More Chinese Fighting Back

 I have no idea where this is, except I think it's in China based on the cheap green fence.

The people who were locked down said "fuck it" and kicked the fence down and got on with their life.

Zealotry as a Substitute for Wisdom

The human mind is pretty limited. The rational/verbal part of the mind seems the most hampered in a lot of ways--it relies on pretty crude models of nature to interpret experience--even the scientific models based on first principles are limited, distorted, and fail repeatedly.

The "wise" approach to life would recognize those limits. Humility and caution would be the typical stance on any given issue. Let's take abortion as an extreme case. When does life start? Does anyone really know for sure? No, not even in general, and it's even less apparent in a particular case. That said, I'm sure lots of women or girls who get an abortion know and feel that they're doing "evil" and suffer afterward for their choice. (That personal moral compass is probably the best thing to follow.)

Humility and caution are pushed aside in favor of extreme positions and zealotry. The zeal of partisans and the group-think/hive mind opinions replaces actual knowing. The same thing happened with covid.

Individuals should be extremely skeptical of political parties and movements, and mass opinion, just like they should be skeptical of their own ideas. On almost any topic, even really mundane things, a truly honest person will realize he knows very little. Take something prosaic like, "which brake pads should I use on my car?" It's possible, but slightly difficult to even come up with an answer for something simple like that, and even in this simple example, the person asking the question is forced to come up with fairly arbitrary and limited criteria to assess "best" versus "worst".

Chinese People are Fighting Back

In the past couple of days, videos and articles about Chinese people fighting back against oppression have popped up on social media.

In one video, villagers gather en masse and throw rocks at police. The story is, supposedly, the police were coming to enforce the harsh lockdowns in their town, just like in Shanghai, and the people were not having it. (Sometimes these videos are fake, or totally out of context by the way, so I won't post it here.) I would take it with a grain of salt, but a similar story is unfolding elsewhere with some better documentation.

Other videos show workers busting out of their factory/prison (where they make MacBooks). The Tesla factory in China had similar conditions, by the way. Workers there are putting in 12 hours a day 6 days a week on behalf of USA corporations, which is hard to even imagine doing indefinitely when you could go home or have a vacation once in a while, but in the circumstance where you are living in the factory, how is it any different than a prison camp?

It's good that the people finally stood up for themselves. That, apparently, is the answer of how far they could be pushed: Weeks of imprisonment.

History is a Giant Pile of Old Propaganda

The long serving foreign minister of Russia recently said that Hitler probably had jewish ancestry. I doubt anyone knows for sure. That theory has been out there for a long time. Is it possible? Sure, why not. There's plenty of pictures of Hitler making the "M" handsign. Some people believe it means "mason", some believe it means a person is really a crypto "jew", which is really extremely similar to being a mason, by the way and vice versa.

History regards Hitler as uniquely evil because of the concentration camp story. The concentration camp started with the evil British Empire and its merchant wars against dutch settlers in South Africa. It used women and children to "win" a war to get monopolies on gold and diamond mines for some homosexual businessmen. This sounds completely insane as a description, but is merely a terse recitation of the available facts.

The US put Japanese, German, and Italian families in concentration camps during WW2. It seems extremely likely that the unfortunate people who died in german concentration camps died of huger and disease because of the failure of germany in the war, rather than through some mass extermination program, which seems like post war propaganda and makes no sense. The concentration camps were evil, and detaining jews there was just as evil as detaining Japanese people in US concentration camps.

Hitler sucked. He caused the slaughter of millions of germans and slavs and destroyed Germany and made it a vassal of the USA and England. WW2 led directly to the creation of Israel.

Does it mean anything if Hitler is a jew? No. There's not some unique brotherly solidarity among jews or any other group. Did anything good come out of WW2. No. WW1 and WW2 marched people of the world toward a giant prison camp. The barbed wire is just starting to get more obvious now.

I think there's zero truth to be had in the stories of "official" history. That said, I don't think you can ever really know what happened with any certainty as an outsider. It's all just speculation, except for the people who were really there in the rooms where plans were discussed candidly by "leaders". Even historians who meticulously compile documentary evidence of this or that event have no clue--it's really just another form of speculation that's not really better informed than wild eyed "conspiracy theories".

Why did Sergey Lavrov make that statement about Hitler? It makes no sense, really. He's a very polished, intelligent public figure. I doubt he makes any statement in public without a calculated reason. There's no obvious overt reason to bring up the Hitler was a Jew meme in his public, official capacity.

I think whipping up tropes that jews believe are anti-semitic helps reinforce the anti-semitism cunard. There's a (former) youtuber brother Nathaniel who pretends to be a Russian orthodox christian. He's an actor. He basically recites the historical charges against jews over and over again even though he is the most obviously jewish person on the planet. I think it's likely that his paid job is to recite those charges to keep them in the public consciousness. It helps keep the "anti-semitism" idea alive, and keeps normie white people afraid of being labelled "anti-semite".

According to this theory, Lavrov is just another puppet on the world stage. So Russia is too. They're just playing a game to slaughter more millions of people.

How Carvana Makes Everyone Poorer

The previous post described how the neoliberal scam makes everyone poorer. Here's a more concrete example: Carvana.

Carvana has a lot of  Wall Street funny money. Their business: buying and selling used cars. It's a financialized wall street version of a corner car lot.

Carvana looses oodles of money, but its executives make a mint. They pocket about $3M in compensation when the average employee makes $30,000-ish. The BOD of Carvana pockets about $400,000 per year for scratching their asses.

All the wall street funny money went into buying used car inventory. Now a beater car costs $5000 instead of $1000. I saw a craigslist post advertising the same type of truck I paid $1500 for five years ago for $7500.

The executives get rich. The wall street bankers who loaned them money and underwrote their stock sales get rich. Everyone else gets shafted by devaluing the currency. Nothing of value was created by that enterprise. It really just shifted some energy and production to a handful of people.

Carvana will probably be bankrupt before the year is over.

How People Got Poor Since 1971

There are a lot of documentaries on YouTube explaining how neoliberalism/financialization or whatever you want to call it made everyone poor (except the 1%). It's actually extremely simple.

Money comes from banks and other financial activity like "selling stock".

The bankers have the first cut of the newly minted money. They lend it into existence. They pocket a reliable amount of no-risk money and have done that for a long time. It accelerated in 1971, but they've been doing that for hundreds of years.

Currently, corporations have the second cut of the newly minted money. The executives pocket a reliable amount of no-risk money and have done that really only in recent decades. A really great example of this is provided by the corporate lawyer at twitter who makes $17M a year--for what? Shrug. She's there with a bucket to get a scoop of the funny money cash and the rest of the scumbags in the twitter hierarchy are probably doing the same. Corporations really have a symbiotic relationship with the banks.

Corporate employees get the third cut. A lot of the money flowing through a corporation is from financial activity rather than sales revenue. Some companies lose money perpetually but always have funds.

The government is just another corporation, and generally speaking its employees have a better deal overall than corporate employees in terms of compensation and benefits.

Everyone else in the economy gets the scraps and leftovers. They have third or fourth or fifth hand access to the wall street funny money. 

The System is Evil

I recently did some work for a woman who raises chickens and sells their eggs. She has a lot of chickens and other animals. The place hums with good energy. It's not some fancy hobby farm, it's a pretty ordinary house on a pretty ordinary property on a rural side road. In fact, all along that particular road, and in the general neighborhood people have gardens, horses, more chickens, and on and on. That's really the way it should be.

Humans are not made to live in cities that require factory farms. The system itself is evil and unnatural in the extreme. It's held together with lies and violence.