01.31.10
Climate and capitalism journal/jan 31
CLIMATE AND CAPITALISM
An online journal focusing on capitalism, climate change,
and the ecosocialist alternative.
January 31, 2010
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Modernity and the left’s misunderstanding of history
The Marxist left ended up with a false view of the dynamics of history and miscalcuated modernity, despite their insights.
The eonic effect and its study can help
Lenin’s hatred of liberalism
Lenin post
To be fair, the current logjam of manipulated liberalism producing idiocy is just the kind of situation that led Marx to his critique. Read the rest of this entry »
Madison Ave gone mad
More comments on the Public Option:
James said,
January 31, 2010 at 2:35 pm ·I agree that the American electorate is rather stupid, but they rightly smelled a rat with this healthcare bill.
—————–
James said,
January 31, 2010 at 2:43 pm ·
Read the story of one of the inside men in the bailout scheme. He basically admits that it was something that Paulson and his crew pulled out of their a*ses…and you wonder why people don’t trust the government:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/04/AR2009120402016.html
Good points. I think that the current generation is the victim of a century of Madison Avenue techniques reaching fruition as a form of dangerous mindcontrol.
It is an exercise that began by selling soap and ended by creating stupidity in those who don’t grasp the source and method of manipulation.
More on Lenin
Two comments on Booknotes: Lenin bio
Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 2:55 pm ·
I’ve not read that book, but some of its reviewers describe the writer’s views as “slanted”. And, in any case, the ruthlessness–attributed to Lenin– is seen as a positive quality in some quarters.I’ve spent some time in Berlin, over the last few years; and I’ve found ostalgie to be very real. I Watched Lenin’s statue being craned out of position, in the “People’s Palace”. and boated down the Spree (to be broken up). Despite my antipathy towards the man, the occasion was redolent of Arthurian myth: the deposed, dead, king being ferried towards the land where the sun sets—to sleep for a hundred years, perhaps, before returning.
nemo said,
January 31, 2010 at 3:20 pm ·
I hold no brief whatever on this particular book on Lenin (which I got out of the library two days ago and read rather swiftly). The question of bias here depends on who is making the charge. Anyway, by all means, find another book. How about someone who grates on the left (and on me) with known bias, e.g. Richard Pipes, who will go out of his way to present ugly facts about the Bolsheviks and Lenin.
My point is merely to note the way that Lenin’s biography tends to suppress the facts of what really happened.
The point here is to understand the horrible betrayal of the left, e.g. the Socialist Revolutionaries, who attempted to produce a reasonable outcome, all of whom were simply wiped out as the Leninists took over and invented something absent in nineteenth century leftism, the Chekist one-party dictatorship plus gulags. We have forgotten what the left was, and the way that Leninists redefine the term, and then proceeded to discredit everything.
That some admire Lenin for his ruthlessness is precisely my point, and/or irrelevant. The left was, not suprisingly, frustrated in the nineteenth century by the failure to achieve revolutionary control. The 48-ers ended up slaughtered as Louis Napoleon swept up the spoils. The Commune was a tantalizing horror that ended in another slaughter. The French Revolution itself was an arrested transformation.
Especially the Commune experience made many leftists, like Lenin, determined to never let the opportunity slip again. The reason for his ruthless determination and murderous totalitarian obsession. Read the rest of this entry »
Booknotes: Lenin bio
Comment on Great Lenin’s Ghost
Jim Buck said,
January 31, 2010 at 10:11 am
Lenin may yet urn out to be the once-and-future king.
You point is quite apt, and you may be right, the point of my remark, about the enduring ‘ghost of Lenin’. My point was that the left is stuck on Lenin, and a fantasy Lenin, that doesn’t correspond to the reality.
The left is a gang of people who often don’t read books, certainly not critical books, and the result is a failure to understand either Lenin or the history connected to him. Here’s one of the first post-bolshevik bios of Lenin, using the new open archives. It is hard to consider how Lenin’s reputation can survive the facts. But it has survived, so I don’t know.
Lenin: A New Biography (Hardcover)
~ Dmitri Volkogonov
Book on the Altenberg 16, comment
Comment on The Altenberg 16, by Suzan Mazur
Lee said
January 31, 2010 at 11:58 am ·
You’ll be pleased to know, as I was, that Amazon is now offering the book for pre-order at a good price. At least, it’s offering it in the US, don’t know about other countries. I got an email about it just now from Amazon and that’s the first I’d heard of the book. Or the conference. I’m looking forward to reading it.
We have discussed this book ad infinitum here, from the beginning when Mazur was first conducting her interviews. We will discuss it some more soon, as it comes out next week, or the week after.
BTW, I was interviewed for the book, but didn’t get included (I am not one of the Altenberg 16, and too radical for the Altenberg set). So I recommend my own World History And The Eonic Effect on the question of the failing Darwin paradigm.
Mazur does a good job exposing the existence of Darwin critics in academia, and chronicles the current collapse of the Darwin paradigm.
However, the book (which is must reading) is full of the halting views of many so-called critics who are still stuck in the Darwin world even as they criticize it.
I think my approach (which is not another theory of evolution) can be helpful on that score.
The text of the third edition is online: http://history-and-evolution.com
The fourth edition is coming soon, so this web stuff will soon disappear.
The eonic effect is the ‘killer evidence’ on the question of evolution.
More on Public Option
Extended comment on Public Option
jacksmith said,
January 30, 2010 at 10:31 pm ·
A LINE IN THE SAND – From jacksmith – WorkingClass
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/01/30/debbie-wasserman-schultz-senators-lied-about-supporting-public-option/
Call your representatives and demand an answer. Do you or don’t you support a public option. Do you or don’t support democratic MAJORITY RULE! We DEMAND! to know.
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/01/21/fixing-health-reform-through-the-reconciliation-sidecar-13-improvements-6-ways-to-save-money-4-important-benefits/
YOU! are dying and suffering needlessly every day http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/27055
http://firedoglake.com/2010/01/21/ma-voters-seek-more-and-faster-change-economy-jobs-top-concern-taxing-health-insurance-very-unpopular-poll-says/
My Fellow Americans and People Of The World
A strong Government-run MEDICARE like Public Option is STILL! CRITICAL!
We have had a long hard struggle to find out what would be the BEST! that this congress and the Whitehouse could do to fix our highly dangerous, poor quality, most costly, and MOST! disgraceful healthcare delivery system in the world. It is clear that congress can do much more for the American people than what is proposed so far.
It is clear that congress can pass a strong GOVERNMENT-run public option CHOICE. Available to everyone on day one. Expand Medicare and not levy any new taxes on workers healthcare benefits and plans. LET THIS BE YOUR LINE IN THE SAND!
Lastly, there can be NO! INDIVIDUAL MANDATES without a strong Government-run MEDICARE like Public Option CHOICE. Or the American people WILL! and SHOULD! revolt with an all out CIVIL WAR against congress and this Government.
House and Senate progressives and the tri-caucuses should aggressively push for the inclusion of a strong Public Option, Medicare expansion, and no new taxes on workers healthcare benefits and plans. If the obstructionist kill meaningful healthcare reform, then you should kill this bill. Because it will be far worse than the healthcare disaster we have now. It’s failure will be on the obstructionist heads. And they will be punished and replaced.
WITHOUT A PUBLIC OPTION CHOICE, THIS BILL WILL KILL FAR MORE AMERICANS THAN IT WILL SAVE.
What is proposed in the Senate bill is the worst case scenario for health-care reform. It would shift trillions of taxpayer, public and private dollars into the hands of the private insurance industry (The single most costly, deadly and dangerous product sold in America). And it would compel by law millions of Americans to financially support this oxymoronic criminal enterprise. You cant have a individual MANDATE WITHOUT A STRONG PUBLIC OPTION CHOICE!
You will have NO! realistic way of controlling cost and quality. Cost will continue soaring through the roof bleeding the American people dry, and KILLing our economy. And our quality of healthcare will continue to decline below our current ranking of “WORST! quality of healthcare delivery in the developed World”.
From the very start, the American people have been crystal clear about what they wanted. They wanted a humane single payer system like the rest of the developed world has (HR676). Or at least a humane strong GOVERNMENT-run public option CHOICE!! This is what the American people gave the democrats control of the house, control of the senate, and control of the Whitehouse to do.
Those of you that can, should prepare now to remove every member of congress that fails to support YOUR healthcare reform with a strong Public Option, Medicare expansion, and no new taxes on workers healthcare benefits and plans. Run against them in teams if you have to. But take them out. And replace them with a strong single payer or PRO PUBLIC OPTION CHOICE candidate.
Now! is the time to bring maximum pressure on your members of congress. Contact your representatives and spread the word.
The Public Option http://tinyurl.com/yfftf76
H1N1 IS A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION!
I have to tell you now that the H1N1 virus is a man-made WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION! and TERROR! It is a WEAPONIZED version of a flu virus. It has swept the planet infecting millions. And causing a global pandemic that has killed tens of thousands, and injured millions.
The H1N1 virus is the product of the DISGRACEFUL, GREED DRIVEN PRIVATE FOR PROFIT MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! It was released in the U.S. in Texas in early January of last year, but not recognized until around April 2009 in California. The reason I know this is because when it came to America, it came to see me FIRST! How sweet…
This was around the time the MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! assaulted the Whitehouse with all their devils deals to cripple and weaken YOUR! healthcare reform. Especially your right to have a single payer system like HR676 (Medicare For All) which most of you wanted.
They don’t even want you to have your HUGE!!! compromise position of a strong government-run MEDICARE like Public Option CHOICE. To compete with their DISGRACEFUL, GREED DRIVEN, MURDEROUS, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT PRODUCT (The single most costly, deadly and dangerous product sold in America).
They also wanted to take away your rights to have your government meet it’s responsibility to use it’s full power to regulate, negotiate, and control drug cost, healthcare cost and quality. Something every other civilized country in the developed World has done for it’s people. Their Greed! moral degeneracy and lack of patriotism knows no bounds.
Many of you will remember that before we knew about H1N1. I posted a open message to the President and Congress warning them to be vigilant about their health, and cautious about any medical advice they received. As I said then “they will not hesitate to try and hurt you”.
The U.S. and the World have been under a BIOLOGICAL TERROR ATTACK! for over a year now. It is CRITICAL that We The People Of The United States take away control of our healthcare system from the GREED DRIVEN MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!
For our own National security, and the security of the world.
A Strong, government-run, MEDICARE like Public Option CHOICE. Available to everyone on day one, with the full unfettered power of the federal government to regulate, negotiate, and control cost and quality. Would be the most workable way to deal with this global crisis at this time. Including patent suspensions as needed for national security or the greater good.
As an American I invite the peoples of the World to help us fix our healthcare crisis. And bring pressure on our government to meet it’s responsibility to protect global security by controlling, and removing the corrupting influence of GREED and the PRIVATE FOR PROFIT motivations from healthcare in the U.S. and around the World.
I call on the governments of the World and the global intelligence community to track down these MASS MURDERERS, and bring them to justice. CONNECT THE DOTS! And be vigilant that they don’t slip in another viral strain on you under the cloak of H1N1 sequestration.
Further, the proposed patent protection on biologic’s must be stripped from the US bill. And greatly shorten/restricted, or abolished completely. This is a grave danger to humanity and global security.
I think President Obama is doing the best he can at playing the disastrous deck of cards he inherited from the previous administration. And I think he is doing an excellent job. But the wolves and devils of the medical industrial complex! are trying to exploit, and take advantage of his good heart, and desperate desire to help suffering Americans. But we must be strong and insist that healthcare reform be done right for the American people. Or everyone loose’s.
This is all I can say in a message post. I’ll try to find a way to tell you more later.
God Bless You My Fellow Human Beings
jacksmith – Working Class
p.s. The so-called nominal H1N1 virus is designed in such a way as to make it more lethal to children and young adults. The medical community must be more vigilant of secondary bacterial infections in the young caused by H1N1. And remember, a viral infection is also a transfer of genetic code to you. Think about it, and be vigilant.
Where’s The People’s History of Bolshevism?
Although Zinn was a hero of the left, he did not do enough to challenge the legitimacy of capitalist America
Well, at least someone has the nerve to critique Zinn. I have always admired many aspects of his life and work, but in the final analysis his famour book/history palls as you see its built in bias. So much indignation over the USA and not a peep, nothing, zero, about the atrocities of the left that have broken all records for mass murder. I was always puzzled as to how such success could come to a book that limited. Perhaps the book is a peanut gallery fan club success phenomenon.
Whatever the case, and I am being slightly unfair since the novelty of a critique of American history deserved its first round, the left suffers from bad literature, bad analysis, dead propaganda, Leninist idiocy engrained, and much else.
Zinn’s book is substitute for real analysis of the problems of the left, and suggests the need for A People’s History of Bolshevism.
Unfortunately, Zinn’s big book is stronger on polemical passion than historical insight. For all his virtuous intentions, Zinn essentially reduced the past to a Manichean fable and made no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about US history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?
According to A People’s History, “The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history.” It uses its wealth to “turn those in the 99% against one another” and employs war, patriotism, and the military to “absorb and divert” the occasional rebellion.
US history for Zinn was thus a painful narrative about ordinary folks who kept struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow were always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed. In Zinn’s view, the ruling elite was a transhistorical entity, a virtual monolith; neither its interests nor its ideology had changed markedly from the days when its members owned slaves and wore knee-britches to the era of the Internet and Armani.
He described the American Revolution as a clever device to defeat “potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership”. His Civil War was another elaborate confidence game. Soldiers who fought to preserve the Union got duped by “an aura of moral crusade” against slavery that “worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful, and turn much of the anger against ‘the enemy’”. Zinn saw nothing unusual in the election of Reagan in 1980. It simply “meant that another part of the establishment”, albeit “more crass” than its immediate antecedents, was now in charge.
Zinn did give voice to many heroic, plebeian losers. He punctuated his narrative with hundreds of quotes from slaves and populists, anonymous wage-earners and such articulate radicals as Eugene V Debs, DuBois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stokely Carmichael, and Helen Keller. Those supplied texture and eloquence absent from the author’s own predictable renderings. But to make sense of a nation’s entire history, one has to explain the weight and meaning of world-views that are not his own and that he does not favor. Zinn had no taste for such disagreeable tasks.
Yet, whether as activist or author, his sympathies were always clear, consistent, and put forth with an ardour no contemporary radical could match. “To understand,” wrote the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, “one must stand under.” In a grim era, Zinn offered many on the American left a certain consolation. They might be losing, but they could comprehend the evil of a 400-year-old order, and that knowledge would, to a certain extent, set them free. But no work of history can substitute for a social movement.
lthough Zinn was a hero of the left, he did not do enough to challenge the legitimacy of capitalist America
Church of Darwin
Reverend Jerry Coyne Thus Saith
At the First Church of Darwin, at the University of Chicago, Reverend Jerry Coyne preaches on evolution.
Ray Comfort’s Darwin
Ray Comfort’s Darwin Comic,
by Ray Comfort – Living Waters
from dawkins site
http://www.livingwaters.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=471&category_id=8&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=199?=en
How We Decide
The Human Brain: How We Decide
California Academy of Sciences – YouTube FFreeThinker
from dawkins site
Are we mostly virus dna?
There’s Less Us To Us Than You Think
One of the problems with decoding the human genome was discovering how little of the human genome was actually… well, human. Are we really made up by mostly virus DNA?
Gecko’s Lessons
Gecko’s Lessons Transfer Well: Dry Printing of Nanotube Patterns to Any Surface Could Revolutionize Microelectronics
ScienceDaily (Jan. 31, 2010) — Watch a gecko walk up a wall. It defies gravity as it sticks to the surface no matter how smooth it appears to be.
Darwin and universities
Published on Saturday, January 30, 2010 by the Guardian/UK
Academics Fight Rise of Creationism at Universities; More Students Believe Darwin Got It Wrong
· Royal Society challenges ‘insidious problem’
by Duncan Campbell
Read the rest of this entry »
Voter incoherence
Published on Sunday, January 31, 2010 by the BBC
Why Do People Often Vote Against Their Own Interests?
The Republicans’ shock victory in the election for the US Senate seat in Massachusetts meant the Democrats lost their supermajority in the Senate. This makes it even harder for the Obama administration to get healthcare reform passed in the US.
Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.
Blueberries
gnxp
Blueberries contain an antioxidant that could prevent mental health decline as you age
http://news.discovery.com/human/blueberries-memory-mental-health.html
Phthalate exposure and behavioral problems
gnxp
A study of New York City students found that phthalate exposure was linked to behavioral problems
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=children-chemicals-fragrences-cosmetics-pthalate-attention-deficit-womb
Remembering faces
gnxp
Many of us struggle sometimes to put a name to a face, but what if you could recognise someone many years after seeing them for a moment?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8474827.stm
Fossil feathers
gnxp
Carl Zimmer: Fossilized structures of what appear to be feathers match the feathers of living birds down to the microscopic level, and from them scientists have determined what color the ancient feathers were
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/science/28dino.html
Cognitive fluency
gnxp
How “cognitive fluency” shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/31/easy__true/
Fighting rise of creationism
RG mail
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/21/religion.highereducation
Academics fight rise of creationism at universities
Breaking the Silence testimonies
RG mail
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3841480,00.htmlYnet News
1/29/10
Female soldiers break their silence
*Six years after first collection of Breaking the Silence testimonies,
organization releases booklet of testimonies from female soldiers who served
in territories. Stories include systematic humiliation of Palestinians,
reckless and cruel violence, theft, killing of innocent people and cover-up.
Here are only some of testimonies *
All over?
RG mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/is-it-already-over-for-obama/article1448094/
Globe and Mail Jan. 29, 2010
Is it already over for Obama?
Rick Salutin
The saddest event in politics is the death of the hope that things can
basically change. This genre of loss involves a setback not just to an
individual but to a population, or a large part of it, which placed its hope
in a candidate or party. We last saw it here in the early 1990s, when Jean
Chrétien’s Liberals forsook the hope and change of their red book, on which
they were elected, and chose instead the insipid task of balancing the
budget by further shredding social programs. Now it’s happening in the
United States.
It involves Barack Obama’s presidency. It appears at this point that its
main achievement will turn out to have been his election itself. That, I
rush to add, was a big feat. But it is entirely different from governing in
a new way. He promised “change,” which is pure rhetorical boilerplate for
presidential candidates, and he brought it. But the change he brought was
the election of a black man as president, full stop.