The Cultural Reader: Hegel on Master-Slave Dialectic - Summary

The Cultural Reader: Hegel on Master-Slave Dialectic - Summary: One of the important and famous ideas introduced by Hegel in his The Phenomenology of Spirit is the idea of master-slave dialectic, relat...

TECHNOCRACY INC. 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Technocracy Inc. Predicted Oil Crisis Over 50 year...

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Technocracy Inc. Predicted Oil Crisis Over 50 year...: I thought I would re-post this article here, as it is buried deep in my RedBetweenTheLines blog at Modblog. And given how often Modblog fai...

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: NORTH KOREA NUKE FREE White House: Military Prepa...

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: NORTH KOREA NUKE FREE 
White House: Military Prepa...: NORTH KOREA NUKE FREE  White House: Military Preparations 'Underway' for North Korea  Which means TRUMP is bullying...

NORTH KOREA NUKE FREE 

White House: Military Preparations 'Underway' for North Korea 

Which means TRUMP is bullying HIS way again 

into a Masculine Show of Force for Poll Ratings 

ITS A GOOD THING THAT NORTH KOREA 

HAS NEITHER NUKES NOR EFFECTIVE MISSILES 

                              Do They Even Work? The Sad Saga of North Korea's 

                                  SERIOUSLY BECAUSE IF THE ATM'S DON'T WORK 

WHY WOULD YOU THINK THEIR NUKES OR MISSILES

                     

PYONGYANG, North Korea — No modern airport terminal is complete without an ATM, and Pyongyang's now has two. But they don't work — because of new Chinese sanctions, according to bank employees — and it's not clear when they will.
ATMs are an alien enough concept in North Korea that those in the capital's shiny new Sunan International Airport have a video screen near the top showing how they work and how to set up an account to use them. The explanatory video is in Korean, but the machines, which are meant primarily for Chinese businesspeople and tourists, don't give out cash in the North Korean currency.
ATMs are not entirely new to the North.
Years ago, the Ryugyong Commercial Bank installed one in a midrange tourist hotel in central Pyongyang frequented by Chinese. Another ATM was spotted at the airport last year, but it never appeared to be turned on.

Since North Korea set off its second alleged nuclear test over a decade ago I have asked a simple question, where is the radiation signature identifying it as a nuclear blast.  I first brought it up here , and have continued to post my thesis that North Korea is Nuke Free on my Facebook News page.

Simply put no nuclear test done by North Korea over the past decade and a half, 
has emitted any significant detectable radiation associated with a nuclear blast.
There is no detection of radiation immediately after the blast, nor for days nor weeks later. In fact only trace amounts have been found no more so than would occur after a volcanic eruption for instance. I GOOGLE it on a regular basis and still have found no significant report on radiation detected. YOU SHOULD GOOGLE IT TOO

When is an earthquake not an earthquake? How we'll find out when North Korea conducts its next nuclear test

 Nuclear weapons are so powerful that when North Korea has tested them previously, it initially produced what appeared to be an "earthquake" measuring around magnitude 5.0.In September last year, a 5.3 magnitude tremor was recorded not far from North Korea's testing facility in Punggye-ri, in the country's mountainous north-east.That "earthquake" was quickly deemed to have been the rogue state's fifth nuclear test, another step towards its stated goal of building a nuclear weapon that could reach the US.It followed an earlier test in January, of what North Korea claimed was a "miniature hydrogen bomb". That exercise triggered what initially appeared to be a 5.1 magnitude earthquake.

North Korea has conducted its recent nuclear tests by placing the nuclear device hundreds of metres below ground in a narrow hole and detonating it.

While most of the radiation generated stays below ground, some can escape or is deliberately released.
Two weeks after the September test, a monitoring station in Canada, more than 7000km downwind of North Korea's test site, detected elevated airborne levels of a radioactive isotope produced by nuclear fission.

A tell-tail sign it's a nuclear explosion and not a natural earthquake is by observing the depth of the, "shake". Natural quakes originate from far under the ground. The epicenter of a nuclear bomb's localized quake is right at the surface.
For comparison, a natural quake today near Fuji registered 5.8 magnitude at 285 miles deep. A September 9, 2016 nuclear bomb test in North Korea registered a 5.3 on the Richter scale at 0.0 km (0.0 miles) deep.

Making WavesBut whether there’s fury behind the sound is still in question. Whatever North Korea blew up, it did so underground. Which is why the specific characteristics of seismic energy are among the most important analytical factors in finding out exactly what made the earth move. “When you squeeze or stretch a rock, it propagates just like sound does,” says Terry Wallace, a Principal Associate Director for Global Security. Practically speaking, Wallace is a forensic seismologist, solving geopolitical mysteries by looking at signatures in the earth.Explosions, volcanic eruptions, and underground collapses predominantly compress rock, creating what’s called a P-wave. Earthquakes, which usually happen when two pieces of rock slip past each other, cause shearing and twisting that create S-waves. “Imagine you have a slinky. If you hit just one end of it, the slinky compresses, then releases in a wave from source to receiver,” says Wallace, describing a P-wave. “In an S-wave, you are actually going to shake the slinky from side to side.” Seismograph wiggles record shaking in three dimensions, which give telltale signs of what kind of waves come out.

North Korea conducted yet another nuclear test on Sept. 8, and it was seemingly the country's most powerful Registering some 10 kilotons, according to reports from South Korea, the blast was apparently twice as powerful as the last test in January. Both are significant increases in explosive power from the first North Korean test in October 2006, which U.S. intelligence officials estimated to be around 1 kiloton.

Again we have reports early on of peoples worries about radiation but none is reported 

Japan confirms North Korea carried out its fifth and largest nuclear test yet 

  N Korean nuclear test raises fallout fears on China’s border, emergency monitoring activated 

Even when radiation is claimed to be found indicating a potential use of nuclear material, 

these are inconclusive because the testing for underground blasts is difficult and the technology is still being worked on.

North Korea’s 2009 Nuclear Test: Containment, Monitoring, Implications Jonathan Medalia Specialist in Nuclear Weapons Policy November 24, 2010

There are several uncertainties regarding the use of argon-37 for long-range detection of nuclear explosions. First, what is the background level of that isotope from natural and human sources? While the background appears to be low, a definitive conclusion would require further study. Second, can an automated system for detecting this isotope be designed and fielded? While it can be detected in the laboratory, or in the field using manual equipment, an automated system would be needed if detectors are to be placed at remote locations, such as IMS radionuclide stations. Carrigan notes a third uncertainty: the detectability of argon-37 would depend on the rate at which it reaches the surface. If a nuclear test released a large quantity promptly, the isotope would be much easier to detect at long range than if it were released over days or weeks. Radioactive isotopes of xenon (“radioxenons”) are of great value for long-range detection, and the noble gas detection equipment deployed at some IMS radionuclide stations monitors only for them.51 They are produced by nuclear explosions and nuclear reactors. Nuclear explosions also generate iodine-133 (half-life, 20.8 hours) and iodine-135 (half-life, 6.6 hours), which decay into xenon-133 and xenon-135, respectively. Radioxenons can be detected in minute quantities at great distances, but such detection must be accomplished soon after a nuclear test because of short half-lives. The half-life of xenon-133, an isotope of particular value for identifying nuclear explosions, is 5.24 days, so long-range detection can only be done within about 3 weeks of a test.52 The other radioxenons of use for monitoring nuclear tests are xenon-135 (half-life, 9.14 hours), xenon-133m (half-life, 2.19 days), and xenon-131m (half-life, 11.84 days).53 53 Half-life data are from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, “Exploring the Table of Isotopes: Isotopes of Xenon (Z=54),” http://ie.lbl.gov/education/parent/Xe_iso.htm. Xenon-131m is of limited value for detecting nuclear explosions because they generate very little of it, and because, given its longer half-life, it is often in the background, at least regionally, generated by nuclear reactors or medical isotope production reactors. Lars-Erik De Geer, “Radioxenon signatures from underground nuclear explosions,” poster for the International Scientific Studies Project, Vienna, Austria, June 10-12, 2009, http://www.ctbto.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ISS_2009/Poster/RN-22D%20%28Sweden%29%20-%20LarsErik_DeGeer.pdf. The “m” in xenon-131m and 

North Korea nuclear test: No radiation detected
14 February 2013
 South Korean experts say they have not detected any radioactive isotopes from North Korea's nuclear test, hampering efforts to assess the device.Eight samples had been analysed but nothing found, the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission said.
Finding certain isotopes - xenon gases in particular - would help experts determine whether a plutonium or uranium-based device was used.
But a well-contained test could yield no radioactive isotopes, experts say.
 

 And again we have a blast, this time claimed to be the much more powerful hydrogen bomb
and yet we have no proof.

North Korea later announced it had conducted its first successful test of a hydrogen bomb.H-bombs, also known as thermonuclear warheads, are massively more powerful than atomic bombs, using fusion - the merging of atoms - rather than fission to unleash enormous amounts of energy.
Though again it has never been confirmed,

a similar blast and quake reaction as a small kilo-tonne nuke.  So far all the tests have been of very small bombs, between .5 KT and 1 KT similar to the nuke tests before the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans.

This kiloton blast can be produced using what is called Ultra High Explosives, and in fact these are as secret as nuclear weapons are in the international market place,

you in fact saw one go off in Afghanistan last week it was called the Mother of All Bombs MOAB or GBU-GB43  George Bush 43, and it was an Ultra High Explosive; GBU.

Such a bomb is what the North Koreans could be using to imitate a Nuclear blast, 
and why would they go to all the trouble to do that?

Well for one its far easier to sell undetected and North Korea is a major illegal arms dealer who sells missiles, and explosive ordinances for them. 

And two its all about face. Each generation of North Korean Great Leader, carries on the threat of Nuclear war against the West, encouraged as they were by General MacArthur who recommended using nukes against them during the Korean War. After that they knew

directly, so close after the bombing of civilians in Japan with US atomic bombs. the fear 

of the power of the idea of nuclear weapons and the resulting nuclear war.

Granddad and Dad worked on it during the Seventies, then Dad occasionally would

threaten the West, usually when they needed help for famines, which in true Stalinist fashion they spent inordinate amounts of time denying. 

Grandson Kim Jong Un becomes New Glorious Leader and Great Helmsman

and he discovers that under his dads rule the family dominated the regimes politics.

Then he discovered the horrible secret, they had no nukes it was all a fient, while

they tried to develop them and the delivery systems for them.

Outraged Un did what all Stalinist leaders do and he Purged and purged, and purged

all those inner circle family members responsible for the big Lie.

The use of Ultra High Explosive bomb underground blasts gave the impression of

Un rapidly trying to develop weapons of mass destruction to threaten the West with

to keep them at bay.

He increased the development and testing of missiles, and he tested out new forms of dry propellants and explosives on his family using anti aircraft guns to execute them.

It works for the Americans and their allies, because it gives them another enemy to

fight that is stand in for China and Russia.

This US policy “North Korea Policy: Failure is the Only Option ” however, stems from several unique circumstances. By all indications, the North Koreans plan to keep their nuclear weapons and are not open to bargaining them away. Acquiring nuclear weapons was perhaps the only major accomplishment of the late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il (father of current leader Kim Jong-un), under whom the country suffered severe economic austerity. Pyongyang seems to believe that entering the nuclear club will bring military security and transform relations with the United States. Pyongyang’s ability to defy the much more powerful United States is a consequence of the North Koreans holding Seoul hostage. The South Korean capital is within range of a massive collection of North Korean artillery and rocket batteries poised to rain down destruction in retaliation for any possible military action by the United States or South Korea. Finally, a rapprochement with North Korea may well be simply impossible no matter what America says or does, because Pyongyang sees peace as a mortal danger to the regime.

Analysis: Are we seeing the Madman Theory in action?

North Korea has drawn the ire of United Nations member states because it initially joined the Non-Proliferations Treaty but broke its obligations with nuclear weapons testing before withdrawing entirely in 2003.
Other nations believed to have nuclear weapons – including India, Pakistan and Israel – never accepted the treaty at all.
Prof Siracusa said much of what Kim Jong-un has done on the global stage, like his father and grandfather before him, has been to bolster their own position in North Korean society.
"I don't think Shakespeare would have any trouble with North Korea, because it is a hereditary communist rule," he said.
"One family has run the place since the late 1940s. They see these weapons as something that prevents other people from approaching them.
"In other words, these weapons are not only designed to hold off the larger powers but also to show their own people that there is some fear here.
"They have become an organising principle in North Korean politics."

Much Ado About Nothing: DPRK’s Latest Missile Test Reveals  No New Capabilities

How to Hack and Not Hack a Missile 

An attack on the manufacturing process will most likely result in defective components that fail even in ground testing. We would likely never know about this, except to wonder why the ground test phase is taking so long. Interestingly, North Korea’s KN-08 ICBM was first seen in mock-up form in 2012, but there was not a single successful ground test until last year. That may not be the result of a cyberattack, but it is at least what a cyberattack would look like. It would be preferable if the failures occurred in flight, and ideally late in flight, leaving the defective hardware out of reach of North Korean investigators. But this cannot be accomplished reliably—defects subtle enough to survive ground testing would cause some missiles to fail but leave others to complete their mission successfully. And, with properly realistic testing, some failures will still occur on the ground, leaving the North Korean engineers to connect the failed parts with the machines that built them. Such an attack can delay North Korea’s acquisition of advanced ballistic missiles, but will not prevent it in the long run.
This is literally rocket science. It is the epitome of a hard problem. And it becomes even harder when political pressure demands more than the hardware can yet deliver, then tries to wash away the embarrassment of failure by demanding an immediate retest without allowing time to investigate the original failure. We didn’t need cyberattacks to cause North Korea’s Musudan missile to fail in seven out of eight tests last year, and we don’t need cyberattacks for two conspicuous failures this year. Kim Jong Un will happily deliver those failures for us, just like we did for ourselves with Vanguard and Atlas and Titan, by imagining successful rocket tests can be conjured out of political dictates rather than tedious engineering. The young Kim’s father was generally more patient about this sort of thing.

A Paradigm Shift in North Korea’s Ballistic Missile Development?In Kim Jong Un’s 2017 New Year’s speech, he announced that North Korea is in the final stage of preparations to test launch an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM). Since then, North Korean media has repeatedly threatened that the launch will occur at a time and place of the North Korean leader’s choosing. On February 12, following multiple failures of the Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), North Korea conducted a test launch of a new type of IRBM, the “Pukguksong-2.” Although not quite a mobile ICBM, this test suggests that Pyongyang has made greater-than-expected progress toward the test launch of a solid-fuel ICBM. North Korea also unveiled what appears to be its new solid propellant ICBM, presumed to be the Pukguksong-3, enclosed in a canister in the massive military parade on April 15.

Limitations of the Musudan MissileThroughout 2016, North Korea test launched Musudan missiles employing high-energy liquid propellants eight times, with only one successful attempt. These tests used a lofted, high-angle trajectory, presumably to reduce the range of the missiles and avoid any escalated tensions that might occur from flying over Japan. However, from an operational perspective, a lofted launch can also make the reentry vehicle (RV) descend more quickly during the terminal phase, allowing missile defenses less time to intercept them. It seems that these consecutive test failures exposed the limitations of its engine, which was developed by reverse engineering the Russian R-27 submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM). The one successful flight test of the Musudan, conducted in June 2016, was likely aimed at simulating the velocity and environment of ICBM reentry by reaching a higher peak altitude of more than 1,400 km with a decreased range of 400 km.

North Korea’s Evolving Nuclear StrategyWhile North Korea’s nuclear capabilities and threats have grown, little attention has been paid to its emerging nuclear strategy for three reasons. First, there is a common caricature of North Korea as backward, unserious and incompetent that has led some to dismiss and downplay its nuclear efforts over the years. Only after its third nuclear test, in 2013, have many analysts begun to take North Korea’s nuclear capabilities seriously. Second, there is a tendency for nuclear scholars to bypass North Korea because, as one suggests, “almost nothing is known about North Korea’s nuclear arsenal or the doctrine by which those weapons might be employed.”5 North Korea and its nuclear program are far from transparent, but this is not a unique problem. US scholars struggled for two generations to understand nuclear thinking in the Soviet Union based on sketchy evidence. It would be a mistake now, just as it would have been then, to throw our hands into the air. Moreover, a surprising amount of evidence about North Korea’s nuclear program actually exists from its past nuclear and missile tests, policy pronouncements and military parades as well as from commercially available satellite imagery                     

The third reason North Korea’s nuclear strategy receives scant scholarly attention is that many analysts assume that non-military goals drive its nuclear decision making. Some argue that its program is primarily aimed at garnering international prestige or rallying domestic support around a leadership with few other claims of success.6 Others see financial motivations; a North Korea bent on trading its technologies to countries like Iran and Syria.7 Still others believe that its nuclear program is a bargaining chip or blackmailing tool to gain diplomatic concessions.8 Such motivations do not lend themselves easily to rational-actor-based strategic analyses that explore connections between means and ends.9 Yet, it would be a mistake to assume that North Korea’s nuclear program is not guided by strategic logic. Its leaders must certainly weigh the costs and benefits of its nuclear investments and actions over time, given their resource limitations and the security risks they run by driving up military tensions.

Its in everybody interests to play the game of saying North Korea has nukes, they say it for prestige, self defense, (the US never attacks a state with WMD) and to mobilize the masses as a militarized forces.

The US says it because it makes them a go to threat when world
crisis slow down. They claim Kim Jung Un is a madman like their other old go to threat Qaddafi, but he is gone now, like Idi Amin before him.
Currently there is no difference between the Madman in the White House and those he accuses of being mad men.

China uses North Korea as a southern bulwark against the US.
They know North Korea does not have nukes, and they play along
to keep the US and South Korea off balance and staying on their
side of the DMZ.

Japan suspects that North Korea has no nukes, but it is reachable by missiles assault using standard explosives or ultra high explosives like MOAB. So whenever the US saber rattles, its Japan that get the shakes.

US security chief defends police-state measures against immigrants, visitors and citizens

US security chief defends police-state measures against immigrants, visitors and citizens

THE REPUBLIC IS AN IMPERIUM
 

LONG LIVE THE EMPEROR

HAIL TRUMP 

THE NEW CAESAR    

AMERICA HAS ALWAYS SUFFERED FROM PRETENSIONS OF RECREATING THE ARISTOCRACY IT ABANDONED WITH ITS REVOLUTION.

Family sitting on gold thrones 

promise they have interests of all Americans at heart 

THERE IS A TORY TENDENCY IN AMERICA

THAT SEES ITS CELEBRITIES AS ROYALTY,

EVERYONE OF THEM MAKES MORE

AND HAS MORE POWER AND FANS THAN QE2 

WHY WOULD A COUNTRY THAT PROCLAIMS ITSELF A DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC, 

REDUCE ITSELF TO A REPUBLICAN IMPERIUM WITH AN EMPEROR

Dealing with Emperor Trump: Field Notes from Ancient Rome

HAVE THEY NOT READ THEIR BURKE 

ON THE RISE AND FALL OF THAT OTHER IMPERIAL REPUBLIC

Meet the Trump of Ancient Rome, a Populist Demagogue 

Who Helped Bring Down the Republic

The man who ultimately brought down the system was a wealthy and ambitious nobleman named Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist demagogue who refused to play by the rules. Clodius had always been eccentric and unpredictable in ways that both shocked and amused the Roman populace. As a young man, he had incited a mutiny among his brother-in-law’s troops. Then, when pirates captured him, he took deep offense at the small ransom they accepted for his release.

Nothing was sacred to Clodius. The more audacious his behavior, the more the public loved him for it. In Rome, for example, Clodius, a noted ladies’ man, committed sacrilege by dressing up as a woman and infiltrating the female-only religious festival of the goddess Bona Dea, with the aim of seducing Pompeia, Julius Caesar’s wife. The scandal led Caesar to divorce Pompeia and gave rise to the famous quip that Caesar’s wife needed to be beyond suspicion.

What Clodius’s critics failed to realize was that he was smart, determined and very much in touch with the frustrations of the common people.

'DEBT HAPPENS': Goldman Sachs just ran its first-ever ads trying to sell you something

Consumer debt in Canada is, frankly, a problem.

According to a recent report from credit monitoring agency TransUnion, the typical Canadian now owes $21,686 excluding their mortgage — a number that has not stopped increasing for over a decade now. To give you a sense of the severity of our consumer debt situation, for every $1 of disposable income, the average Canadian owes $1.65. In fact, Canada’s household debt — the amount of money that all adults in a household owe financial institutions—is the highest among its Group of Seven peers, even exceeding the size of our own economy!

SEE 5000 YEARS OF DEBT DAVID GRAEBER

Let us remember that the current Financial capitalist system is the result of the evolution of Capitalism post Bolshevik revolution when for a period of time post WWI the Austrian School of Anti Marx Anti Socialism pseudo market economics, as Karl Polanyi says they crashed the Austrian Kroener causing a depression but hey it proved their theory right.

As Hilferding correctly analysed Capitalism has moved from productive capital, industrialization, to Fiance Capital, banking Monopolies cartels, stock exchanges dominating the market, it was the post war expansion of Capital as Capital for the first time in the past three hundred years,

It lead to Depression globally, despite the magical thinking of Von Mises and Freddy Hayek, and in fact it was Keynes who saved Capitalism , first by clawing back financial speculation which is all the Austrian school is about, Keynes observing the workers revolution in Russia provided capitalism with a future free of revolution, by ending finance dominance and returning to production, in other words State Capitalism, which was historically hegemonic pre and post WWII. See Tony Negri Marx Beyond Marx

Finance capitalism did not return until Nixon ended the use of the gold standard and made the American dollar the basis of the world economy. American Imperialism then spent the seventies crashing economies in Latin America through Hot Money see Robert Naylor Dictatorships and brutal market capitalism ensued With a further financialization of the market Reaganism created the conditions for the financial tech bubble of the nineties.

For the 2000's we spent 16 years evolving into a told financial capitalist economy, where our debt was the 99% is what is fueling capitalist growth, our mortgages, our cars, appliances, our lives are a slavery to debt and capitalism can no longer produce with out our debt. Even if you pay off your debt next week you will quickly once again get into debt, because the system requires it.

The capitalist economists, and the executive of the state and the banks, tell us debt is bad, terrible, and then they offer us unlimited debt through credit cards, car financing a creation of the nineties, mortgages that last thirty and forty years, this is the real capital in circulation.

The 99% are capitalism, the 1% are parasites, coupon cutters, a rentier class, they are not capitalism, we are, only when the proletariat understands this can we say we are seeing a rise in class consciousness.

We have always created capital that is the secret Marx revealed, under advanced capitalism, it reaches a period of decadence where its expansion becomes a contradiction a negation of the negation. Here we see it in the ironic nature of post modern capitalism , it requires us to be in debt to grow, it requires our money, that it pays us to come back to it, to circulate as money M-C-M the earlier productive period of industrialization until the 20th Century was C-M-C which is why the politicians and pundits as well as journalists,today tell you on the one hand you should not be in debt and get out of it as quickly as possible bemoaning our debt load, while the Bloomberg, WSJ, etc. tell us we need to spend more to go into debt in order to keep the market going, its called SPENDING capitalism now requires capital not as production or property but as money, money is making money off money.

During Occupy Wall Street the Tobin Tax was renamed the Robin Hood Tax and was promoted as a way of reducing debt, since trillions of dollars trade in the FOREX minute by minute. Today those minutes and nanoseconds of computer time, which was created for the international monetary exchange markets, a late twentieth century development,

But let’s broaden the scope. The LinkNYC stations are maintained by CityBridge, a consortium of telecom, hardware, and media companies (notably, the Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs) under contract with the city government. It’s the kind of public-private infrastructure that excites the urban planners and technologists who imagine New York as a data-driven utopia, a so-called “smart city.”

Today you have M-B-M money bit money; Bitcoin and Fintech, which still maintain the language of capitalism in its industrial stage. It is even applied to this cloud based virtual business interface. You data mine for Bitcoins. Virtual currencies are bits of information, their value is zero yet they increase in value through exchange. The reality is that of course they do we live in an capitalist exchange value system which will twist all to its end of M-C-M.

However bits are just information, calculations, no more real now than when the Tulip Crash happened in the very first bourse. With the advent of fintech capital becomes redundant since all that is transferred now is information, bits and bits of information, and used cybernetically could act as a transformative element for the evolution of autonomous self managed socialism.

           Pricewatch: You'll never guess how much the average Irish family spends

A family of four in Ireland spends about €50,000 a year on basic outgoing the average Irish homeowner were to add up all their spending over the course of a year, the chances are they would be pretty shocked by the total.

When all bills including food, mortgage payments, utilities, insurance and motoring costs, phones, entertainment, education and childcare are totted up, the cost of living for a family who bought even a modest home during the boom years could easily top €50,000.

----30----

THE TRANS PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP AND THE WINNER IS: VIETNAM

The U.S. International Trade Commission said the Trans-Pacific Partnership would increase economic growth and create jobs
Exports would increase, but imports would increase more, the report said.
Critics worry it would cost jobs by exposing American workers to low-wage competition from countries such as Vietnam. They also say it would allow multinational corporations to challenge local laws by saying they violate the trade deal.

As part of his legacy tour President Obama visited Vietnam, and allowed them the right to buy weapons from their old foe the USA to help keep at bay an even older foe; China. Obama calls this his Asia Pivot.

Its ironic that those who call themselves fiscal conservatives, denounce governments for picking winners and losers, and then cheer on these trade deals that do just that.

For Obama and Vietnam his visit was a win for the TPP which both countries agree is vital. And in Vietnam's case this is vitally true, more so than for any other pacific nation even Japan.

For all the controversy raised by the secrecy and wheeling and dealing behind the scenes diplomatically with no one admitting anything, that went into the creation of the TPP in the end it is just another agribusiness trade deal, with add ons, or as the Americans call them; earmarks.

It is a trade agreement that also allows Vietnam to become the newest of the developing countries in the pacific region to create a modern Fordist economy based on outsourced manufacturing, aka sweatshops.

Unlike Cambodia which is picking up the apparel business that Bangladesh is losing as it faces increased calls for government regulation, health and safety regs, workers rights, unionizaiton, Vietnam aspires to also produce car parts, steel, etc. 

This is where the TPP would allow Vietnam to benefit from off shoring by Japan where Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda, etc. could produce car parts, as could Korea with Hyundai, Kia, etc. 

The seal of joint approval came this week when for the first time a sitting US President visited Vietnam, and with he brought that valuable weapons agreement. 

Vietnam is one of the contestants with China over sovereignty in the resource rich South China Sea, around VN deep sea oil beds exist that are in contestation.  Japan, the Phillipines, Malaysia all are fellow contestants for the sovereignty and resources of the South China Sea against China's claims of ownership. 

For Vietnam the TPP is even bigger than the South China Sea resources, because it will remove tarriffs and open markets in North America to their sea food and agricultural products, to Japan and Korea as outsourcing for car manufacturing, and a new trading partner with Australia and New Zealand.

No other country gains as much from the TPP as Vietnam, and small as it is, it believes that it can be a competitor to China's regional hegemony by also producing car parts for them as well. For Vietnam its a win win situation.

For the other eleven members of the TPP the only real advantage to the agreement is that of dropping tariffs on agricultural goods.

For Multinational corporations its another step in the development of a global corporate free trade policy to their liking. 

POLITICAL ASTROLOGY 

THE YEAR OF THE YANG FIRE MONKEY

I have written about Political Astrology before and in particular about the impact of unexpected change created in the Year of the Monkey.      

It has been twelve years since the last one, and at that time I used it to predict the minority government of Paul Martin and his and the Liberals fall from power. That was 2004, I also used it as the basis of predication of the coming Obama campaign for POTUS and the auspicious birth it would have in the year of the Monkey.

With the topsy turvy politics that began a year ago with the totally unexpected win by the NDP in Alberta and later the Trudeau Liberals federally in Canada and the Trump and Sanders campaigns in the US change of the trickster kind, the unexpected is the norm, it flows right into the year of the Monkey. As I said back in 2004;

And why should we put such credence into the Year of the Monkey? Well it occurs on a twelve-year cycle, and in Canadian politics the year of the Monkey has seen the fall of many PMs and their parties.In the monkey year1992, Brian Mulroney stepped down as PM and was replaced by Kim Campbell, who went down to defeat in the 1993 election.In 1980 Pierre Elliot Trudeau came out of retirement to defeat PC Prime Minister Joe Clark, who had held his office for only a year. Of course PET had the year of the Monkey on his side having become PM in 1968, a crucial and revolutionary year of the Monkey.1968 is a quintessential year of the Monkey, with the Paris uprising of students and workers, the Tet offensive effectively defeating the Americans in Vietnam, the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention which led to the election of two time loser Richard Nixon. The assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the Russian invasion of Chezslovakia.The Year of the monkey in 1956 saw John Diefendbaker elected Leader of the Progressive Conservatives who win the 1957 election with a Minority Government, the first minority government in Canadian history, which lasted only one year.

The Unexpected Should Be Expected should be the motto of this year of the Monkey as it is the norm.

Today we are seeing a much broader range of change occurring as this is the year of the Male Fire Monkey a much more active trickster. With a Jupiter nature, the Monkey Trickster spirit is sure to impact on mundane politics which Jupiter rules. The rise of both Trump and Sanders are reflective of this spirit. And so is the win by Leicester in the Premier League of Football, their first such win in 132 years, at 5000-1 Odds !!!

Hoary astrology is the practice of Political Astrology; it uses a base style of chart first developed in England by the father of modern political astrology William Lily who predicted the Great London Fire of 1666. I do not have those abilities nor do I use the standard astrological tools. I use an intuitive method looking at events that would fit in the spirit of this year of the Monkey.

Hanuman which is the Monkey God in Asia is the spiritual nature of Man the Trickster, which we find in other cultures with their tricksters; Set of the Egyptians, Loki of the Norse, Coyote and Raven of North American first peoples, the Fox in Aesop’s Tales and in Japan, and Mercury for the Greeks.  All of them turn the world on its head, spin the magician or shaman around the leave folks guessing. They do it with a laugh, either on you or on them. While the tricks can teach a lesson that lesson may not be benevolent nor without some pain or other form of unexpected event.

In this the campaigns of Trump and Sanders actually reflect that Fire Yang of this year’s Monkey Tai Sui the Grand Duke of Jupiter. Jupiter rules politics, the Twentieth card in the Tarot; XX The World or Aeon

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Both candidates for POTUS came from behind, with nothing but negative expectations and media prognostications the magick of the media appointing or anointing their winner and their loser, as though they were Thoth himself.

But here the truth of Ptah did not come from the lips of the media but rather from the people, change was in the air, as the saying goes. In the spirit of the Monkey King, the people decided to support these two politicians because they were not the usual kind of politician. One was a seventies anti war activist a self avowed Socialist, the other a racist bigoted businessman who was both a Democrat and a Republican.  Such Janus like archetypes now fill the imagination of the mass of the American public.

The seventies, which is when I became a young radical activist, have returned, to remind the yuppies, nerds and geeks that they are the baby boomers who lived in the seventies, making it a time of both mass anti war protest and organizing for a political revolution, a music and cultural upheaval and finally a spirit of change, that society as well as the individual could change, it was Yippie culture and Hippie culture combined, it was protest and self help/inward awareness, paganism and Buddhism began to expand in North America. All of the counter culture, freak culture of the Woodstock generation is wrapped in an old guy who was a hero of mine when I was a teenager and he was an anti war socialist elected mayor in Vermont.

This particular historical moment in time, on the way to the second decade of the 21^st. Century with its millennial generation is exactly where we were at fifty years ago, ironically. All the Occult and Revolutionary revival of the seventies is coming to be the norm in this new age. The concept of an alternative consciousness, a worldwide ascendant consciousness of humanity and the idea of a revolutionary consciousness baptized the new century in Seattle and Chiapas in 1999. And five years ago its zeitgeist became apparent to all of us with the Weltanschauung of the Arab spring.

Both Trump and Sanders reflect this zeitgeist in the year of the Monkey, the anti free trade movement has a left and right base and both these candidates reflect these bases, while their parties the Democrats and GOP do not.

They are the Left and Right of the same coin, a libertarian urge to social change for the good of the individual and for society. Unfortunately as we have learned from history this left right deviation occurred in the thirties and created fascism, which has returned as the zeitgeist of the Trump movement. White America is being swept up in final campaign, before it becomes a minority in the United States. 

Both Sanders and Trump reflect this, both are appealing to predominately white voters, and in both cases they are appealing to the working class, there is no middle class that was a socioeconomic myth of  sixties sociologists to confuse producers with consumers, creating new classes such as blue collar and white collar, to separate them into economic categories. Everyone wants to be white collar, middle class, a consumer, who may or may not be a direct producer, like auto workers, or secretaries, both jobs created for post WWII North America.

Trump appeals to the older white working class, while Sanders appeals to the new generation their children and grandchildren who now live in a pre socialist world of postmodern capitalism. Like Star Trek that my generation grew up with the advanced communications, social media, internet world which is very much the creation of the 21^st Century, is real change occurring instantly give or take a couple of months or years of development.

Apps reflect this change, this shift from consumer based capitalism, to active ameliorating capitalism on its way to becoming socialism, not just the conditions for socialism but actually shifting productive relations into socialist relations of production.

Everyone under advanced capitalism is becoming a producer user, even this blog is reflective of that change, by its very nature the blog allows me to create more than just an article but an actual autonomous media form, that can be spread everywhere on the internet, no different than the New York Times.

The modern technology being used by millennial’s attests to this sense of coming socialism, socialism of the association of free producers, artisans not wage slave labourers,  using apps they create and share. We have a sharing economy bursting through a capitalist economy, whether you and I like it or not. Revolutions are radical change whether people like it or not and we are in a period of revolutionary change unseen since after WWI.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Uber is one of these kinds of disruptive technologies it confronts the old taxi culture that grew out of the forties to sixties when a small group of capitalists dominated and created an industry based on ownership of state sanctioned cab licenses. 

The ultimate purpose of Uber and other such apps, is to eventually be used by us to call autonomous vehicles to our home, workplace or shopping mall, we will no longer own cars, but use a new form of public transit, privatized as it is now. It will change because we are now actually talking about socialism in North America. 

Currently Uber is destroying the taxi industry, and transferring that ability to drive people, to people themselves, taking it out of its specialized role in society, in much the same way the car itself replace the horse drawn carriage or the street trolley.

But eventually once Big Auto starts producing autonomous vehicles, there will be an app used to call up a vehicle, but there will be no need for Uber.

Cars would be leased and once they outlived their lives they would be returned for recycling and reuse, this idea has been in circulation for twenty years now.

Socialism is the natural result of the contradictions of capitalism, which is a failed economic model, based on continuous growth of at least 3% annually, as Prof DavidHarvey has pointed out. Socialism occurs when capitalism reaches the point of restricting the growth of technology, robotics, automation, which can free us from the drudgery of wage slavery. We move from an economy based on production and waste, to one that is that is green, that uses natural resources in a way that considers their finiteness, that then relies on reusing and recycling these products.

Green economics is one aspect of socialism it involves current research in areas like green manufacturing, green chemistry, etc. These are actual fields of research and development. The idea is to take responsibility for your product from cradle to grave and when we go to bury it we find ways of breaking it down and reusing it.

Autonomous production; the freedom to choose, that supposed gift of capitalism is actually central to socialism, the concept of the free association of producers comes with the change in technology, like 3D Printing. This allows for manufacturing at home, a return of home based work, an end of the factory.
The Internet of Things, IoT allows us to administer things, not people, Engels ideal of the socialist state.

Millennial’s understand this, they grok the potential in the social media they use, they live in and live with. They used this to create the Arab Spring, the first world wide revolutionary struggle since the Bolshevik and Spanish revolutionary  struggles in the twentieth century . This consciousness of change was not lost on them.

It is this spirit of hope and change of that revolutionary potential that makes them embrace Sanders call to political revolution and Socialism.

It is the fear of job loss, of destruction of the norm, of the end of power of the white race that drives their parents and grandparents to Trump.

Like the turn of last Century which saw a horrifying war of Capitalist expansion that cut short the lives of an entire generation in Europe, and the creation of Modernism as a result, we are in a period of change, where consciousness, our social and personal self awareness is aware that we and the times we live in are full of potential for change and are changing.

Unlike the lost generation of WWI our Millennial’s as well as members of Gen X, Y, Z are all here. And like the generation of revolutionaries, modernists, they are the voice of the future, of a socialism that is not 19^th or even 20^th century, but a new model of an advanced technology shared for free in open source. 

Where work is what we all do because it is something we want to do, not because we are selling our time to someone else. Technology is on the edge of history, like Marx predicted in his work the Grundrisse, we can transform capitalism into socialism, by using technology to free us from wage slavery.

The followers of Trump are the heirs of the post WWI reactionaries and traditionalists who also appear at this time with the futurist and modernists movements, they are the founders of Fascism. 

They are not quite conservative or aristocratic, though these values and images of power appeal to them, they are actually as much a part of the revolutionary change in consciousness that is occurring, their spokespeople on the right talk about dialectics, gnosis, Hegelianism, all the left topics that while they dispute them consider them important enough as an ideology to continuously confront despite their protestations that Socialism has failed, and is a failed ideology.

It is more than an ideology; it is a historical zeitgeist originating in capitalism once capitalism develops industry and technology to a level of autonomous use it transforms into the potential for a socialist political economy.

It is here that the conspiratorial ideologues of the right, like Eugene Volokh, influence the readers of both the National Review and the National Enquirer. 

This movement of radical traditionalism of Evola and Volokh appeals to the American conspiracy theory imagination which Trump uses very effectively.

 However the white working class, like the coalminers in Appalachia who have abandoned Clinton for Trump, do not see that their jobs, their lives, their very existence being sacrificed by their bosses but because of Free Trade deals.

 With a reactionary consciousness they look to the very same boss who sold them out to save them, the left and the Democratic party has failed them. But they too embrace Sanders political revolution from the right, and support Trump because he will end trade deals. He will save their jobs. Even if the Republican Party is the party of free trade the very reason they have lost their jobs, they do not care, they are not republicans they are Trumpites.

Sanders and Trump’s political revolution also calls into question the whole two party system and Trump more than even Sanders has exposed what a rigged game it is.

In a sense Trump as post modern aristocrat has stepped down from his lofty heights to save the people. His politics are not of reform or revolution but of the great man in history no different from Mussolini or Bismarck who created state socialism in order to unify Germany.

Sanders political revolution harkens back to the seventies, to the ideals of the anti war movement which was the first post WWII movement to seriously threaten the establishment, even more so than the very successful CND anti nuke movement that it originated from.

He has not announced its structure, because as a transitional program it is made up of demands like #Fightfor15, ending Big Money in politics, etc. are all tactics for change, they are not a real program for socialist change. He is using this campaign like a big anti-war teach-in.

America’s political system is broken, this election has proven it.

 

And the Monkey King knows it and is only too glad to show it.