MAG-nificent May!

It's time to WELCOME the Fae!

Winter time has gone and past-o,
Summer time has come at last-o.
We shall sing and dance the day
And follow the ’obby ’orse that brings the May.

Chorus (after each verse):

So, Hail! Hail! The First of May-o!
For it is the first summer’s day-o!
Cast you cares and fears away,
Drink to the old horse on the First of May!

Blue bells they have started to ring-o,
And true love, it is the thing-o.
Love on any other day
Is never quite the same as on the First of May!

Never let it come to pass-o
We should fail to raise a glass-o!
Unto those now gone away
And left us the ’obby ’orse that brings the May!

(repeat first verse)

Beltane and May Day

Gather ye rosebuds...

Axis mundi

Self-moving Motions

Penrose Diagram

Hail to the Chief!

Gus Wiencke, "Chief Tamanend"

TAMANEND was partner with William Penn in a boldly conceived agreement dated 1683 that Europeans and Indians would live together in peace as long as the creeks and rivers run and while the sun, moon, and stars endure.

Penn's unprecedented Indian treaties captured the imagination of Europe. Voltaire wrote about them as portent of a new age and an exception to European extermination and expulsion or even enslavement of the American Indians.

As an Indian, Tamanend trusted Penn and his lofty ideal of a commonwealth of freedom, peace, and tolerance for all inhabitants.

TAMANEND, A VILLAGE SACHEM

The historical facts about Tamanend are based on some eight documents from the first fourteen years of Pennsylvania history. To these facts we can add the little that is known about the Lenape Indians.

Tamanend spoke an Algonkian language which was quite different from that of the Iroquois to the north. Modern anthropologists estimate the population of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians to which Tamanend belonged as between 2,500 and 12,000. Their prescence rested light as a bird's wing over a vast region of forests and streams. It extended from north of the Raritan River across New Jersey to the ocean, and down into northern Delaware and all along the Delaware up to the Lehigh.

Tamanend lived in the forests between the Pennypack and the Neshaminy. Here the Indians hunted deer and beaver in the winter. In the warmer months they raised corn, beans and squash in small clearings and fished in the Delaware for shad and herring. Tamanend's people lived in family groups, each family or clan making a temporary village of about fifty to a hundred persons. When the soil was exhausted and firewood was used up, they simply moved the village to another site.

In one of these villages - which one is unknown - Tamanend was the sachem or trusted spokesman. But each village ordered its own affairs in a very democratic and independent manner. Everyone had some part in any important decisions and these were made by consensus. The English exagerated the position of sachems and called Tamanend the King of the Delawares. Tamanend was nothing of the sort; he could not give orders like a king or feudal lord and the Lenape Indians had no overall tribal government

However, so great was the power of Tamanend's personality that Indians and English settlers remembered him for a hundred years. Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary and lifelong friend of the Lenape Indians, wrote about Tamanend years later: He was an ancient Delaware chief who never had an equal. He was supposed to have had intercourse with the great and good Spirit.

William Penn was greatly interested in the Indians and even before coming to America, he had established a policy of making honest agreements of peace and consent with the Indians. King Charles II had made Penn the absolute owner of the entire province, but Penn did not agree with the king that "the savages" had no more right to the land than did squirrels and rabbits.

In 1682 Penn arrived in America and quickly made it his business to get to know the Indians well. He even learned to speak the Lenape language and liked the melody of its words. The Indians called him Miquon, the word for quill in their language or Brother Onas, using the Iroquois word. Penn entered into cordial negotiations with more than twenty sachems becuase no single leader could speak for the Lenape people and that is how Penn got to know Tamanend.

TAMANEND AT PERKASIE, MAY 1683

In May 1683 Penn mounted his white horse and rode north to an Indian village called Perkasie, the present site of Silverdale in Hilltown Township, Bucks County. There Tamanend and his son, Yaqueekhon, received Penn with great hospitality at a feast of venison, roasted acorns, and boiled hominy. A short vigorous man of 39, Penn joined the young men in leaping and dancing to Indian singing and the beating of drums.

Penn began by winning the trust of the Indians for his purpose of establishing a league of peace and amity. Then he laid the groundwork for buying tracts of land. He wanted to make sure that all Indian claims to land were settled before he would take the next steps of surveying parcels of land and selling them to European immigrants. And Penn reserved to himself exclusive rights; no settler was permitted to buy land from the Indians as they did across the river in New Jersey.

Penn's ideas of land as property for exclusive and personal use and the Indian concepts of the land as our mother were worlds apart. Furthermore Tamanend's people knew nothing about the English legal system of written deeds of sale and legal title to permanent land ownership.

For Europeans personal ownership of land was an intense and lifelong concern. The possibility of owning a big tract of land was the magic of America. Buying land was the way for a European to gain personal liberty, to accumulate wealth and status, and to insure security in old age.

The Lenape Indians, however, already had liberty and security in their communal society where individual wealth was of little importance. To sell land was as incomprehensible to Tamanend as it would be to sell a bushel of tomorrow's sunshine.

Penn held many other meetings with Indians such as the one with Tamanend at Perkasie. At these councils Penn must have given broad assurances to the Lenape Indians. For example, Indians remembered that they had been promised a strip one mile wide on each side of the Brandywine for hunting. However, when they complained of mill dams stopping the migration of fish, the government officials could find no written records of the old agreement. Some historians conjecture that Penn's heirs may possibly have destroyed such records of promises made by William Penn in those councils with the Indians in the first years.

At any rate, Tamanend understood that sale of land to Penn did not mean driving the Indians out. And Penn instructed his surveyor never to disturb any of the few, widely scattered Indian farm plots and villages. So Tamanend had good reason to believe that his people could go on hunting for game and raising corn and beans as before. There seemed to be plenty of room for Indians and whites. And William Penn was confident that Indians and Europeans could live together in peace.

TAMANEND IN PHILADELPHIA, JUNE 1683

On Saturday, June 23, 1683, a month after meeting with Penn at Perkasie, Tamanend and five other sachems stood in the New Quaker Meeting House in Philadelphia on Front Street near Sansom. Captain Lasse Cock, the Swedish interpreter held in his hand a deed of sale,, written in English on a sheet of paper. Cock explained in Lenape words what this English indenture or contract of sale said. I Tamanen doe grant and dispose of all my lands lying betwixt Pemmapecka and Nessaminehs Creeks and all along Neshaminehs Creeks to William Penn Proprie'r and Govern'r of Pennsilvania etc his heirs and Assignes for Ever.

The Swede signed the deed as a witness and handed the pen to Tamanend. Bending over the table, Tamanend needed to fill his pen a second time to inscribe all of his mark, a snake coiled.

Tamanend stayed for several days as honored guest in William Penn's house and there was more feasting on Sunday. In the afternoon he sat in the pine board Meeting House while a visiting Quaker, Roger Longworth preached.

Once more Tamanend put his mark on a piece of paper. This was a receipt for the purchase price which for him was a delightfully generous stack of wares: 2 guns, 20 bars of lead, 25 pounds of powder, 6 coats, 8 shirts, 5 hats, 5 pair stockings, 5 caps, 20 handfulls wampum, 1 peck pipes, 10 tobacco boxes, 10 tobacco tongs, 2 kettles, 5 hoes, 6 axes, 16 knives, 100 needles, 2 blankets, 38 yds. duffields, 4 yds. stroudswater (blue & red woolen cloth), 10 glasses, 7 half-gills, 4 handfulls bells. As was proper for a sachem, Tamanend divided everything among his people with only the smallest share for himself. The women as keepers of Lenape history memorized all that Tamanend told them of pacts with William Penn and so preserved an accurate oral record for generations.

COMPLAINTS FROM BOTH SIDES, 1684

The next year Tamanend must have been angry because he caused some disturbances as learn from a letter written in December 1684 by Thomas Holmes who was land surveyor for Penn. Holmes does not explain what was wrong. It might be that cow pastures and pig pens across old trails disturbed the Lenape Indians. At any rate, Homes complained to Penn who was in England that people were afraid to buy land in Bucks County. He informed Penn that Tamanend "threatens to fire their houses." And as a result, people were going over to New Jersey instead.

Penn wrote a stern letter from England, dated June 1685 saying that as for Tamine ... if the Indians will not punish him, we will & must. However, Tamanend did not break the peace with the white men.

Tamanend appears again in documents of history dated May 1692. He along with a delegation of Indians complained to officials in Philadelphia that he had not been paid the full purchase price. One conjecture is that there was not enough to distribute to all in his clan who claimed a share. Tamanend demanded 9 guns, 10 matchcoats (sleeveless woolen jackets), and 10 blankets.

Penn was absent in England so the officials promised to look into the matter and quieted the Indians with two dozen rolls and two forbidden gallons of rum. At a later time they gave Tamanend 6 guns of good quality, 10 Dutch blankets, 10 kettles, and some bread and beer.

In supplying Indians with guns, powder, and lead, the English ran no risk of being attacked. The Lenape Indians did not maintain a warrior society. They had an old understanding with the Iroquois by which they had agreed to a neutral and non-combatant status. They would ... take no part in the Iroquois warfare. That fighting had begun in the 1500s for control of hunting and of trading furs for valued Dutch muskets and metal wares.

The Quakers and Moravians and Mennonites who were pouring into Philadelphia were all pacifists. So Penn had good reason to think that a genuine peace could prevail between the Europeans and the Lenape Indians who were also not a warlike people.

TAMANEND'S LAST MESSAGE, 1697

Twice again the documents of early Pennsylvania report Tamanend's presence at two councils dated 1694 and 1697. At these councils Tamanend reaffirmed peace and understanding between his people and the Europeans. Yes, he had sold the land between the Neshaminyand the Poquessing. Yes, it should extend backward from the Delaware two days journey by horse, or vaguely in a straight line to the further border of the Province, as yet unknown to Penn.

At these councils the Indians recalled the ideals of Brother Onas that Indians and white people should be as equals and they should be as "one head and one heart." It was time again for Tamanend to speak and he gave his last message to the Indians and to the white men. We and Christians of this river have always had a free roadway to one another, and though sometimes a tree has fallen cross the road, yet we have still removed it again and kept the path clean and we design to continue the old frienship that has been between us and you.

After 1697 nothing more appears in documents of history about Tamanend. Historians suppose that by the year 1701 Tamanend was dead. In that year the Lenape Indians sent a letter to the King of England affirming their support and high regard for Penn who was in serious trouble with the royal government. Tamanend's mark was not on that letter and he was not at other councils of that time.

In his four short years of residence in Pennsylvania William Penn had so impressed the Lenape Indians that peace prevailed for about seventy years. This was to be only a brief interlude before the Lenape Indians vanished from Bucks County on a westward trail of blood and betrayal ...

TAMANEND A LEGEND TO THIS DAY 

After 1697 Tamanend became a legend in the memory of both indians and the whites. Some ninety years after Tamanend, the Continental Congress sent Colonel Morgan out West to try to win the support of remnants of the Lenape Indians against the British. Morgan made such a good impression on the Lenape people, now in Ohio, that they called him a "Tamanend."

During the American Revolution patriots gave the name St. Tamany, to a festival for celebrating freedom for the common man. It took place om May 1 with dancing, smoking the calumet, and orations in support of a federal government.

In later years a political organization took the name Tamany Hall. James Fenimore Cooper made the legendary Tamanend a character in one of his novels. And Tamanend was the hero in the first American opera, "Tamany," which was performed in New York City.

The "Delaware," a wooden warship in the American navy bore as its figurehead the carved bust of Tamanend. Built in 1820, the ship carried 74 guns and was flagship in the Mediterranean. The figurehead can still be seen in Annapolis where naval academy students ask the ancient Indian's help before taking exams.

Henry Mercer of Doylestown thought that he had found Tamanend's grave on the Neshaminy near Chalfont. He wnated to put up a solid concrete turtle as big as a house to mark that spot. However Mercer could not convince historians of his theory and he dropped his plans for that red cement turtle.

However in 1923 Mercer did locate the site of Playwicky, a winter-time Indian village in Penn's time. Subsequent finds of artifacts by Colonel Henry D. Paxson coroborate Mercer's location; the stone Indian relics found here are now in the University of Pennsylvania Museum. A bronze marker on the road from Feasterville to Langhorne marks the hillsides of Playwicky where Tamanend may have gone hunting three centuries ago.

When the land for a new park in Southampton was purchased in 1975, a contest was held to name the park. Prize winning entry was "Tamanend," a reminder of our historical heritage in this Indian.

THE TAMANEND TRIBUTE ROCK

Friends of Tamanend Park, committed to preserving the park's natural beauties, have placed a cluster of weathered Delaware River boulders in the park to honor the Lenape Indians. The date, 1683, marks the year of Tamanend's partnership with Penn for a lasting peace. Five Indian names appear on the boulder: Tamanend, Wheeland (brother), Yaqueekhon and Quenameckquid (sons), and Weheequeckhon (sister's eldest son to be Tamanend's successor). Yaqueekhon signed a treaty document in 1692 and he is named in a council of the provincial government with Indians who well remebered Penn's first message to them: I desire to enjoy (this land) with you in Love and consent that we may always live together as Neighbours and friends.

Legendary Precursers 

Kawanio che Keeteru!

Blackholes and Math

On Math for Non-Maths (like me)

Incompleteness

...but now we repeat ourselves.  Hi Lindy!!!

Formulist:Intuitionist::Parmenides:Heraclitus

Self Reference:  The exclusion which proves the rule (1... the "unit" ie- Sun:Star)  Words=Sets One:Many  1:Difference:Repeated.

Parmindean conclusion: "If One is not, then nothing is"

Heraclitian conclusion: "You cannot step into the same river twice"

...and Generation from Opposites

Being on the Outside. Look in? Or out?

^^h/t - A Miserly Foreigner^^

Outsiders moving in:

Looking Inside?  1st Order Observation beats a  failed 2nd Order Observation:

...and Looking Outside from the Outside?:

Free Will - Dennett et al

Slavoj Zizek and Byung-Chul Han

Sylvere Lotringer, "The Dance of Signs"

Excerpt:

These causes are always going to be some sort of childhood event for Freud. At least in part, and we're going to talk about the two-legged model of causes in Freud's work in a moment, part of which, of course, is the "current events", and then there's the other leg of that being, the "childhood" elements. But Lotringer is trying to frame Freud's interpretations as, yet he's not trying to go for neutrality, he knows that he's bringing his own interpretive schema, he just thinks it's a good interpretive schema. But Lotringer is trying to, at the very least, point out that it is "reactive". It is reacting to the dream, to the manifest or nihilic content instead of using that as an active element which will lead to some new creation. Lotringer has kind of a classic schizoanalytic, in a sense, phrase: "I will learn to resist The Melody of Causal Relations in the torper of narrative accumulations in order to reinvent the intensity of risks ceaselessly menacing and forever being reborn." And this is, of course, one of the main gripes with what schizo analysis is, that it is risky. It's going to take one to the limits of, you know, these... different flows are going to be accentuated in all their raw, potentially destructive power, kind of operating on the edge. I mean he constantly talks about the rough edges of reterritorialization and deterritorialization. And Deleuze & Guattari call this a sort of homemade atom bomb of an activity. So there's something dangerous in going to these limits of, you know, the dissolution of the ego, like John Cage talked about, and in a sense what Deleuze & Guattari talk about. And we are forever rebirthing our analysis. But of course, always making it reborn anew, in the sense of Nietzsche's eternal return. The eternal return of difference itself in, you know, this is the' whole point in "Difference and Repetition" basically, is that one must repeat the difference that always comes back as different.

Salvador Dalí, “Maison pour érotomane” (ca 1932)

The second painting, “Maison pour érotomane” (ca 1932) shows a Catalan landscape, with rocks morphing into a horse, cello, and car. (Erotomania is the delusional disorder in which a person believes someone else to be madly in love with them, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.) According to Sotheby’s Aleksandra Todorovic, the transmogrified figures are a direct allusion to the couple in Jean-François Millet “L’Angélus” (1857–59), a painting Dalí used as a reference for many of his own works: “By transforming the Catalan rocks into anthropomorphic and sexually charged images, the artist eroticizes the landscape that witnessed his first delirious encounters with Gala.”

America Against America

by Wang Huning

Amazon blurb:

In 1988, a young Chinese man traveled to the United States on an academic research trip. During his six month stay he visited 30 cities and 20 universities throughout the country. Upon the conclusion of his trip, he authored a book called America versus America, which described the contradictions of the American political and socio-economic system, as well as a critique of capitalism and democracy.

That young man was Wang Huning, who is currently a member of the CCP's Politburo Standing Committee (China's top decision-making body) and the first-ranked secretary of the CCP's Secretariat. He has been called the "Grey Eminence" of the CCP. As such, Wang is believed to be the chief ideologue of the Chinese Communist Party and the principal conductor behind the official political ideologies of three paramount leaders beginning with Jiang Zemin in the 1990s. 30 years later Wang is still helping to formulate Chinese domestic and foreign policy at the highest levels.

This book is an attempt by a scholar to explain the reasons behind the success of the United States in the 20th century, as well as offer a critical take on the various structural problems that were already facing the US in the 1990s. It offers a brief outlook of why the US is potentially heading toward a decline. Although America Against America was first published in 1991, more than 30 years ago, it is still widely read amongst high level Chinese political figures and bureaucrats. Any serious student of US-China relations will benefit greatly from reading this book that remains at the core of Chinese strategic thinking vis-à-vis the United States.

Deleuze on Nietzsche - Against the Dialectic

Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche's work as its' cutting edge

Distinctions - Accidental difference:Relative difference::Pure difference

Excerpts (from Video):

In Nietzsche the essential relation of one force to another is never conceived of as a negative element in the essence. In its relation with the other force, which makes itself obeyed, it does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its' own difference and enjoys this difference.  The negative is not present... on the contrary it is the result of activity, of the existence of an active force, and the affirmation of its difference.

Negation "is only a subsequently invented, pale, contrasting image in relation to its' positive basic concept - filled with life and passion." - Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Deleuze's Nietzsche wants to affirm difference because guess what, it can create new stuff. There's no good and evil, true and false, in Nietzsche. We invent those because we value them, or we value them because we invented them, the humanist conceit. We can say where Nietzsche affirms difference, Hegel disappears it. Each instance of the will to power is a "yes", an affirmation, whereas every negation or starting with a lack, is a "no".

There is though one, one particularly reactionary force that makes the negative central, Ressentiment, revenge, slave morality. That's what dialectics is, not power, but a representation of power. And representing power is not power in the same way that talking about politics is not politics. And with both politics and power, talking about it lets the world just keep on doing whatever it was already doing. Idle chatter justifies the status quo that permits idle chatter in the first place.  And that is it for dialectic. It's not a dialectic. Don't quote me.

...So let me paint the world for you all the way down to the smallest things that exist, from bouncing molecules that feel or repel each other, to the striving of some species to overcome changes in its environment, to your own will to see something accomplished in the world of things. These are all wills that differentiate. You too are repeated acts of willing, in a great sea of willing. The you that refers to you is not "Identity". It's a repetition of your will to differentiate. Not one force, either, but many forces. Multiplicity not Identity. 

So your acts of willing not only differentiate you from other acts of willing, but every act of willing differentiates anything that is anything. The will to power is not some childish outburst to get your own way, it's the metaphysical reason for why anything is different from anything else. Existence. That's why both Nietzsche and Deleuze put such a high value on creation, movement, artistic practices, and such a low value on debate, resentment, and moralizing.  Creativity, making, is active. While resentment negatively represents yourself as good only because others are more evil than you. That's critique without creation.

So, all things that are, are processes. They're struggles in time to not disappear to the background, that is, to become undifferentiated. Will differentiates. A whole plurality of wills. Even our most permanent objects are processes, mountains, stars, the universe itself, and you.

Now, why is this cool? Through differentiation, a fundamental expression of power, and not just special human power, but the power of anything to continually become, and to continue to exist. This is not the critical, not the negative, but the affirmative attitude towards the world. This is ultimately then a affirmative attitude to the world that reflects the world's own attitude towards itself to create and to repeat the creative act. The scientist creates prospects, the artist creates affects, the philosopher creates concepts. Creation affirms power our power.

Scientists artists and philosophers should be a lot more like dancers. Where Deleuze says dance, laughter, and play are affirmative powers of reflection and development, Nietzsche says, "I know not what the spirit of a philosopher would like better than to be a good dancer, for the dance is his ideal and also his art. In the end, likewise, his soul piety."

So let's go back to those metaphysical categories. Cause, effect, possibility, actuality, sameness, otherness, all begin in difference rather than sameness. Not an accidental difference, which is how the dialectic conceives of it, but pure difference. Differences that are not ultimately sublated within an identity, or an idea. A dance of difference, rather than the boring plotting of ideas through history. And for Deleuze, and for Nietzsche, we don't serve ideas or movements, they serve us. And at their very best, they serve life itself.

The New Cancel Culture II

The New Cancel Culture

Slavoj Zizek, "Cancelling Palestine"

Current debates about Israeli policy are rife with double standards, leading to absurd decisions like Germany’s recent cancellation of a pro-Palestinian gathering. By quashing legitimate speech and assembly, an Israel-aligned establishment risks inciting precisely the kind of anti-Semitism that it wants to prevent.

LJUBLJANA – It is only April, but we already have a good candidate for photo of the year. On April 12, German police shut down a Palestine Congress that was set to take place in Berlin, and among those arrested was Udi Raz, a devout Jew with a red yarmulke. In photos and videos of the incident, one can clearly see the smirking aggression on the faces of the policemen – reminiscent of their forebears in the 1930s – as they drag away a Jew.

Among those swept up in the ongoing struggle against anti-Semitism in Germany, many are Jews. The Palestine Congress itself was a joint initiative of the Berlin-based organization Jüdische Stimme für Gerechten Frieden in Nahost (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East) and the pan-European political movement and party DiEM25, whose top figure is Yanis Varoufakis. Yet the German Ministry of the Interior has now banned Varoufakis not only from entering the country, but even from online participation in any political activities there.

Varoufakis is fully justified in claiming that, with this ban, the German government has crossed the line into authoritarian behavior. Worse, the German political establishment – including even the Greens and Die Linke (The Left) – have supported the move, reflecting the breadth of the new anti-anti-Semitic cancel culture. To be sure, similar incidents are occurring in the United States, where, for example, Hobart and William Smith Colleges recently placed political theorist Jodi Dean on leave, after she published an essay discerning an emancipatory potential in Hamas’s October 7 attack. But Germany represents an extreme case of how the establishment has appropriated cancel culture.

To dispel any suspicion that Varoufakis might have delivered an anti-Semitic speech at the Palestine Congress, one can simply read his prepared remarks. The text unambiguously condemns any form of anti-Semitism, and demands only that the same standards be applied to both sides in the conflict.

On April 13, CNN reported that, “Hundreds of Israeli settlers surrounded Palestinian villages and attacked residents across the occupied West Bank … after an Israeli boy who had gone missing from a settlement was found dead.” Let’s call these attacks by their proper name: mob lynchings. Far from a normal police investigation, the Israel Defense Forces have simply allowed vigilantism to prevail. One can only imagine how the enlightened West would react if it had been hundreds of Palestinians attacking Israeli settlements after a Palestinian boy went missing.

Or consider another case: On January 18, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rejected the idea of a Palestinian state and promised that Israel would control the entire region it currently occupies: “And therefore I clarify that in any other arrangement, in the future, the state of Israel has to control the entire area from the river to the sea.” Netanyahu’s use of “from the river to the sea” has come under particular scrutiny, and for good reason. When Palestinians or anyone on the left have used the same phrase to demand a free Palestine (as in the popular chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”), those on the right have disingenuously argued that they are calling for the death of all Jewish people in Israel.

In short, a phrase that is denounced as genocidal when Palestinians use it is now being used by Netanyahu. The formula “from the river to the sea” represents what Israel is actually doing and planning to do, but would never publicly admit to doing, until now – when the Israeli prime minister himself turns it into an obscenity.

I could go on with these examples. On April 2, Netanyahu called the airstrike that killed seven aid workers in Gaza a “tragic case of our forces unintentionally hitting innocent people.” How, then, would he describe the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children at the hands of Israel’s forces?

The house of cards is falling. Previously, Israel at least pretended to follow two rules: criticism of Israeli policies is permissible, but anti-Semitism is not; and the bombing of Gaza is directed at Hamas, which itself terrorizes ordinary Palestinians, not at Gaza’s entire population. Lately, however, these distinctions have collapsed. Netanyahu has openly stated in interviews that in cases where direct anti-Semitism is not allowed, criticism of Israel has taken its place. Likewise, many senior Israeli officials have become increasingly open in equating Gaza with Hamas.

According to Israel’s hardline finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, over 70% of Israelis support the idea of “encouraging voluntary immigration,” because “two million people [in Gaza] wake up every morning with the desire to destroy the State of Israel.” (If this is the case, perhaps it has something to do with the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Gaza.) The implication is that all Gazans are legitimate targets – and it is clear that the West Bank is next.

Given this, the oft-repeated argument that Israel cannot really eliminate Hamas misses the point. For Israel, the true goal of the war is to absorb Gaza and the West Bank: a Greater Israel, from the river to the sea. Until then, Israel needs to be able to claim that Hamas remains a threat, to justify continued military intervention.

The gap between elite and popular opinion in Western developed countries, as well as in some Arab countries (such as Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco), has grown too wide to be papered over. While governments basically support Israel, their citizens can only protest – and, increasingly, be canceled, threatened, and even arrested for it. The danger I see is that if popular dissatisfaction explodes, it will take the form of anti-Semitism. That is why acts like Germany’s cancellation of the Palestine Congress should be recognized for what they are: a new perverted chapter in the history of anti-Semitism.

Un-Biased Spies Like Us

Sun Tzu - Know thy Enemy

Examined Life - Zizek, et al

John Donne, "Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud"

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Giles Deleuze, "What Can a Body Do?"  (Lecture)

Baudrillard - Our Theatre of Cruelty

Von Neumann and the Universal Constructor

Earth Day (aka Lenin's Birthday) 2024

We're ALMOST There!

I Can't WAIT!!!

On the Evolution of Intelligence...

Fermi Paradox - The Myelin Filter? Life May be Common... but Intelligence?

from Wiki:

Myelin is considered a defining characteristic of the jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes), though axons are ensheathed by a type of cell, called glial cells, in invertebrates.[16][17] These glial wraps are quite different from vertebrate compact myelin, formed, as indicated above, by concentric wrapping of the myelinating cell process multiple times around the axon. Myelin was first described in 1854 by Rudolf Virchow,[18] although it was over a century later, following the development of electron microscopy, that its glial cell origin and its ultrastructure became apparent.[19]

In vertebrates, not all axons are myelinated. For example, in the PNS, a large proportion of axons are unmyelinated. Instead, they are ensheathed by non-myelinating Schwann cells known as Remak SCs and arranged in Remak bundles.[20] In the CNS, non-myelinated axons (or intermittently myelinated axons, meaning axons with long non-myelinated regions between myelinated segments) intermingle with myelinated ones and are entwined, at least partially, by the processes of another type of glial cell the astrocyte

Functionally equivalent myelin-like sheaths are found in several invertebrate taxa, including oligochaete annelids, and crustacean taxa such as penaeids, palaemonids, and calanoids. These myelin-like sheaths share several structural features with the sheaths found in vertebrates including multiplicity of membranes, condensation of membrane, and nodes.[16] However, the nodes in vertebrates are annular; i.e. they encircle the axon. In contrast, nodes found in the sheaths of invertebrates are either annular or fenestrated; i.e. they are restricted to "spots". The fastest recorded conduction speed (across both vertebrates and invertebrates) is found in the ensheathed axons of the Kuruma shrimp, an invertebrate,[16] ranging between 90 and 200 m/s[17] (cf. 100–120 m/s for the fastest myelinated vertebrate axon).

Zizek, "The Actuality of Hegel: Our Untimely Contemporary"

Chemistry for Physicists

...and Visa Versa

Michael Levin

Cellular Consciousness - Either a Self-Aware OR Non-Self-Aware Set of Emergent Qualities (Agental System) from and for the Collective.  Solving the Problems of the Collective.  Catch the Scaled-Up  (Brain) Wave.

A Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME)

A Neurally-based Top-Down Approach to Programming aka "Training"?

From The New Yorker

Kyle Chayka, "The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher"

Byung-Chul Han, in treatises such as “The Burnout Society” and his latest, “The Crisis of Narration,” diagnoses the frenetic aimlessness of the digital age.

“The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark,” James Salter wrote in his 1975 novel, “Light Years.” An encounter with a single “slender” line of writing, as he put it, can send a reader spinning off on a new trajectory; her life becomes divided into a before and an after the moment of reading. For Kevin Maret, an undergraduate art student at the University of Idaho, that moment came while reading “In the Swarm: Digital Prospects,” a slim monograph by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han that was first published in English by M.I.T., in 2017. In May of 2023, while scrolling Instagram, Maret encountered a video gloss on Han’s work; Maret was intrigued enough that he borrowed “In the Swarm” from his university library. Han’s writing, polemical and aphoristic, spoke to Maret’s experience of growing up on social media, and crystallized for him the lack of control he felt regarding his relationship to the Internet. In a recent conversation, Maret pointed out a few of his favorite lines: “The occupants of the digital panopticon are not prisoners. Their element is illusory freedom. They feed the digital panopticon with information by exhibiting themselves and shining a light on every part of their lives.” He told me, of the book, “The first time I read it, I read it in two hours.”

Since then, Maret has kept “In the Swarm” out on library loan and carries it with him like a talisman. “I can put this in a jacket pocket if I walk down to the coffee shop or the field by my house,” he told me. He stocked up on other books by Han: “The Transparency Society,” “Saving Beauty,” and “The Agony of Eros,” which are all written in the same pamphletary format, somewhere between manifesto and essay, and mostly run under a hundred pages. Maret is part of a growing coterie of readers who have embraced Han as a kind of sage of the Internet era. Elizabeth Nakamura, a twentysomething art-gallery associate in San Francisco, had a similar conversion experience, during the early days of pandemic lockdown, after someone in a Discord chat suggested that she check out Han’s work. She downloaded “The Agony of Eros” from Libgen, a Web site that is known for pirated e-books. (She possesses Han’s books only in PDF form, like digital samizdat.) The monograph argues that the overexposure and self-aggrandizement encouraged by social media have killed the possibility of truly erotic experience, which requires an encounter with an other. “I’m like queening out reading this,” she told me, using Gen Z slang for effusive enjoyment—fangirling. “It’s a meme but not in the funny way—in the way that it’s sort of concise and easily disseminated. I can send this to my friends who aren’t as into reading to help them think about something,” she said. Like a Sartre for the age of screens, Han puts words to our prevailing condition of not-quite-hopeless digital despair.

Born in 1959 in South Korea, Han originally studied metallurgy in Seoul, to placate his parents, who wanted him to take up a practical discipline. When he was twenty-two, he moved to Germany; he pledged to continue his studies but switched to philosophy, with a focus on Martin Heidegger. In 1994, he got a Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, and then began teaching phenomenology, aesthetics, and religion, eventually landing at Berlin University of the Arts. He has published steadily throughout the past two decades, but has shunned interviews and has rarely travelled outside of Germany. John Thompson, the director of Polity, an independent publisher in the United Kingdom that has put out fourteen of Han’s books since 2017, told me the demand for his work has grown largely by word of mouth. “There has been this grassroots reception of Byung-Chul Han that has driven the demand, and it’s not the conventional way of major review coverage,” he said. Thompson continued, “He’s like an engine. The ideas and the books are just flowing.”

Han’s breakout work was “The Burnout Society,” originally published in German, in 2010. Nearly a decade before the writer Anne Helen Petersen tackled “millennial burnout,” Han diagnosed what he called “the violence of positivity,” deriving from “overproduction, overachievement, and overcommunication.” We are so stimulated, chiefly by the Internet, that we paradoxically cannot feel or comprehend much of anything. One of the ironies of Han’s writing is that it travels easily through the very channels that he despairs of. By condensing his ideas into brief, unadorned sentences, Han flatters the reader into almost feeling as though she has thought the thoughts herself. “The Burnout Society” and Han’s other books now star in countless YouTube explainer videos and TikTok summaries. His ideas have particularly struck a chord with readers who deal in aesthetics—artists, curators, designers, and architects—even though Han has not quite been embraced by philosophy academe. (An essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017 cautiously labelled him “as good a candidate as any for philosopher of the moment.”) His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. According to the Spanish newspaper El País, “The Burnout Society” has sold more than a hundred thousand copies across Latin America, Korea, Spain, and Italy. A museum director in Beijing told me, “The Chinese art world is obsessed with him.” Alberto Olmos, a well-known Spanish author and critic, described Han to me as a “wonderful DJ of philosophy,” spinning together references—Barthes, Baudrillard, Benjamin—in catchy new combinations. In 2023, in an interview with Dazed Korea, the K-pop star RM, from the band BTS, recommended “The Agony of Eros,” adding, “You might find yourself deeply frustrated because the book suggests that the love we are currently experiencing is not love.”

My own first encounter with Han was “Non-things,” which I found positioned prominently in the small-press section of an independent bookstore. I was drawn by its gnomic title and the postmodern collage on its cover: a photograph of skyscrapers seen from within a city, spliced with a photo of skyscrapers shot from above, turning the buildings into a geometric abstraction. In “Non-things,” Han argues that online we encounter a glut of information—i.e., non-things—that distracts us from having experiences with objects in the world: “The digital screen determines our experience of the world and shields us from reality.” The best way to read Han is similar to the best way of reading the Bible: flip through, find an evocative line, and proceed from there. Each sentence is a microcosm of the book, and each book is a microcosm of the œuvre, thus the reader need not delve too deep to get the point. “The smartphone is a mobile labour camp in which we voluntarily intern ourselves,” Han writes in “Non-things.” Spicy! It is a koan to meditate upon, and a description that immediately makes one hate oneself for staring at a screen. I kept reading because I felt like I had to, in case Han might be able to offer me some salvation.

Han’s latest book in English translation, “The Crisis of Narration,” was published in the U.S. earlier this month. (Like comic books, the volumes seem to roll out one extended, episodic narrative; all of the Polity editions have similar cover designs, forming a coherent visual brand.) The book is about the decline of “storytelling,” which in Han’s argument is an endangered mode of establishing meaning in an age dominated by the bullet points and edited clips of content that we consume online. The book builds upon the argument of “Non-things,” but, instead of lamenting a dearth of real-life objects, Han laments our ability to narrativize our “lived moments.” “For digital platforms, data are more valuable than narratives. They do not want narrative reflection.” Is this why my life as documented on Instagram doesn’t actually add up to a unified whole, despite all the time and labor I’ve invested into curating my account? Han’s concept of “information,” the opposite of narration, which requires a kind of non-data-driven capacity for imagination, has something in common with “content,” the catchall term that both describes and denatures twenty-first-century culture into so much undifferentiated mush. In “The Crisis of Narration,” Han writes, “In digital late modernity, we conceal the nakedness—the absence of meaning in our lives—by constantly posting, liking, and sharing. The noise of communication and information is supposed to ensure that life’s terrifying vacuity remains hidden.”

To that, the Internet-addled brain simply wants to respond: “Yas queen!!! Byung-Chul Han, run me over with a truck.” If you are a denizen of social media, to read Han is to feel both dragged and affirmed. His status as a kind of philosophy daddy to a younger generation is reinforced by the scant glimpses that readers get of his personal image. In photographs, he wears mainly shades of black, often with a broken-in but still elegant leather jacket and a thin scarf. His long hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and his skin glows like an influencer’s. His telegenic quality belies his isolation from the media ecosystem. He is not on social platforms; he told El País in a rare interview that he writes three sentences a day and spends most of his time caring for his plants and playing Bach and Schumann on the piano. His aura of offlineness—we craven online people might be tempted to call it a personal brand—seems to confirm that he has access to some wisdom that the rest of us lack.

Charles Pidgeon, a doctoral student in the University of Oxford’s English faculty, who studies literature about the Internet, described Han’s work as “kind of old-fashioned humanism: What are you taking from this? Something that should reorient your relationship to the world and to your own life.” But he added that Han’s digestible grand pronouncements don’t always hold up to close scrutiny. “There are a lot of things you can pick holes at,” Pidgeon told me. He pointed to “The Burnout Society” ’s argument that humanity has shifted from an “immunological society,” characterized by barriers, to a “neuronal society,” characterized by boundlessness and frictionless circulation. Of course, the covid pandemic signalled an extreme return to an immunologically organized world, which had not really gone away. “The kind of reductive clarity which is so important to how his writing functions is also part of the risk of it going very wrong,” Pidgeon said.

In “The Crisis of Narration” especially, Han runs the risk of speaking with too much curmudgeonly distance from his subject matter. He rightly observes “the present hype around narratives,” which might include the mania for “storytelling” in corporate marketing or the rampant popularity of ted talks. He argues that, though “stories” is a buzzword, we have lost a true, deeper capacity for narrative meaning-making. (Here he evokes the archetypal “fire around which humans gather to tell each other stories.”) He describes posting on social media as “pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion”—which is fair enough. There is little in his writing, however, to acknowledge that digital spaces can also produce meaningful experiences, an oversight that, at this point in the twenty-first century, seems almost quaint. We don’t read Han for a holistic orthodoxy; it’s hard to blame a sixty-something-year-old for not grasping TikTok’s paradoxical way of fostering both exploitative and emancipatory forms of expression. But he overlooks the way that social media enables self-narrativization, the construction and projection of a personal identity, with a freedom that was never possible in the top-down hierarchy of traditional media. For many people, the Internet is the new campfire.

One has to wonder what Han makes of the way that his own ideas have flourished in the Internet information economy, within the avalanche of non-things. When we read about the Internet, we so often crave an answer or a solution: Is a technology good or bad? How can we escape it? Han is not in the business of offering solutions or bullet-pointed life hacks, but online his writing can be readily turned into convenient, digestible lessons. (One TikTok caption: “Byung-Chul Han and self optimization #capitalism #marxism #therapy.”) Han’s books “critique excess digital consumption but are also compatible with it,” Pidgeon told me. They can be used as “another fashionable or modish set of thoughts to be pushed through S.E.O. and imbibed in little chunks by people,” he added. “That’s the real trap of it. You can never be outside of the system that you’re trying to talk about.” But Han’s ardent, almost brutalist style is also designed to speak for itself, and in that sense it resists digital culture’s way of forcing a person to stand in for his creative output. Part of Han’s revelation to readers is that they do not have to be a persona. If Han posted his own TikTok videos, most commenters would probably just ask what brand of leather jacket he was wearing. (Honestly, I want to know that, too.) Perhaps we should take his writing as an incitement to live our own offline lives instead. Until we put his ideas into practice, though, his writing offers an aspirational symbol to tote around, to flip through, to explain to our friends. As Maret, the University of Idaho student, put it, “The Han Hive is activated.”

Copy Cats

Edited extract from ‘Shanzai: Deconstruction in Chinese’ by Byung-Chul Han, "The copy is the original"

In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original’

In 1956, an exhibition of masterpieces of Chinese art took place in the museum of Asian art in Paris, the Musée Cernuschi. It soon emerged that these pictures were, in fact, forgeries. In this case, the sensitive issue was that the forger was none other than the most famous Chinese painter of the 20th century, Chang Dai-chien, whose works were being exhibited simultaneously at the Musée d’Art Moderne. He was considered the Pablo Picasso of China. And his meeting with Picasso that same year was celebrated as a summit between the masters of Western and Eastern art. Once it became known that the old masterpieces were his forgeries, the Western world regarded him as a mere fraud. Yet for Chang himself, they were anything but forgeries. In any case, most of these old pictures were no mere copies, but rather replicas of lost paintings that were known only from written descriptions.

In China, collectors themselves were often painters. Chang, too, was a passionate collector. He owned more than 4,000 paintings. His collection was not a dead archive but a gathering of Old Masters, a living place of communication and transformation. He was himself a shape-shifting body, an artist of metamorphosis. He slipped effortlessly into a role of past masters and created a certain kind of original. As Shen Fu and Jan Stuart put it in Challenging the Past: The Paintings of Chang Dai-chien (1991):

Chang’s genius probably guarantees that some of his forgeries will remain undetected for a long time to come. By creating ‘ancient’ paintings that matched the verbal descriptions recorded in catalogues of lost paintings, Chang was able to paint forgeries that collectors had been yearning to ‘discover’. In some works, he would transform images in totally unexpected ways; he might recast a Ming dynasty composition as if it were a Song dynasty painting.

His paintings are originals insofar as they carry forward the ‘real trace’ of the Old Masters and also extend and change their oeuvre retrospectively. Only the idea of the unrepeatable, inviolable, unique original in the emphatic sense downgrades them to mere forgeries. This special practice of persisting creation (Fortschöpfung) is conceivable only in a culture that is not committed to revolutionary ruptures and discontinuities, but to continuities and quiet transformations, not to Being and essence, but to process and change.

In 2007, when it became known that terracotta warriors flown in from China were not 2,000-year-old artefacts, but rather copies, the Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg decided to close the exhibition completely. The museum’s director, who was apparently acting as the advocate of truth and truthfulness, said at the time: ‘We have come to the conclusion that there is no other option than to close the exhibition completely, in order to maintain the museum’s good reputation.’ The museum even offered to reimburse the entrance fees of all visitors to the exhibition.

From the start, the production of replicas of the terracotta warriors proceeded in parallel with the excavations. A replica workshop was set up on the excavation site itself. But they were not producing ‘forgeries’. Rather, we might say that the Chinese were trying to restart production, as it were – production that from the beginning was not creation but already reproduction. Indeed, the originals themselves were manufactured through serial mass-production using modules or components – a process that could easily have been continued, had the original production methods been available.

The Chinese have two different concepts of a copy. Fangzhipin (仿製品) are imitations where the difference from the original is obvious. These are small models or copies that can be purchased in a museum shop, for example. The second concept for a copy is fuzhipin (複製品). They are exact reproductions of the original, which, for the Chinese, are of equal value to the original. It has absolutely no negative connotations. The discrepancy with regard to the understanding of what a copy is has often led to misunderstandings and arguments between China and Western museums. The Chinese often send copies abroad instead of originals, in the firm belief that they are not essentially different from the originals. The rejection that then comes from the Western museums is perceived by the Chinese as an insult.

In spite of globalisation, the Far East still seems to be the source of a great deal of surprise and confusion, which could release deconstructive energies. The Far Eastern notion of identity is also very confusing to the Western observer. The Ise Grand Shrine, the supreme Shinto sanctuary located on Honshu island, is 1,300 years old for the millions of Japanese people who go there on pilgrimage every year. But in reality this temple complex is completely rebuilt from scratch every 20 years.

This religious practice is so alien to Western art historians that, after heated debates, UNESCO removed this Shinto temple from the list of World Heritage sites. For the experts at UNESCO, the shrine is 20 years old at most. In this case, which is the original and which the copy?

In a culture where continual reproduction represents a technique for conservation and preservation, replicas are anything but mere copies

This is a total inversion of the relationship between original and copy. Or the difference between original and copy vanishes altogether. Instead of a difference between original and copy, there appears a difference between old and new. We could even say that the copy is more original than the original, or the copy is closer to the original than the original, for the older the building becomes, the further it is from its original state. A reproduction would restore it, as it were, to its ‘original state’, especially since it is not linked to a particular artist.

Not just the building but all the temple treasures of Ise are completely replaced, too. Two identical sets of treasures can always be found in the temple. The question of original and copy does not arise at all. These are two copies that are, at the same time, two originals. It used to be that when a new set was produced, the old set would be destroyed. Flammable parts were burned, and metal parts were buried. As of the last regeneration, however, the treasures are no longer destroyed but put on display in a museum. They owe their rescue to their increased exhibition value. However, their destruction belongs to their cult value itself, which is clearly disappearing more and more in favour of their museum exhibition value.

In the West, when monuments are restored, old traces are often particularly highlighted. Original elements are treated like relics. The Far East is not familiar with this cult of the original. It has developed a completely different technique of preservation that might be more effective than conservation or restoration. This takes place through continual reproduction. This technique completely abolishes the difference between original and replica. We might also say that originals preserve themselves through copies. Nature provides the model. The organism also renews itself through continual cell-replacement. After a certain period of time, the organism is a replica of itself. The old cells are simply replaced by new cell material. In this case, the question of an original does not arise. The old dies off and is replaced by the new. Identity and renewal are not mutually exclusive. In a culture where continual reproduction represents a technique for conservation and preservation, replicas are anything but mere copies.

The cathedral of Freiburg Minster in southwest Germany is covered in scaffolding almost all year round. The sandstone from which it is built is a very soft, porous material that does not withstand natural erosion by rain and wind. After a while, it crumbles. As a result, the cathedral is continually being examined for damage, and eroded stones are replaced. And in the cathedral’s dedicated workshop, copies of the damaged sandstone figures are constantly being produced. Of course, attempts are made to preserve the stones from the Middle Ages for as long as possible. But at some point they, too, are removed and replaced with new stones.

Fundamentally, this is the same operation as with the Japanese shrine, except in this case the production of a replica takes place very slowly and over long periods of time. Yet ultimately the result is exactly the same. After a certain period of time, one effectively has a reproduction. However, one imagines one is looking at an original. But what would be original about Freiburg Minster if the last old stone were replaced by a new one?

The original is something imaginary. It is in principle possible to build an exact copy, a fuzhipin of Freiburg Minster, in one of China’s many theme parks. Is this then a copy or an original? What makes it a mere copy? What characterises the Freiburg Minster as an original? Materially, its fuzhipin might not differ in any way from the original that itself might someday no longer contain any original parts. It would be, if at all, the place and the cult value related to the practice of worship that might differentiate the Freiburg Minster from its fuzhipin in a Chinese theme park. However, remove its cult value completely in favour of its exhibition value, and its difference from its double might disappear, too.

The onset of industrialisation increased the need for the museumisation of the past

In the field of art as well, the idea of an unassailable original developed historically in the Western world. Back in the 17th century, excavated artworks from antiquity were treated quite differently from today. They were not restored in a way that was faithful to the original. Instead, there was massive intervention in these works, changing their appearance. For example, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) arbitrarily added a sword-hilt to Ares Ludovisi, the ancient statue of the god Mars, which was itself a Roman copy of a Greek original. During Bernini’s lifetime, the Colosseum itself was used as a marble quarry. Its walls were simply dismantled and used for new buildings.

The preservation of historical monuments in the modern sense of the term begins with the museumisation of the past, whereby cult value increasingly gives way to exhibition value. Interestingly, this goes hand in hand with the rise of tourism. The so-called Grand Tour that began in the Renaissance and reached its apogee in the 18th century was a precursor of modern tourism. In the eyes of tourists, the exhibition value of ancient buildings and artworks, which were presented to them as attractions, increased. In the same century as tourism was beginning, the first measures to preserve ancient structures were undertaken. Now it seemed imperative to preserve ancient structures. The onset of industrialisation further increased the need for the conservation and museumisation of the past. In addition, the burgeoning fields of art history and archaeology discovered the epistemological value of old buildings and artworks, and rejected any intervention that might alter them.

Aprior, primordial positing is alien to Far Eastern culture. It is probably this intellectual position that explains why Asians have far fewer scruples about cloning than Europeans. The South Korean cloning researcher Hwang Woo-suk, who attracted worldwide attention with his cloning experiments in 2004, is a Buddhist. He found a great deal of support and followers among Buddhists, while Christians called for a ban on human cloning. Though since revealed to be falsified, at the time Hwang legitimised his cloning experiments with his religious affiliation: ‘I am Buddhist, and I have no philosophical problem with cloning. And as you know, the basis of Buddhism is that life is recycled through reincarnation. In some ways, I think, therapeutic cloning restarts the circle of life.’

For the Ise shrine, too, the technique of preservation resides in allowing the circle of life to begin anew over and over again, maintaining life not against death but through and beyond death. Death itself is built into the system of preservation. In this way, being gives way to the cyclical process that includes death and decay. In the unending cycle of life, there is no longer anything unique, original, singular or final. Only repetitions and reproductions exist. In the Buddhist notion of the endless cycle of life, instead of creation there is decreation: not creation but iteration; not revolution but recurrence; not archetypes but modules determine the Chinese technology of production.

It is not by chance that printing was invented in China

As we know, even the terracotta armies are manufactured from modules or stock components. Production in modules is not consistent with the idea of the original, as from the outset these are stock components. Foremost in modular production is not the idea of originality or uniqueness, but reproducibility. Its aim is not the manufacture of a unique, original object but mass-production that nevertheless allows variations and modulations. It modulates the same, thereby creating differences. Modular production is modulating and varying. Thus it allows for a great deal of variety. However, it negates uniqueness in order to increase the efficiency of reproduction. For example, it is not by chance that printing was invented in China. Chinese painting, too, uses modular technology. The Chinese treatise on painting, the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, contains an infinite row of component parts from which a painting could be composed or indeed assembled.

The question of creativity arises once again in light of this modular type of production. Combining and varying elements becomes more important. Here, Chinese cultural technology works like nature. As the German art historian Lothar Ledderose put it in Ten Thousand Things (2000):

Chinese artists … never lose sight of the fact that producing works in large numbers exemplifies creativity, too. They trust that, as in nature, there always will be some among the 10,000 things from which change springs.

Chinese art has a functional relationship with nature, not a mimetic one. It is not a question of depicting nature as realistically as possible but of operating exactly like nature. In nature, successive variations also produce something new, clearly without any kind of ‘genius’. As Ledderose says:

Painters like Zheng Xie strive to emulate nature in two respects. They produce large, almost limitless quantities of works, and are enabled to do so by module systems of compositions, motifs and brushstrokes. But they also imbue every single work with its own unique and inimitable shape, as nature does in its prodigious invention of forms. A lifetime devoted to training his aesthetic sensibilities enables the artist to approximate the power of nature.

NAZI Globalism v. Democratic Globalism

From video starting @ 28:54:

From 1938 to 1946 the Allies made serious and fundamental mistakes in their assessment of Germany's ability to resist huge amounts of punishment, and an equally a complete failure to understand where their bombing offensive might be having a real impact. They were wrong, albeit in different ways pre-war, confounded during it, and confused after it. And part of the problem was a constant failure throughout the whole of the war to understand how Germany's economy worked. Applying an activity index, as the RAF was trying to do which used the British economy as its starting point, was never going to work. They didn't know that they were fighting a country which, until the string of disasters at the end of 1942 and then through 1943, simply hadn't really considered the possibility of losing the war and therefore didn't give overriding political priority to economic production.

Inside of Germany until the start of 1943, it was virtually impossible to know that there was a war on. In Britain though at the same time, everybody's lives have been turned utterly upside down, almost from the first days of the conflict. The reality, certainly for this period that the video covers today of 1941 to early 1943, was civilians in Nazi Germany only had a very limited amount of rationing. Production of Civilian Goods really hadn't slowed down very much, and most women, in fact the vast vast majority of women, never went to go and work inside the German economy.

Whereas in Britain, something like half of all women were involved. Indeed, once the invasion of Britain was abandoned in November of German Manufacturing 1940 until about June of 1941, many men were demobilized from the Army and returned to manufacturing jobs and jobs in the Civil sector, basically to build up for Barbarosa. When Albert Speer took over as Armament Minister in February of 1942, the Vermacht was being supplied with all manner of useless dross, from piano cords, to electricity meters, to hundreds of kilometers of spare belts, to Jungle uniforms for the step of Russia, and so on. All whilst Pierce was convinced that his bombers had reduced German production capacity by at least 30%.

For many observers, and frankly until quite recently including me, this was one of the trickiest bits of trying to understand the war. Or, if you are of a certain bench, you might say this was just down to the Germans will to resist. You might cite examples used by, for example, Goebels and his diary of factory workers moving their workbenches into the Frozen streets of a German winter and carrying on working. In 1944, fighter production rocketed up with over a thousand machines a month being built. At its' peak German women, as we mentioned a minute ago, never made up a significant percentage of factory workers for fear of impacting the troops morale if it happened. German civilians were never hungry until the very last days of the war. German troops had sufficient amounts of small arms ammunition right up until May 1945.

There are some obvious things that one can point to: Innovation definitely played a part, the extensive use of easily moved machine tools also had an impact, which if they weren't destroyed during an initial bombing, were fairly easy to set up in a new Factory. A good Railway Network within Germany proper helped a great deal too, because it was relatively simple to tear down factories and move them further East and South if you needed to. But none of these factors are sufficiently comprehensive in an explanation.

There were some clever little tricks which were used by the German state which helped as well. Things like, for example if you were a German worker who was bombed out, if you returned back to your shift within 48 Hours you got more help than if you didn't. In fact actually, you got help if you didn't go back, you didn't get helped at all. And production targets, and prizes, and holidays, and all manner of other things were offered too. But this was really ultimately marginal stuff.

And the question remains, how did this economy survive, and indeed Thrive under the biblical levels of Destruction coming from the air in 1942 - 43 - 44? Were the Nazis somehow better? Did they believe their ideology more strongly? Were they somehow superhuman, were they gods of old reborn?

Um, no no, not really. The answer to these questions is actually quite simple: short-term economic fixes combined with the industrialization of human suffering among subject peoples. In the West, the economies of France, and Holland, and Belgium, and Denmark, and Norway, and many other places were stripped bare. Italy was bled White, even as an ally. When it had surrendered to the Allies, it was considered a turn coat, and it was absolutely exploited to the maximum. In the East the approach was purely genocidal, working starving men and women and children to death to support the living standards and war production within the Reich itself. The systematic leeching of occupied territories was as much political as anything else. The Reich must be maintained now. The war will be short, thus we do not need to take a long-term view. Resistance can be crushed without fear of retribution, because after all, we are the master race and we will be here for a thousand years.

Manufacturing capability that could have contributed far more to the Nazi war effort if it had been left in place, was instead broken up and shipped back to Germany. Workforces were turned into forced labor. Russians were slashed for civilians outside of the Reich. Agricultural products were taken directly to Germany, whilst the locals teeter on the edge of starvation. France, for example, had three times as many cars on its roads as Germany did. In 1939 something like one and a half million, but by 1942, it had less than 100,000. The rest having been taken to Germany. In 1939, France had the French Manufacturing capacity to build a vast amount of stuff, something like 250,000 Vehicles, something like 3,000 aircraft, 10,000 Arrow engines, 2,000 tanks, and so on, and so on, and so on. By 1942, almost all of this capacity, with the exception of the huge Renault plant at Buon Bellacor, which was basically largely intact. That's a whole other story, but during the whole War, it produced something like 38,000 vehicles for the Reich, which was a drop in the ocean at potential capacity. Anyway, the Renault Factory, and a couple of others were basically left behind, but the vast majority had gone.

And these moves were highly inefficient and disruptive, but they benefited Germany, and Germany alone in the short term. Even where the Nazis didn't move equipment, they became the primary customer by force. And for all production, they paid with script and promisory notes and not with currency, which preserved the Reich's limited reserves of hard currency. In total France exported something like 990,000 vehicles to the third Reich during the whole of the war, and got paid almost nothing in exchange. This was a recipe for disaster for the French economy as the war dragged, on but shortterm ensured that Berlin Housewives didn't go hungry, ME-109's got made, and the bombed out in Germany got looked after, if they were German and Aryan, of course.

Elements of the Holocaust also helped. For example, during the course of the war, 85,000 fully loaded trains carried confiscated items from Jews back into Germany from across Europe and the Soviet Union, their possessions from table lamps, to Pianos, to garden furniture were distributed to those who been bombed out. The mass use of slave labor meant that there was no need to bring German women into the workforce, when women from the occupied territories mostly Ukrainian and Polish could do the work, and Jews from across Europe could be worked to death on production lines. I can't do the Holocaust contribution to the German economy justice here, but I may try to tackle another another time. It was not insignificant before the final solution became the final solution. Putting aside the Holocaust and the death camps, the composition of the labor force itself was completely extraordinary and beyond the wildest imaginings of the Allies. For most of the war, laborers were sought from within the occupied territories, initially voluntarily, but when less than 1% of workers stepped forward, the Germans immediately reverted to force drafts and mass arrests to make up the shortfall. After the war Speer claimed that he had no idea where the SS was getting its 400,000 workers that he demanded to boost production in 1944 from, a claim that beggars belief, but we'll come back to Speer another day. In reality, in 1942 Poles, Albanians, Greeks, Czechs, Slovenians, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians, Romanians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Hungarians, Dutch, French, Norwegians, Danes, Italians, and other nationalities besides, were shipped in, worked for 10 to 12 hours a day, fed just enough to keep them alive, and treated like cattle with the threat of being shot or imprisoned in a concentration camp if they bucked the system. In all, some 6 and a half million Forced workers worked in Germany during the war, and perhaps as many as 1.3 million of them died as a result.

And all of this is before we start to consider the situation with the prisoners of War. There was something like 2.2 million Soviet Prisoners inside of Germany, just 30% of them would survive to go home. 10% of the male French population, some 1.8 million men became prisons of war in June 1940, and most were pressed into service whilst being held as hostages, as guarantees of the Vichy Regime's good behavior the sordid and sorry details of the deals done by the Vichy Regime to get their men back are worthy of a video in its own right. Deals for expelling Jews, for volunteering their own workers to go to Germany, the establishment of free worker schemes from amongst the powers themselves, are just some of the low lights of the system of blackmail that the Nazis established over Vichy France. And it was all for naught, because the Germans occupied France in 1942 anyway, and held the remaining prisoners for the rest of the war as forced labor. And there is an irony in the Nazi State here, one which prided itself, after all, on racial Purity but became involuntarily incredibly Multicultural as the war went on. When it surrendered, some 11 million people scattered from its borders across Europe and the Soviet Union in the largest migration ever seen in human history. And unfortunately, tens of thousands of them died in the process of trying to get home.

In short then, the combined United States and RF bomber commands were, and would be trying to bomb not Germany, but the entire Continental European means of production, enhanced by slave labor on an unimaginable scale. Little Wonder it didn't work. In London, politically speaking, the idea was fairly simple, they had seen how the blockade of Germany in 1914-18 in the first world war, combined with Battlefield defeat, had led to a revolution within Germany's border and a swift surrender. To assume that the same results might be possible through bombing, especially given the pre-war predictions of people like Trenchard, is understandable. They failed to realize not just the economic factors, but also the political ones. Practical political resistance within Germany had been, Political Resistance, rendered next to Impossible, almost from the moment that Hitler took power. Certainly from about 1936, it was impractical to conduct large scale resistance of any kind. A combination of Gestapo surveillance, the effective subversion of Law and due process, the use of fear as a weapon which crushed all but the weakest of Uprising during the war, and even had people wanted to resist, the reality of being bombed out, as so many millions have were, is that you became entirely dependent on the State to survive. The process of bombing people, bound those people to the government in a way that had been completely unforeseen by London, or Washington, and it's a fact worth bearing mind today.