Well an awful lot of it has to do with the price of Oil.

Also Chavez chose not to completely crush the Neoliberal/Capitalists the way Castro did. So they were waiting…gestating…growing…like one of those Alien babies inside a host…

Thats also why i am not optimistic about Amerika. Even if a bernie gets elected
the powers-that-be will just wait him out.

w
v

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

Since I’ve known you, you have never said anything like “I like capitalism” or “I dont like capitalism” — What can you say about what you think about ‘Capitalism’.

Say…’something‘.

At this point, capitalism exists.

It however can’t be allowed to run things because that’s purely undemocratic. Right now it runs things. Will capitalism change? Most likely. Can it be altered, limited, modified, transformed into something else and better? Yes that’s possible. What keeps it in place as it is, is beliefs.

wv wrote:

I can never really make sense of what you mean when you talk about not liking ‘philosophical’ answers to ‘big questions.’ I wish you could put that another way. What is a ‘philosophical answer to a big question’? Give me an example.

It;s just a contrast between looking at things historically, which accounts for messiness and contradictions and paradoxes and for concrete practical reality, and idealism (in the philosophical sense) or essentialism (either term really), which deduces things just based on ideas.

So for example, essentialism: since religion is lies, if we get religion out of social and public life, it will improve people. That’s a social engineering idea. Thinking about political life solely in terms of big rational ideas of justice or good is social engineering; in turn, social engineering is always based on someone’s arm chair ideas of what people are and how they can turned into what they should be instead. So another term for all this is “dogma.”

So for example in the French Revolution the Jacobins replaced Christianity with worship of the Supreme Being, a rational and deistic idea of proper spiritual belief. Result: old religion didn’t go away, it just lurked in opposition, because people don’t abandon beliefs that define them if you simply impose systematic social structures on them from the outside. So, there was chaos, the terror, the regime was always unstable, and it ended up leading to a military dictatorship (Napoleon). Napoleon, ironically, was just fine with Catholicism because it kept the masses in line. So the Jacobins were not wrong about religion making people non-revolutionary, but they tried to fix it through dogmatically imposed social engineering.

Lesson: if you dictate systematic changes from the top down that are based solely on principles of reason, you just end up creating another monstrosity.

Practical solution: there is no general, overall practical solution, those are always rooted in time and place. So in case of the French Revoluion, you don’t attack religion, you declare religious freedom generally, ally with what is practically speaking useful in existing religious belief (charity? hey good idea!), leave it alone, but exclude it from matters of state, law, economic policy, and any form of public administration.

The problem? Reason said destroy traditional religion and replace it with something that is more directly in keeping with the aims of the Jacobion revolutionary state, because that way everyone becomes better citizens, “better citizens” also being something defined by reason.

But history is messy and never does what reason says it should or ought to.

What does aligning with history mean? You do what is practically possible and necessary to achieve things organically in the name of sound political principles.

And, practically speaking, that means you have to choose which people you can never appeal to, and find ways to end-run them without The Terror or genocide. So practically speaking, there are racists, and you defeat them politically and keep them out of power. But you don’t start executing them in mass, like they did with the guillotine in The Terror.

===============

Well, so, you dont ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Capitalism?
Those value judgments about liking or disliking capitalism ‘dont compute’ in your brain?

Basically, I agree with what you wrote in that post. Basically. I basically think we are ‘stuck’ with this: “…You do what is practically possible and necessary to achieve things organically in the name of sound political principles.”

However, my reading of the ‘situation’ leads me to think its more likely than not, that we dont have ‘time’ to avert disaster doing what i just said we are ‘stuck’ with.

I also, think we may go wrong with ‘philosophical answers to big questions’ as you point out — but i still think its fine and dandy to have…oh….a meta-vision or grand unifying vision BASED on core values like ‘democracy,’ ‘love,’ ‘compassion’,
‘fairness,’ ‘critical thinking,’ ‘tolerance,’ ‘equality,’ etc.

Those values can kinda create a rough, nebulous, vison. Which is different than a ‘dogmatic philosophical answer.’ The vision is more like a guiding star. A direction. A leaning toward the light kinda thing.

….i would also say, Corporate-Capitalism ‘exists’ and its a very very bad thing, as it exists now. Its what we got though. Its where we start. And probly finish.

w
v

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

I have also ingested molecules from the singularity that expanded during the big bang fourteen billion years ago.

Well technically every molecule in existence derives from the big bang, or rather from the results of the big bang (but not from the singularity that caused it, cause that singularity existed before molecules did). It actually took a few hundred thousand years for atoms to even exist, and molecules of course came later.

See this is the thing. If you’re going to be so free with your opinions of the Rams on a dedicated Rams board, you should at least know a little something about them.

http://www.haystack.mit.edu/edu/pcr/Astrochemistry/3%20-%20MATTER/nuclear%20synthesis.pdf

In the very beginning, both space and time were created in the Big Bang. It
happened 13.7 billion years ago. Afterwards, the universe was a very hot,
expanding soup of fundamental particles. The universe expanded rapidly
during inflation and expands at a more or less constant rate now. As it
grows, it cools.
At first, the universe was dominated by radiation. Soon, quarks combined
together to form baryons (protons and neutrons). When the universe was 3
minutes old, it had cooled enough for these protons and neutrons to combine
into nuclei. This is known as the time of nucleosynthesis. Hydrogen,
helium, lithium, and beryllium were produced. Today, about 90% of the
universe is still hydrogen. Remember that only the nuclei of these atoms
were created at this time. The universe was still far too hot to allow these
nuclei to attract electrons and form atoms. That didn’t happen for another
300,000 years, at the time of recombination.
At this time the universe had cooled sufficiently for atoms to exist. Echoes
from these first atoms can still be seen in the Cosmic Microwave
Background.

===============

WEll if you are gonna post fake news about the Big Bang,
I’m just gonna have to go back to wrestling with an ethical dilemma — my 86 year old mother feeds birds on her patio. But now she has rats. Lots of em. They make her cringe and she cant enjoy her patio anymore. So she wants me to poison them. (we figured there are too many to catch and release somewhere).

I dont like the idea of poisoning things. Plus, what if they die out in the open and the crows and ravens eat the poisoned rats?

w
v

nittany ram wrote:

wv wrote:

nittany ram wrote:

This means you’ve sipped water containing molecules that have passed through Bud Grant’s urinary tract.

You need to make peace with that.

———————-

I have also ingested molecules from the singularity that expanded during the big bang fourteen billion years ago.

Which means I am one with God.

w
v

No wonder God’s been doing such a sucky job of late.

You’re a distraction.

==================

Look, not only have i ingested molecules that were around during the Big Bang — but i have ingested molecules that were around BEFORE the Big Bang/

So I’m not only one with God, I’m one with the the thing that was here before God.

Which makes me TWO with God.

Or somethin. I think. I dunno.

w
v

nittany ram wrote:

This means you’ve sipped water containing molecules that have passed through Bud Grant’s urinary tract.

You need to make peace with that.

———————-

I have also ingested molecules from the singularity that expanded during the big bang fourteen billion years ago.

Which means I am one with God.

w
v

zn wrote:

<

Juan Cole 2017.06.27 09:41
https://www.juancole.com/2017/06/accuses-planning-attacks.html

Am a huge fan of Sy Hersh; on this we disagree.

Assad would not be insane to launch chem attacks. He has been doing small ones here an there all along when his troops got in trouble. It is strategic and makes perfect sense (however morally vile and illegal it is)
—

==============
Nah, Juan makes no sense there. Assuming arguendo that Assad used some kind of gas strategically — ie, when he was on the ropes, and losing — it makes NO sense to use that kind of tactic when he was winning and had the backing of the Russians and the US had just announced it was not seeking regime change any
more. Hersh makes way more sense ‘to me’.

Bottom line, again, for me is — i wouldnt trust anything the CIA/American-MSM said about ANYTHING anymore. (or the CIA allies in Europe, ie, the European versions of the MSM) (oh, and yes that included Sy Hersh’s ‘sources’ — i dont trust them for a second)

That leaves me (and others) in a position of continuous agnosticism/skepticism about…lots of stuff.

Also, on a strange but related tangent — i have been reading Noam since the 80’s and I’ve never known him to use the term ‘false flag’ before. But recently he used the term. I think it was referring to Syria but i’m not sure. When Noam Chomsky starts tossin around terms like ‘false flag’ things are entering the Salvadore-Dali-Zone.

w
v

I share the Max Blumenthal view about Syria/Sarin/Iran/US, etc. Fwiw.

Blumenthal wrote one of my favorite books btw. About Israel, called ‘Goliath.’

w
v

==================
transcript. Video also at: http://therealnews.com/t2/story:19418:Is-Trump%27s-%27Warning%27-to-Syria-a-Prelude-to-Another-Strike%3F

Is Trump’s ‘Warning’ to Syria a Prelude to Another Strike?
June 28, 2017

Aaron Mate: It’s the Real News. I’m Aaron Mate. The US has issued a new threat to Syria over chemical weapons. On Monday, the White House said it believes Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, is preparing a new chemical weapons attack and that he would pay a heavy price if one takes place. That statement appeared to catch the Pentagon off guard, but on Tuesday, military officials said the US had picked up chemical weapons activity at the same airbase that the US bombed in April. Syria and Russia have rejected the claim and call it a provocation. The US has been ramping up military operations inside Syria, recently shooting down a Syrian warplane and increasingly targeting Iranian-backed forces. The Washington Post reports that Senior White House Officials are “focused as much on Iran as on the Islamic state.”

We’ll discuss all this. I spoke earlier with Max Blumenthal, award-winning journalist, author, and a senior editor for AlterNet’s Grayzone Project.

Let’s start with this White House statement on Syria. The Trump administration followed it up with the testimony today from Nikki Haley, the UN Ambassador, speaking to Congress. She said it was also meant as a warning to Russian and Iran.

Nikki Haley: The goal is, at this point, not just to send Assad a message, but to send Russia and Iran a message, that if this happens again, we are putting you on notice.

Aaron Mate: That was Nikki Haley speaking today in testimony to Congress. Max, can you talk about this White House statement about Syria and this potential chemical weapons attack they say and the context especially of what the Trump administration has been doing on the ground in Syria.

Max Blumenthal: First of all, this statement is bizarre by the Trump administration. We’ve seen Nikki Haley, who’s the neoconservative’s favorite member of the Trump administration take ownership of this statement, which reminds me distinctly of Bush administration statements about Iraqi WMDs, that they would launch a preemptive strike to prevent Iraq from deploying WMDs. Meanwhile, the Pentagon wasn’t alerted about the statement. There was no coordination with the State Department. This is bizarre in itself. It’s unclear what prompted the statement. However, as you mentioned or as you suggested, US troops are … Special Forces are actually training Syrian rebels on the Syrian/Iraqi border Al Tanf at the Al Waleed border crossing. US forces have just brought a advanced long-range rocket system into the area, which is supposedly a deconfliction zone.

They’re operating from within 100 kilometers of what is effectively a US base on the Syrian/Iraqi border, and they’re there to prevent what would amount to at least a symbolic land route between Ramadi and Iraq where a Shiite majority, which is friendly with Iran, controls the government through Syria to Lebanon to Hezbollah, which is the Shia militia, which functions in many ways as a proxy of Iran and has been supported by the Syrian government and effectively has been one of the most effective element of military resistance against Israel, one of the few ones left. The US is doing this partly in coordination with Israel and Saudi Arabia, which fears this nebulous concept of a Shiite crescent across the Middle East, and it’s doing it to help partition Syria. That’s one of the reasons why the mostly Kurdish Syrian defense force was armed, to take Raqqa back from ISIS.

I think this could lead to some kind of attempt to partition Syria if the US is serious about doing this. If the US is serious about disrupting this contiguity, it will find itself in direct conflict, not only with the Shia militias, which are already present in the area. It’s already weighed several attacks against them, but also with Iran and potentially with Russia, which has pledged to protect the Syrian government from regime change in state collapse.

That’s the background, but there are other aspects to this. If we go back to April 4th, when there was the alleged sarin attack at Khan Sheikhoun in Al-Qaeda controlled Idlib in northern Syria, what was the background to that? Assad was winning. The Syrian government was winning. There was really no reason to deploy a chemical weapons attack. The negotiations at Astana did not involve the US, between the Syrian government and the Saudi-backed Syrian opposition, and they were going very well for the Syrian government.

Trump, through Nikki Haley and Rex Tillerson, had just reversed course on the longstanding official US policy, advancing regime change in Syria, so you had all these factors converge into a chemical attack, which violated the red line. The US went back on its reversal of the regime change policy. Trump was overwhelmed by these images he saw of writhing children produced by organizations connected to the Syrian armed opposition, the White Helmets, the Syrian American Medical Society, etc., and he launched a cruise missile strikes, but the cruise missile strikes weren’t enough. They were symbolic. They destroyed some grounded planes at the Shirat Airbase, and the national security state seems to want more, so we have this bizarre statement about a possible Syrian chemical weapons strike.

The day after Bashar al-Assad visited Hama, which is considered a bastion, a long-time bastion, be Islamist resistance against his government, he actually had a friendly visit there for the first time in years, just highlighting how well the war is going for the Syrian government. Why would they want to deploy chemical weapons and trigger another military strike with US troops already in the country. It doesn’t make sense. To me, it just looks like a psyop, and it makes me worry that in the next 48 hours, there could be some kind of unilateral US strike in Syria.

Aaron Mate: Max, it could just be a coincidence, but in terms of timing, I have to wonder, too, or at least point out that this statement from the White House came right after Sy Hersh, who we interviewed here, published a story saying that Trump went ahead with that airstrike on the Syrian airfield despite US Intelligence saying they had no evidence that Assad had carried out a chemical weapons attack.

Max Blumenthal: Sy Hersh citing a advisor to the intelligence community, someone who’s been in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA, asserted that the strike in Khan Sheikhoun in April was a conventional strike by the Syrian government, coordinated with Russia and that the Jihadist elements who control that area had actually staged a propaganda [ku 00:07:43] and managed to get Trump to strike the Syrian government and reverse his entire policy on Syria, the one he campaigned on, which was against regime change.

That report really dovetailed with my understanding of what happened, although I can’t prove it was a false flag. The evidence that there was a sarin attack by the Syrian government is … It’s not only hard to come by, it just doesn’t add up logically, and the explanations for why Assad would have authorized such a strike seemed ridiculous to me, that we would just let him get away with anything, so he just feels like he can do whatever he wants.

Even if you go back to 2013, when Sy Hersh poked holes in the official narrative of the chemical strike at East Ghouta just east of Damascus, which nearly triggered a US war regime change. We have to remember that that strike occurred. We have to consider the timing of that strike. Two days after inspectors from the organization for the prevention of chemical weapons arrived in Damascus, this attack occurred. The timing was very fishy. We have three instances of fishy timing leading up to this current bizarre statement by the Trump administration, and Sy Hersh has surfaced again to punch holes in the official narrative. I think that’s another aspect of the timing of this statement, and we have to wonder what it will lead to. We still don’t understand the logic behind it, and I think even people in the Pentagon are wondering what triggered it.

Aaron Mate: On that point of a disconnect between the Pentagon and the White House, there have been all these reports showing that there’s White House officials, like Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who are leading the push for a confrontation with Iran, but are being met with resistance from people in the Pentagon who say that they don’t want to commit US forces to that goal inside Syria.

Max Blumenthal: It’s an unwinnable war. It would be an unattainable goal. The US just isn’t willing to pour in the amount of blood and treasure that Iran, Syria and Russia are, but particularly Iran. This is almost existential strategic importance to the Iranian government to maintain contiguity between Iraq and Syria. For the US, it’s another delusional imperial gambit that can go very wrong, and if US troops start to die, that will be nobody’s fault but the Pentagon’s for allowing, for putting them in this situation, and they would not have been defending any critical American interest. If anything, they’re defending the interest of Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Aaron Mate: There was a piece in The Washington Post last week in which a White House official, who wasn’t named, but was quoted, confirmed that the US is essentially placing Iran on the same level as ISIS inside Syria in terms of it being a priority. The official said, I’m going to quote what they said. “If you don’t think America has real interests that are worth fighting for, then fine.” Let me ask you, on the issue of Iraq, doesn’t the fact that the US relies on these Shia militias that are backed by Iran inside Iraq, give Iran leverage over preventing US confrontation inside Syria or does the Trump administration simply not care about that anymore?

Max Blumenthal: That’s not the only leverage that Iran has. Their elements can be activated that can make the security of the US Embassy in Baghdad absolutely untenable if the US wants to be extremely provocative and aggressive inside Syria, inside Iraq or elsewhere. The popular mobilization units were basically the frontline in the capture of Mosul from ISIS. It’s ironic because these groups were celebrated in US media and Western media for taking out ISIS, but when Shia militias assisted the Syrian government in extricating Jihadist militias from East Aleppo, al-Jabhat al-Nusra being the leading militia among them, the Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate, they were accused of genocide by the US government and every kind of atrocity. Very few of them have actually been established, but there’s this hypocrisy there on what’s been happening in Syria versus Iraq or this disparity in the narrative on what Shia militias are allowed to do, and it’s because it was of strategic importance for the US to recapture Mosul, but the battle of Aleppo and the defeat of the Jihadist militias actually represented a defeat for Western proxy groups and a defeat, to put it crudely, for the empire.

Now, all of the forces have converged on the Syrian/Iraq border. There used to be two wars. There was the war against ISIS, and then there was the war that the US was supporting against the Syrian government. The two wars were contradictory. The Syrian government as the British military think tank IHS James is established, has fought almost half of its engagements against ISIS and is, in the words of James, the hammer to what should be the US’ anvil against ISIS, but the US always was attacking the Syrian government through proxies while trying to fight ISIS. It can’t do that anymore because the Syrian government has recaptured so much territory.

The armed opposition is confined to some areas in Daraa, Quneitra in the south, and in the north to Idlib, so the wars are converging into one, and the question is, will the US allow the Syrian government and its allies, the Shia militias and Russia to actually take on ISIS. For example, there’s the city of Darazor in the northeast of Syria. This city has been surrounded by ISIS for years. You have about 200,000 people who are completely surrounded by ISIS, and they’ve been defended by the Syrian army, basically prevented from being overrun like Raqqa was, and the Syrian army is starting to make serious gains in Deir ez-Zor.

Does the US throw the Syrian defense forces in the majority Kurdish militia that the US is arming and complicate the Syrian army advance because it’s afraid that the Syrian army will start to recapture more territory, start to capture oil fields that ISIS had seized, upset the US partition plan, or do they allow ISIS to be defeated? I think we’re going to see, and I’ve seen conflicting quotes and conflicting reports on what the US wants to do around Deir ez-Zor, but let’s not just look at Raqqa, let’s also look at Deir ez-Zor and what the US intends to do there.

Aaron Mate: What do you think that intention is?

Max Blumenthal: You can go back to December 2016 when Secretary of State John Kerry hashed out the first cease fire with Russia, which allowed the civilians population in Syria to breathe for a while. The whole point was to let people start having some kind of existence without perpetual warfare and conflict. That was completely upended around Deir ez-Zor, and it was upended because the Pentagon was extremely upset about one of the main planks or conditions of the ceasefire, which was that the US would coordinate with Russia against ISIS. The Pentagon did not want to coordinate with Russia against ISIS, at least under Obama, under the watch of Defense Secretary Ash Carter.

The United States Air Force attacked the Syrian army on a strategic hilltop, defending Deir ez-Zor from ISIS, killing 80-100 soldiers. ISIS advanced, took the hilltop, and nearly overran Deir ez-Zor, and the cease fire was dead, and there’s a lot of indication. Gareth Porter, the investigative journalist, has done a great report establishing that this strike was intentional, and it was designed to prevent Russian-Syrian coordination. Is that the thinking that prevails in the Pentagon? If so, I think it’s extremely dangerous, and in light of Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia, in light of this current statement that Nikki Haley, the UN Ambassador’s taken ownership of, we have to wonder if the Trump administration is deprioritized the fight against ISIS and has empowered and emboldened the Iran hardliners, like Defense Secretary Mattis, National Security Council
Director HR McMaster, to take the fight to Iran.

Aaron Mate: Just to clarify, the official Pentagon line on that attack in September from the US on the Syrian military was that it was a mistaken airstrike. That was the official explanation given.

Max Blumenthal: They made a big mistake. The Syrian army in no way resemble ISIS and had armored vehicles and hardware that ISIS just simply didn’t have. If it was a mistake, it was a really boneheaded one.

Aaron Mate: Max Blumenthal, award-winning author, journalist, and senior editor for AlterNet Grayzone Project. I’m Aaron Mate. Thanks for joining us on the Real News.

Hersh on RealNews: