Apparently, there is a sex tape, circulating on the internet, featuring a Navalny ally Lubov Sobol’ and her Dagestani lover.

«Аким! Мы и не трахаемся, и фильм не смотрим, и манго не едим, и колу не пьем! Занимаемся какой-то х**той!»

Соболь пошла по рукам… pic.twitter.com/xc0yJYWm5x

— СуховЪ (@VatnikVII) June 4, 2021

Russia completes first pipeline of Nord Stream 2.

Women, children, and apparently Polish, most hurt.

https://www.ft.com/content/b9f4af6e-deef-473d-b4fd-0329ab1f1d03

Ukraine Uncensored & Related Missives

Better late than never, this JRL promoted piece:

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/ukraine%E2%80%99s-accelerating-slide-authoritarianism-186368

came out two years after this one:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/24/gauging-ukraine-with-russia-and-belarus/

On the subject of TNI, is this a setup?

https://nationalinterest.org/profile/michael-averko

While positively noting some of its content, I’ve also been a well reasoned critic of TNI’s overall slant. If svidos can be an influential part of the US foreign policy establishment, than there should be room for pro-American/pro-Russian moderates. Related:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/05/22/bbc-limits-and-related-censorship-on-russia-coverage/

Some people can be their own worst enemies.

Vaccines have always been avoided by big Pharma. They depend on Universities, Charities and governments for development. the only need for big Pharma this time was for rapid production by the billion.

Symbolic of this bar chart.

A sharp reply to the sanctions regarding the SCF:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/06/04/think-tank-wars-and-the-enforcement-of-thought-crime-laws/

Humor for the Open Thread.

PEACE 😇

I think I’ve found quite possibly the most perfect description of the current state of Chinese culture:

China is a billion people from Redneck South. They only like films for tits and explosions.

In a way, it reminds me of the West in the 19th century when it’s ascent was at it’s peak – unparalleled cultural and economic development, yet at the same time absolutely dreadful working conditions for the lower classes, blood sports (animal cruelty) and so on and so forth. Yet at the same time the materialistic cancer is appearing in China despite the fact that their ascent hasn’t reached it’s end yet because Western civilization has subsumed every other one.

Most Westerners don’t seem to understand this. They go for the “hurr carpet nuke china they treat animals badly” while 250 years ago it was the same goddamn shit in their countries too. Like, their thinking style is “we don’t do that, you must magically advance your society in a day, otherwise we will jack off at the thought of exterminating you.”

Obvious conclusion – from global mankurtization/globohomo, to this rabid form of thinking, der ewige westoid is the biggest threat to human survival and advancement.

As far as i know, TNI is realist school of foreign policy funded by Nixon Foundation or something. So their thinking is dual approach – they want to do “Nixon goes to China” thing except this time, go to Russia, and get Russia to join US to contain China.

Also, as realists, they correctly understand that US Empire is expensive and contrary to US national interest. I mean, they call themselves The National Interest for a reason. As such, they dislike neocon/neoliberal/globalist vision at American expense. So they are more receptive to Putin’s multipolar international framework and live and let live approach.

But its an American Interest publication, not a Russian Interest.

What do you think about autonomous drone attack (Turkish drones reportedly used at Libya.)? There has been a lot of news report and pieces recently, mostly negative from the West. I read a piece comparing it to detonation of atomic bomb (lmao).
I think the West, particularly USA, particularly dislike to see cheap and effective drones developed by 2nd tier country and sold pretty much anyone. Affordable killing machines can damage USA hegemony on high tech military equipment. USA don’t want to sell drones, why shouldn’t I go and buy from others? At the end, there’s no congress, no drama, no sanction etc…

America Sucks and is stupid the American military is criminally incompetent and unbelievably corrupt and stupid. Not a controversial thesis but here is some recent evidence

1)failed missile interceptor test. First of all missile defense by way of hitting a missile with another missile or a laser is impossible, second it is just a way of shoving tax payer dollars to greedy fucks, and to fucking fail on top of it all.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-missile-defence-fails-test-drill-military-shoot-down-target-north-korea-a8188236.html
this is from another test from 2017 but embarrassing reasoning http://www.defensenews.com/naval/2017/07/24/sailor-error-led-to-failed-us-navy-ballistic-missile-intercept-test/

2)America is behind on hypersonic missiles and can’t even launch their prototypes during tests, they simply do not have the brain power and discipline and selflessness to make advanced weapons
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/air-force-hypersonic-missile-test-fails-to-launch-from-b-52/ar-BB1fmDhE

3) U.S navy ships crashing because of incompetence and overwork of crews and fucking touch screen ship steering, https://militarytruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/The-Navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-systems-to-save-money.-Ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives..pdf you can’t make this shit up

RIP those who lost their lives, though they be Americans they deserve better.

The U.S empire is over, the end.

So South Africa’s population is expected to get younger in 2050?

Amd India’s too? How does that go with falling fertility, and India’s aging population? The southern states are already below 2.1.

If Indian cognitive elites are so smart, why is India a lot worse run than East Asian states?

Socialism vs caste system. Chinese are more equal and meritocratic and Indian smart caste simply doesn’t care about the underlings. Indian rich live very nice.

Reading a lot of horror stories about inflation dooming us all, and indeed CPI is above 4%.

And yet 10 year Treasury sells for glorious 1.55%. Either our Financial Wizards want to lose a lot of money, or something doesn’t add up. And yes Fed is running $120 billion/month QE but that’s been stable for months as far as i know.

Most of their smart fraction is working in American hospitals, tech companies and universities.

Do Indian rich never leave their house? That doesn’t sound too appealing to me.

When killer drones get small and cheap enough Gates and Bezos and Zuckerberg will to have to live under ground 24/7. The future does not completely suck!

Either our Financial Wizards want to lose a lot of money, or something doesn’t add up.

USD is simply one part of global issues with banking and currencies. Russia is selling USD assets: (1)

• What are they going to buy?
• Will the RUB go up versus global trade currencies? If so, RUB denominated oil revenue will decrease because of the unfavorable F/X change.

EUR is much much worse than USD. China’s RMB is almost certainly worse than USD, once the penalty for State Owned Enterprise bad debt is factored in.

“In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.” — Desiderius Erasmus

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-reserves-idUSKCN2DF1R9

missed the edit by 2 sec and left a superfluous “to” in the middle of my second to last sentence.

: (

* Alex Tabarrok observed that it is “depressing” that you’d have done better investing in Dogecoin this year than in Pfizer. I think this is a function of (1) vaccines being priced in, and (2) populism was never going to allow Big Pharma to extract significant profits from Corona vaccines, so furthermore, it was never even going to be worth much in the first place. In fact, pharma as a whole not only underperformed Dogecoin or crypto, but even the stock market as a whole. If the vaccines were created to “enrich” Big Pharma, as conspiracy people claim, they sure were not very competent at the “enrichment” part.

It is priced in and “not allowed to extract significant profits” because the way vaccines are imposed and marketed, with as much bad news as good news being propagated, is intentionally divisive thru physical segregation and political polarization. Before that, everyone has been used to losing much of economic and social rights, and the structural social-distancing imposed since the lockdowns (The “international travel not bouncing back” is a good example – year-long border closures and the vaccine passport ensure that a good portion give up their dreams of ever leaving the country)

Whoever going beyond being a black-and-white antivaxxer can see Big Pharma not as the ends, but one of the means. As a Russian who hasn’t been subject to serious lockdowns after the initial burst last March-May and whose prime vaccine is a state effort, our host don’t really see the plot.

The urban young generation is “lying low” (躺平), like the Japanese youth before them.

This is actually related to the predominant employment type: in the 70s heydays, and even up to now, Japan had a rigid system of life-long employment security with career progress based on seniority for the middle class (I’ll assume the working class is close to that, but being more flexible). There was definitely long hours of overwork, but you could at least have a drink at the end of the day while being a breadwinner for stable families.

Come the ’90 crash and the liberalization of labor markets – part-time and freelance (“freeter”) jobs now absorb a significant part of the workforce if not being predominant. Irregular hours and earning barely enough for convenience store food and rent mean eating and sleeping irregularly, bury yourself in otaku pursuits, and have no means for raising kids.

Dengism is this, but with everything played up to Randian levels. There have only been a small contingent of really secure labor, while everyone else races to the bottom.

Blinky Bill posted an interview with Nabiullina, Russian Central Banker.

She noted that to derisk, she wanted to reduce currency holdings in Central Bank portfolio. At this time, it means increase gold reserves.

Effectively, as dollar is eliminated, euro and yuan will take its place alongside with gold. This makes sense because EU and China are Russian trade partners and US is not. Russia doesn’t need USD because Russia doesn’t do much trade with US. It makes no sense for Russia to hold useless dollars.

In reality, Reserve Currency is an obsolete Boomer concept. If in like 1970’s if Angola wanted to trade with Mongolia and didn’t know relative prices, reserve currency was helpful. But since the 80’s at least there was such thing as Internet and fast electronic currency trading.

Whatever currency trading and hedging tools are there for the dollar either already exist for any currency pair or can be developed easily. There is no need for USD or any other currency as middleman. In the past, management of multiple currencies was complicated, today its algorithmic numbers on a computer.

You don’t need reserve currency anymore. Just currency of your trading partners, and hedge your prices and contracts accordingly. So save USD for countries that trade with US, no need for it to be global. And Russia doesn’t really needed until trade with US become significant.

I’ve only been in Gujarat and New Delhi about a decade ago, in my limited experience they live in nice walled villas and drive to gleaming technoparks to work. They drive by people literally living in shipping containers on the side of the highway.

Never been to China, so can’t say how things are done over there.

it amazes me that the powers-that-be across the world and over time never seem to see the danger in masses of their young men having nothing to lose

You forgot the superpowered mystery drone that violated US airspace, scouted critical infrastructure, and escaped not one but two helicopters after a 70 mile chase in Arizona last February:

FBI hunting souped-up drone that air-trolled a border patrol chopper

https://dronedj.com/2021/05/24/fbi-hunting-souped-up-drone-that-air-trolled-a-border-patrol-chopper/

New info surfaces on mysterious Tucson ‘high-powered’ drone

https://dronedj.com/2021/06/02/new-info-surfaces-on-mysterious-tucson-high-powered-drone/

Never mind all the other mystery drones trolling US nuclear plants, destroyers off San Diego, and THAAD installations on Guam.

She noted that to derisk, she wanted to reduce currency holdings in Central Bank portfolio. At this time, it means increase gold reserves.

Effectively, as dollar is eliminated, euro and yuan will take its place alongside with gold. This makes sense because EU and China are Russian trade partners and US is not. Russia doesn’t need USD because Russia doesn’t do much trade with US. It makes no sense for Russia to hold useless dollars.

Gold is a physical commodity. While it is a “store of value”, very few deals are priced in Troy Ounces of Gold. There are all sorts of expenses, overhead, and delays associated with physical rather than electronic transactions.

The Euro (EUR) makes USD look like a paragon of virtue. Their interest rates are even more negative than the U.S. and the ECB is effectively hamstring by German insistence on inflexible Austerity economics that massively distorts intra-EU trade.

Valuation for Chinese Yuan (RMB) is opaque, uncertain, and therefore risky. For example: (1)

-4- The amount of debt in China is massive and the amount is unknown.

The total amount of China debt is unknown with S&P estimating the amount not reported by local communities and banks being over $6 trillion:

China may be sitting on a hidden debt pile of as much as 40 trillion yuan ($6 trillion), concealed off-balance-sheet by the country’s local governments, according to research from S&P Global Ratings.

Until valuation is more transparent, there is too much uncertainty to place large amounts of wealth reserves in RMB denominated assets.

PEACE 😇
__________

(1) https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/06/11-reasons-chinas-economy-failing-terrible-shape-never-trust-data-coming-china/

Time to reply all the other posts!

America Sucks and is stupid the American military is criminally incompetent and unbelievably corrupt and stupid. Not a controversial thesis but here is some recent evidence

RIP those who lost their lives, though they be Americans they deserve better.

The U.S empire is over, the end.

Crypto-imperialist mourning the loss of “their” country’s dominance.

Socialism vs caste system. Chinese are more equal and meritocratic and Indian smart caste simply doesn’t care about the underlings. Indian rich live very nice.

Culturally China also had a caste-like division of the “Four occupations”: gentry-scholars, peasantry, artisans and merchants (the order’s rationale is apparent to any traditionalist). But this had never been as rigid as India or even Japan’s castes. The gentry class fused with merchants and the peasantry with artisans: rich merchants buying bureaucratic titles, scholars owning land and making money, and labor moving between the fields in peak seasons and the workshops off-season.
This goes a long way in explaining deep-seated cultural differences.

(Japan industrialized after the caste system fell apart in late bakufu)

Reading a lot of horror stories about inflation dooming us all, and indeed CPI is above 4%.

And yet 10 year Treasury sells for glorious 1.55%. Either our Financial Wizards want to lose a lot of money, or something doesn’t add up. And yes Fed is running $120 billion/month QE but that’s been stable for months as far as i know.

Asset price inflation and people hoarding money because of having their normalcy upended by lockdowns and the false-reopening?
We’re just getting started.

USD is simply one part of global issues with banking and currencies. Russia is selling USD assets: (1)

• What are they going to buy?
• Will the RUB go up versus global trade currencies? If so, RUB denominated oil revenue will decrease because of the unfavorable F/X change.

EUR is much much worse than USD. China’s RMB is almost certainly worse than USD, once the penalty for State Owned Enterprise bad debt is factored in.

This is why the central banks are impatient to get CBDCs set up – they can write-off bad debts with a currency reset.

You don’t need reserve currency anymore. Just currency of your trading partners, and hedge your prices and contracts accordingly. So save USD for countries that trade with US, no need for it to be global.

Reserve currencies are based on the concept of backing – having an anchor in assets which mostly retain their value in the medium term. In the olden days, per Mises’ regression theorem, valuable goods such as precious metals become the reserve currency, and then states minted those. Due to wars and Keynesianism everyone went off the gold standard and onto Bretton Woods, which is backed by USD priced in gold. Vietnam led to USD going off gold standard and everyone followed suit, leading to freely-floating currencies either backed by economic strength, other commodities (petrodollar), or Uncle Sam’s guns (in the case of USD). CBDCs will be backed by banning any other means of payment and controlling channels of distribution, like how the Eastern Bloc did it.

You don’t apparently see the point of reserve currencies, so I have to explain all these to you.

Gold is a physical commodity. While it is a “store of value”, very few deals are priced in Troy Ounces of Gold. There are all sorts of expenses, overhead, and delays associated with physical rather than electronic transactions.

The Euro (EUR) makes USD look like a paragon of virtue. Their interest rates are even more negative than the U.S. and the ECB is effectively hamstring by German insistence on inflexible Austerity economics that massively distorts intra-EU trade.

Valuation for Chinese Yuan (RMB) is opaque, uncertain, and therefore risky.

Until valuation is more transparent, there is too much uncertainty to place large amounts of wealth reserves in RMB denominated assets.

See my CBDC comment above. (China-bashing goes nowhere when the US and Europe have the potential to sink even further)

it amazes me that the powers-that-be across the world and over time never seem to see the danger in masses of their young men having nothing to lose

They’ll either clamor for UBI, quit the system or throw themselves at the riot cops. Compliance, flight or fight.

When killer drones get small and cheap enough Gates and Bezos and Zuckerberg will to have to live under ground 24/7. The future does not completely suck!

If we still had supply chains for killer drones.

“I learned to live simply.”
– Anna Ahkmatova

Reserve currencies are based on the concept of backing – having an anchor in assets which mostly retain their value in the medium term.

I recommend collectible stamps over USD, or Euro, RMB for that matter then.

Fictional foreign assets that you can’t even access if you get sanctioned make no sense in the modern world.

Here is the rate at which we are creating USD backed financial assets.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCMDO

Euro, RMB, etc are likely following the same path.

The good news is this plot is consistent and predictable. The bad news is unless you trade in USD, you know for a fact that if you purchased a $trillion of those assets today, there will be like $10 trillion of that printed next year. Unless you plan on increasing your shipments to US by $9 trillion, that money is useless to you, and that $1 trillion that you already have is sort of useless too unless you import $1 trillion worth of goods from US. Which you won’t as US always runs trade deficit. And if you want to buy something strategic, even if Congress allows (and they won’t, national security reasons), people who just got fresh $9 trillion will outbid your pathetic $1 trillion.

Clearest example is China. They spent a generation working insanely hard to accumulate $1 trillion in reserves. It was their life. And then Federal Reserve showed up and printed $4 trillion in a week with a few keystrokes.

Trollolol. Too bad Chinese. You think China will win a bidding war vs Federal Reserve and associated banks? LOL no. Their $1 trillion is worthless, and they can’t even spend it domestically. China wasted a life of one generation of their people on imaginary numbers that can be created in unlimited quantity at will.

At least China trades with US, but it won’t last long. Once US sanctions start, that $1 trillion will become completely worthless.

Again, i recommend collectible stamps over currencies of non trading partners. Russians understood that a while back. Rest of the world is slower on the uptake, but they will catch on. Only fools will hold on to reserve currency without trading component.

They don’t care. It’s a very dog eat dog world there.

I said “reserve currencies”, not “exchange and trade currencies” (but you are right if you speak in term of pure fiat)

Collectible stamps, or physical commodities you can barter (precious metals foremost, raw materials second). Cryptos possibly.

Chartalist theories (domestically) or exchange currencies (for international trade) besides, it is ultimately real production and flows of goods and service that matters.

At least China trades with US, but it won’t last long. Once US sanctions start, that $1 trillion will become completely worthless.

Sure. China loses that trillion of scrap paper, the US loses some or maybe most of its good imports, and the World loses supply chains and will head towards economic collapse worse than the Great Depression. You are talking about trade embargoes between the 2 largest economies on the Globe, one never tried on the Soviets since the 70s.

The collateral damage will be great – practically an economic nuclear strike, and a MAD at it.

http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-classic-in-praise-of-sikhs-the-coolest-warrior-tribe-around/

The bullet that hit Guru Garanth Sahib on 5th June at 6am. This is the bullet that all Sikhs need to remember. This is fired at you all. #NeverForget1984 pic.twitter.com/XcgnRmqAUx

— Amaan (@amaanbali) June 3, 2021

Dear Bill P, I would now like to answer to your comment, sorry that I’m two weeks late, but better late than never.

And this living simply did not impede her from creating beautiful poetry and raising her son in manner that would allow him producing an outstanding contribution to ethnography (ethnogenesis through passionarity).

Being rich and comfortable is good, staying human is better. If you need to choose, do it wisely.

[MORE]

raising her son in manner that would allow him producing an outstanding contribution to ethnography (ethnogenesis through passionarity).

https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/tag/lev-gumilev/
“Lev Gumilev’s Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere (which, for those of you who don’t know, is an influential work in neo-Eurasianist thought). It certainly isn’t light reading, and is more than a little odd. The idea that ethnic groups (ethnoi) are a product of an upsurge of people who have a mutation giving them a greater capacity to convert energy into work (passionarnost’) is weird enough. The idea that this energy comes from the animate matter of the ‘biosphere’ and also from some sort of mysterious and undefined ‘cosmic radiation’ is downright kooky. At least old Lev was smart enough to realize that the ‘noosphere’ [derived from the Greek word ‘nous’, meaning mind] was a load of nonsense, but otherwise I can’t say that he convinced me of his theories. I sympathize with those who think that they’re pseudo-scientific gobbledegook. ”

I can never get away from the impression that 95% of irrationalist Rightism is a load of horseshit. Everyone can cook up stories like these.

Not a reply to your understanding, but speaking of Buddhism:
I’ve been thinking if the prevalence of Sufism in Turkey and India are because of these people’s (cultural or actual) ancestors being Buddhists. Turkic types in Central Asia had been heavily Buddhist, and the cultural ethos acquired from Buddhism stayed even after embracing Islam, spreading into Persia and Anatolia after adopting a Sufi guise…

It’s all orgones, all the way down.

Gumilyov was a poet, just like both his parents were. His theory is poetic. This doesn’t mean that he was incorrect in his observations.

He correctly described the ethnogenesis and passionarity, but he could not find a convincing explanation of why the ethnogenetic impulse appeared and how it was produced. His “biosphere induced” “mutation ” hypothesis might today be more adequately phrased in terms of epigenetic influence on psychological types and behavioral patterns.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33798973/

Gumilyov was a genius and a seer, seers find a path forward and then “Soviet Engineers ” fill in the details and streamline the narrative so it could be taught in universities.

https://lurkmore.to/%D0%A2%D0%B5%D1%85%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F

🙂

Gumilyov was not a Rightist at all. He was a Soviet ethnographer. Biosphere and Noosphere as states of evolution of living matter were developed by Vernadsky and widely accepted in Soviet scientific circles.

As I replied above to melanf, the fact that they missed crucial elements to describe the underlying mechanism, does not invalidate their observations.

The idea that ethnic groups (ethnoi) are a product of an upsurge of people who have a mutation giving them a greater capacity to convert energy into work (passionarnost’) is weird enough. The idea that this energy comes from the animate matter of the ‘biosphere’ and also from some sort of mysterious and undefined ‘cosmic radiation’ is downright kooky.

I have read a number of Gumilev’s books when i was like 10 (that’s what you get for growing up in librarian family) and that’s not how i remember it at all.

‘Passionarnost’ is an idea adopted from biology (those logistics growth curves that all life follows – steady state, exponential growth to fill the niche, steady state, decline) and applied to culture. I think that was a pretty clever approach and its still valid to this day.

As for energy, ‘cosmic radiation’, and ‘biosphere’… Err… Seriously? Gumilev studied Eurasian nomadic tribes (Mongols, Turkic tribes etc) and how rainfalls, draughts, solar radiation etc were impacting nomadic migration patterns.

In a modern world where if you are hungry you can buy a potato from Japan or whatever Gumilev has less relevance. But in middle ages and earlier, climate had massive impact on both settled cultures and nomadic migration. How is that ‘kooky’? And yes, for people of those times energy came from organic source – horse. Of course. And horse ate animate matter – grass. Grass was impacted by sun radiation and rainfall. How is that controversial in any way i don’t understand.

…Although the official Soviet authorities rejected his ideas and banned most of his monographs…

Doesn’t Dugin work with his Eurasianism? If Gumilev rejected European influence and praised the Mongols, that fits Dugins work, afaik. From a modern perspective, that’s a right-wing idea.

Gumilyov did not extend this ethnological ecumenism to the medieval Jews, whom he regarded as a parasitic, international urban class that had dominated the Khazars and subjected the early East Slavs to the “Khazar Yoke”. This last phrase he adapted from the traditional term “Tatar Yoke” for the Mongol domination of medieval Russia, a term Gumilyov rejected for he did not regard the Mongol conquest as a necessarily negative event.

There is more to Reality than meets the eye.

Gumilyov had to find a “material ” cause to explain his observations, otherwise he would have been accused of idealism by the official Marxist Sovok thought police. Therefore, he came up with the idea of “mutation ” that would have occurred somehow in large groups of people simultaneously at the same time. He wrote himself that this is something that should be worked upon and investigated more and that he himself found his theory somewhat lacking.

The notion of epigenetics and large genomic data analysis are relatively recent knowledge. I would even argue that genomic data science is not yet sufficiently mature to yield completely convincing results. We need an AI / Deep Learning approach to complete genomic data science and be able to describe dynamic patterns of genetic information expression in human populations.

Perhaps we would find some patterns leading to passionarity and others to decay and downfall of human populations creative potential. Then we would perhaps look back and say: this looks quite like Gumilyov imagined it. What a genius this man was!

🙂

Using the famous meme as a template:

Gumilyov did nothing wrong…

The simple fact that Russian Westernizers and their post-Khazar allies hate him and disparage him, is proof enough that Gumilyov’s insights are valuable.

Well, to be fair to his detractors, Gumilyov had to venture into the speculative area of environmental influences upon the human psychotypes and the impact of the psychotype upon culture, religion and social organizations. One of the questions he tried to answer was: why and how minor and obscure ethnic groups (Slavs, Arabs, Turks…) end up suddenly swarming apparently out of nowhere, occupying huge areas and assimilating more advanced and well established neighbors.

He explained it as a sudden modification of the behavior of these populations that made a large proportion of them for a time into “passionaires” (or would it be “passionaries” in English?). This modification in behavior was correlated with a change in psychotype. Given that he operated into a Marxist materialistic framework, he had to posit a material cause, e.g., a “mutation ” that suddenly changed the genomic pool of a given population. How this might happen, he was unsure of and was vague about.

Today he would have probably just said: Epigenetics !

And everyone would have applauded (without really understanding) …

🙂

Using epigenetics to explain mass differences in psychologies seems like an empty theory to me. All things are possible, but then again, all things are possible.

Only proper that he got cucked by a Chad Dag.

LOL

If you gave one population a regular dose of lead in their food to grow up with, while their clones in another population did not, they would exhibit quite divergent psychologies. Technically speaking, epigenetics isn’t any different, via triggers on methylation that alter expression of genes which affect neurotransmitter profile, which will affect psychology and thus personality.

Vodka can provide an accessible experiment on this.

why and how minor and obscure ethnic groups (Slavs, Arabs, Turks…) end up suddenly swarming apparently out of nowhere, occupying huge areas and assimilating more advanced and well established neighbors.

Did he have a comment on the Genghis Khan process of going up to a mountain top and then after taking his army in the direction the Sky God instructed him at?

Maybe the guys at Cambridge and Harvard think this is too silly to give a minute of discussion to but there must be some nuanced views.

Russian Government to move further towards “traditional values”

New National Security Strategy:

To neutralize the threats associated with the distortion of history, with the destruction of basic moral and ethical norms, with attempts to introduce alien ideals and values in the field of education, culture, religion, the Strategy formulates a new strategic national priority “Protection of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, culture and historical memory “.

https://rg.ru/2021/05/31/patrushev-raskryl-neizvestnye-podrobnosti-zhenevskoj-vstrechi-s-sallivanom.html

from June 1, a law comes into force, which introduces the concept of “educational activities”. It is designed to regulate the conduct of various lectures, courses, the organization of presentations, as well as the creation of educational portals. The document spells out the directions of educational activities, in particular, “the dissemination of the spiritual and moral values ​​of the peoples of the Russian Federation”, “the development of the ability of creative self-expression” and others. It also regulates who exactly can engage in educational activities. Educators must have at least two years of work experience or participate in the implementation of socially significant initiatives. They will also be obliged to publish all their legal data and work on the basis of contracts. Non-profit organizations recognized as foreign agents will be completely prohibited from engaging in education. As specified in the State Duma, the law is intended “to protect schoolchildren and students from anti-Russian propaganda presented under the guise of educational activities.”

Honored Jurist of Russia Ivan Solovyov comments: “The state tightly controls part of education (the schoolds), but through other supposedly educational activities it is easier to influence the younger generation. First of all, traditional values ​​will be subject to protection: history, family, peaceful existence and development of different religions, cultural potential, achievements in science and technology ”.

https://www.mk.ru/economics/2021/05/30/chto-izmenitsya-s-1-iyunya-shtrafy-za-rezinu-kontrol-cen.html

The US has had plenty of accidents and disasters before with the military – the Mark 14 torpedo, results of the Bikini Atoll tests, etc.

The empire will likely endure this reasonably.

Is there an update or followup post for this?

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/afrotriumphalism

Based. But if you dislike Putin and hate westernizers, what do you believe in?

Agreed, but the normal epigenetics anecdote seems to be along the lines of “my ancestors worked very hard as slaves, which changed my genetics, so I npw need to catch up on sleep.”

As if flapping your arms will give you, and your kids, the genes for wings.

Epigenetics as another word for magic is pretty common, unfortunately.

I believe in the biological and spiritual survival of my kin and kind. Starting with, but not limited to my own genetic lineage. See my reply to FerW on the previous open thread.

Epigenetics is the word for the environmental impact upon the expression of genetic information mediated through the modification (mainly methylation, but also supercoilng or relaxation of DNA) in utero and early childhood. As I wrote in my reply to mal above, the majority of people who hear this word have no clue what it means.

Below a nice review on the topic, see for yourself if that might perhaps explain some of the things Gumilyov has described :

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32706263/

A psychology is first and foremost the amount and balance of neurotransmitters in your brain. Do we agree?

Look, flat out you said it’s not your job to tell others what to find sacred or not.

Ie you won’t get a Dharmic state that bans cow slaughter & promotes Honor killing.

Therefore, you’re an unserious homosexual।।

4/6
The necessity for a policy & enforcement of punishment to uphold archaic Dharmic culture is critical.

Once that capability of Kshaatra is lost, the Vedas (and their interpretation) sink to lower states of consciousness. All other dharmas become mechanical or die out. pic.twitter.com/knaqnqfjbw

— Allama 1ball (@Parikramah) July 27, 2020

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

As far as i know, TNI is realist school of foreign policy funded by Nixon Foundation or something. So their thinking is dual approach – they want to do “Nixon goes to China” thing except this time, go to Russia, and get Russia to join US to contain China.

Also, as realists, they correctly understand that US Empire is expensive and contrary to US national interest. I mean, they call themselves The National Interest for a reason. As such, they dislike neocon/neoliberal/globalist vision at American expense. So they are more receptive to Putin’s multipolar international framework and live and let live approach.

But its an American Interest publication, not a Russian Interest.

At times, both interests work – arguably more so than is generally noted.

The basic TNI slant is realist, while giving space to neocon and svido views. My contention remains that there should be room for the pro-American/pro-Russian perspective. Concerning TNI:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/08042016-fuzzy-history-how-poland-saved-the-world-from-russia-analysis/

https://www.eurasiareview.com/07112016-realists-on-russia-analysis/

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/21/getting-real-with-the-us-foreign-policy-establishment-realists/

https://www.eurasiareview.com/25052020-what-evelyn-fakas-trey-gowdy-and-some-others-dubiously-have-in-common-oped/

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/10/11/slanting-against-russia-us-establishment-pastime/

https://www.eurasiareview.com/31082017-talking-russia-continued-us-foreign-policy-establishment-limits-analysis/

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/09/21/remembering-stephen-cohen/

Not really. Even if somewhat true, that view is so reductionist as to be unhelpful. Like saying a container is foremost for storing things, therefore it has water in it, as water is a thing.

Okay, so how is information mediated in your psyche?

🙂

Bashibuzuk has collected two accusations of homosexuality in two days. At three, he wins the game.

I suggest the vodka experiment. Bashi can recommend brands, I’m sure.

What was the 2nd one?
Something I missed.
But today being homo is socially”adaptative ” as you would say.

🙂

The only one I personally drink is Russian Standard. Among the non-Russian ones, Gray Goose is good. But I agree with the Sputnik & Pogrom crew that vodka is rather a tasteless and boring alcohol. I prefer whiskey and bourbon.

Speaking of gay: Danya Milokhin, a Russian tic-tocker has become the star of the Saint Petersburg Economic Forum and will be the new face of the Sberbank advertising:

Danya Milokhin is on the right, wearing the cute skirt.

https://vz.ru/news/2021/6/2/1102400.html

What happened to rums and brandies? 🙂

You are right. I like those better than vodka too.

I was thinking ‘why has this man not set up a quasi PayPal-esque service that allows cryptos to be interchanged with real cash money (USD, RMB, EUR, RUB); a robust micro-financial system. I should be able to deposit diamonds in South Africa and get USD via crypto in Canada’. With his technical understanding and capital wealth surely it’s within reach.

I can only forge so many Nigerian death certificates to claim large sums of money as “inheritance”. And I’m not even black. It’s not like uncut diamonds where you can walk them to any jewellery chain-store in Canada, claim they were from “grandma in Israel” and get a stack of cash.

Then I remember Jack Ma, his internal ‘illegal’ Alibaba mini-bank and the soy sauce stains of crypto-currency that enabled its smooth operations across borders.

The events I see through my inebriation:

1. Tesla sells well in China
2. Chinese farmers produce most of the bitcoins out there.
3. Musk states Tesla will accept bitcoin (which will inflate or at least solidify the viability of cryptocurrency.)
4. Only non-regulated Chinese environment suffers. This is perfectly fine as the Chinese have poisoned the land from the air to the ground water tables.
5. Chinese government, not understanding that capitalism and nice western things have civilized them, decide to stamp down on crypto-businesses and mining (probably due to mental retardation from heavy metals in drinking water)
6. Musk says Tesla won’t accept BC because of “green” (or some communist shit).
7. More likely Tesla was threatened by the PRC that it will close its business if it starts to accepts BC (again after Jack Ma got a stern talking to for his secret Alibaba quasi-bank which utilized cryptos as one of many ways of moving money around).
8. A few hasty news post (in various media) shortly states that Tesla may (or may not) open a factory in Russia. Unofficial intentions and feelers, build Tesla in Russia, sell to China. Gotta maintain that 1.6 billion customer base.
9. Huge sells from mysterious wallets, dropping the price of crypto across the board.
10. Musk bitches like some 8 year old girl. Linkin Park was explicitly mentioned in a true sign of homosexuality. A random drunken tweet of illiterate pixel-based art somehow tricks twatter fags to believe it is a signal (like QAnon homos or a prostitute that thinks she’ll get an extra tip if she does the “swirl”).

I get an impression Elon Musk had the SEC crawl up his ass for manipulating stocks, but needing a fast way to make large stacks of cash he jumped to manipulating cryptos (twatter plebs will believe anything). No regulations, no criminal charges. And now he boohoos because his (lack of) statements are not making waves like they used to to bolster his secret wallets and off-shore accounts and shelf corporations. Feeding “profits” back to SpaceX and Tesla. Jack Ma and his services seem to have been shut down and no one of relative scale can assist.

I recall John Carmack (Armadillo Aerospace, ID Software, Oculus) talking about Elon Musk and how he nearly bankrupted himself at one point trying to get his first SpaceX rocket off the ground (after many failures). A man like that is a true, blue, balls-deep gambler.

The things that I see impact pricing of cryptos:

-If China (primarily) or G7 nations begin to regulate or prevent crypto trading. Or worse, tax capital gain. This is probably the largest impact, it’s ability to move money from nation to nation and almost tax free made cryptos sexy for the young and hungry.

-The volume of trades based on black market transactions (drugs, organs, counterfeits, firearms, diamonds, etc.)

-How much A-rab money Gulf Mohammedans are pumping through Indian intermediaries. It’s illegal in most states but not for the Indian migrant force that has its own web of connections back home.

-Whales, hodlers, and other rejects selling in bulk.

-Activity by nations excluded by the financial system (Iran, North Korea and friends); I imagine if Hamas is using cryptocurrency the Israelis will be soon shutting it down with a vengeance even if it creates a hiccup in its illegal diamond and organ trade.

-Elon Musk and his squad of desperate no-high-value-skills legion surging from one coin to the next

-The number of exchanges that trick normies (mostly women) that cryptos are just like stocks.

The future of crypto:
As for all the 56-IQ fags who think crypto (that we see in today’s form) will last well into the future know this…. all our CPU infrastructure is based on MOSFETs (x86 and ARM) and we are coming close to its limits. NVIDIA is making moves for a GPU-powered computer which means the big boys (Intel, ARM designers) need to make a bigger move. CPU pipelines are so thin and so close to each other that electrons literally will quantum tunnel to adjacent pipelines; when enough of them do this there is your bit-flip and thus your error and thus why there is extensive bloat ON EVERY STACK in error-checking and cycle-redundancy checks and prediction engines and error-correcting RAM and and and and and….

There is great potential in photonic and quantum CPUs but as of yet there is no Intel-like entity to build the global infrastructure to allow these CPUs to be made cheaply. All computer science is based on this foundation. All cryptos are based on this computer science. I shouldn’t need to extrapolate more than this to get through to people. Use crypto, make stacks, start making businesses that generate revenue. Hodling, it’s what I tell my girlfriend to do to my balls when i nut in her.

One of the questions he tried to answer was: why and how minor and obscure ethnic groups (Slavs, Arabs, Turks…) end up suddenly swarming apparently out of nowhere, occupying huge areas and assimilating more advanced and well established neighbors.

Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics answers your question well, here is a good rundown https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/to-overthrow-an-empire/

It is also important that the leader comes from outside the social system. It is extremely difficult for one of the tribal leaders to unify the tribes by imposing himself as an overarching authority. The other tribal leaders are liable to say: why you and not me? This quickly leads to bickering and things falling apart. This is why great unifiers, such as Muhammad, Chinggis Khan, and Paul Muad’Dib, were relative outsiders (but at the same time, they were attuned to the culture of the people they ended up leading).

A group with high Assabiyyah unites behind a figure with such traits and applies their Assabiyyah to the surrounding population.

Gumilyov is an original thinker in his own right, I hadn’t heard of him before this thread. the idea of capacity to convert energy into work being a ethnic trait that factors into who gets conquered is lost on most Westerners who will point towards things like ethics, intelligence, god, genetics, germs, steel etc. Though some of these things explain sluggishness, they do not prevent future sluggishness or explain past passionarnost’. Vigor/morale is behind success.

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/transhumanism-2/#comment-4700719

Social adaptation probably has its limitations against the limitations of reality – not all which is malleable to social conception, but yes, quite a powerful rank on our new caste system of reality.

I think that an awful lot of faith is placed in the dissipating powers of porn, drugs, and other will killing distractions. And seemingly not without some justification judging by the rather pathetic state of most manhood. What we have today is far better than the old bread and circuses.

Just wait until mass market VR porn is rolled out. I predict a discouraging number of males retreating to a fake world of bonking CGI porn stars all day rather than facing the system grinding them down.

An ugh emote is needed, Unz.

The first one with growing leashed tyranosaurus is good and truthful, but this sort of thing probably has roots reaching year 1992 when GOP had huge trouble with another hugely popular political outsider billionaire Ross Perrot catching large parts of previous Reagan/Bush voters, while opposing NAFTA trade agreement. Leaving aside Trump’s petty, vulgar and noveau riche type personal character peculiarities aside, he could be called Ross Perot 2.0, just the one who went into Republican primaries, instead of running as independent.

Perhaps inviting Danya to the SPEF, an event where Putin himself made a public appearance, was a subtle signal to the “Western Partners ” that RusFed is looking for a compromise before the Putin – Biden meeting. And if that was the signal, then it was well received, with the Denmark stopping the construction of the Polish – Norwegian pipeline, which was to be an alternative to Nord Stream 2, on completely ridiculous (pseudo)environmental grounds.

What do you mean by “psyche”?

In FUSSR there was a belief that answering a question with another question is typically Odessite (i.e., influenced by the Jewish way of communicating). Moreover, I would like to remind you that you were the one who wrote that epigenetics cannot explain differences in psychology.

Therefore I expect that you already know what psyche is. But if you express opinions about potential epigenetic influence on psychological characteristics of populations or lack thereof, while you still need an explaining what psyche is, then I am probably wasting my time exchanging with you.

Be well…

Just fall back to gold and silver when the hammer falls on cryptos or the lights go out

People use words in different ways, so, before I answer a complex question, I prefer to clarify what it is they mean by the question.

I have no idea what your rant is about, but I’ll reflect on it and see what it informs me about you.

I agree that words are subjective and that the topic that we discussed (starting with my post about Akhmatova and her son) is a complex one. It didn’t stop you from writing that abrupt changes in behavioral patterns of populations cannot be correlated with epigenetic modification of the genomic expression of the individuals who belong to these populations.

Here is your comment:

Using epigenetics to explain mass differences in psychologies seems like an empty theory to me. All things are possible, but then again, all things are possible.

From your comment, I derive that you have a good grasp of the following concepts : “epigenetics” and “mass différences in psychology “.

Please correct me if I am wrong, that is if you did write this comment of yours without having an adequate understanding of “epigenetics ” and “mass psychology “.

My comment 88 was addressed to Triteleia Laxa as a follow-up on our exchange started with comment # 50. For some reason, it was detached from the rest of the exchange.

Sequel: “Afromediocrity”

Albeit with the inevitable constriction of gibs, these low IQ places will become rather socially darwinistic. Afrotriumph is possible – in a very long term future.

There is great potential in photonic and quantum CPUs but as of yet there is no Intel-like entity to build the global infrastructure to allow these CPUs to be made cheaply.

Seems like a job for a large state with a lot of money and tech ambitions… Wonder who it could be…

While the USA’s ruling trash are up to the job of fixing this, it still appears the US dollar is still the least worst for parking a lot of your assets. Other potentially good ones like Switzerland and its franc are just too small, you covered some of the problems with gold for this purpose.

The news about the Russian sovereign wealth fund dumping all its dollars is interesting, but it’s only $186 billion to begin with, around 4% of the nation’s estimated annual GDP per Wikipedia. Absent other evidence, I assume it’s because of the malintent of the increasingly Jewish US ruling class, they can’t hide their centuries long desire to damage or destroy “Russia.” And that’s not counting how “Putlier” and “Russia” convenient excuses for things like the Democratic party apparatus having terrible computer security or being so wretched they inspire people to leak damning information about it.

I’m starting to get the impression that you’re more interested in “gotchas” than discussion.

I have a reasonable understanding of the concepts you mention. I am just waiting for you to clarify what you mean by “psyche” as it is word used differently a lot. I am also confused as to why you are so reluctant. It reinforces my negative impression.

No expeditionary military facing peer or near peer adversaries can continue to be effective in that domain with the sort of social engineering that’s happening to the US military right now. See the “Proud Legions” chapter of This Kind of War by T.R. Fehrenbach on how the US army so quickly lost its core competencies between the end of of WWII and the beginning of the Korean War.

Perhaps it will be adequate for a civil war in the US, the other type of military is focused inwards, and it should be able to continue to “break things and kill people” in the Third World absent intervention from Russia etc. for some time. But that’s not quite the same thing as remaining the world’s hegemon unless it starts to openly threaten the use of nukes, and that doesn’t work well against nuclear armed adversaries, and would certainly change its reputation and the nature of its “soft power.” See how well the PRC’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy is working abroad, or not.

The Bikini Atoll test was an accident in the fusion device working too well, at the time we didn’t have enough lithium-6 for it to create tritium during the explosion process, so it had a lot of lithium-5 that was thought to be mostly or entirely inert. Which turned out not to be the case.

We need some positive energy in here।।

Ano4 you’re cancelled from being Dharmic.
Imagine trying ੨ find esoteric meaning in faggotry

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

Slowly but surely, America is becoming a better place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/opinion/Naomi-Osaka-ambition-women.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/upshot/jobs-rising-wages.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Alright, for me psyche / self is just a concept created by humans to describe the integrated set of perceptual and cognitive processes as well as their emotional appreciation.

That a person is both conscious of and not conscious too?

No expeditionary military facing peer or near peer adversaries can continue to be effective in that domain with the sort of social engineering that’s happening to the US military right now.

That’s what Elon Musk’s Starlink/Skynet is for. Total battlefield dominance via direct command and control satellite groups and drone swarms. Good luck jamming those – you won’t, at least not from Earth surface.

US military is preparing for war with very little human soldiers, and correctly so. The only question is of “human rights” formality – can’t legally have machines do all the killing, some human must click “approve” button on a computer screen prior to attack to make it legal.

And who is best to click “approve” button as much as possible in a genocidal war scenario? An experienced soldier who has seen violence in combat first hand and has some compassion? Or a transgender person with deep psychological issues who treats warfare as video game and has been brainwashed to hate “fascist” Russia from birth?

So yes, that’s a near peer conflict that US is gearing up for, and the strategy for fighting it is far from irrational. People who don’t see it are stuck on the last war and history shows fighting the last war is always a deadly mistake.

Seems like a dangerous strategy. As in, the transgender person with deep psychological issues gets immediately gangstalked on the internet by Russians. A cheap but effective tactic for such people.

Something though tells me those hypersonic missiles might not be for… earthly targets, then.

Either way, the US has to be decapitated and dismantled by the end of the century if humanity is not to deserve an extermination.

All information flows including the ones we are not conscious of at the individual level.

Ok, great. I have 3 points. I will repeat my original post below as well.

Using epigenetics to explain mass differences in psychologies seems like an empty theory to me. All things are possible, but then again, all things are possible.

1. Epigenetics faces an epistemological problem when explaining mass psychologies. You really have no way of testing your hypothesis and a particular epigenetic explanation will always remain just one possible hypothesis among “all” potentials.

2. Most theories therefore, to be compelling, have to substitute out evidence and replace them with superficial connections. Or maybe they don’t “have” to, but then I can’t otherwise explain why they all seem to be of the “the land became dark and lost its green, so epigenetics means that their personalities became dark and lost their green” variety.

There is little reason to think the two should match up, yet, in these theories, they always do. I consider this astonishing similarity, between external factor and that mediated through changed genes, to reveal that there’s no there there, and this adds musculature to my first point.

3. I believe that your psyche extends far beyond the limits of your body. Call me kooky, but I am confident in my own experiences. Obviously I do not expect your agreement on this, but my perception is what my perception is.

Interesting:

In search of the first mosque in France

From 1915 to 1919, the Bois de Vincennes hosted a mosque, attached to the hospital dedicated to the Muslim soldiers of the First World War.

Someone didn’t read the linked “Proud Legions” chapter; get back to us after you do that.

Someone also doesn’t know anything about satellite communications; your scenario doesn’t require a Starlink scale network, and signals from satellites aren’t very powerful when they reach the ground. Although I suppose a huge network would make current peer adversaries’ anti-sat capabilities moot.

Someone needs to fill in the blanks about how “drone swarms” will actually get to combat zones; insert “… and professionals discuss logistics” which includes scale, how big will these drone fleets need to be? Which unless your streets are paved with gold also includes where they’ll return to, maintenance, etc., and how these parts of the system avoid retaliatory attack from peer or near peer adversaries. We’re not talking about killing a general from a Third World country visiting a really trashed one we still have lots of assets in, that’s not in a position to do literal tit for tat retaliation.

I’d also be interested to know how well non-stealth drones will survive against, once again, peer or near peer adversaries. They get a much stronger vote than Third World “goat herders.” As Svevlad implies, they can mount serious intelligence operations to reveal who and how to cause the self-destruction of barely functional “transgender persons with deep psychological issues who treat warfare as video game.”

Continuous counterstrike capability development is the only reason why Russian cities are not burning today like in Iraq or Libya.

In 2002 US withdrew from ABM treaty and by 2006 proclaimed nuclear primacy, that is, ability to launch first strike and survive retaliation from Russia. But US got bogged down in Iraq and Financial Crisis in 2008. The tie eating Georgian performed below expectations and war was canceled. That tie sacrificed itself but saved a lot of people.

In 2009, pesky Russians started work on Sarmat, 2011 – Bulava, 2012 – Kh-101/102, in 2015 Calibr made a splash in Syria, 2018 – Avangard/Kinzhal/Poseidon etc.

There’s always something. By the time Starlink and the drones are ready, Nuklon should be as well. As long as Russians can keep up, war will keep getting canceled.

Someone also doesn’t know anything about satellite communications; your scenario doesn’t require a Starlink scale network, and signals from satellites aren’t very powerful when they reach the ground. Although I suppose a huge network would make current peer adversaries’ anti-sat capabilities moot.

Starlink does what, 200 Mbs/s right now? Once fully rolled out its bandwidth will support a huge drone army. And a very large part of that army won’t be on the ground.

Someone needs to fill in the blanks about how “drone swarms” will actually get to combat zones

Are you familiar with a little thing called Starship?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/06/the-us-military-is-starting-to-get-really-interested-in-starship/

I mean, Ars Technica is trying to present it as something new but the purpose of Starship has been obvious from the start. Its a military bomber, or “cargo delivery” vehicle. Can drop drones or precision rods, doesn’t matter.

and professionals discuss logistics” which includes scale, how big will these drone fleets need to be?

1,000’s of tons.

Which unless your streets are paved with gold

Welcome to the Pentagon, golden toilets too.

where they’ll return to, maintenance, etc., and how these parts of the system avoid retaliatory attack from peer or near peer adversaries.

Next round of Starships, from the middle of the ocean, or the middle of Oklahoma, doesn’t matter will deliver spare parts and supplies, and bombs/rods to the opposition.

You can retaliate of course, but those Starships are made from cheap steel and launched from a cornfield on Mexican border. It is a very ‘Russian’, or post-apocalyptic design approach. You can blow up a few steel tanks or a cornfield here and there, but it won’t stop them from coming.

You will need your own space infrastructure that can keep up with the US, but that’s a different discussion.

I wonder if this is typical of the mainstream French media coverage of this kind of issue? It feels quite grounded compared to coverage of similar topics in British papers.

It seems like this chap is now almost a household name for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Blanke

Some wise words from Ch’an master Linchi. These words go completely against the grain of modern life, especially in the West. Seeming so innocuous, they are subversive and revolutionary. If you tried to live this way in the West you would meet tremendous pushback from everyone. Yet evidently, these words also went against the grain in ancient China. Humans in all ages suffer from the same diseases.

Buddism has no room for special effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat and drink, then move your bowels and pass water, and when you’re tired go to sleep. Fools will find me ridiculous, but the wise will understand

It is the least worst because most of the funds come from American satrapies.

Once American influence fails the capital will vote again, either somewhere else or in more tangible assets.

To everyone speculating war tech development and military mental degeneration, financial warfare in the form of meddling with USD, trade war, embargo, international COVID restrictions, etc. are far more effective – cutting the money means none of these outrageous proposals get fulfilled or maintained, and psychology of the soldier never matters.

Tho at the end of financial war will be the hot MAD war all of you want to avoid (or secretly hope for).

Buddhism is fun, it supports a variety of ontologies as wide as Greek philosophy. Tantrism, Zen, Theravada, Pure Land and so on…
Only that Greek philosophy is positive while Buddhist philosophy is negative.
(This sounds a lot like Taoism but only superficially)

I am looking forward to election of the first Black Russian president. If Grigoriy Siyatvinda becomes a politician, he might perhaps play his most extraordinary role as the president of RusFed. Imagine Kamala and Grigoriy signing the treaty of friendship and cooperation between USA and RusFed, imagine them launching together the construction of trans-Beringian railway…

“And the stone that the builders refused, shall be the head cornerstone…”

Greek philosophy has something very similar to Chan and Mahayana philosophy – the skepticism of Pyrrho.

Hercalitus, also, produced a version of Taoist non-dualism, and he was known as the “dark philosopher”. Pythagoreans and Stoics are similar to religious Mahayanists and Theravadins respectively.

Unfortunately the West took as it’s central philosopher the banal Aristotle. Although the Renaissance was inspired by the poetic Plato, and maybe he can be compared to the Buddhist “mind” school – although the theory of Platonic Forms has wrecked much intellectual havoc in the intellectual history of the West, and is now reappearing in the guise of a strict (rather than loose) HBD.

The pre-modern West and East were not so different – it’s just a question of emphasis. You could be an excellent Taoist just based on reading Montaigne’s Essays.

Buddhism itself sees it’s many manifestations as not in conflict, but as appropriate to people on different levels of insight, no matter how contradictory each manifestation seems. I substantially agree with this view, and it has the great benefit of eliminating conflict and replacing it with a “hierarchical” approach, which I think far more intellectually mature.

Dualism creates conflict and intolerance, and strikes me as intellectually immature – although I have noticed, that many people who claim to be Buddhist have a deeply dualistic approach to the world, so superficial labels should not be given undue weight.

Further, Buddhism sees all it’s approaches as basically just medicines, expedient means, and not as actually reflecting some kind of ultimate reality. It’s a remarkable conception, but a fully realized Buddhist is someone who has actually left Buddhism behind 🙂

So it doesn’t really make sense to fight over views that aren’t even meant to reflect reality 🙂

I couldn’t disagree more strongly. I find everything said here garbage, complete garbage, and nothing but complete garbage. Just sayin’.

No problem 🙂

It’s certainly not for everyone, and I did say it rather goes against the modern grain, especially in the West. It probably goes against the mainstream in every society in every age. I certainly would not recommend this as a “general” philosophy suitable for everyone – indeed I would regard it’s widespread adoption as impossible.

But it is an important sensibility, that historically has been influential in elite intellectual circles across the world, notably East Asia, but also significantly in the West.

Politically, this sensibility has been rather suppressed in the modern world, and opportunities to live according to this philosophy have grown exceedingly scarce.

Now this poses a political problem – force everyone to be part of the “productive” system, and those that find such a life distasteful, and would more naturally be suitable to a life of quiet contemplation or abandon, will become rebels, agitators, subversives, and malingerers.

In it’s milder forms, you will get a Bartleby the Scrivener or a Hunger Artist, at it’s more extreme, a political terrorist.

Beyond that, the value of this philosophy is that even if it does not replace the mainstream philosophy of “productivity” that the mass of men live by, it lessens it’s intensity, which is a massive mental health benefit. And there are serious indications that modern society is groaning under the weight of its own intensity.

Finally, the value of this philosophy is it’s immense life-affirming effect on those naturally predisposed to appreciate it, and it’s capacity to liberate into health and joy those who can benefit from it. Historically, Ch’an/Zen has been a great source of art, poetry, and life.

You have every right to dislike it and reject it for yourself, but a wise and healthy society will find a place for it.

Looks like we are perhaps witnessing the “eclosion” of a Covid Bellingcat.

https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke-wuhan-lab-story-embarrassed-media-1596958

China would be like “oups”…

Linji Yixuan was quite drastic in his purging the kleshas from his pupils’ minds. This is due to him being soundly beaten up by his teacher Huángbò Xīyùn every time he attempted to ask stupid questions or tell idiotic stories.

That’s how Linji became enlightened.

Some people would strongly benefit from receiving Huangbo’s 40 blows even to this very day.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/276779.The_Zen_Teaching_of_Huang_Po

“All the concepts you have formed in the past must be discarded and replaced by Void.”

You cannot fully appreciate Rinzai if you don’t know what he learned from Obaku.

Hey, I’m starting a book on Pyrrhonism!

I have been really preoccupied, perhaps morbidly from a “normal” perspective, with the COVID vaccination drive. It’s probably time to move on and see it as a symptom of a wider sentiment of rejection:

Anti-vaxx isn’t really about whether the vaccines have issues, or coercion, or medico-political right, but fundamentally it represents how it is administered in a consumption-based society, dispensed shot by shot, with the power of the state. It might actually be a subliminal rejection of consumerism, and with that modern production, how human identity is reduced into an individual that impact others and be impacted, and both the economic and political structures that are bound up with it, if we adopt the perspective of Dugin’s . Which is why it is mostly the types dissatisfied with the old status quo that are most central (including libertarians that are crypto-localists and crypto-agrarians), in addition to those masses who have been alienated more mildly.

That’s widely understood but barely put concretely, except by agorist authors and critics of capitalism who are on the trend – because deep down, those don’t acknowledge this still affirms the Old Normal, even if that inevitable leads to a form of social control more or less like the false reopening.

(Contra Bashibuzuk, no, I’m not making the move since the prospects of anywhere, and even that of staying, are ultimately illusory, in the Buddhist sense of word. If facing the beast of liberalism’s own doing is in the Karma of humans living under global liberalism, you cannot avoid it. That is called 應劫 in Chinese.)

There are 1,000+ Russian troops and contractors in the Central African Republic supporting the government in taking on insurgents. But why? How in the world does it fit into any Russian grand strategy?

Epigenetics is mechanically sound, its not particularly complicated and it is rather self-evident via the gut-mind ecosystem, etc. Its not really much more complicated than anything else in evolution which can cause actual genetic changes via natural selection, including phenomena like convergent evolution.

Neurotransmitters are to the brain as the concept of combustion physics are to the car engine: the basis of its operation. As noted before, for an accessible personal experiment, vodka provides all that is needed. This also functions en masse. Its not “superficially compelling”; alteration of neurotransmitters will directly affect your judgment, inhibitions, emotions, etc. You can also look up the operation of dopamine reuptake blockers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_reuptake_inhibitor

He’s our diversity inclusion poster for the mentally challenged.

It should be noted that such notions of “lack of reality” have been argued to have severely stymied development of science in China(though tbh the Chinese usually didn’t take it that far in practice) because it essentially undermined the notion of first principles, making deductive reasoning impossible by positioning either an infinity of causes to effect or close enough to it.

Aristotlean logic, while strictly incorrect in its concept of elements, provided a basic for workable theories on the world.

You keep on referring to “collectible stamps”. You have my attention. I’m interested in finding out more about this market. Is it really a good place to invest money right now? How safe is it? Why might this be a better place to invest than say numismatic coins? At least with the coins, you do own some precious metals, with stamps all you have is paper.

My mother must have shared a similar philosophy. She had a black belt for less serious infractions and a red one for “special occasions”. 🙂 My father was only called in once or twice for really special operations. It all worked out quite well for my benefit. I’m afraid to think what might have become of me had my own proclivities for “stupid and idiotic” behavior been given free reign to expand.

I think the theory once was visited that Russia would end up with an election of Natalia Poklonskaya versus Ramzan Kadyrov as president, a highly entertaining contest that would have only the assured outcomes of that it would be almost certainly negative for her residents.

First Principles impede the ability to be open minded about the results of experiments. They are mental straitjackets. All you need for good science is a willingness to experiment, a sense of adventure, and honesty about what works.

Today, we have First Principles – but little real science.

First Principles, peer review, the whole scientific bureaucracy – secure prisons for little minds. Eventually some bold and fearless spirit like Francis Bacon or Lin Chi will sweep all that nonsense away, and usher in a new era of experiment without presuppositions.

Your intelligence is perfectly adequate for science, Daniel – what you lack is boldness, courage, a sense of adventure. You seek security, like all small men.

Yes, at the highest levels the insight that there is no ultimate reality does eliminate the motivation to do Faustian science, because the element of drivenness and fear is eliminated, and one lives a life of joyous appreciation. But this is a tiny fraction of men.

As Nietzsche said, the most intelligent and spiritual men will always be relatively uninterested in science, mere control of physical things, and science will always be the domain of the broad base of intelligent but mediocre men. But this broad base of mediocrity will benefit from living in an intellectual culture free of a heavy accretions of definite notions about reality.

Huang Po is another one of my all time favs!

Confucian China had become suffocated by a heavy encrustation of order, decorum, ritual, custom, and convention. This happens periodically in every society and sometimes drastic measures are required to break spiritually free from the dross.

We will perhaps soon require drastic measures ourselves. Well, it is all expedient means anyways.

For a gentler version of the same message, there is the Japanese Bankei.

Don’t Get Mad – Get Even

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/07/football/ukraine-football-kit-map-russia-scli-intl-spt/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_latest+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Most+Recent%29

A map of Russia with Crimea included, along with a Slava Rossiya.

Francis Bacon, like Isaac Newton, all held principles of an ultimate reality, though it was not necessarily the material reality.

For Francis Bacon, science was no less than humanity’s religious mission. He believed you could read this right out of Genesis 1, where God laid out his own creative process, and then invited humanity to imitate it.

As Bacon saw it, God had ordained for humanity to rule over the world, and although humanity had corrupted its reign through wickedness, humanity’s reign could be restored through the ambitious, but disciplined, application of humility and love.

It’s important to understand how he saw this fitting together.

Humanity’s power, Bacon said, was knowledge. To know the world was to have power over it. So in order to exercise all the power that God had intended for us to have, we first had to understand everything we could about the world that God had made.

You need not concern yourself with that: you should focus on your next dosage of Thorazine which might make a valiant, if most likely futile effort to combat your mental weakness toward hypocrisy and perhaps even against all odds, grant you a limited theory of mind.

Bacon’s advance was to be open minded about what Gods rules were.

Yet he did indeed retain the idea of a stable reality, with a fixed set of rules. That worked well until quantum science.

Today, the assumption of fixed, stable reality is known to be false, and retaining it is a mental straitjacket impeding progress.

No position is false, it exists in a nested hierarchy, with each appropriate to a particular level.

At a particular level of reality, the assumption that a fixed set of rules exists may be quite helpful. At a higher level, quite injurious.

At an even lower level, the scholastics “knowledge” had utility.

This is just as things pertain to science. At higher levels, a concern with science itself impedes flourishing. Science itself exists within a nested hierarchy.

But this is beyond what you can appreciate, so I will leave off there.

But this is beyond what you can appreciate, so I will leave off there.

The reply button to the lower left of the message.

Yes, I can see why you might think so, and indeed, it is valid on a certain level of reality 🙂

It might actually be a subliminal rejection of consumerism, and with that modern production

Good insight.

These political feuds are never about concrete fact, but always symbolic in nature. Countering a political opponent with fact and reason, when he is operating on the level of symbol and myth, is a futile exercise.

I think it’s increasingly important to recognize the huge role myth and symbol play in human life, and the comparatively small role reason plays.

In politics, it never pays to understand something literally. One must always dig deeper.

For instance, in the latest Israel-Hamas conflict, liberal progressives were aligned with Hamas, which on the surface violates progressive principles in every way. Yet pointing that out was singularly ineffective.

Because on the mythic level, Israel represents technological civilization, European culture, and Whites, and progressives are “about” being anti these things more than they are about anything else.

LOL i don’t know. 🙂 It was just an example.

Martin Armstrong is big on collecting antique coins; it seems to have mostly worked out for him, but its more of a fetish than investment.

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/history/ancient-economies/owning-a-piece-of-history/

I have read somewhere on teh internets that Ramzan has taken a second wife. As a true Mu’meen (I like to use weird transliteration styles for the Islamic lingo) he technically qualifies for four wives and an endless number of infidel concubines. I would suggest he takes Poklonsksya as a third wife (if she converts to Al Din) or as a concubine (if she doesn’t) the progeny of their union would a marvel to behold.

🙂

Same here. I am quite fortunate to have had a stern upbringing. And I thank my parents for everything.

I had quite a strange upbringing, basically alone and surrounded by books, eventually adopting at times fairly fanatical views and living most of my life without anything like television.

I think it did well for me, to be honest but it did make me very strange(perhaps on top of whatever natural strangeness I possessed), with an intense fondness for asceticism.

Apologize for getting into an argument with you over science.

I am not very interested in science. I’m a simple person who isn’t materially successful, so I shouldn’t be talking about what it takes to gain power over the physical world.

I’m sure you, who are passionate about science, understand it much better than me. Its just my big ego.

3. I believe that your psyche extends far beyond the limits of your body. Call me kooky, but I am confident in my own experiences. Obviously I do not expect your agreement on this, but my perception is what my perception is.

I don’t disagree with you on that, but does your psyche extend beyond your mind?

Also:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5487283/

Well, I was a bookworm for most of my life, especially when young. But, as I already mentioned once in one of my previous comments, around 16 years old O understood that girls don’t really like the quiet bookworm types, then I started doing sports and adopted a more “young thug” attitude. That was easy because the fall of the Soviet Union was a time of intense youth violence, especially in Moscow. I think being strange is okay. We need strange people so life doesn’t end up predictable and boring.

Echoing your link, this also finds a similar effect:

https://neurosciencenews.com/adhd-drugs-epigenetics-18563/amp/

Concerning, this does not seem to require prenatal exposure; it appears that dopaminergic drugs are somehow modifying sperm and although the mechanism seems to be unknown, the effect is substantiated.

Well AaronB is just taking words out of their context, after all Chan is beyond books and words, precisely because it is transmitted through teacher-disciple lineage. It is absolutely impossible to understand Chan without instructions from a master, which is commonly accepted fact among all legit practitioners of Chan, and even less when you translate cryptical and terse Classical Chinese texts to modern English and study alone. Every master of Chan has studied under other Buddhist masters, in an unbroken line going through Bodhidharma to Mahakasyapa and finally to Buddha.

I find it out funny how Aaron legitimises the behaviour of many anti-semites on this site. Oh, how those guys just love to take random citations from Talmud and Bible and say: “see how those evil Jews want to enslave and rule over us, we know better than Rabbis and Bible scholars!” At least those damn nazis can claim that Judaism and Christianity are holy book based religions, unlike Buddhism which has no one holy book, but a Dharma transmission lineage from the Buddha.

For such delusional beings there is no value in the living tradition itself, but only how that tradition serves in legitimising their own particular worldview.

No matter, it’s cool that Aaron has gone further on the Way than our monks! What a guru!

Fools will find me ridiculous, but the wise will understand

🙂

Some words of wisdom from great Taoist of the West, the Ch’an master of 16th century France, Michel de Montaigne. At age 38, he retired to live a life dedicated to “tranquillity, freedom and leisure.”. Initially depressed, he achieved liberation from burdensome mainstream ideas by adopting Taoist wu-wei –

It seemed to me I could no better serve my spirit than by surrendering it to the savouring of its own thoughts.…Like a bolting horse, it had a hundred times more space to move in….”

In his pursuit of an easeful state, Montaigne wrote that “there is nothing I would break my head against in the name of scholarship.”

While he went so greatly against the grain of the Western Faustian culture of struggle only then emerging, elite Western intellectuals down the ages adored him – perhaps some instinct of self-preservation telling them he was the antidote to the mysterious disease they suffered from. Nietzsche, utterly opposite in sensibility, loved him.

Here are some quotes. Many of his best I could not find online sadly –

“….We are great fools. ‘He has passed over his life in idleness,’ we say: ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of all your occupations….”

“….I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: it’s all the same thing … to attack a tough position in war, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are illustrious actions; to … laugh, sell, play, love, hate, and gently converse with our families and with ourselves in the right way … not pretending to be what we are not, that is rarer, more difficult and less remarkable …”

Concerning, this does not seem to require prenatal exposure; it appears that dopaminergic drugs are somehow modifying sperm and although the mechanism seems to be unknown, the effect is substantiated.

Also see this:

THE YAZATA HAOMA

The Yazata Haoma, known in Persia as Hōm Izad, in India as Hōm Yazad, is the divinization of the force or spirit (Av. mainyu-) within the haoma plant (cf. Boyce, 1992, pp. 52-53; Lommel, p. 187). In the Hōm yašt Haoma manifests himself to Zoroaster “at the time of pressing” in the form of a most beautiful man and exhorts him to gather and press haoma (Y. 9.1-2). He is frequently hailed as “the Golden-Green One” (zairi-), also as “golden-green-eyed” (zairi.dōiθra-). He is “righteous” (ašavan-, q.v.), “furthering righteousness” (aša-vazah-), and “of good wisdom” (hu.xratu-,cf. Skt. sukratu- “wise” of Soma; see AirWb., cols. 246, 254-55, 1681, 1772-74, 1819). Through the potency in his plants he grants “speed and strength to warriors, excellent and righteous sons to those giving birth, spiritual power and knowledge to those who apply themselves to the study of the nasks” (Y. 9-22)

https://iranicaonline.org/articles/haoma-ii

Someone should look into the epigenetic effects of Ephedrine. Although, to be fair it is quite possible that Soma/Haoma was not (solely ?) ephedra.

But why?

To repaint the CAR war map, of course.

🇨🇫 Was asked to update a map on the War in Central African Republic and I have no idea what is going on there.

Might research this area in the future. pic.twitter.com/KuojWXZduP

— Rafal R. (@rr0162) February 24, 2021

This map highlights the current battle-lines in Central African Republic 🇨🇫 pic.twitter.com/YawBXdnrl9

— Samuel Ramani (@SamRamani2) May 5, 2021

I assume it’s because of the malintent of the increasingly Jewish US ruling class, they can’t hide their centuries long desire to damage or destroy “Russia.”

Almost correct. Russia has excellent relations with the Palestinian Jews of Israel. And, you can see the virulent hatred for the Palestinian Jews of Israel coming from the SJW Islamic Globalist Elites in the U.S. Thus, it would be more accurate to say:

… it’s because of the malintent of the increasingly Muslim US ruling class, they can’t hide their centuries long desire to damage or destroy “Russia.”

Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib are Elite U.S. leaders pushing the “Russia, Russia, Russia” myth. George IslamoSoros has been funding Anti-Semitic & Anti-Russian NGO’s for decades.

Russia has temporarily stoppered its Muslim problem by getting rid of troublemakers like Boston Marathon Bomber Tsarnaev. However, dumping is a short duration tactic that has to be replaced by something else.

PEACE 😇

From Pavel Pryannikov’s Telegram blog (Google translated from Russian)

I don’t disagree with you on that, but does your psyche extend beyond your mind?

I would probably use those as synonyms.

Thanks for the link too.

I agree with your comment and I don’t believe it disagrees with mine.

Buddhism which has no one holy book, but a Dharma transmission lineage from the Buddha

Is it consistent with Buddhism for an individual to be able to just close their eyes and see?

I find it out funny how Aaron legitimises the behaviour of many anti-semites on this site. Oh, how those guys just love to take random citations from Talmud and Bible and say: “see how those evil Jews want to enslave and rule over us, we know better than Rabbis and Bible scholars!”

Indeed, but I do not claim my selections “represent Buddhism”. I have always made quite limited claims. I have been clear that I am talking about one particular sect within Buddhism, and that I am even only speaking of certain particular masters within that sect. So a sect within a sect. My selections don’t even represent the whole of Ch’an, just an influential sect.

I think that’s intellectually responsible and quite different from what the anti-Semites are doing.

I have also claimed that in my opinion, I think the logic of Buddhism tends naturally to develop into the selections I’ve offered. I’ve explained my reasons for thinking so, and made clear that I have no problem if others do not find my reasons compelling.

You say that Ch’an relies on transmission outside words. But the selections I offered do not present any positive teaching – they merely negate received views. So no verbal transmission is indeed being offered.

I think we can see, that your charge is baseless. To be charitable, perhaps you did not understand the specific and limited nature of my claims, so I will not impute any I’ll motive to you.

But I am glad you gave me the opportunity to clear that up.

My mother tried but any disciplinary actions just made me sneakier and better at covering my tracks.

Gang psychopath, I guess

June 6th – Our General Finally Falls, Obtaining Shaheedi. “Baba Deep Singh came so far to give his head at this place, and I am privileged to be able to give mine right here,” stated Sant Bhindranwale before running out of ammo, charging the machine guns with his Talwar (Eye Wtiness accounts). from Sikh

https://www.instagram.com/p/CPw9Uzgs3y7OhZEZQD7em4sTQS6qLZfhYudnxs0/

ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ

I don’t get your question? Different meditative practices are quite common in Asian religions.

Isn’t being silent and eyes closed, so that one could think more clearly, and therefore “see,” consistent with all humanity?

Qi-shi: You have crossed the ocean to come here and have thus endured danger. What is the object of your visit?
Ananda Jennings: My object is to realise the Buddhadharma.
Q: One should be clear about the question of birth and death when one studies the Dharma; what is your opinion about ‘birth and death’?
AJ: Since fundamentally there is neither birth nor death, what is the use of formulating opinions which alone are ‘birth and death’?
Q: If there is neither birth nor death, what is the use of studying the Buddhadharma?
AJ: Fundamentally there is no Buddhadharma, and he who realises Dharma is Buddha.
Q: The Buddha possessed thirty-two characteristic marks and when he pressed his toes to the ground, the ocean symbol radiated; can you do this?
AJ: Both the ability to do this and the inability to do this pertains to phenomenalistic sophistry.
Q: Although your interpretation is profound and what you say is correct, the mere speaking of eating does not satisfy hunger., what, according to you, is the ‘Ultimate Sentence’?
AJ: The Ultimate has no ‘sentence’ and speech also has no basis, the non-thinking nature of enlightenment being free from verbiage of opinion and ideas.
Q: You have spoken of it in detail and every word of yours accords well with the Patriarch’s meaning. But the word ‘knowledge’ is the gateway to all kinds of calamity. Since you have entered by means of correct interpretation, may I ask you this: Without using words or speech, what is your fundamental face?
AJ: The Diamond Sutra says, ‘Anuttara-samyak-sambhodi is not Anuttara-samyak-sambhodi.
Q: It seems to be so, but the life-root can not be cut off by knowledge and views (consciousness). I hope you will look into this.
AJ: I have not had much opportunity to read the sutras. After my previous seclusion for four years, when I spoke to others, they all said that my words accorded with the Buddhadharma. In my opinion, understanding that does not derive from the mere reading of sutras seems not to belong entirely to human consciousness.
Q: That which does not derive from the reading of sutras and shastras but manifests during one’s meditation still belongs to the former wisdom which is also consciousness.
AJ: That Buddhadharma postulates true realisation but does not rely on human or cosmic consciousness.
Q: By not being bogged down in sutras and shastras and by not clinging to the self-nature, the ‘thusness’ of the Dao is everywhere and the truth prevails anywhere one may happen to be. It can expediently be called ‘The One’.

I don’t get your question? Different meditative practices are quite common in all Asian religions.

You seemed to be saying that Chan/Buddhism needs teacher-student transmission.

In reply, I wondered whether an individual might just see the truth themselves?

Or, perhaps be shown what they need by creatures/spiritual phenomena?

Isn’t being silent and eyes closed, so that one could think more clearly, and therefore “see,” consistent with all humanity

I wouldn’t use the term “think” for a process that is more like watching an interactive film, but I also don’t know what term to use.

Patriarch Linji is not any minor figure. Did you not notice Silviosilver’s reaction? Tarnishing the image of Dharma for one’s egoism is not intellectually responsible behaviour. Maybe this is news to you, but faith is a sensitive thing for other people too.

Chan teachings are advanced Sutrayana traditionally only meant for monks who have gone far in the path, and who are well grounded in Buddhist basics, in Chan Dharma lineage is of paramount importance, there has never been a Chan master without his own master. Even Linji was a monk, with a master, living in a monastery.

But go on Aaron, please go on and explain us more how you don’t really care and how you are happy by not caring, maybe you should write a 10 000 word essay about how you really don’t care, and if we still would not believe you, maybe you should then write a book about about how you dont really care, maybe repeating to people how you don’t care makes them to believe that you really don’t care, so go on Aaron!

(Arrested development?)

Graham Greene wrote that every man’s life has a turning point; and that most men don’t recognize it when it comes along. But Jonathan Franzen wrote, what if the big event is not an event at all, but an insight; and that everything is clear after the insight. I think Franzen is right, so I read all of the philosophic viewpoints in the comments looking for the insight. Thank you AaronB, especially. These are quite interesting. Maybe next time.

I’m tired, I will go to sleep….

But before falling sleep I think that maybe there’s not enough violence nowadays, is it good that people have so much of time to think of non-sense? Is this how our species uses it’s precious free time, after hundreds of thousands of years of constant struggle?

Raising the retirement age was justified by the fact that it would save the “missing” 850 billion rubles per year.

They would have raise retirement age regardless of money. Its the same situation as in most of the world – they will need people to keep businesses running.

Japan can (and does) print whatever money it needs, but it still needs business to operate. So they have to keep old people employed. Those who don’t breed, work to death.

Breaking female workers down by age, the increase in employees aged 65 and older stands out. In June there were 3.59 million such workers, up from a monthly average of 1.45 million in 2009.

But as a percentage, only 17.7% of women 65 and older were working, compared with 34.3% of male seniors. As Japan’s population continues to age and the labor shortage continues, more senior women are likely to enter the workforce.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-sees-record-number-of-women-working-but-challenges-remain

Did you not notice Silviosilver’s reaction?

Ah, so the quality of a spiritual text is to be judged by an avowed atheist who embraces aggression. Apparently, spirituality is a popularity contest lol. Not superficial at all – can see I am dealing with a person of real depth here 🙂

I quoted Linchi verbatim. I urge everyone to go read him, as well as his wonderful master, Huang Po. You, on the other hand, seem to be scaring people away from reading him with mystifying mumbo jumbo. You are scared people will think for themselves.

By lying to people here that I misquoted him – something easily checked, so a futile maneuver – I am beginning to think that you are a dishonest person with an agenda – not necessarily a conscious one, though.

I think you have an unconscious desire to keep people attached and materialistic, and hence miserable. Unable to achieve liberation yourself, you instinctively wish to prevent others from doing so. After all, misery loves company.

In this last age of the Kali Yuga, people like you appear with increasing frequency. Self appointed gatekeepers trying to bar the passage to the other shore.

I am here to fight your heavy, lumbering atmosphere with divine lightness 🙂

Chan teachings are advanced Sutrayana traditionally only meant for monks who have gone far in the path, and who are well grounded in Buddhist basics, in Chan Dharma lineage is of paramount importance, there has never been a Chan master without his own master. Even Linji was a monk, with a master, living in a monastery.

Ch’an is liberation from all that childish nonsense.

But go on Aaron, please go on and explain us more how you don’t really care….!

My intention is to write a library of books on not caring 🙂

Because not caring is best demonstrated by caring, as anyone who understands not caring knows.

Guatemala reacts to Kamala Harris.

No one takes the illegitimate Harris/Biden regime seriously.

PEACE 😇

Your intention is to bolster your rather pathetic ego via attention seeking. It is both childish and predictable. The only reason that you don’t realize it is that on top of your total lack of theory of mind in understanding others, you further incapable of realizing how ridiculously pitiful you come across.

But I suppose, that’s one of the basic defining characteristics of mental illness.

It looks like the government forces have the upper hand and are retaking the country. But can anyone answer why do this? How does it fit into the overall strategy?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atlas_of_the_Central_African_Republic#/media/File:LocationCentralAfricanRepublic.svg

Your intention is to bolster your rather pathetic ego via attention seeking.

I’m pathetic, childish, egotistic, pitiful, and mentally ill. I’m ok with all that.

I am quite worthless. But it is good that these ideas, that go against the grain, get out there 🙂 It is good that people know about Linchi.

It is good that the gloomy, serious, ponderous, heavy, water buffalo people, the ones without a divine spark, the attached and materialistic, and consequently the unhappy, do not quite have it all their own way.

And the rage I reliably elicit in you and Altan and others of your ponderous flat footed ilk is proof I am threatening your empire of gloom 🙂

that’s one of the basic defining characteristics of mental illness

Those who see a bit farther always seem mentally ill to the dull conventional conformist.

You’re missing his whole “financial prophet” role which I see as the most important (he says the whole set of mistakes, COVID & Great Reset, will tank the West by 2032-37 and shift the financial center of the world to China)

I’m skeptical of all so-called prophets, though I find him interesting.

Trump would be smiling in his Floridan retreat. But if there hadn’t been that much rigging and Trump had kept the office then the Guatemalans should have been telling him to mind his own business and go back home, too, since both Biden/Harris and Trump/Pence are two faces of the same Yanqui imperialism.
Trump isn’t the new Jesus.

An update on HK’s vaccine rollout: the BioNTech vaccine is inducing strokes in young uni students, something that only occured in much older cases with real latent risk for the Sinovac one. I think both have their own share of Bell’s palsy and Guillain–Barré, some on relatively young cases, which are likely to be rare reactions common to all COVID and some other types of vaccines, and maybe independent from the type of platform used.

Audacious Epigone and lots of anti-vaxxers say the risk of adverse reactions from the vaccines is much greater than the risk from natural infections, young people should reject it altogether. They’re thinking on the assumption that since the whole COVID thing is a ploy and there is no fundamental need to vaccinate, one case of avoidable reaction is too many (kinda like what Cuomo thinks of the lockdowns he ordered, saving one life is worth it). Besides there are reports of vaccinated individuals contracting COVID (this is possible since many types of vaccines only alleviate symptoms), and even wilder claims of dying of COVID after vaccinations.

Here’s the question to pro-vaxxers: what would you think to be the acceptable base rate on rare and serious adverse reactions like the ones I mentioned above? How does this compare with vaccines for other diseases where vaccination is compulsory by state mandate, or to annual flu vaccines? If you see any thing “wrong” with my above thinking you can say what you know too (but those will be seen as deluded from a antivaxx perspective).

I hope this will be constructive and won’t devolve to name-calling, bitter rivalry and arguments of social systems many debates on COVID vaccines have become nowadays.

One of the more amusing, yet rather sad parts of your belief is that you trigger rage. Its yet another aspect of your surprisingly uncreative and ultimately, deeply inwardly focused mindset toward self-promotion.

Like I said before, work on your theory of mind.

That and Thorazine.

Based Africans.

[MORE]

https://www.takimag.com/article/institutional-collapse/
Another seeing the writing in the wall, except that his perspective is only limited to the US while everyone else’s governments are more or less on the action.

Great point to Bashibuzuk for his “Westroika” observation in that it is actually an reaction of globalist elites to the structural crisis caused by their previous mistakes in policy decisions (or if Kissinger to be trusted, some elements of malice). I see it as being based on the logical conclusion of liberalism pointed out by Dugin, of freeing the individual of its self into “dividuals” and of the possibility of post-humanism, something the globalist elites are channeled into seeing and which implies lots of off-the-wall policies – that’s precisely what is meant by the World-System & Liberalism’s “Karma”.

It is good that the gloomy, serious, ponderous, heavy, water buffalo people, the ones without a divine spark, the attached and materialistic, and consequently the unhappy, do not quite have it all their own way.

So we are the water buffalo people without the divine spark? You are now Aaron revealing quite much about the inner workings of your mind, I must say. A tribalist with a messianic complex?

You seemed to be saying that Chan/Buddhism needs teacher-student transmission.

How else you will understand a tradition or training that can not be expressed by words and is beyond the scriptures? How else Chinese could have discerned between self proclaimed Messiahs like Aaron and genuine Chan masters?

[T]he origins of this lineage-based transmission scheme are to be found in Indian Buddhism and the fourth- and fifth-century Buddhist meditation tradition of Kashmir. There are a number of parallels between the Chan transmission scheme and Chinese family genealogies of the eighth century and later, but we should remember that Indian Buddhists had parents and teachers, family genealogies and initiation lineages, just as the Chinese did. As an amalgamation of Indian and Chinese elements, though, the Chinese transmission schema developed within the Chinese Buddhist context and was particularly well adapted to that milieu.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_lineage_charts

In reply, I wondered whether an individual might just see the truth themselves?

Good question! It is theoretically possible in Buddhism, but self awakened Buddhas are exceedingly rare, iirc chances to become self awakened Buddha are something like a one in one hundred billion.

But remember Buddhas are driven by sincere compassion, therefore it’s probably even harder to meet Buddhas on internet, where most people are motivated by selfish desires and pride, myself included.

Or, perhaps be shown what they need by creatures/spiritual phenomena?

Possible, but not advisable for anyone except highly realised masters, and even for them it can be a risky endeavour. Mind can be a tricky think and there is no limit for human delusions.

I wouldn’t use the term “think” for a process that is more like watching an interactive film, but I also don’t know what term to use.

Are you speaking about clairvoyance or imagination? Well our mind has also its own way to see things, often after concentration and careful pondering we see better how things are.

“.. you trigger rage..” – This is very telling, Mowgli. You should talk about your rage issues with your machine therapist. Perhaps it will tell you that pointing to humans that their “theory of mind” is not adequate is not how humans think and communicate. Humans have minds while machines have only theories of it.

Yo Anatoly when’s that Great Bifurcation text dropping?

You are coming from a different background, so my questions and observations may only translate with difficulty.

If I ever seem obtuse in this conversations, please be patient with me. I am trying my best. It is fun to explore ideas like these.

But remember Buddhas are driven by sincere compassion, therefore it’s probably even harder to meet Buddhas on internet, where most people are motivated by selfish desires and pride, myself included

I feel that someone motivated by deep compassion would suffer a lot. They would appear to those around them as a blank canvas, perfect for putting our most extreme qualities onto.

In this way, their presence, might bring out those people’s most extreme qualities, which is generally dangerous and hurtful all around.

Are you speaking about clairvoyance or imagination?

Is “imagination” where your pride goes into overdrive, and “clairvoyance” what you see when you drop that?

Possible, but not advisable for anyone except highly realised masters, and even for them it can be a risky endeavour

Maybe those spiritual phenomena deserve love and acceptance too?

Rage comes from a place of feeling threatened. What threatens you about AaronB?

The point is that he doesn’t, it’s a self-belief of his that he keeps insisting due to its self-promoting implications: if you trigger rage in others, you are threatening in some fashion and therefore important.

His hypocrisy is annoying and it’s entertaining to call him on his nonsense, but its not really very anger-inducing.

His greatest threat to me is if I waste too much of my time in responding to him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

Perhaps water buffalo people is too harsh.

Just very “earth bound”, gloomy, heavy, serious, attached, unhappy, people.

As for Messiah complex, I am proposing that some people might enjoy an alternative to heavy, serious Faustian striving, and showing that many of history’s most eminent minds, East and West, thought a simple, ordinary, unambitious life the best one – a point of view that I believe, is suppressed today, and perhaps the source of much of our modern angst.

A rather modest claim.

But one, tellingly, that elicits rage 🙂

Sorry for misunderstanding, your comment seems sensible.

Personally, I like his posts. They have something of Hermes to them; who made jokes and tried to rile people up too.

You might prefer comparing him to Loki, but he doesn’t seem malicious or out for vengeance.

If you find mythological comparisons too grandiose, you can also just use the word “fool”. Such types are often tempered by developing their nurturing side.

Personally, I like his posts. They have something of Hermes to them; who made jokes and tried to rile people up too.

When Leonard Cohen went to Mount Baldy Zen Center, he met with its abbot Sasaki Roshi. On one of their first meetings, the Roshi told Leonard Cohen: “Here you are not a Jew and neither am I a Zen Master”. Leonard Cohen stayed at the Mount Baldy many years and became a personal secretary to Sasaki Roshi.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/from-the-archives-state-of-grace/article32811767/

Perhaps Aaron should go to Mount Baldy, although Sasaki Roshi has passed away a few years ago at a venerable age of 97 years.

https://www.mbzc.org/