Quote Only Thread

[IanEye]

"What's weird is pineapple supposedly makes semen taste better,
yet semen makes pineapple taste AWFUL." - Harris Wittels

[identity]

more from Nicolas Bouvier's wonderful The Way of the World - Two men in a car from Geneva to the Khyber Pass (in 1953!)

Tabriz (Iran)

When I asked him about the road to Tehran, which was making us anxious, he set aside his stones
and began to laugh.

‘It’s a bit early, but no doubt you’ll manage, and if you can’t get through,
you’ll see some amazing things… The last time I did it – ten years ago perhaps –
the floods had carried away the bridge over the Qizil Uzan. There was no way of
getting across, but as the waters might subside from one day to the next, buses and
trucks kept arriving from east and west, and because the banks had been loosened
by the rain, many of them had been bogged down at the bridgeheads. I had too.
We settled in. The banks were already covered with caravans and herds. Then a
tribe of Karachi (the name given in north Persia to gypsy nomads, musicians and blacksmiths)
on their way south set up their little forges and began to do odd
jobs for the truck-drivers, who obviously could not simply jettison their loads.
Drivers who were self-employed soon began to sell things on the spot, bartering
goods for vegetables from the peasants round about. At the end of the week,
there was a village at each end of the bridge, with tents, thousands of animals
bleating, mooing and lowing, and campfires, poultry, and a few shelters made out
of branches and planks to serve as tea-houses. Families rented a place under the
canvas of empty trucks, there were tremendous backgammon games, a Dervish
or two exorcising the sick – not to mention all the beggars and whores who had
rushed in to take advantage of the windfall. Magnificent chaos! And green grass
was beginning to shoot up. Only a mosque was missing. What a life!
‘When the water went down, everything dissolved like a dream. And all of that
because of a bridge that shouldn’t have collapsed, because of our disorder and our
poor, negligent officials. Ah, believe me,’ he said fervently, ‘it’s well said that
Persia is still a land of wonders.’

The word made me ponder. At home what is ‘wonderful’ tends to be an exception
that’s arranged; it is useful, or at least edifying. In Persia it might just as
well spring from an oversight, or a sin, or a catastrophe which, by breaking the
normal run of events, offers life unexpected scope for unfolding its splendours
before eyes that are always ready to rejoice in them.

[cptmarginal]

Political rulers have a Masonic solidarity that can transcend ideological differences, such as that between authoritarian Communism and capitalist democracy, bonded by their common desire for obedience and loyalty – and, of course, the retention of power.

[identity]

from Robert Irwin's Memoirs of a Dervish - Sufis, Mystics and the Sixties:

Late in the November of that year (1965) I met a nurse on a blind date. Here I shall call her Juliet. After Juliet and I met in London and had dinner, she came up to see me in Oxford the following day. For both of us it was unplanned and unexpected. We listened to Ravi Shankar and the Beatles in my room and later we walked hand in hand round Christ Church Meadow. Afterwards, I took her round to see John Aiken. That afternoon he confidently lectured us on the crystal memory banks that were concealed in Peru, Persia, Tibet and elsewhere; the impossibility of building pyramids today; mystic union conceived of as existence at the sub-atomic level; the end of the Brahmin Kalpa; prophecies by Jehovah’s Witnesses regarding the End of the World; the Kundalini yoga system and erotic heresy in Oxford; what higher mathematics could tell us about the End of the World; the architectural codes of pre-Inca civilisation; the hypnotic basis of Indian mysticism; Sufism as black magic; black magic to be considered as white magic at the highest level; evidence for the lost continent of Lemuria; how civilisations flourished on top of electromagnetic fissures; marriage as a way of making dialectical progress on a spiritual path. John always smiled as he poured this stuff out. He was a walking encyclopedia of dodgy knowledge. What was I thinking of, exposing Juliet to all this?

[Iamwhomiam]

Interesting read, Identity. I kinda think "they've" gotten the 'new' world already planned out:

edited to add "ing" to first word

[Elihu]

This has nothing to do with QE, unemployment, CPI, GDP, macroprudential supervision, or any other high-sounding term to come out of the Fed or the mainstream economics profession.

It has to do with the twin dollar pathologies of rising debt and falling interest. These flaws are fatal. They are inexorable, like plate tectonics on Earth. And they will be fatal.

Owners of gold increasingly wonder why they should bid on the dollar. Or, if not, they bid and buy dollars, and the new owner of the gold wonders. And so it goes, like bankruptcy as described by Ernest Hemingway. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

https://monetary-metals.com/the-decline ... -oct-2015/

[Elihu]

"credit creation sets in motion an exchange of nothing for something"

Jan Nieuwenhuijs ‏@KoosJansen Dec 4

[divideandconquer]

On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had—the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustrations, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have. Always changing, it is always out of reach. Would you like more money? Here, have more! An attractive sexual partner? No problem. Higher status? More intelligence? Whiter teeth? You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can’t have something the more you desire it, you are never happy. -- A Pleasure and a Calling by Phil Hogan

[divideandconquer]

I know you got 40 billion dollars, but can you just keep it to one house? You only need ONE house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it to two rooms? I mean why have 52 rooms and you know there’s somebody with no room?! It just don’t make sense to me. It don’t.”― Tupac Shakur

[Elvis]

Of course they're Muslim Terrorist among us, plenty of them who infiultrated over a very pourous southern border over many years!!! Anyonewith half a brain understands that! Of course we dd have a dumb down very low bar standard, don't we! Build the wall Donald!

—Reader comment on the execrable Conservative Tribune website

[Elihu]

Now project the mentality of a savage, who can grasp nothing but the concretes of the immediate moment, and who finds himself transported into the midst of a modern, industrial civilization. If he is an intelligent savage, he will acquire a smattering of knowledge, but there are two concepts he will not be able to grasp: “credit” and “market.”

He observes that people get food, clothes, and all sorts of objects simply by presenting pieces of paper called checks—and he observes that skyscrapers and gigantic factories spring out of the ground at the command of very rich men, whose bookkeepers keep switching magic figures from the ledgers of one to those of another and another and another. This seems to be done faster than he can follow, so he concludes that speed is the secret of the magic power of paper—and that everyone will work and produce and prosper, so long as those checks are passed from hand to hand fast enough. If that savage breaks into print with his discovery, he will find that he has been anticipated by John Maynard Keynes.

[Nordic]

Truth telling has been shoved off into the alternative Internet media where I would wager the government runs sites that proclaim wild conspiracies, the purpose of which is to discredit all skeptics.

-- Paul Craig Roberts.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/02 ... g-roberts/

[minime]

Will you deliver Spain from bondage?

[AlicetheKurious]

"Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the spigot."

Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed, but it's back."

Robert Dreyfuss, The Thirty-Year Itch
Mother Jones, March/April 2003

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top Exxon officials, says it's clear that most oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term -- especially if tensions in the region spiral out of control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco' written all over it."

Ibid

[identity]

Mackinder formulated a very basic geopolitical principle, one still debated to this day. There were, according to Mackinder, three basic geopolitical realities to the world: (1) a resource-rich Heartland comprising central Eurasia and dominated by Russia, and touching upon China. Around this area were (2) an Inner Crescent, comprising Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Chinese-Japanese orient, and (3) an Outer or "insular Crescent" comprising the two American continents, sub-Saharan Africa, and the vastness of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Additionally, Mackinder coined the expression "the World-Island" to describe the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Eastern European component of this "pivot area" or "Heartland" was, as we shall see in a moment, a vital component of Mackinder's vision.

[...] Mackinder stated one implication of his thesis, namely, that the very geographical structure of the world, its uneven distribution of land and resources between the inhabited continents, its uneven distribution of technology and modern armaments, and its division into the three areas of Heartland, Inner and Outer Crescents, led to certain strategic opportunities, and was "such as lend itself to the growth of empires, and in the end of a single World Empire," an empire which, Mackinder realized, could end in global tyranny.

So how would one dominate this Heartland, and use it as a stepping stone to creating such a "World Empire"? Mackinder answers this question with his three famous dicta of Geopolitics:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the world.

But there is an apocalyptic "catch," and to his credit, Mackinder saw it, and in seeing it, he strongly implicates the possibilities of apocalyptic social engineering to create just such a World Empire out of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations:

"In a monkish map, contemporary with the Crusades, which still hangs in Hereford Cathedral, Jerusalem is at the geometrical center, the navel, of the world, and on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at Jerusalem they will show you to this day the precise spot which is the center. If our study of the geographical realities, as we now know them in their completeness, is leading us to right conclusions, the mediaeval ecclesiastics were not far wrong. If the World-Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland, be central in the World-Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt."

In other words, Mackinder is hinting at a fourth and fifth geopolitical dictum, each of which imply two different paths to Mackinder's "World Empire":

Whoever dominates the World-Island dominates Jerusalem and thereby dominates the world;
Whoever dominates Jerusalem dominates the World-Island.

– J. Farrell, 2011