I’ve previously written here about an actual, real live, in-existence, software package for distributed electronic barter using military grade encryption.  Well, as part of the archiving of my files from the soon-to-be-defunct geocities free webhosting service, I realized that this software package might become otherwise unavailable, so I’ve archived the latest version here for those of sufficient technical talent.

That is all.

Now I am returning to the issue of consciousness and the absence of self with which I began Part 1 of this post.  It is only my own view, and it isn’t original.  It is also entirely open to challenge by anybody who understands these matters better than I do - and there must be many.

It is usual in Western thought for the question of the self to be treated as an epistemological issue.  But what I am really setting out to do in this series is to recover from the sloppy psychological models of the past - all that couch-talk about the unconscious, the subconscious, the collective unconscious, and so on, for those workings of the mind which proceed in us quite without our assistance, and over which we presume sovereignty.  I’ll begin with a thumbnail sketch of the hardware, so to speak, of the mind.  Some observations about the much more interesting and altogether too, too fallible software will follow in the next post.

Neurologically, all sentient organisms have one or more systems which project the consciousness of self, insomuch as that hologrammatic thing can be said to exist.  These are not coterminous with the divisions in the human brain and nervous systems but, largely excepting thought it seems, are distributed across them.  They activate different areas of the brain.  They are separate from the visceral nervous system.  I contend that they have evolved out of the most nascent awareness of sexual division, selection and self-maintenance.  In other words, the survival strategy of sensing, to borrow the old German Idealist term, “the thing that is” beyond the organism itself is the only reason for human self-awareness and self-interest.

The “hardware”

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The Telegraph reports that:

(Prehistoric Britons) were able to travel between settlements with pinpoint accuracy thanks to a complex network of hilltop monuments.

These covered much of southern England and Wales and included now famous landmarks such as Stonehenge and The Mount.New research suggests that they were built on a connecting grid of isosceles triangles that ‘point’ to the next site.

Many are 100 miles or more away, but GPS co-ordinates show all are accurate to within 100 metres.

This provided a simple way for ancient Britons to navigate successfully from A to B without the need for maps…

According to historian and writer Tom Brooks…

‘‘So advanced, sophisticated and accurate is the geometrical surveying now discovered, that we must review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebears as primitive, or conclude that they received some form of external guidance.”

I await Thomas Cahill’s new edition of The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels wherein he describes the “external guidance” received by the Stone Age forebears of the Britons as the wanderings of Abraham with his son Isaac bringing the light of their advanced culture to the ignorant savages.

Starting at about 10 minutes into the season premiere of “Sons of Anarchy” (a biker gang), titled “Albification” is the following dialog:

Law enforcement officer: I’m guessing this isn’t about cigars.
Town father: Ethan shares a common interest.
Ethan: The Sons of Anarchy have been supplying weapons to gang members for over a decade.  Its time it stopped.
Officer: (picking up business card handed to him) “The League of American Nationalists”
Ethan:  (shifty eyes, and inflection avoiding racial agenda) The League represents an influential group of businessmen who are tired of criminals undermining local enterprise.
Officer: (with an “I’ve got your number” expression) Right.  And how many black and Latino businessmen in your influential group?
Ethan: (with an OK you’ve got my number deadpan): None.
Officer:  I know who you are.  (then looking at the obviously ex-con bodyguard of Ethan’s) White hate.
Ethan:  Quite the opposite, deputy chief.  (with a “he doth protest too much” unctuousness) We are separatists, not supremacists.  We are God fearing patriots.  And in a time when black radicals are in power in this country we are desperately trying to remind our citizens of their founding beliefs.
Officer: (again, with the “I’ve got your number” expression) That all white men are created equal. (pregnant pause with no retort from Ethan)  What the Hell do you want from me?
Bodyguard: Call us what you want.  We’ve got the same goal:  Stop scumbags from arming scumbags.
Ethan:  We just want you to know, we are at your disposal, if you need us.
Officer gets up and walks out.

This “screenwriting” is chock-full of little pieces of, uh, propaganda that deserve careful dissection and examination.

The proposal (first made in 1992) is relatively simple:

Replace all taxes on economic activity (such as the income tax) with a single tax on the net, in place liquidation value of household assets, at the risk free interest rate (nominally around 3% or the long-term average of the short-term Treasury rate). Homestead is exempted (intended to include home and tools of the trade for self-employment—nominally around $300k/family in 2009). Businesses are not taxed, only their owners.

Use this calculator to find out how various households fare under various assumptions.  The output is the change in the household’s after tax income.  If it is positive, that household prefers the NAT over the present system.  If negative, that household prefers the current system.  In the default example, the household before tax rate of return on assets (its investment skill) is set to a relatively high 11.11% to show that even Warren Buffet may prefer the NAT if he is as good an investor as his mythology would have us believe.  Set that rate of return lower to see what happens to Warren, Bill and their buddies if they’re not as good as they’re supposed to be according to modern myth.

Earned income is different from total household income (the current tax base).

“Income” means the same thing here as it does in the 16th Amendment authorizing the taxation of “income from whatever source” which includes not only wages but also dividends, capital gains, rents, net-sales, interest, etc.  In other words, “income” means the return on all investments including the investment of one’s labor for a return (commonly called wages, salaries, or “earned” income).  In this example the total household “income” (taxable under the current income tax system) is its “earned income” plus its rate of return times the household’s assets.

by Alexander Baron

In 1999, I developed a theory that I called The Wizard Of Oz Syndrome to explain the cause of state repression. Although the phrase is not original – I thought it was ! - I believe that the ideas expounded therein show us the root cause of the problem: individuals in the service of the state are never but never held personally accountable for their actions, so they can and do, do whatever they damn well please, which often as not is make the lives of innocent people a misery.

Ironically, the one place where this doesn’t happen is the new China. Although China is most definitely a repressive society by Western standards, its government takes a dim view of civil servants who exploit or endanger its citizens, and severe punishments – including public executions – have been meted out to transgressors.

The inspiration for The Wizard Of Oz Syndrome was sad, and at times painful, personal experience. The inspiration for the Theory Of Blanket Dismissal was also personal experience, though thankfully of a marginally less painful kind, the kind of pain that comes from banging   one’s own head repeatedly against a brick wall.

So what is this theory? Although I didn’t mention it by name, I touched on it in a speech I delivered in Central London on September 17, 2005 when I alluded to some beliefs in the political sphere as revealed truths, because “No amount of reason, evidence, logic or rational argument will ever convince the true believer otherwise.”

The Theory Of Blanket Dismissal is something which extends far beyond the purely political sphere, including at times most damagingly for some people into the field of police work, criminal and related investigations. I am not alluding here to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, which is thoroughly documented – though painfully ignored time and time again. I am talking about something that goes far deeper.

To illustrate this theory, and how it works in practice, I propose to examine two high profile murder convictions, the case of Michael Stone in the UK, and that of Mumia Abu-Jamal in the United States.

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Economagic is a fantastic resource for people who care about economics!

For a simple example, you can drill down to house price data history and then click on the “GIF Chart” link to see this:

“Turn advanced features on” and you can save multiple data series to your workspace which you can then use to create composite graphs like this:

I chose that more or less on a “whim” based on my suspicion that rental vacancies may be a proxy for wealth centralization (you can’t afford to hold onto ownership of a rental unit that is vacant unless you are wealthy) and that labor force participation rates, sans bubbles, go down when wealth centralizes*.  I was not surprised to see the 1990s bubble increasing labor force participation rates but I was a bit surprised by the fact that the housing bubble didn’t prevent more of a slide—that is until I remembered that much of the construction work went to illegals…

This resource was started as a class project to help teach economics forecasting and has evolved into a nice free service with enhanced subscription services.

You’d think the gummint would have standardized all these time series and presented them in this public form long before an unfunded student project would have, but that’s only if you had any faith in gummint to do the job it proclaims itself to do…

*When the middle class is rebuilding, this correlation can reverse as greater security allows a return to the bread-winning father, mother and children, but at present, the women are committed to participate in the labor force to try to sustain the illusion of a middle class.

by Bo Sears, for Resisting Defamation

Van “Well the answer to that is, they’re assholes” Jones has quite a mouth on him.  As the man who brought race to the green agenda with his statements about “white polluters” and “white environmentalists steering poison into the people of color communities,” he didn’t hide his opinions too much.  Thus, in the end, the midnight departure of this supremacist from federal employment.

I hesitate to call him a racist, by the way, because that term has lost all its meaning in both the dominant media culture and the corporate entertainment culture. Besides, anyone who flinches at being called a racist is way behind the times. But the same can’t be said of ...

Supremacist, hypocrite, bigot, divisive

It was clear from his claim that all Euro-Ams are clones of each other and lack diversity, that Jones was a hard-core supremacist. He was, by his own statements, also a bigot and divisive.  His caricature of white Americans pointedly made no reference to nationality (e.g., American) or to continental origins (e.g., Europe).  We happen to know from other sources that to verbally strip blacks of their American nationality and their African origin is regarded by Jones as a wholly bigoted and divisive act.

... liar

And he was a liar for saying that school massacres are only carried out by ‘suburban white kids.’

Most of the dominant media culture, a creature controlled by the urban-coastal class, flinched from reporting Jones’ anti-white rhetoric.  Instead, the emphasis was laid on his remarks about Republicans and the 9/11 Truthers.  Reporting of Jones’ racism was suppressed.  That the dominant media culture on TV and in print acted so uniformly (except for the instance of the article referenced above) tells us all we need to know about the media bosses dislike of “whites” roused by black radical rhetoric.  It also tells me that they definitely do not respect RD’s position that denigration and dehumanization of European Americans is not to be tolerated.

But something good may have came out of Jones’ full-on attack on “whites” as a demographic - most probably, some of us woke up to the fact that, for the Obama Administration, we are marked by the color of our skin.

That said, a close reading of Jones’ comments yields something even more useful.  It’s ironic of course, given his racism, but some of his claims we can build on.

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