as an agro-industrial model of modern economy?5

Thus, those purportedly professional economists at the World Bank and elsewhere, who would conclude such incompetent and detrimental nonsolutions in the form of policy suggestions for more effective family planning6 seem to have little intention for seriously solving the Philippines economic problems. Do they instead prefer to cling to the conventional academic dogmas of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus that have taught them to believe that the relationship between an economic system and human population remains cyclical and void of any intelligent and rational foresight?7 If the economy cannot support the population, their logic supposes, then the population needs to be reduced. In their approach to economic science, do they ever bother to ask that since economic systems are created by human activity, they should be driven by a political intention to better serve the needs of a growing population? The rapid increase in the numbers of the poor in underdeveloped nations like the Philippines is clearly a result of the absence of combined, international economic policy initiatives designed to facilitate those nations in pursuing their sovereign right to economic development. And, as we will see, the global initiative for population reduction is directed by the same forces who seek to undermine the sovereignty of the worlds nation-states.8

To get the most competent view of this issue as possible, we must investigate the true relationship between population growth and economics. And doing so will require us to examine both past and present economic and political developments in the Philippines, and the world

Population and Economics

The global economic system is in a state of collapse. Despite the fanciful reports that we can now expect the benefits of a recovery, the central banks of the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and elsewhere have desperately flooded the currency markets with money in a doomed attempt to revive a dead global banking system that has been kept in a kind-of zombie state since the late summer of 2007. This collapse is caused by an insanely overleveraged and speculation-driven financial system that produces no real physical wealth for the benefit of the peoples of the world. To quite the contrary, it has gorged itself by looting that physical wealth, and bailing the system out has only worsened things by creating an even wider chasm between physical economic conditions, and the financial schemes created to generate fictitious wealth.9

The recent report by the U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), chaired by one Philip Angelides, not only documents how this parasitic system gestatedand grew over the last thirty years, but also concludes that little to nothing has been done by the U.S. government to correct the problemin particular, an Obama presidency that claimed it would change things.10 The conclusions of that report should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the U.S. statesman and economist, Lyndon LaRouche; as it concurs with what he had specifically forecast would take place in the world economy during a public address in July of 2007.11

LaRouches (inset) Triple Curve function illustrates how the decoupling of a financial system from actual physical economic progress will result in hyperinflation and physical economic collapse.

In fact, LaRouche has been warning of such a collapse process for decades. In the 1960s, he announced that a series of currency crises would lead to the dismantling of the post-war Bretton Woods agreements, which would then open the door to currency speculation and the unbridled looting of national economies by international finance. Later, in his 1983 book, There Are No Limits to Growth, LaRouche provided a specific refutation of the allegations of a population problem. Although great feats of economic and social progress are possible in this modern age, he wrote, most of the worlds inhabitants continue to tolerate [miserable living] conditionswhich even existing technologies are capable of solving[because] some people with a great deal of power over the periodicals, universities, financial institutions, and political parties of much of the world, simply do not wish society to solve these problems.

It is the deliberate policies of globalization and neocolonialism that have led to the slide toward lower orders of the economic and technological potential vital for nations to support their growing populations at ever-improving living conditions. Todays result is a degenerated economic state where population growth continues at a deceleration, and with the masses supported at only near-minimal living standards. The population growth among the poor that has been the subject of so much debate is thus another hallmark of the economic collapse we are facingthe complete inverse of the claim that it is a leading cause of hindering the Philippine economy from progressing.12

As distinct from the dominant approach to economics as a speculative science that over-relies on econometric statistical forecasting, LaRouche speaks of a science of physical economy.13 This approach had led him to the discovery that progress in economics can be most accurately measured by potential relative population-density. To effectively expound on this curious dynamic created by the interaction of scientific discoveries, technological advances, and social and political progress is beyond the scope of this essay; but perhaps a general idea can best be briefly illustrated to the reader by the historical example of mans discovery and utilization of electricity.14

World-wide population growth. Notice how surges in population occur following cultural and scientific renaissances.

The twentieth century saw unprecedented, exponential growth in worldwide population (see graph).15This was made possible, in large part, by the economic transformation that occurred in the same era due to electrification. Electricity has revolutionized everythingfrom agriculture, to medical science, to industry, to infrastructure and transportation. It has enabled economies a greater potential tosupport growing populations at better living standards in more concentrated areas. It has even contributed to allowing large cities to exist in parts of the world where the potential for dense human habitation was previously impossible. (Therefore, an increase in the potential relative population-density.) It has truly changed mans relationship to nature and proves that the Earths (or even the Solar Systems) carrying capacity for human habitation is not something of a fixed order.

Save the Nation!

If we view the Philippine economy from this standpoint, we see how adequately servicing the populations need for electricity is not possible with the current levels of infrastructure. This, and many other areas of what LaRouche defines as the physical economy need rapid modernization and expansion to support dignified living standards for a population that is over 95 millionand beyond.16

But, yet, the Philippines does not lack the potential workforce needed for such a task. She has long since proven herself capable of producing very competent professionals and skilled workers in many fieldsobserve how many OFWs are health care workers, technical operators, or engineers, for example. The dilapidated condition of this country should tell us that the solution lies in the creation and utilization of a large portion of skilled, productive labor to solve many of the logistical problems hindering her from becoming a great nation.

These are the kind of employment opportunities that the government should cultivate for the youthinstead of pretending the solution lies in attracting foreign investors to set up things like call centers, simply because Filipinos speak English and are willing to work much cheaper than the average Westerner. The problems presented by the World Bank representatives and others are not simply that there are too many young Filipinos without decent job opportunities, it is that their right to have access to meaningful employment in their own country has been denied to them. It is evident that the Philippine government needs a policy outlook that is every bit as bold the New Deal programs of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt if it is to solve the nations economic problems.17

However, the Philippines faces a very different world than that of America in the 1930s. She is a poor nation in an integrated global system that did not exist before World War II, and economic policy changes will therefore require Filipino leaders to fight for major initiatives like those being prescribed by LaRouches affiliates of the Save the Nation movement.18

Included among the movements urgent proposals is a call for the Philippine government to declare a moratorium on the debt incurred through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and those related institutions who have successfully enslaved the Filipino people to service a ballooning national debt inflated by the arbitrary manipulation of interest rates and currency values. If we take the amount of debt that, in actuality, the Philippines originally incurred, it is found thatshe has grossly overpaid the amount owed to her creditors.19 Yet, still the costs of continuing to service this illegitimate debt is reported to consume a vast percentage of government revenue, rather than being used to invest in the desperately needed improvements for the Filipino people.20

When the U.S. Opposed Imperialism

In order for one to understand how such injustices are permitted to be perpetrated in our civilized age, we must look at the history of the global financial system. We begin during the twilight of World War II, when Roosevelt began to work toward establishing a more organized system of international finance with the intention to serve the sovereign nations making up the world community. Such a system could not only facilitate the rebuilding of those countries viciously ravaged by the war, but also those that had been bled dry by colonial exploitation. This was the intention for holding the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, which was successful in establishing an approximation of just such a system.

Although the Bretton Woods agreements would indeed prove indispensable to the task of rebuilding Europe after the war, and allowed the opportunity for some steps of progress to be made in parts of the former colonial sector, Roosevelts unfortunate death in the April of 1945, the succession of Harry S Truman, the U.S. support for the recolonization of liberated peoples, and the declaration of the Cold War by Winston Churchill would all mean the termination of FDRs vision for economic and technological progress under a global New Deal. The United States would instead form a Special Relationship with her historical adversary: the British Empire.21

Filipino patriot Carlos P. Romulo accurately recognized that only the U.S. possessed the clout to pressure the European powers to let go of their Asian colonies after World War II. A great opportunity forefieted by the pro-imperialist Truman Administration.

The Bretton Woods system finally came to an end in August 1971, and its fixed-exchange rates would be replaced with the currency speculation that LaRouche had warned of.22 As a result, we now have an international financial system that has been allowed to operate largely outside of the control of the worlds sovereign statesa parasitic imperialism that sucks the life out of nations and governments.

Opponents to this new imperialism in the Philippines and elsewhere have been quick to denounce todays United States as an American Empire. Although some of these observations are not lacking in insight, such denunciations actually misidentify the true nature of the beast that many anti-imperialists believe themselves to be fighting. While the prewar United States flirted considerably with colonialism (the Philippines are, of course, a testament to this fact) and todays U.S. commonly acts as the primary enforcer for todays global imperialism, these practices must be recognized as a deviation from the founding intentions of modern U.S republicanismthe very same intentions that the Philippine Republic based herself upon.23

Those decriers would do well to study that fact, while also observing how even the once-powerful U.S. economy has also suffered at the hands of this present financial system. Major cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore that were once centers for productive industry and commerce are now post-industrial hell-holes with ever-higher rates of poverty, crime, and disease that are comparable to those in the underdeveloped countries. The majority of the States public infrastructure is, at best, undermaintained, and, at worst, literally falling apart. Many state and municipal governments are faced with fiscal emergencies that have forced them to cut essential social programs, and lay off large numbers of police, firefighters, teachers, and other public employees. This has led to mass protests by the American citizenrya citizenry that has fallen victim to the eagerness of both the Bush and Obama presidencies to ignore their Constitutional obligations to promote the General Welfare, and instead subject their people to fascist austerity measures in order to finance massive bail-outs of the investment banking system.24 LaRouche has warned that the policy of flooding that banking system with monetary capital will lead to a hyper-inflationary breakdown like that of Germany in 1923which is now becoming evident in the spikes in commodity and food prices. These are the empirical manifestations of economic collapse, done at the bidding of a global financial apparatus largely operating from the City of Londonwhat LaRouche has rightfully identified as the modern, post-war form of the British Empire.25

A More Just Global Financial System

To counter these post-war developments, LaRouche has been campaigning for decades to have the U.S. government reclaim the historical tradition of FDRs anti-imperial strategy to promote nation-building in the former colonial sector. Using Roosevelts legacy as a precedent, LaRouche has called for a domestic policy spear-headed by a restoration of the Glass-Steagall standard which would separate and protect commercial banking for productive purposes from the speculative schemes of investment banking.

For foreign policy, he was the first to publicly call for a New Bretton Woods conference to reestablish a global financial system based on fixed-exchange rates, and has also organized for the establishment of an economic alliance between the United States and the great Eurasian giants of Russia, China, and India. These Four Powers represent well over a third of the worlds population, are abundant in natural resources, and also possess the powerful, high-technology manufacturing capabilities necessary for the development of the major infrastructure projects needed to aid the poorer and smaller nations of the world. Such an alliance would act as the catalyst for the establishment of what LaRouche refers to as a Hamiltonian credit system of world finance, and provide the necessary counterbloc to the destruction wrought by the exploitive, feudal-monetarist system that is typified by the City of London and Wall Street. This would be the equivalent of applying the Glass-Steagall standard on an international scale, where a group of respectively sovereign nations declare that all of the illegitimate toxic gambling debt of the neo-feudalist financiers will be frozen, and then audited and investigated later (i.e. after crisis conditions have been effectively dealt with), thus freeing up the capital being injected into the investment banking system in the form of bail-outs to instead finance much-needed major infrastructure projects.26 The nations of the world can either adopt this model in the immediate term, or, LaRouche has warned, face an economic collapse comparable to the dark age of the 14th century.

For the Philippines, the alternative to fighting for such changes in global policies, as well as implementing an emergency domestic program like that now being advocated by the Save the Nation campaign, is to willingly dive into the mudslide toward dark age. The drive to legislate a program for controlling population growth is simply a reflection of a deeper problem, namely that many Filipino policy makers would seem to prefer to give up on establishing economic self-reliance, and further capitulate to those ill-intentioned, imperialist interests who are destroying their countrys economy.

__________

II. Environmentalism as Neo-Eugenics

The Infamous NSSM 200

Now that we have begun to recognize how population growth and economic development are actually interrelated, we can turn our attention toward examining the background for those ill-intentioned, imperialist interests that are subverting the Philippine government to adopting a population reduction program.

I will first refer the reader to the infamous U.S. National Security Study Memorandum 200. Written by National Security Adviser and British Foreign Office agent Henry A. Kissinger in 1974, and adopted as policy by the Ford Administration in 1975, this document explicitly names 13 underdeveloped countriesone being the Philippinesto be pressured into adopting policies that would severely limit their population growth through initiating contraception and sterilization programs. It also discussed the possibility of having the U.S. Agency for International Development withhold food aid as a way to get these poorer nations to comply with population reduction measures. Although not stated explicitly, the usage of the USAID option would result in curbing overpopulation by contributing to famine. Kissinger also made note of the fact that the United States already contributed more than half of the total funds for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which could be used, along with other U.N. agencies, to carry out the mission he was advocating.

Kissingers justification for such genocide? He believed that economic control over the worlds finite resources was better off in the hands of America and her European allies, ostensibly claiming that they would be needed in the fight against the Soviets. Population growth (and, consequently, economic development) in these resource-rich countries was a threat to that hegemony, as such expansion would require them to draw upon that resource base in their drive to establish themselves as strong, sovereign nation-states, rather than poor, post-colonial banana republics.27

What is a Natural Resource?

Although the ecological effects of population growth were not the main focus of Kissingers report, his assumption in the scarcity of the worlds resources was also expressed throughout policy-making circles and was very much popularized in the late 60s and early 70s by academics such as Paul Ehrlich and Dennis Meadows.28Such theories, which assert that human population growth is exceeding the Earths carrying capacity by depleting natural resources and destroying the equilibrium of nature, provide much of the basis for the ideology popularly referred to as environmentalism.

Ehrlichs Population Bomb (1968) and Meadows Limits to Growth (1972) widely propagandized the fears about an overpopulated planet.

There are, of course, issues and concerns raised by a scientific approach to the management of Earths biosphere and resources that are not illegitimate. Environmentalism as it is commonly preached, however is founded not upon science and reason, but upon dogmas about man and his place in the universe that are not unlike those of a pagan cult. It is a dogma that rejects the Judeo-Christian concept of man being made in the image of his Creator and therefore in possession of qualities which set him apart from the rest of the natural world. In environmentalist ideology, man has no ability to participate in Creation and wilfully change and improve his relationship to the universe; he is instead confined to live like all other creaturesas Earth-Goddess Gaias passive victim within a limited and cyclical natural balance.29

If we accept the misanthropic viewpoint of individuals who think like Kissinger, Ehrlich, and Meadows, we have no choice but to ignore the facts about the history of human progress. For example, when it comes to defining a natural resource, we must ask how a natural substance comes to be made useful for human activity in the first place. Coal, oil, uraniumall of these have existed on Earth long before humanityand when our species finally does arrive on the scene, these materials continue to stay in the ground for millennia, untouched. But civilization has eventually proven itself capable of producing great minds that possess a rigorous drive for knowledge, men and women who have discovered more efficient sources of power from substances that previous generations would have found little use for.

Still, such revolutionary discoveries do little good for the cause of mankind unless they are coupled with the political will and foresight needed to apply them to benefit the economic condition of the general populace. Even nuclear fissionthe most powerful and efficient energy source that man has mastered thus farhas yet to be applied and utilized on the mass scale necessary to solve many of humanitys current problems.

Elements of what later became Germanys Nazi movement were rooted in proto-environmentalist, Wagnerian nature cults (depicted on the left) who disdained artificial industrial society. These groups later fed the membership of the Thule Society (middle), which in turned later spawned the Nazi Party. Nazi eugenic propaganda (right) focused on the economic burdens caused by the excess numbers of useless eaters (e.g., the less-advantaged).

-The Climate Change Hoax-

However, the reporting from much of the worlds predominantly English-speaking media outletswhich tend to be very proud to claim they represent a balanced and impartial viewpointleads us to conclude that there is a regimented scientific consensus stating that the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil produces industrial gas emissions that are causing a catastrophic change in the Earths climate. And, in a similar vein, nuclear power is once again being presented as too dangerous a technology for man to control.30

Since climate change being caused by carbon dioxide is as plain a textbook fact as the Earth being round, and the potential danger of nuclear energy proves that there is such a thing as too much technological progress, the recommended solution is to instead move to more sustainable (i.e., inefficient) sources of power generation like wind and solar.31

But, in reality, much of the alleged proof about both the anthropogenic causes of climate changelike the charges against nuclear energyhave been thoroughly refuted by not a few qualified scientists and other experts in numerous fields. While such rebuttals are worth reading for oneself, they are not to be the main subject of our focus at this time,32 since it is the underlying political intentions of the environmentalist campaign against industrialization (particularly in the developing world) that are to be exposed here in this essay.

Once industrial gas emissions are identified as the driving cause of altering the planets climate, human expansion becomes seen as an enemy in the battle to save the Earth. However, most of the worlds developing nations desperately need to industrialize in order to attain adequate living conditions for their peoples. But, instead of receiving the level of assistance from the more advanced sector that will aid them in becoming industrialized and self-sufficient, they are told that highly inefficient and costly technologies like solar panels and wind mills are the only environmentally-sustainable solution. They are told that they cannot strive to attain the levels of energy consumption (e.g. adequate and dignified living standards) that has been achieved in the developed countries, and that their non-industrialized, sustainable economies will help to enable the industrialized world to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.33

It is not difficult to hear the echoes of the 19th century imperialism that condemned colonial countries to remain as poor, backward agrarian economies, and where any industrialization or infrastructure built was limited and designed only for the benefit of the colonial power. Like the god Zeus who sought to enslave mankind by denying him the ability to control fire, any effective modern imperial policywhether it be the British Empire of the 18th and 19th centuries, or her modern-day bastard, Globalizationthrives on forbidding technological and economic progress for the masses. The not unintended results are the most effective methods that empires have relied upon to check population growth: famine, epidemic disease, and civil discord. Policies influenced by the sinister ideology of sustainable growth thus become a death sentence for the billions of the worlds poor.

The WWF: Enemies of Progress

Of the many international environmental NGOs that are at the forefront of such pro-genocidal, anti-human propaganda campaigns, there is one that is deserving of particular attentionboth because of brevity, and because of its wide influence in the Philippines and other post-colonial countriesand that is the World Wildlife Fund/Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).34 The WWF insists that it is mans overpopulationin and of itselfthat has disturbed the ecological balance, whether it be by encroachment and deforestation (which is usually the result of poor farmers forced to use backwards and outdated methods of agriculture), or by overconsumption and industrialization.35

Those readers who have not yet begun to ponder upon the economic implications of what the environmentalist movement actually advocatesand still think that usage of terms like genocidal and anti-human are sensationalist or hyperbolicshould familiarize themselves with the indisputable influence that eugenics still has on todays environmentalism.36

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Living Sustainably: What Intentional Communities Can Teach …

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"This kind of honest, personal investigative work is crucial and refreshing as people meet both familiar and unprecedented challenges in living together."Julianne Warren, author of Aldo Leopold's Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac

"Reading this book feels like listening to a good friend who has gone on a long and sometimes strange trip and is now sharing the excitement and revelations of her journey with us. Inviting, informative, and down to earth, Living Sustainably will interest anyone who wants to know how we can live out our values in an increasingly unsustainable American culture."Dave Aftandilian, coeditor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness

"Sanford's study of the ways in which democracy, simplicity, and nonviolence are practiced in these communities offers many thought-provoking models for a different kind of life in contemporary America. Her book is an engaging overview of the quirks and challenges that these communities face, as well as their many achievements.

[This book] will leave its readers with a richer understanding of both the tribulations and joys of living in intentional communities."Communities

"The book, which chronicles the 15 intentional communities Sanford visited over a four-year period, offers some suggestionsif not answersabout what many of us can learn from those who live in intentional communities."Christian Century

"I recommend this honest personal odyssey to anyone on the brink of transition to a more sustainable lifestyle. Sanford shares insights from people who are in the process of inventing and testing creative small-scale solutions within their intentional communities. Those communities are presented as demonstration sites willing to share their experimental responses to the violence of environmental and social crises.

At first glance, the reader finds little or no explicit religion in this book. But the literally down-to-earth engagement of the interviewees tells of intimate connections between humans and their habitat and thus actually offers a re-reading of religion."Reading Religion

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Posthumanism week 3 Lorna Simmonds

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Is what you make worth what it destroys?

To investigate how our creative impetus may affect the world

A problem of Globalisation?

Tony frys Design in the borderlands

Problem = monstrous project of total economic colonization, globalization creates a single global shared view and eradicated all the local ones so need to compromise opinions. Seek knowledge from other cultures and see what other think, make us more sustainable

Marshall mcluhan

Technology shapes ourselves in the world, extends ability and processes it in some way. They work us over, they leave no part of us untouched or unaffected. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of media and technology

Electricity and circuits are an extension of the nervous system.

Mining a longer text how do media (technology) shape the body or the world?

Clothing our extended skin

How the media shapes the body or human experience influences in fashion from the media, effects the way we dress. Alters temperature, clothing can be used as a heat controlling mechanism as an extension of the skin. Began to dress for the eyes in Europe instead of for traditional clothing. Offensive text

Washing machine process of making things more efficient and quicker makes it less common to hand wash, hand wash may be more therapeutic and rewarding, sense of achievement. Mechanizing it removes the experience and turn it more into a work process.

Clock limits and restricts what theyre doing, without a clock we would have no measure of time. Time is a part of globalization. Time is valuable, time is commodified, its about how quick you can do things rather than what you do with it. Paid with time. Time is a construct of human perception.

Clothes clothes change the way we interact with the world. Can be physically constricted. Offensive and sexist and racist, talks about backwards people in tribes, women dressing to be looked at but now dressed to be looked at and touched.

Ontological design design a reality

-design is something more inescapable and profound that is generally recognised by designers it designs the world, it designs into existence and also designs out of existence certain features

-designing is fundamental to being human we design in ways that prefigure our actions, we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed.

We design our world and our world designs us

Design practice directs the trajectory of the future; it designs away certain possibilities of the present.

Design is never complete because i never ceases to have consequences.

Is what you make worth what it destroys?

Tonkinwises Design away

How does he suggest design (practice) affects the world?

Dont agree with the text, we need to design to make a living, dont really have time to think about its effects when we need to survive. Trying to get people to not design. Says that design effects everything, creating a new object destroys other things such as materials and ecology.

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Cary Wolfes What is Posthumanism? Introductory …

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In the introduction to Cary Wolfes What is Posthumanism?, his objective is to find ways to push human analysis beyond its inherent anthropocentrism. In this book, Wolfe engages the ongoing discussion of the transformation of the human, and it is through this introductory chapter that he attempts to unravel the problem of humanism, which he believes has been responsible for positioning humans as superior to other life forms and animals.He states: Humanism is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth of all people []Humanists endorse universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition.

The above passage is from a Wikipedia article that Wolfe purposely includes because he wishes to point out humanisms categorical separation between the human and the non-human, and its conception of Man as a privileged being. Wolfe s goal is to point to the specific concept of the humanthat grounds discrimination against nonhuman animals and the disabled in the first place.Wolfe thinks that in order to even start to think about posthumanism, we must stop placingthe human at the top of a hierarchy of living animals and looking at the human as the pinnacle of perfection for all other beings to be measured against.

Wolfe cites R. L. Rutsky who states: The posthuman cannot simply be identified as a culture or age that comes after the human []for the very idea of such a passage, however measured or qualified it may be, continues to rely upon a humanist narrative of historical change. This is not to say that Wolfe rejects humanism entirely, but rather that he thinks we need to move away from trying to redefine the human as we have come to understand it. Man should never have been so privileged, and should never have dictated what living beings must try to aspire to me.Unlike Hassan, Badmington, or Robert Pepperels take on posthumanism, Wolfe complicates the transformation of the human into posthuman and suggests that it is something more than just a new way of thinking that comes into play with theEnlightenment and Mans wish to become a liberated subject.

He elaborates on this in the following passage:If,however, the posthuman truly involves a fundamental change or mutation in the concept of the human, this would seem to imply that history and culture cannot continue to be figured in reference to thisconcept.Inother words, there are humanist ways of criticizing the extension of humanism that we find in transhumanism.Wolfe believes that transhumanism has been used to describe beingswhose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to no longer be unambiguously human by our current standards. Transhuman [] is the description of those who are in the process of becoming post-human.

This passage hits several points, the first being that transhumanism describes something so enhanced as to not be recognizably human. This suggests a higher state of being, which implies that transhumanism as an extension of post humanism is merely what comes next the next generation of an already superior being.From what Wolfe has stated thus far, I can gather that he does not see posthumanism as Mans evololution into something more. If anything, this definition is the opposite of how he sees posthumanism, for the rhetoric still suggests that Man sits atop a hierarchy.

This becomes clear further along in the introduction, as Wolfe cites Nick Bostrom in order to communicate his point:This sense of posthumanism derives directly from ideals of human perfectibility, rationality, and agency inherited from Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment.Wolfe then states that the best-known inheritor of the cyborg strand of posthumanism is what is now being called transhumanisma movement that is dedicated, as the journalist and writer Joel Garreau puts it, to the enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span.

From this, I can discern that for Wolfe, posthumanism is the complete opposite of transhumanism, which he sees as nothing more than an intensification of humanism. Wolfe insists that his sense of posthumanismis thus analogous to Jean-Franois Lyotards paradoxical rendering of the postmodern: it comes both before and after humanism,which implies that it is not automatically post it exists alongside.Furthermore, he writes:Posthumanism in my sense isnt posthuman at allin the sense of being after our embodiment has been transcendedbut is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself.

Wolfe does not seem convinced that posthumanism should have anything to do with autonomy and superiority, as these seem to be the egotistical needs acquired from the humanist idea of mastering other species. He writes:To be truly posthumanist, the concept of subjectivity itself needs to be undermined and transformed in a way that does not privilege the human. It is only by giving up notions of personhood that speciesism can be destabilized, he argues, so that we can become posthumanists.Wolfe tries to re-imagine subjectivity as something not exclusively human in order to answer what posthumanism is. Rather than focus on what it has been historically, he imagines what it could be if anthropologically, we were no longer invested in maintaining human superiority.

Works Cited:

Wolfe, Cary. Introduction: What is Posthumanism?What is Posthumanism? xi-xxxiv.

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Posthumanism/Post biology Dr. S. Devika

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Posthuman or post-human is a concept originating in the fields of science fiction, futurology, contemporary art, and philosophy that literally means a person or entity that exists in a state beyond being human. In critical theory, the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to re-conceive the human. It is the object of posthumanist criticism to critically question Renaissance humanism, a branch of humanist philosophy which claims that human nature is a universal state from which the human being emerges; human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apex of existence. Thus, the posthuman position recognizes imperfectability and disunity within him or herself, and understands the world through heterogeneous perspectives while seeking to maintain intellectual rigour and a dedication to objective observations. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can become or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.

The posthuman is roughly synonymous with the cyborg of A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway. Haraways cyborg is in many ways the beta version of the posthuman.

Following Haraway, Hayles, whose work grounds much of the critical posthuman discourse, asserts that liberal humanism which separates the mind from the body and thus portrays the body as a shell or vehicle for the mind becomes increasingly complicated in the late 20th and 21st centuries because information technology put the human bodyin question. Hayles maintains that we must be conscious of information technological advancements while understanding information as disembodied, that is, something which cannot fundamentally replace the human body but can only be incorporated into it and human life practices.

Posthumans could be completely synthetic artificial intelligences, or a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.

Posthuman does not necessarily refer to a conjectured future where humans are extinct or otherwise absent from the Earth. Both humans and posthumans could continue to exist but the latter will predominate in society over the former because of their abilities. Recently, scholars have begun to speculate that posthumanism provides an alternative analysis of apocalyptic cinema and fiction, often casting vampires, werewolves and even zombies as potential evolutions of the human form and being. Many science fiction authors have written works set in posthuman futures.

Postbiological evolution is a form of evolution which has transitioned from a biological paradigm, driven by the propagation of genes, to a non-biological (e.g., cultural or technological) paradigm, presumably driven by some alternative replicator (e.g., memes or temes), and potentially resulting in the extinction, obsolescence, or trophic reorganization of the former. Researchers anticipating a postbiological universe tend to describe this transition as marked by the maturation and potential convergence of high technologies, such as artificial intelligence or nanotechnology. Experts in AI even believe it holds the potential and capability for a postbiological earth in the next several generations. AI could be utilised to solve scientific problems and to analyse situations much faster and more accurately than our own minds.

The move to a complete postbiological stage has two different routes. One route is the change of human consciousness from a biological vessel into a mechanical; this would require the digitisation of human consciousness. A mechanical based vessel would increase the computational power and intelligence of the human consciousness exponentially. The other route is the complete replacement of human consciousness by AI, for this the human race would die out, replaced by our own creation of AI.

While in some circles the expression postbiological evolution is roughly synonymous with human genetic engineering, it is used most often to refer to the general application of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science to improve human performance.

However, the most common criticism of human enhancement is that it is or will often be practiced with a reckless and selfish short-term perspective that is ignorant of the long-term consequences on individuals and the rest of society, such as the fear that some enhancements will create unfair physical or mental advantages to those who can and will use them, or unequal access to such enhancements can and will further the gulf between the haves and have-nots.

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NRx vs AltRight: What now? | Poseidon Awoke: Realist

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The AltRight term received a lot of attention recently thanks to a US presidential candidate targeting it in a speech. This has given a lot of air to the movement, further accelerating its capture of the right. As the New Right captures hearts and minds, the AltRight will drop the Alt and simply become the Right.

NRx has received some recognition in the past few years, as part of the Dark Enlightenment. But its effects have been far outstripped by the AltRight. And thats OK, because of the division of labor of cognition. They play separate, but related, roles.

Humans exist in classes which are formed on a biological basis, and which are most easily divided by IQ, though this is nothing more than a convenient marker. At the bottom of this post I have provided Curts original post and my slightly modified version of it. This is a table of the various classes of the New Right. I think it would be valuable to further complete this mapping of the members of the various classes because we need each class to repackage and present the same message in terms that their class can interpret. We also need to create hierarchical linkages in order to move the messages downstream effectively and spread them throughout the Right.

According to Curts table, NRx is middle class. Some might take offense and argue that it is upper-middle class. Sure, the leaders of NRx are likely upper-middle class, but the average NRxer is solidly middle class. Software engineering is a middle class profession. People who run teams of middle class professionals are upper-middle class (CTOs, CIOs, CEOs, Directors, etc). The middle class is not a salary range: it is an ability range. The middle class are those who have the ability to engage in the system of production. This is why the middle class seeks liberty: because given freedom to choose their means of production, they will choose and perform, because they can. As an aside, this is why working classes are less interested in liberty, because they simply cant capitalize on it within the system of production to nearly the level of the middle class. And the lower and under classes have zero interest in liberty, because they are completely unable to capitalize within the system of production; they desire security, not liberty (and thats what self-interested politicians trade them in return for votes).

We can argue about the parameters of classes, and we should. We should define them. We need to understand their roles and to define the behaviors that makes one a good member of any class, because these behaviors and actors do exist in every class. We just need to incentivize them properly, which is why we must define and understand them.

The middle class has certain behaviors which make them middle class.They follow norms of propriety. I was right when I wrote that NRx is Right Brahmin Signalling. From the SJW encyclopedia: Brahmin is a varna (caste) in Hinduism specialising as priests, teachers (acharya) and protectors of sacred learning across generations. NRx is a group of teachers and priests, solidly middle class and exhibiting middle class mores and norms, such as the prohibition on ridicule, mockery, libel and slander.

The working classes do not share the middle class values and prohibitions on ridicule, mockery, libel and slander. I have seen very clearly the revulsion of NRx to the coarse meming of the AltRight. The NRx aspersions about populism of the AltRight. This is simply the middle class reaction to working class norms.

The thing is: the middle class needs the working class. They will do the jobs that the middle class just wont do. Say, for example, openly attack with vitriolic hostility the enemies of Western Civilization using Pepe and Le Happy Merchant memes. Or say, engage in high energy physical activities which raise the cost of the status quo on the controlling elite. Once the cost of the status quo is high enough, then that controlling elite will accede to the demands of the Right. Who will formulate these demands? Ultimately, the aristocratic class will, with large input from the scholarly classes. Who will implement these demands at the local levels? Obviously, the people who organizeall production, the middle class, under the direction of the upper middle class, with the real work being done by the working classes at the direction of the middle class.

We have a problem with moral license. Typically, our Churches have granted us moral license to defend the West, but the modern Churches are corrupt and useless. Our current set of priests will never grant us moral license to defend ourselves. Waiting for them is suicide. Alternatively, our politicians could grant us moral license to defend ourselves, but they are corrupt and useless and waiting on them is suicide.

The working class (and the lower classes) are the first to feel the affects of diversity. They are not nearly as insulated from it as the middle and upper classes. For this reason, they were the first to grant themselves moral license. This is the AltRight: the working class which has declared war on the Left and on those who pretend to be our leaders (the cucks) who refuse to grant us moral license to self-defense.

Their weapon is (currently) mockery, ridicule, libel and slander. This weapon is off the table for the middle class for normative reasons, thus it was unavailable to NRx, which instead uses Continental and Cosmopolitan philosophy, using myth and critique, respectively. Priests use myth and teachers use critique.

We are in the process of granting full moral license to ourselves for the purpose of defending our civilization. NRx will become an integral part in granting this moral license, or it will fade into irrelevancy. They will use narrative, myth and critique to justify our Holy War for the survival of our people, or they will become nothing.

Im currently working on ideas for reforming Christianity. NRx is full of the religious, but they have neglected this topic, possibly because they do not understand that this is an essential step, and that only we on the right will undertake it. Does that sound ambitious enough for you?

There are many excellent religious scholars among NRx. Their job is to re-invigorate the Germanic Initiatic Oath within Christianity: Dont lie, Dont steal, and protect the commons (every man a sheriff, reciprocal insurance). They must also understand clearly the Morality of Transcendence: man is directing his own evolution, transcending out of savagery to become closer to God and to live in Gods will (I am speaking in your voice here, NRx). They should create the narrative, using the Bible, that our new era of truthful scientific language is demanded by God (dont lie)(Testimonialism), and our prohibition of parasitism (dont steal)(no welfare state) is Gods law, and that we must become closer to God by promoting the best of our species, and limiting theworst (transcendence/domestication).

If NRx has a place in this movement, it is to reform the Church and grant ourselves moral license to defend Western Civilization, by any means necessary. The AltRight and the working class are preparingto march.

(These folk know exactly what theyre doing by the way. They have adopted leftist ridicule and are actively manufacturing desensitization as a means of combating the falsehoods and pseudoscience of political correctness)

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NRx vs AltRight: What now? | Poseidon Awoke: Realist

Heat Street Apologizes for Saying Pepe the Frog Isn’t Anti …

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Heat Street Editor and former British Conservative MP Louise Menschhas writtenan article agreeing with the establishment media and Clinton campaigns claims that Pepe the Frog is a white supremacist icon.Mensch apologized for another Heat Street article by Ian Miles Cheong, who defended the innocent green frog meme last week.

Under the title Hillary Clinton Is Absolutely Right, Pepe Meme Is Antisemitic An Apology, Mensch apologized for Cheongs defence of the cartoon frog, claiming that the piece was inaccurate.

We apologize for publishing it, she wrote, adding an editors note on Cheongs story:This article was wrong and we should never have published it.Pepe the Frog is antisemitic.

Heat Street, backed by Rupert Murdochs News Corp, boasts in its motto: Free speech celebrated. No safe spaces.

Quoting Cheongs claims that no single group or ideology has ownership of the meme, Mensch argues: That is untrue. While Pepe, once a harmless frog meme, may have started out as a widely used meme, the frog is now a symbol of the Nazi Jew-baiting of the alt-right.

Her hyperlinked evidence of this blanket statement is a Google Drive foldertitled Pepe that contains a dozen Nazi-themed Pepe alterations. A Trump/Pepe image, with no Nazi imagery, is included. Nineof the 22 images in the folder do not feature Pepe illustrations at all.

That is the entirety of her argument: one dozen Nazi variants out of thousands of Pepes across the Web. Below I show some handful of antisemitic Pepe / Trump memes, they are everywhere, she writes, before linking to the Drive folder again. She makes no case for theimplicit suggestion that using a Pepe meme without Nazi or anti-Semitic imagery (i.e., the vast majority of Pepe memes) is automatically an embrace of Nazism and anti-Semitism.

Cheong, the managing editor of Gameranx and aprominent playerin the GamerGate controversy, has since retracted the claims of his original piece, stating that he was wrong about Pepe. Cheong reiterates Menschs claims that It has, in fact, become an anti-semitic meme.

Mensch has not yet added an editors note to another Heat Street article contradicting the far lefts white nationalism narrative. Last week, contributor William Hicks posted a piece sarcastically calling pop stars Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj white supremacists for spreading Pepes on their social media accounts.

This article was likely pushing back on the political lefts claim that Donald Trumps son is a racist for posting a Pepe on his Instagram. Mensch is now putting the full force of her editorial authority behind that left-wingnarrative.

Pepe is a cartoon frog who began his Internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike. But in recent months, Pepes been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the alt-right, wrote Elizabeth Chan on behalf of the Clinton campaign last week, in an explainer thatattempted to link the Internet meme with white supremacy.Theyve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.

The explainer based its comments largely on a Daily Beast interview with notorious troll and self-proclaimed parody account, Jared Taylor Swift, who made satirical comments about reclaiming Pepe from the normies. Swift and a fellow troll, Paul Town, later told the Daily Caller that they gave the Daily Beasts Olivia Nuzzi the most ridiculous quotes they could think of and she printed them, falling entirely for the troll. With noevidence but Nuzzis discredited piece, mainstream media reporters have uncritically declared the frog to be anicon for white nationalism on air, including NBCs Katy Tur and ABCs George Stephanopoulos.

Mensch fails to state that the creator of Pepe the Frog, Matt Furie, is actually a Democrat who expressed support for Hillary Clintons campaign, after his favorite candidate, Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the race.

Its weird that people are saying hes been a longtime white supremacist meme, said Furie, who denied that his frog had anything to do with white supremacy. If anything hed be part of the Green party. Hes a frog, why would he support white supremacists? That doesnt make anysense.

But she doesnt need to analyze or even acknowledge any of that information. She has a folder with 12 Nazi Pepes in it, and that is enough for her to shut down any other interpretation.

Charlie Nash is a reporterforBreitbart Tech. You can follow himon Twitter@MrNashingtonorlike his page at Facebook.

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The Truth About Pepe The Frog And The Cult Of Kek

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Ill cut right to the chase:

Pepe the Frog isnt a white nationalist symbol.

Pepe the Frog isnt a harmless meme propagated by teenagers on the internet.

Pepe the Frog is, in fact, the modern-day avatar ofan ancient Egyptian deity accidentallyresurrectedby online imageboard culture.

Does that sound like the most b@tsh#t crazy thing youve ever heard?

Strap in, friendo. Youre in for one hell of a ride.

(UPDATE 11/9/16: Well memed, America, well memed. A post-election follow-up to this article has been added here.)

The precise origins of Pepe the Frog are, like all imageboards memes, obscure and unimportant.

All you really need to know is that sometime around 2010, a sad-looking cartoon frog began to trend among posters on 4chan.org and similar underground imageboards.

Shortly after, the age-old piece of online vernacular used to express laughterLOLfell out of favor on these sites.

In its place a new slang term of synonymous meaning rose to common use: KEK.

The origins of this trend are much more important. It comes froman odd technicality involving the Korean language and the popular video game World of Warcraft.

Keep that in mind for later.

And so, just like that, twoseemingly unrelatedelements that would later give life to a deity were arranged in piecemeal fashion. But they remained dormant for several years, up until

By this time, Pepe the Frog had become the unofficial mascot for 4chans political discussion board (a highly despised corner of the Internet fittingly entitled Politically Incorrect).

/Pol/ is a place where the unspoken outsiders of Millennial culture gather en masse. Here youll find the lonely and depressed, the socially inept, the generational dropouts, and all shades of disenfranchised youthevery one of them united with an unshakable underdog mentality that pervades the forums every kilobyte.

To call this place a white nationalist or alt-right message board is categorically incorrect. /Pol/, above all else, is place where our societys status quo is mercilessly challenged. Its a melting pot for well-meaning free thinkers and misguided mad men alike.

It isa place of chaos.

So when Donald J. Trump strolled onto the political scene in 2015, it was a match made in heaven. He immediately became /pol/s candidate of choice.

And it wasnt long before Trump was mated with /pol/s beloved mascot, in typical imageboard fashion:

And then, something very strange began to happen

One last thing you need to understand about imageboard culture: dubs.

Every post on 4chan and similar venues comes with an 8-digit numerical stamp. This number represents that posts entry position in the entire posting lineage of the imageboard.

With the amount of traffic these sites get, the last couple digits of this number are essentially a random roll. When a poster gets repeated digits, its called dubs, trips, quads, and so on.

Since a poster cant know their post number until after theyve submitted the post, its common for people to bet the contents of their message on the occurrence of repeating digits, like so:

When that endeavor proves a successful, a GET has been made and the stroke of luck is celebrated.

Out ofthis practice, a strange phenomenon began to take place on /pol/:discussion threads associatedwithTrump displayed noticeably frequent GETs.

It wasnt long before all of these seemingly random elements discussed so far became irreparably tied together within imageboard culture:

and a god was born.

Soon, it became all the rage on /pol/ to hail Trump as nothing less than gods chosen candidate.

Butwhichgods chosen candidate exactly?

The answer is obvious: Kek.

Remember how we learned that kek the meme came about from an obscure Korean languageonomatopoeia, completely independently from Pepe the Frog?

Well, it turns out Kek is alsoand always has beenan ancient Egyptian deity

A frog-headed one.

Quite the coincidence, wouldnt you say? A little, perhaps you reply.

A little indeed, but thats just the verytip of the synchronicityiceberg. Thats just where this unfathomable string of coincidences begins. And where it ends? We just dont know. Day by day this all getting stranger

The second major (little) coincidence can be foundwhen one looks into whatKek stood for among the ancient Egyptian pantheon:

Kuk(also spelled asKekorKeku) is the deification of the primordial concept of darkness in ancient Egyptian religion

Like all four dualistic concepts in the Ogdoad, Kuks male form was depicted as a frog, or as a frog-headed man, and the female form as a snake, or a snake-headed woman. As a symbol of darkness, Kuk also represented obscurity and the unknown, and thus chaos. Also, Kuk was seen as that which occurred before light, thus was known as thebringer-in of light.

And who else, at this point, had been declared a bringer of light into the world by enthusiastic supporters (mainstream and imageboard alike)?

It gets even weirder.

The pot really started to boil when this bizarre misprint statuette was dug up from a mysterious vendor called Ancient Treasures on Amazon. For years the product had been coincidentally mislabeled a KEK statue,despite actually bearing the hieroglyphics for the frog goddess HEQET.

And ya know, the thing about this ONEunique arrangement of hieroglyphicsthey bear an undeniable resemblance to a certain special something:

Do you see it?

A person sitting down. In front of a computer.

Like say, to post on an imageboard?

And whats that on the other side of the computer?

With this holy talismans discovery, The Cult of Kek suddenly took on a concrete form. This new digital faith is summed up neatly in this image passed around on all the major imageboards of the day:

It Gets Weirder: Pepe/Keke Emerges in Plain Sight on September 11th, 2016

Soon, /pol/s users werequite ironically, at firstattributing all strokes of luck for the Trump campaign (and likewise, all strokes of misfortune for the Hillary campaign) to their benevolent frog-headed deity that spoke to them in dubs.

But all of that came to a head on September 11th, 2016, when three major, mind-blowing events transpired within 48 hours of each other. Three events that would change the face of Kek worship forever:

(Note this persons post number)

Heres the short version: Pepe is a cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike.

But in recent months, Pepes been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the alt-right. Theyve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.

What can I or anyone else hope to add here? How bizarre does reality get? How deep does the rabbit hole go?

Oh, I see how deep

Now get a load of this one.

While all of this was happening, one or a few anonymous 4chan contributors discovered an old track from the 80s on YouTube. A track stamped all over with a very familiar face:

Thats right folks. A B-side vinyl by performer P. E. P. E., sporting a frog with a magic wand.

A frog.

And whats P. E. P. E. stand for?

Probably. What are sweet repeating digit GETs all about? Probability.

What is this gist of Kekism on /pol/? He speaks to them through dubs. Their ancient egyptian god of obscurity and chaos emerges/enters at points of probability.

Feel like thats a stretch? Check out what the full-length vocal versions album artwork is adorned with:

Dont see the significance? Let 4chan help you:

(Again, note the posts number)

Andheywhos that fair-haired man pointed towards Trump Towers clock in the artwork?

Gee, I wonder who.

Most likely?Chaos Magick.

You see, one of the core tenets of Chaos Magick practice (the only mainstay, really) is the creation of magic sigils (also called glyphs) to codify and project ones Will into the Universe.

Basically, you make an image that represents your will (desire fueled by powerful emotions or altered states) and the universe will take care of the rest.

When a lot of people pool their united willpower towards a single sigil, its called a Hypersigil, and its exponentially more potent.

Pepe/Kek is 4chans hypersigil.

Millions of the little people that browse 4chan have embedded the image of Pepe with their hatred for Hillarys alleged corruption, and their hope for Trumps victory over her in November. Whether they did this consciously or not, its exactly what has happened.

And so far, their hypersigil seems to be working.

Absolutely I am. But you must understand, magic probably isnt what you think it is. Its not about wand-waving or pentagrams or sacrificing babies.

Magick is actually much less involved than that. As a matter of fact, youre casting magick right now. You pretty much always are, whether you like it or not.

Thats because the REAL magic comes from plain and simple human attention. How you look at reality shapes it in ways that were only now beginning to fully understand. Ironically, the science of quantum physics is rapidly bringing the reality of magick to light (shadilay).

In my bookYoure Imagining Things, Ill tell you how it worksand WHY it worksin plain-spoken English. Ill also explain how you can use your attentionto alter your own little pocket of reality in extraordinary ways. Click here to check outYoure Imagining Thingson Amazon.

Most likely? Kek will continue to grow in power and continue to oppose Hillary Clinton and the corrupt political establishment. Will the Lord of Light win out over the powers that be? We shall find out very soon. (UPDATE 11/9/16: We found out what happened, didnt we?)

Yes.

Meme.

(And spread this around on social media.)

(And keep an eye on TheCultofKek.com for big things on the horizon.)

The rest is here:

The Truth About Pepe The Frog And The Cult Of Kek

NSI Stem Cell | Stem Cell Therapy Injection Treatment

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The Stem Cell procedure is minimally invasive, gathering a sample of adipose tissue from the abdomen. Theses cells remain sterile and after adult stem cells are extracted, they will be readministered back into the patient. This is done by one of the three methods: Intravenous, Intranasal or Localized.

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NSI Stem Cell | Stem Cell Therapy Injection Treatment

John McAfee Resurfaces With a Bang as Adviser to Crypto …

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John McAfee disappeared from the public markets after MGT Capital Inc. severed ties with

the controversial antivirus software developer, but now hes back and advising a cryptocurrency startup thats conducting an initial coin offering.

McAfee is joining CryptoSecure, a firm that says it offers hackproof security solutions for the digital-coin industry, as senior strategic adviser, according to a press release Wednesday. Key Capital Corp., a company focused on precious-metal mining, fintech and cancer treatments, is leading development at the startup. Shares of Key Capital, which trade over the counter, surged almost 400 percent after the announcement.

Mr. McAfee met the CryptoSecure team on a recent Blockchain cruise conference at which he was the keynote speaker, the statement said. During an early morning discussion on the security deficiencies of the cryptocurrency market, he was appraised of CryptoSecures military-grade hybrid Blockchain, Trusted Solaris OS, One Time Pad infrastructure project.

MGT, the cybersecurity company that shifted its focus to Bitcoin mining, said in January that it was parting ways with McAfee. Hed been serving as chief cybersecurity visionary, a position he took in August after resigning as chairman and chief executive officer amid a company reorganization.

The decision was totally amicable, MGT Chief Executive Officer Robert Ladd said in an interview at the time, though he added that the company, which had its shares delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in October 2016, was getting some feedback that in order to get uplisted etc. it might be easier to not have John McAfee be an officer or director of the company. McAfee had said the decision was mutual.

McAfee confirmed Wednesday in an email that he is advising CryptoSecure.

Related:John McAfee Says Bitcoin Boom to Put MGT in the Black

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John McAfee Resurfaces With a Bang as Adviser to Crypto ...

Donald Trump Jr.’s Wife Vanessa Files for Divorce … – tmz.com

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3/15/2018 2:21 PM PDT

Exclusive Details

Donald Trump Jr.'s wife is filing to divorce him after nearly 13 years of marriage.

Vanessa Trump filed docs Thursday in the Manhattan courts, and she's seeking an uncontested proceeding. That's a strong sign the couple has already hammered out details of their split, such as child custody and property.

Sources connected to the family tell TMZ the divorce has been a long time coming, and the relationship has been "bad for a while." Among the issues, Vanessa "hates politics and Don Jr. is gone all the time."

One source says contrary to being upset, Don Jr. is "relieved."

They have 5 children together -- between the ages of 3 and 10, and got married in 2005.

According to the NY Post, which first reported the split, Vanessa's been upset about some of his controversial tweets ... most of which defendPresident Trump and his policies.

Vanessa got a major scare just last month, when she received an envelope with white powder, and a hate letter for Don Jr. that read, in part, "You the family idiot. This is the reason why people hate you. You are getting what you deserve." The powder turned out to be corn starch, and the sender was eventually arrested.

Our sources say that incident absolutely "freaked her out."

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Donald Trump Jr.'s Wife Vanessa Files for Divorce ... - tmz.com

After Slavery | US Slave Emancipation and its Aftermath

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In the latest in a series of interviews, Bruce Baker of the After Slavery Project interviewed historian Michael W. Fitzgerald of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota about the evolution of his scholarship on Reconstruction, and about his forthcoming study of post-emancipation Alabama. Fitzgerald is a prolific author, with two highly-acclaimed monographs, a number of important articles and a recent survey in print, and a third major monograph on the way. He took part in the AS-sponsored Wiles Symposium and contributed an essay to the edited volume After Slavery: Race, Labor and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South (Florida, 2013).

BB: Lets talk a little about your background and your earlier work and then move on to discuss the book you are finishing up on Reconstruction in Alabama. First of all, where are you from originally?

MF: I was raised in Canoga Park, California, which is a suburb in the west end of the San Fernando Valley. My Dad is from Chicago, and my mom is from Florida. I was a kid in the 1960s and early 1970s. I did my BA and PhD at UCLA.

BB: Who did you work with there?

MF: Alex Saxton was my chair, and was a model of political engagement combined with tolerance. Armstead Robinson was there for a couple of years while I was coming in and was very helpful in terms of focusing my research on Reconstruction, as was Margaret Washington. But my dad was a history teacher, so we did the whole Gettysburg tour, and we had history books around the house. And with a mother from the South and a dad from the North, the race relations stuff of the sixties was being very much talked about in our home, even in Los Angeles. So Im part of that generation for whom watching the racial chaos of the sixties and the seventies play out had a strong impact.

BB: Thats interesting. One of the things that I saw as I was reading up and thinking about this is that while you were working on your PhD you were working on the Marcus Garvey Papers. To what extent you see that experience feeding into your later scholarship and interests?

MF: Well, very much so. I actually teach African American history here, but it had never occurred to me that I was an African Americanist rather than a Civil War era historian. Certainly the notion that black nationalism is a force in American life has been muted by the political agenda of Reconstruction scholarship, which tends towards celebration of the integrationist impulse of the Radical Republican movement. That issue has been more interesting for me than for a lot of Reconstruction scholars because I do see the community sentiment as one of the things that is driving black politics in the Reconstruction era. While I was writing my dissertation, I spent a couple of years as a graduate student doing that, and those sets of issues were on my mind as I was writing the manuscript.

BB: How close was your first book, about the Union League in the Deep South, to what your dissertation was?

MF: It is my dissertation, almost unedited. Essentially what Im looking at is the first black political mobilization and seeing it largely as a labor phenomenon, as driven by African American disaffection with gang labor, overseers, women and kids in the workforce, the kind of centralized plantation system derived from slavery. Its incredibly unpopular among the freedmen. And the political mobilization of Reconstruction becomes a force tearing the old structure of the plantation apart and pushing in the direction of sharecropping. The argument is essentially that the labor mobilization, the explosive mobilization in 1867, 1868 into the Union Leagues is one of the reasons why decentralized farming takes hold. White planters start to decide they have to rent land to freedmen because the freedmen are just not working in a way that they can make a profit on. And the reason this is interesting is that in graduate school my major political activity was organizing tenant union locals for Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, the West L.A. tenant movement. My buddies were all activists in that movement. And it was funny because UCLA in the late seventies, early eighties was this pronounced social history, left place, and I was kind of on the moderate end of that because I actually believed in electoral politics. The tenant union activities resonated with what I was finding in Alabama in terms of how outside organizers could start things rolling. In terms of the emotional energy of the book, thats kind of what inspired me, that I was playing off the ideas with what I was finding doing tenant politics in the late seventies, early eighties.

BB: In some ways that sounds similar to the scholarship from that period and a little bit before on the Populists. Things like Lawrence Goodwyns work and Robert McMaths on how does a movement work, how does organization happen.

MF: And I was reading those books. As an undergraduate I actually read the long version of Goodwyns book when it first came out. I was very into it.

BB: How did you choose Alabama and Mississippi for your dissertation?

MF: Theres a charming story. Im in my first year as a graduate student, and I read about this movement in Armstead Robinsons seminar. And I said, Union Leagues, thats really interesting. So I go over to the old card catalogue in the university research library and look up Union League, and theres almost nothing there. And I say, Gee, how frustrating. And then I thought about it and said, Hey, wait a minute, this is interpretively significant. Theres nothing here. And it turns out almost nothings been written. Well, the last full-scale history of Alabama in Reconstruction is Fleming in 1905. There really hasnt been a full revisionist state study, though certainly elements have been done. And so once I got into it, I realized that there was some writing room. Thats one thing. And the other thing is I was thinking a two-state study because you dont want to have it be utterly unique to the politics of one state rather than the other. Alabama has the best evidence, and I spent more time on Alabama than I did on Mississippi.

BB: Is that part of why you got interested in Alabama and stuck with Alabama for the Urban Emancipation book?

MF: Yeah. You know, Im not at a big research university. Im at a liberal arts college, which means that time to pick up a whole new field and do it comes tougher to me. So if you want to do good scholarship, the inclination is to stick with things you know and expand on them. And thats what Ive done. In fact, Armstead Robinson told me in the old days, Alabama, nobodys done it. Go do it. And he was right. So the Reconstruction in Alabama book I am writing now is the culmination of my career, and it draws on all the work Ive done.

BB: Before talking about Urban Emancipation, I wanted to take a digression into a couple of the articles that you did. You did an article in Agricultural History about the motivations for the Ku Klux Klan. Also the article in the recent After Slavery collection builds on that and expands that. Both of those emphasize the connection between Ku Klux Klan activity and the material circumstances brought about by emancipation. In some ways, the argument that the Ku Klux Klan was responding to petty property theft by African Americans is something that Walter Fleming would have agreed with. The question that leads me to is, what kinds of things can we take from the very old generation of scholarship, like Fleming and so forth, to use as a basis for current studies? (Obviously not the assumptions about racial hierarchy) But more than some other scholars of our generation, I think your work often goes back and says, Well, wait a minute, there is a good idea here. Lets see what we can do with it.

MF: Youre probably referring to the Fleming essay also that I have in that new book about the Dunning School. The problem with redeeming Fleming is that hes a Klan enthusiast. He really thinks that in order to get what whites need, racial violence was essential. And he rather applauds it. Once he wrote his Reconstruction book, he actually collaborates with Klan-style groups to promulgate the memory of the wonderful KKK. The founders of the KKK wrote a memoir, and Fleming wrote the introduction to that memoir accusing them of backsliding, that they arent enthusiastic enough about the wondrous violence they used. So its hard to get happy around Walter Lynwood Fleming. But hes there. Hes intelligent, and the other thing is that he has letters that former Klansmen wrote him that he sticks in the footnotes. He provides us all these wonderful primary sources for Ryland Randolph and other really unpleasant people. So the fact is that theres all kind of evidence from racists that this white supremacist guy has access to that we dont. The other thing is that his animating view is that class the tension between Black Belt planters and whites up in the hillsreally is a big thing in white Democratic politics. Hes not wrong about that. There are elements of what he does that you can take, but you need to say what he is all about, very clearly. The part of those two Klan essays that people could object to is that I do think that whats going on is that as the shift goes on from gang labor, overseers, and the rest, to decentralized tenant farming, like sharecropping, that you go from a situation where the planters are feeding the hands and feeding their families, as part of the wage, to a situation where the hands are providing their own provisions over the crop year by borrowing money from the planter or the local merchants. So they are in a situation where they are providing for themselves. And when you have a bad crop, there is a tendency for them to steal somebodys hog and remember, this is the era of open ranging, where people dont fence in their hogs, but they actually send them off into the woods. And now freedmen have dogs and guns. So if you take the planters correspondence seriously, they wail about it all the time: The freedmen are stealing our hogs.

Its not a major motive for the Klan. The major motive for the Klan is electoral violence and putting black people generally in their place. But if were talking about a third-tier motive, and one that is easily defended in the public sphere, they talk about theft all the time. If there is an issue of a freedman appropriating their livestock, the planters they can live with it, if cotton pays, but what about the neighbors who were not planters? If freedmen are stealing anything, its going to be from both groups, but only one group gets the benefit from the labor of freedmen. Im not sure if I used the term in the article, but I think its like an ethnic cleansing from the point of view of non-planter whites who really want to drive the freedmen out of their neighborhood for a number of reasons. I think thats what is going on.

BB: Kind of like later whitecapping violence where poor white tenants are driving all the African Americans out of the neighborhood so they can get better wages and better terms.

MF: The other thing is a lot of poor whites are moving from the piedmont and the hills down to the Tennessee Valley or other areas, so they dont like freedmen as rivals as tenants either. And thats another mechanism thats driving this along. What I would also say is that there is a difference between the two articles. When I did the first research, which was in the Agricultural History piece in the late nineties, the research method was to take my list of four hundred or so indicted Klansmen and try to find them in the reels of microfilm and whatever indexes existed. It was a laborious process. It was driven by just, Oh, that name sounds familiar, let me double check on my list. So theres sort of a haphazard quality to it, and I just did 1870. I did the agricultural census, and I did the population census. I found, lo and behold, of everybody I could find that was indicted as a Klansman, they are almost all destitute. So the median wealth for accused Klansmen in 1870 that I found in that first case was zero. They just have no money. And theyre all in their early twenties, and theyre all, so far as I can tell, poor. So I figured, okay, first article, poor whites attacking labor rivals, attacking people for these kinds of class reasons. By the time I wrote the second article, the piece for our anthology, we have Ancestry.com and other things where you can find them more readily. So I took the research back to 1860, too. Theyre still poor in 1870. I found more names, and theyre still quite poor, but if you go back to the families in 1860 before the Civil War, they werent so poor. A lot of them are from slave-holding families. About half of the ones I could find are from slave-holding families, some of them prosperous slaveholders. In 1870, theyre poor. In 1860, theyre not, which kind of gives you a sense of their potential motivation. They come from families who have been impoverished by the war. The two articles are in tension simply because the research available to me changed. But I think that the newer version is interesting, too.

BB: One of the things you were talking about just then about poor whites moving down from the hills into the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt, in some ways that parallels the movement of African Americans from the countryside into the city of Mobile. So that might be a good transition for you to talk about your Mobile book. How was it different studying a city from the very rural environments of your first book?

MF: My first book has a chapter on whats going on in the cities, and a good deal of that chapter deals with Mobile. The thing that struck me was this chaotic factional situation in Mobile where two different factions of the Republican party, largely black and native white, are at each others throats to the point that you had actual fistfights, real fights between two Republican factions. And I was wondering, What in Gods name is going on in Mobile? So as I began to ponder the next project, I got intrigued with trying to figure out what the Mobile explanation was. What I found was that there were two factions, both of them interracially led. Theres kind of a moderate, native white southerner-dominated faction of which all the leaders are light-skinned according to the ones I could find in the census theyre all lightskinned, literate, and a good number of them are Afro-Creoles. So you have this group that is sort of into legal means. You have another group, led by carpetbaggers, and kind of stereotypical carpetbaggers, where the leadership is all dark-skinned, and most of them are former slaves and not as literate as the other group. This Radical group is much more inclined toward mass action: streetcar occupations to integrate streetcars, strikes on the docks. And these two groups are struggling for leadership all through the era to the point that they actually defeat an incumbent Radical Republican congressman, an African American congressman, because they ran a moderate light-skinned Creole against him and divided the Republican vote. This dispute ties into broader social trends. What I did was I analyzed this urban black factionalism, and tied it to the process of emancipation. Huge numbers of freedmen are moving into the suburbs of Mobile, and these immiserated recent migrants from the countryside become the basis for all this direct action on the docks and in streetcar occupations and in other forms of popular direct action tactics. I wish the book had gotten more attention because I think its a model for whats going on in southern cities. You can analyze Republican factionalism in terms of whats going on in the black community in the urban areas where factionalism is most intense, because there are patronage positions for activists to fight over.

BB: Steve Wests recent article about black politics in Greenville, South Carolina, a year or two ago is a little bit like that. Hes actually talking there about the late 1880s, and elections there over whether the city is going to be wet or dry.

MF: There was a book on blacks in Charlotte, I think, back fifteen or twenty years ago, that found very strong differences over the prohibition issue between the respectable middle-class folks, which I think is part of the West article, if I remember correctly, and political activists who are Republican party people who are more in touch with this broader constituency that is not thrilled with this. I think that actually kind of works here. Theres also an interesting thing in that book about this subculture of black activists who are dependent on federal jobs and how their lives work as political activists and how they support themselves as political activists. My sense is that no one has done it. The problem is that a one-city study doesnt get as much attention as it deserves in terms of the wider interpretation, which is something youre going to discover when your magnum opus on Greenville comes out.

BB: Right, whenever that is! Although youre working on the big book on Alabama, and well come back to that in a moment, you did write a much broader scope book a few years ago called Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in America. Could you talk a bit about the experience of why you chose to write that, how it obviously the elephant in the room is Eric Foners Reconstruction how the view of Reconstruction that you present in your book varies from the view that has become standard from Foners synthesis?

MF: Im quite an admirer of Foners. I think that his book is still the gold standard, and everyone has to situate themselves relative to the excellence of that work. In particular, his emphasis in the late 1860s on the interconnection between whats going on on the plantation and popular politics is very consistent with my Union League stuff. So Im a thorough admirer. But Ive spent, now, twenty-five years teaching in the classroom, and Ive tried to assign Foners short history, and its so good and so sophisticated that I had trouble getting my excellent, smart undergraduates to engage with it. I had an undergraduate who went on to library school, from Atlanta no less, who told me she skipped reading the book for my Civil War class! I was trying to figure out what portions of the Reconstruction struggle could be communicated effectively to an undergraduate audience. Another reason for writing the book is that some scholarship has come out since Foner. Factionalism in the black community is something Im very interested in. And the railroad issue is interesting to me. I was trying to integrate African American agency into the decisions on railroad programs that turn out so badly. They arent really responsible, but I do think we should pay attention to at least how theyre thinking about these issues. Ive always been an admirer of Mark Summerss book on railroads. So class within the black community, faction within the black community, and the economic development issues that dont get a tremendous amount of emphasis in Foners book I think are important. The other thing was the press approached me and asked if I wanted to do this. It occurred to me vaguely that if I wanted to write a Reconstruction history of Alabama, I needed a better grounding in national politics. It forced me to do the background reading in other states and Washington, D.C. Im conceptualizing what Im doing in Alabama as what state studies might look like going forward. I felt like I wanted to contextualize it in the national context because, to tell you the truth, to go back to Fleming, Fleming thinks his Alabama study is the South writ small. I would follow that aspect of his work. Alabama is, to some extent, the model Deep South state, and it is so central to the national consciousness of how the civil rights movement played out that I think that its a nice place. Because there havent been a lot of state revisionist studies, or post-Foner full scale histories of states. What that means is that Flemings book remains the standard place to look for the narrative for Alabama, and thats ridiculous in the twenty-first century.

BB: If we think about the revisionist period, there are a lot of other state studies. So if we think about the Dunning School, and he sends his various students off to do their state studies, then we did get, in the revisionist period, other state studies of particular states. So, Simkins and Woody start things off with South Carolina. Its not as revisionist as some of that later ones. And then you get other studies like Jerrell Shoffner for Florida, and so forth. And in all these various states, but why do you think, in the context of Reconstruction historiography, Alabama historiography, why didnt somebody write a book about Reconstruction in Alabama?

MF: I have no idea. Maybe Atlanta is a cooler place to do research than Montgomery. I dont know. Ive always thought Montgomery is an interesting place. It has a lot of history. Another reason for this absence is that scholars know a state study is probably not going to galvanize the whole field, whereas detailed studies on some novel angle that is of interest to people oftentimes make a bigger splash. But let me tell you what I think is going to be my contribution with the Reconstruction in Alabama book. Beyond just the synthesis of everything else Ive done, my sense of the great accomplishment of Foners book is to take the scholarship on, and use the fresh primary source materials in the Freedom papers project, at the University of Maryland to excellent advantage. He integrates whats happening socially on the plantations with the great political struggle of military Reconstruction when blacks get the right to vote. So for the late 1860s, its a wonderful synthesis of political and social history, and its exactly the sort of thing I was trained to do at UCLA in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. This is the brilliance of Foners work, and in the fact that its so utterly plausible. But only the last hundred pages of Foners book deal with the period after the Greeley election, after 1872. His interpretationits still greatbut in terms of the labor connection to Reconstruction politics, it kind of runs out of steam in the early seventies. And you see less of it. He talks about the depressions impact, certainly. I think you might make an argument that whats going on in Alabama in the 1870s is kind of like whats going on in South Carolina, with fairly strong divisions among the white opposition. The place I would look for this is Permans book on factional politics during Reconstruction. Heres what I would say. Foners argument in his Reconstruction book is that the Klan is led by planters. The upper class, the political elite has decided that Reconstruction is intolerable, and that violence is the only way they can beat people at the polls and put black people back in their subordinate position. I think hes right. The Klan has, early on, a lot of elite participation, and at a time when plantation agriculture is collapsing, 1867, there is a lot of fury among planters. And theres a lot of violence coming from planters and overseers in 1865 and 1866 as they try and deal with people on the basis of freedom. So Foners argument is that the Klan is upper-class led. But with sharecropping, a couple of years in, the plantation system improves.

Once the freedmen go to work as sharecroppers and the price of cotton recovers, planters are not so desperate anymore. And in 1870 when the Democrats temporarily regain the governors office in Alabama, I think you start getting a conservative push-back of planters who are tired of the violence and whose major issue is becoming labor shortage. Once cotton reaches twenty cents a pound, tenants are really desired. Big planters really dont like it when you push their tenants out. And by 1871, 1872, the Greeley campaign, this dissident conservative tradition reemerges, especially in the old Whig counties of the black belt. Part of this is that the Klan is driving so many freedmen into their neighborhoods that the areas that are not violent have this relative surplus of labor. I did something sort of interesting, statistically. The way to do a quantitative sample of wealth among black people is to use this 1 percent sample of the census that the demographic history program at the University of Minnesota has. What I found is the freedmen in 1870 are poorer in the richest areas of the Black Belt than just about anywhere else. So workers are being driven from areas where blacks are more prosperous to the areas where theres so much labor that theres a surplus. These are the richest areas of Alabama, and freedmen are keeping less of their money. Somebody must be making money off them. You read the planters letters, and they say, Oh, weve got 60 percent, 100 percent interest rates down at the store. Things are going really nicely. I think whats going on is that in the early seventies there is a real attempt among a lot of planters to try and coexist with the black majorities that they think will be permanently governing their counties. I think thats whats going on. Whats interesting is that I think that Foner, because he tends to see the planters as the villains, hes missing the stuff that Perman is talking about, about these former Whigs who are moving towards some kind of coexistence, or are trying to win through less violent methods. It makes sense to integrate the labor and the political history. It just doesnt play out the same way in the seventies that it does in the sixties. Then in the fall of 1873, the economy collapses, everything tanks, and the planters suddenly instead of having a labor shortage are trying to desperately drive people away from their plantations. And theres this big wave of theft fears again. So what happens is you get this white-line, White League as the political situation changes. And some planters still arent that thrilled. You find in South Carolina that the planters oppose racial extremists in the areas where blacks are 80 percent, 90 percent of the population. I think its exactly whats happening in Alabama. So what I think my book is doing is taking the Foner labor emphasis and extending it to the seventies with somewhat different results. Theres this conservative subculture who hadnt been thrilled with secession, who hadnt been thrilled with the war going on and on, and had basically been persuaded that states-rights Democrats crazy people had wrecked their lives and they were going to do it again. The argument is that there is a subculture of whites whose racial views dont move them towards the more extreme forms of violenceuntil the economy tanks in 1874.

BB: So with your book, what is the end date going to be?

MF: Theres a new constitution in Alabama in 1875. It solidifies a lot of stuff. I know that people talk about the long Reconstruction but my Reconstruction is already long enough because to make the argument Im making, I have to go back before the war and talk about the origins of conservative dissent. So I dont even get to the African American core chapter till Chapter Five because Ive got to do the war, Ive got to do occupation, Ive got to do the impact of whats going on in Presidential Reconstruction. So my book ends in 75 because I figure my lifespan is finite. I need to finish this damn thing.

BB: Certainly the new constitution is a good end-point. In a way, theres a long Reconstruction in some places, and a shorter one in Alabama or in southwest Georgia as Susan ODonovan found. Reconstruction is effectively over for African Americans by 1868. They dont even really get much out of the seventies.

MF: And part of this that is just distressingly current is the amazing number of ways to prevent local black majorities from meaning anything. There are counties where blacks are still a majority, but they just strip those counties of self-governing powers. Theres a board of supervisors, but they have no power. The power is officials appointed by the governor. You set up a committee to vet jurors so African Americans wont serve on juries. Its very impressive. The ways you can make an electoral system do what you want it to if you decide to play games with the ballot box is incredibly instructive in our contemporary situation. Im sort of hoping there are some lessons there.

Bibliography

Fitzgerald, Michael William. The Union League movement in Alabama and Mississippi : politics and agricultural change in the deep South during Reconstruction. Ph.D. diss, UCLA, 1986.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. The Ku Klux Klan: Property Crime and the Plantation System in Reconstruction Alabama. Agricultural History 71 (Spring 1997): 186-206.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. Splendid Failure: Postwar Reconstruction in the American South. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. The Steel Frame of Walter Lynwood Fleming. In The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction, edited by John David Smith and J. Vincent Lowery, 157-178. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

Fitzgerald, Michael W. Ex-Slaveholders and the Ku Klux Klan: Exploring the Motivations of Terrorist Violence. In After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, edited by Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly, 143-158. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Goodwyn, Lawrence. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

McMath, Robert C. Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers Alliance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

ODonovan, Susan Eva. Becoming Free in the Cotton South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Summers, Mark W. Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

West, Steven A. A Hot Municipal Contest: Prohibition and Politics in Greenville, South Carolina after Reconstruction. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era11 (Oct. 2012): 519-51.

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Donald Trump Jr.’s Wife Vanessa Files for Divorce, ‘Long …

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3/15/2018 2:21 PM PDT

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Donald Trump Jr.'s wife is filing to divorce him after nearly 13 years of marriage.

Vanessa Trump filed docs Thursday in the Manhattan courts, and she's seeking an uncontested proceeding. That's a strong sign the couple has already hammered out details of their split, such as child custody and property.

Sources connected to the family tell TMZ the divorce has been a long time coming, and the relationship has been "bad for a while." Among the issues, Vanessa "hates politics and Don Jr. is gone all the time."

One source says contrary to being upset, Don Jr. is "relieved."

They have 5 children together -- between the ages of 3 and 10, and got married in 2005.

According to the NY Post, which first reported the split, Vanessa's been upset about some of his controversial tweets ... most of which defendPresident Trump and his policies.

Vanessa got a major scare just last month, when she received an envelope with white powder, and a hate letter for Don Jr. that read, in part, "You the family idiot. This is the reason why people hate you. You are getting what you deserve." The powder turned out to be corn starch, and the sender was eventually arrested.

Our sources say that incident absolutely "freaked her out."

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What is Slavery?: The Abolition of Slavery Project

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Slavery refers to a condition in which individuals are owned by others, who control where they live and at what they work. Slavery had previously existed throughout history, in many times and most places. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, Incas and Aztecs all had slaves.

Whatdoes it mean to be aslave or enslaved person?

To be a slave is to be owned by another person. A slave is a human being classed as property and who is forced to work for nothing. An enslaved person is a human being who is made to be a slave. This language is often used instead of the word slave, to refer to the person and their experiences and to avoid the use of dehumanising language.

What doesit mean to be a Chattel Slave?

A chattel slave is an enslaved person who is owned for ever and whose children and children's children are automatically enslaved. Chattel slaves are individuals treated as complete property, to be bought and sold.

Chattel slavery was supported and made legal by European governments and monarchs. This type of enslavement was practised in European colonies, from the sixteenth century onwards.

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Psychedelics Facts | Drug Policy Alliance

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Psychedelic drugs include LSD (acid), psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline (found in peyote), ibogaine, salvia, and DMT (found in ayahuasca). Psychedelic substances have been used for thousands of years for religious and therapeutic purposes.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychedelic drugs such as LSD were considered promising treatments for a broad range of psychological and psychiatric conditions. Tens of thousands of people were introduced to them in clinical studies, as an adjunct to psychotherapy, or as part of a religious or spiritual practice.

By the late 1960s, however, as millions of people experimented with them, psychedelics became symbols of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent. By the early 1970s, the government had halted scientific research to evaluate their medical safety and efficacy. The ban persisted for decades, but has gradually been lifted over the past decade.

Today, there are dozens of studies taking place to evaluate the medical safety and efficacy of psychedelics, and the Supreme Court has ruled that psychedelics can be used as part of the practices of certain organized religions.

The time has come for people who care about psychedelics to step out of the shadows and bring their voices to the table.

Support psychedelic justice.

Sources:

Grinspoon, Lester and James B. Bakalar. 1997. Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered. New York: The Lindesmith Center.

Grob, Charles and Roger Walsh, ed. Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Expore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics. SUNY University of New York Press, 2005.

Stamets, Paul, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1996.

Stolaroff, Myron. The Secret Chief. Sarasota, FL: MAPS, 2006.

Strassman, R. J. 1984. Adverse Reactions to Psychedelic Drugs: A Review of the Literature. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 172: 577-95.

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Japan Suffers the Biggest Cryptocurrency Heist in History …

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TOKYOOn Friday evening in Japan, one of the biggest virtual currency exchanges in Asia, Coincheck, announced that it had lost 58 billion units of the cryptocurrency NEM, worth roughly $530 million dollars, which may well be the biggest cryptocurrency heist in history.

For those of us with a long memory, the press conference was eerily reminiscent of Feb. 28, 2014, when Mt. Gox, once the worlds largest bitcoin exchange, declared bankruptcy and announced that it had lost over $500 million worth of bitcoins to hackers. (The figure was later revised down to $430 million.)

This new incident is an embarrassment to the Japanese government, which has been trying to make Tokyo the global center for cryptocurrency.

According to Coincheck at its press conference on Friday, and on its webpage announcements, hackers first broke into the firms NEM accounts at 2:57 a.m. Friday, local time, on Jan. 25.

The security breach went undetected, however, until almost 11:30 that morning.

According to sources close to Japans Financial Services Agency, hackers using overseas servers were able to disguise themselves as authorized users and enter the system. They then withdrew large amounts of NEM, spreading the withdrawals out several times during the eight and a half hours they went undetected.

Yusuke Otsuka, the chief operating officer of Coincheck, confirmed suspicions that the firms cyber security was subpar when, at the press conference, he admitted that the stolen currency had been kept on-line in a hot wallet rather than a much more secure offline storage facility known as a cold wallet.

In laymans terms, it would be like a convenience store in a bad neighborhood keeping $50,000 in large bills in the cash register, rather than periodically depositing the money in a bank vault off the premises.Mark Karpeles, the former CEO of Mt. Gox, told The Daily Beast, The firm also did not use an extra layer of security known as a multi-signature system.

Company executives offered some assurances that they might recover the funds, enigmatically stating, We know where the funds (NEMs) were sent. We are tracing them and when they are cashed out, it may be be possible to get them back.

The firm has notified Japans Financial Services Agency and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. The police have not yet officially opened an investigation.

The Financial Services Agency, which had warned the firm about lax cybersecurity measures in recent months, gave the company a bureaucratic slap on the wrist, but one that may turn into a serious penalty. The agency demanded Coincheck turn in a report on the hack and the countermeasures for preventing a recurrence by the middle of February. The FSA also announced Monday, that it would begin inspecting other cryptocurrency exchanges and may conduct on-site inspections.

Coincheck suspended trading in all cryptocurrencies except bitcoin on Friday. The firm has said it would reimburse the 260,000 customers who lost NEM, but not at the full rate at the time of the theft. It currently estimates this will cost 460 billion yen ($430 million), based on the firms pre-theft assessed value for the NEM. There is some skepticism that it will be able to do this solely with internal funds. The firm has not said when it would reimburse the customers.

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In reality, the firms webpage and its contracts absolve it of the responsibility to pay back customers for any losses they suffer. The terms of use clearly state, In the event that due to hacking or other means, our assets are stolen we can fully suspend, partially suspend or cancel services provided to the user without notice.

Public reaction to the crypto-heist has been rather muted, so far. Few were feeling much sympathy for Koichiro Wada, the president of the company, who seemed insufficiently apologetic at the press conference. (Mark Karpeles may have made a deeper bow after the Mt. Gox incident, and hes not Japanese.)

When netizens dug up an old tweet in which Wada ridiculed a homeless woman, some expressed glee at seeing him brought down a few pegs. Yet due to the companys promise to pay back the users, the impact still seems small.

One of the more amusing responses came from the newly formed cryptocurrency-themed all-girl band, Virtual Currency Girls, which debuted this month. The group is composed of eight members, clad in masks and frilly maid uniforms, each one representing a virtual currency, such as bitcoin cash, ethereum, and of course, NEM.

In a hastily convened press conference on Saturday, the girls said that the freezing of accounts at Coincheck would temporarily affect their salaries. Their management offered to pay them in cash (yen) but the girls insisted that they would wait for Coincheck to resume full-operations and be paid in virtual currency, As a point of pride.

Koharu Kamikawa, the 17-year-old member who is the bands NEM avatar, had stern words for the perpetrators. Its absolutely bad [what you did]. I want to say to the hacker, You jerk, you stupid jerk. Give everyone back their NEM!

If only it were that easy, or hackers cared about the feelings of aspiring 17-year-old Japanese pop stars.

Japan has taken tremendous steps in the last year to become a center of cryptocurrency while China, Korea, and other countries are cracking down on them and their users.

In April of 2017, Japan officially recognized bitcoin as legal tender. In September last year, the Financial Services Agency (FSA) recognized 11 cryptocurrency trading exchanges, giving them semi-official status. Over 30 percent of global bitcoin transactions are conducted in yen.

But much of the activity surrounding cryptocurrency, including Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), which are essentially a form of crowdfunding centered around a cryptocurrency, fall into a gray zone. The FSA may issue guidance and warnings, but if youre a cryptocurrency trader in Japan, let the user beware has to be your motto.

If Coincheck goes under or cant repay the users, it may be the beginning of a problem that Japan will have to fix if it wants to be at the heart of the virtual currency world.

There is also the question of whether the Japanese police have the will or the ability to go after the hackers. If they dont, more crypto-heists are likely to occur.

Mark Karpeles told The Daily Beast in an email, The hack of NEM assets was due to their lack of use of cold wallet. It means someone breached into their server, potentially gaining access to information such as their user database. Only a forensic analysis of the breached server(s) will allow to tell how much data was accessed, and it is unlikely such information will be released, considering how the Japanese police acted so far Efforts to arrest crypto-currency thieves require more than one countrys law enforcement to work.

The Japanese police never apprehended the hackers of Mt. Gox, but they did arrest Mark Karpeles as a scapegoat, as detailed in the book which I wrote with Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky, Pay the Devil in Bitcoin: The Creation of a Cryptocurrency and How Half a Billion Dollars of It Vanished from Japan. Karpeles is still on trial four years after the hack was discovered.

Up to now pop idol groups, manga, robots, and anime have been the core of Japans tourist promoting strategy known as Cool Japan, but it seems that adoption of cryptocurrency (and the girl band promoting it) is now also part of the Cool Japan agenda as seen by Japans Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

If thats the case, putting in place some real regulations, and maybe getting major cryptocurrency exchanges to at least store their funds in cold wallets is what the new Cool Japan needs to do.

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Rationalism vs. Romanticism | Ramblings of a Psychology …

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Rationalism is a particular view about the way the world is; what we can know about it; and a bit about what people are like.

The basic idea is that you cant trust your senses, only your intellect. There are a number of reasons for believing this, the simplest and most commonly-cited of which are the ones listed by Descartes, often thought of as the first rationalist, in his Meditations. One is that sometimes your senses deceive you; for example, a straight stick in a glass of water looks bent. As Descartes put it, it is unwise to ever really trust those who have deceived you once; if your senses deceive you sometimes, how do you know they arent deceiving you all the time?

Descartes examined everything he believed, and if he thought it was even possible that he might be wrong, he cast that belief out; in the end, the only thing he was sure he knew was that he was thinking, and it takes something to be there to be thinking, so he could infer that he existed (this move has been criticized by later philosophers). Rationalists see the existence of external objects as open to doubt.

On top of this, Descartes added a set of things he could be sure about because they were true by definition, like all triangles have three corners or all bachelors are unmarried men. These are things he could know without knowing anything else about the world (called a priori in philosophy) and that everyone is born knowing (because they are true by definition, you cannot not know them; thats contentious, but its what he said. These are called innate beliefs). For this reason, rationalism is also used to describe any view that attributes a lot of significance to mental properties or innate intellectual abilities; in trying to explain how children learn to speak, Naom Chomsky famously said that children are born with an innate aptitude for language, almost like knowing a language all of their own, before they are born; this is a rationalist approach to language-learning.

Romanticism is a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.It Elicits emotion and glamorizes the events. Not romantic as in candles, soft music, and good food, but romanticism as in patriotism, nationalism, or devotion to a cause

Romanticism was a reaction to rationalism as much as it was a result of the social changes. As rationalism became more popular, more people started questioning the assumption that human nature was rooted in rationalism. The romantics are the philosophers and literary writers who addressed irrational motivations in human nature, particularly emotions.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was considered the first romanticist, and romanticism grew with the increasing popularity of his books. In The Social Contract, Rousseau questions the whole idea that people need government and argues that education

should focus on individuality, not society.

Man is born free and yet we see him everywhere in chains.

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Michio Kaku Discussing Transhuman Technologies Dawn of …

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In this news piece*, renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku talks about recording and transferring thoughts in mice (yes, its actually being done in labs right now!) and speculates on the ability to digitally upload consciousnessand basically become immortal.

Iliked the part about thought-directed computers (aka neural or brain-computer interfaces). I cant wait until I can do these posts directly from my brain!

How about the pill that slows down time? That was a new one to me Wow!

*The title of this video is Uploading Consciousness & Digital Immortality | Interview with Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku The sources are listed below:

Published on Mar 29, 2014

Breaking the Sets Manuel Rapalo speaks with theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku, about his latest book The Future of the Mind discussing a the how realistic it would be to digitally upload memories and consciousness, and why were living in the Golden Age of studying the human mind.

LIKE Breaking the Set @ http://fb.me/JournalistAbbyMartinFOLLOW Manuel Rapalo @ http://twitter.com/Manuel_Rapalo

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Transhuman Code – A concept by WISeKey SA

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Digitalization is the new normal with disruptive waves to the economy, business models, consumer choices and demands.Today, we must acknowledge that we are either building a future of technological grandeur at the expense of what makes us magnificent, or we are building a future of human grandeur with the help of magnificent technology. The path we collectively choose will determine whether our future is bleak or bright.

We urge your commitment to #maketechhuman because technology shall serve people and not people serve technology. This is humanitys manifesto for choosing wisely:

To fully reap the benefits of digitalization and technology, all humans must have quality access to connectivity. Governments shall be committed to the expansion of next-generation smart infrastructure, and establish principles of technological neutrality, through a simplified, market-oriented, and transparent regulatory environment, and through incentives to invest in less profitable areas, as well as by fostering investments for skill and capacity building.

Securing the privacy of every human being is paramount to realizing the full potential of our future. Therefore, personal data conveyed over the Internet or stored in devices connected to the Internet is owned and solely governed by the individual. It is paramount to protect all citizens in the all-digital age.AI systems should use tools, including anonymized data, de-identification, or aggregation to protect personally identifiable information whenever possible.

An array of emerging digital threats may harm citizens. Users must trust that their personal and sensitive data is protected and handled appropriately. We strongly support the protection of the foundation of AI and other technologies, including source code, proprietary algorithms, and other intellectual property. We believe governments should avoid requiring companies to transfer or provide access to technology, source code, algorithms, or encryption keys as conditions for doing business. We encourage governments to use strong, globally-accepted and deployed cryptography and other security standards that enable trust and interoperability. We also promote voluntary information-sharing on cyberattacks or hacks to better enable consumer protection.

Respecting the authority and autonomy of every human being is paramount to realizing the full potential of our future. Therefore, personal digital data will not be used as research, rationale, enticement or commodity by any entity or individual, except with the explicit, well-informed, revocable consent of the individual owner of the data.

Improving the human condition is paramount to realizing the full potential of our future. Therefore, a universal code of ethics reflecting the highest order of human values will govern the development, implementation, and use of technology.

Advancing human faculties is paramount to realizing the full potential of our future. Therefore, to that end, the secure, approved, and accountable aggregation of personal information and resources to increase our individual abilities is a fundamental objective of technology.

Advocating and innovating the greatest good for all humanity is paramount to realizing the full potential of our future. Therefore, technology, no matter how advanced, will never supersede the spiritual purposes or the moral rights and responsibilities of any human being anywhere. Technology will serve humanitys needs.

Democratizing human vision, ingenuity, and education is paramount to realizing the full potential of our future. Therefore, technology will remain humanitys greatest collaborator but never represent humanity itself.

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Transhuman Code - A concept by WISeKey SA