• Patriarchic¹ Pre-fascist Rewards Consumerism goes to Societal Collapse

• Family and Society: Beyond Max Weber and Into Our Futures What’s Left of Them

The following is excerpted from a Wikipedia entry last modified at that moment in “His Story” by “Me, Myself, and I are Here” on 13/12/23..

“ Social comparison theory and cognitive dissonance have been described by other psychologists as “the two most fruitful theories in social psychology.”^[62] Cognitive dissonance has been variously described as “social psychology’s most notable achievement,”^[63] “the most important development in social psychology to date,”^[64] and a theory without which “social psychology would not be what it is today.”^[65] Cognitive dissonance spawned decades of related research, from studies focused on further theoretical refinement and development^[66] to domains as varied as decision making, the socialization of children, and color preference.^[67]

“ In addition, Festinger is credited with the ascendancy of laboratory experimentation in social psychology as one who “converted the experiment into a powerful scientific instrument with a central role in the search for knowledge.”^[68]An obituary published by the American Psychologist stated that it was “doubtful that experimental psychology would exist at all” without Festinger.^[69] Yet it seems that Festinger was wary about burdensome demands for greater empirical precision. Warning against the dangers of such demands when theoretical concepts are not yet fully developed, Festinger stated, “Research can increasingly address itself to minor unclarities in prior research rather than to larger issues; people can lose sight of the basic problems because the field becomes defined by the ongoing research.”^[70] He also stressed that laboratory experimentation “cannot exist by itself,” but that “there should be an active interrelation between laboratory experimentation and the study of real-life situations.”^[71] Also, while Festinger is praised for his theoretical rigor and experimental approach to social psychology, he is regarded as having contributed to “the estrangement between basic and applied social psychology in the United States.”^[72] He “became a symbol of the tough-minded, theory-oriented, pure experimental scientist,” while Ron Lippitt, a fellow faculty member at Lewin’s Research Center for Group Dynamics with whom Festinger often clashed, “became a symbol of the fuzzy-minded, do-gooder, practitioner of applied social psychology.”^[73]

“ One of the greatest impacts of Festinger’s studies lies in their “depict[ion] of social behavior as the responses of a thinking organism continually acting to bring order into his world, rather than as the blind impulses of a creature of emotion and habit,” as cited in his Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.^[74] Behaviorism, which had dominated psychology until that time, characterized man as a creature of habit conditioned by stimulus-response reinforcement processes. Behaviorists focused only on the observable, i.e., behavior and external rewards, with no reference to cognitive or emotional processes.^[75] Theories like cognitive dissonance could not be explained in behaviorist terms. For example, liking was simply a function of reward according to behaviorism, so greater reward would produce greater liking; Festinger and Carlsmith’s experiment clearly demonstrated greater liking with lower reward, a result that required the acknowledgement of cognitive processes.^[76] With Festinger’s theories and the research that they generated, “the monolithic grip that reinforcement theory had held on social psychology was effectively and permanently broken.”^{[77] ”}

We thank you for your kind attention and good offices as you, your friends and indeed all of us get to grips at a proverbial 30 seconds to midnight with a world that tried to run itself on ludicrous barbaric religious slogans, proverbs and rhetoric but may only succeed in destroying itself.

John Blundell

The new new maths, the new neurolinguistics, human health, energy & weather systems, philosophy of science

Australia

¹ Patriarchic – meaning not of any family’s male ancestors but of all of a society’s political, cultural & legal powers being crafted, shaped, manipulated and perpetuated by rich old men and transferred to rich younger men – is the critical adjective in my Community Economist newsletter terms ACUP, ECUP & HCUP of 1996 precisely germane to the South Australian Police assault on my life and property at that very moment of history. These sociological functions and political operations by men (not to be trite but to be necessarily explicative in a world of men so inured to societal chaos, devastation and killing that they refuse to listen, have “no ears” and will not let up until politically quashed or extirpated) were artificial compartmentalisation, excessive codification and human commodification under patriarchic fiscal elites.

No planet B

I WILL remember 2023 as another year of sadness and anger, and not just because of my personal loss. Constant alarming news on the environment coupled to a political class still largely unable or unwilling to heed the warnings from scientists frequently make my job a [gloomy situation]

This is especially so in the UK, where our shopping trolley of a government has veered alarmingly to the right on a lot of what exprime minister David Cameron – recently resurrected as foreign secretary – once called “green crap”. Pledges to max out North Sea oil and gas; motorist-friendly policies; row-backs on net zero; crackdowns on environmental protesters. Those in power obviously think these are vote winners, showing a depressing eagerness to seek short-term gains by dismissing or denying longterm problems. One of my big hopes for 2024 is that they are proved wrong at the ballot box. Fighting back against the green crap is all part of the war on woke, another thing that has made me despair this year. Somehow, attempts to make the world a fairer place for everyone and a greener one for nature have been weaponised by those for whom the status quo is just fine.

Iam a white, middle-aged, home-owning, heterosexual, able ‐bodied male (he/him), so the war on woke rarely touches my life directly. But I’m also a cyclist and a tofu muncher and I live in north London, so anti-woke politicians really wind me up. But that is what they are trying to do, so I will try to be zen about it.

I have learned, though, how casual, careless use of language can offend. Iam also a SOBS – a survivor of bereavement by suicide. There is a trigger phrase in that community: “committed suicide”. This is a throwback to the time when suicide was a crime. It isn’t any more, but the phrase has stubbornly stuck. When I hear people say my wife committed suicide, I have to bite my tongue and then gently point out that many SOBS find it offensive. Completed, please. Or just plain English: she killed herself.

Some people will probably regard this as “wokeness” and yet another example of how “you can’t say anything these days”. But I hope it demonstrates that being anti-woke can be unnecessarily hurtful. It doesn’t cost anything to be sensitive to others’ feelings. It is a small thing. But it gives me a taste of what LGBTQ+ people, those with disabilities, ethnic minorities, environmental protesters and other marginalised groups must feel when their hard won gains or lifestyles are smeared as “wokeness”.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m privileged to do the job I do and I will keep on doing it. And there have been highs among the lows. I travelled a lot this year, though narrowly avoided a few hairy situations. I was in Morocco just before the earthquake, Israel just before the Hamas attack and Iceland just before the volcano. I recently spent a few days in Dorset. My advice: avoid this English county, something bad is going to happen there.

On top of that, I think our rivers campaign helped move the issue up the agenda. Our Rewilding Weekender was great, not least because I got to meet so many of our wonderful readers. Ditto New Scientist Live. And I landed a prestigious journalism award.

I write this as COP28 begins in Dubai. Hopes aren’t high, but they spring eternal. There is still time to avert a triple catastrophe of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. Just don’t get me started on the US presidential election.

Graham Lawton, in New Scientist last month

Yippenoody and thanks bro. I do believe good humour is the flipside of enormous mountain-shifting fight and excellent. Openness is not an interview moment for a gruelling hackneyed How-do-you-feel-cub-reporter or Quarter-million a year TV anchor – well it is in fruitloop Paint-me-a-picture Tell-us-your-story Anything-but-real-human-macro-industrial-and-social-and-ecological-policy-concerns-our-sponsors-hate-that-shit-so-stay-with-the-Christmases-Brthdays-Easter-Eid-Duwali-and Fireworks-displays-highly-derivative-politically-filtered-vetted-and-sanitised vaguely-cultural-effulgences-ceremonies-and-stuff-tah

The above end of year sentiments were published along with those of two of his colleagues at #NewScientist 16-23/12/2023 by Graham Lawton.

Just today @greeneconomyact @X has finished a 6 set summary of the New Scientist end-of-year piece on bone-jarring and blood-curdling early nineteenth century Northern England ‘dark satanic mills’ or turn of the 21st century Brazilian favelas pentacostal wealth ministry extreme/ ethical/ or was that effective altruism, and also on @X re-supplied an entertaining readable article by Graham about high (if daffy) hopes with Iceland magma to produce power, which appears in the fresh out 4/1/24 edition

via John Blundell Maths Neurolinguistics Energy Health Philosophy of Science

Australia 🦘🇦🇺

..zany Twentieth Century Paranoid Moments with Ernst Shacklegruber – or as Community Economist worldwide newsletter wrote with just a touch of exasperation over the fevered deliberations of all of the brain-dead 1890s English provincial South Australia’s members of parliament, grandiose Supreme Court pomposities and surviving gentlefolk of the late Sir Thomas Playford’s Church of Christ at Norton Summit down the road from Blundell Orchards Ashton farm who quite naturally and understandably believed that fresh & ‘dry’ toxic-synthetic-chemical-free food was the work of the Devil: ‘get two mirrors and look up your own arseholes.’

The following note arose from a completely turgid and bewildering ABC Australia 🎭/ Drama & Comedy moment in my local library as a retired cop sat himself down next to me and pretended to read @DailyMail crap on a screen. This is bizarre, I thought. But you take care of yourself or you’re dead, Jimmy.

“Readers will forgive that this essay is jarringlly incomplete and a bit of a dissequenced jumble but there’s a situation arisen/ kindly see 5 paragraphs down.

“So if the piece isn’t sorted out to our mutually expected, stratospherically – at moments like this the writer is allowed to blow his bags – well, a little – high journalistic, sociological and philosophical standards by say 3PM Friday I’ve been arrested and would appreciate any national if not international uproar you might be able to swing on my behalf. John”

“But make sure you pray istikhara^1,2 and see how you feel before jumping into anything. In the end it’s all with Allah, right?”

‘Of course, Ahlam nodded with fervour. She believed in the power of istikhara to steer a course of action, as they all had been instructed to. But Abida was sometimes unsure if she referenced him with real feeling or because the situation seemed to necessitate it.

‘..She said insha’Allah³ when making any statement pertaining to a future event

‘..masha’Allah when cooing at someone’s baby or sharing a photo of a sunset online and

‘..alhamdulillah⁴ for any crisis averted, no matter how minute

‘She had chosen to dress this way, and with this choice came expectations of behaviour. She could swear and laugh and rage, she could be inappropriate and wild, but to the world she would still be defined by this cloak, this fabric.’

..from Zeynab Gamieldien The Scope of Permissibility 2023 ⁵

The road to both a genocidal and an ecocidal hell-on-earth is literally paved – by double-mouthed shysters, advertising copywriters, city lawyers and consultants to government, these last supplying members of parliaments and congresses and neoliberal business cabals trading in human bodies and landscape (as they call it) in 193 countries because they need to be told what to think, say, write and do to ensure their re-election. How else would they know in a world where all electronic communications have been turned over in toto to marketing mostly not-ecologically-sustainable for more than another 2 or 3 years of junk consumer and self- and other-harm product and intelligent leadership everywhere has been siloed away from the public eye, marginalised, these hard-working people’s contributions magnanimously trashed, and its inspirational frontrunners and great teachers commonly wasted-away by security-services caseworked with bad diets, childish play therapies, pharmaceutical drugs, years of imprisonment or immediately killed?

(2) Soft words – hard questions.. Robert Fisk The Independent 8 July 2006

“When I worked at The Times – in the free, pre-Murdoch days – I enjoyed life as Middle East correspondent under the leadership of a bearded foreign news editor called Ivan Barnes. This brilliant, immensely humorous man – blessedly still with us – was a connoisseur of weasel words, get-out clauses and semantic humbug, and one of his favourite questions was this; What do you think of a man who begins each statement with the words, ‘To be completely frank and open with you’? You can see his point. ‘If someone promises to be frank with you – completely frank, mark you – then what is he being the rest of the time?’ Barnes would ask. ‘As for completely…’ On balance, I agree that the key word is ‘completely.’ It reeks of 100 per cent, of totality, of black and white. It is also, I notice, one of Blair’s favourite words – along with⁷ ‘absolutely.’ Blair is always being completely and absolutely honest with us. He is always absolutely convinced he was right to invade Iraq (even when the rest of the world completely realises the opposite).⁸ He is always completely and absolutely certain of his own integrity. I call this the ‘Ho-ho’ factor.

“So all the Fisk radar warnings went off this week when Blair told us that ‘we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West’ felt by Muslims. Completely, Muslims’ ‘sense of grievance’ – fury might be a better word – is ‘completely’ false. Is it? We are screwing up Afghanistan, destroying tens of thousands of lives in Itraq, and America now has a military presence in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman – and Muslim grievance is ‘completely’ false. No, look at Blair’s statement again. He doesn’t suggest there is even a grievance. It is a false ‘sense’ of grievance. Anyone who understands mendacity knows exactly what Blair comprehends all too well: that Muslims do have a ‘sense’ of grievance and that it is not false at all.

“It’s odd, though, how folk think they can get away with this stuff. Take my old chum Professor Alan Dershowitz, who announced on the evening of 11 September 2001 that I was a ‘dangerous man’ because I asked the question ‘why’ about the international crimes against humanity in the United States. This week, in an article in The Independent, Dershowitz was at it again. I especially enjoyed his description of a standard US military torture, ‘waterboarding.’ He described it as a technique that produces a ‘near-drowning’ experience.’ Ho-ho. You bet it does. He says that this is torture. But why the word ‘technique?’ Why does it ‘produce’ an ‘experience?’ Actually, the experience is one of drowning, not ‘near-drowning’ – that’s the point of this vile practice.⁹“I love these key phrases which are littered throughout Dershowitz’s article, so soft and gentle: ‘the nature of permissible [ hey Zeynab 🙂 ] interrogation,’ ‘questionable means,’ ‘latitude’ (as in ‘should more latitude be afforded to interrogators in the preventive (sic)¹⁰context’), ‘sometimes excessive efforts’ and so on. All this, mark you, is premised on one totally misleadistatement. ‘Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists with no fear of death and no home address have rendered useless the deterrent threat of mass retaliation.’ True – if such people existed. But there simply hasn’t been any suicide terrorist with a weapon of mass destruction¹¹– not ever…

“The whole torture fandango gathers weasel words like moss. Take a reference in the Wall Street Journal to torture last month as ‘aggressive interrogation techniques.’ ‘Technique’ again, please note. I suppose that’s what you can claim the US soldier was applying when he last year stuffed an Iraqi general upside-down in a sleeping bag, sat on his chest and killed him. Take again Çeku, the brutal KLA leader who has popped up as Kosovo’s prime minister, but is still wanted for war crimes by Belgrade. The Financial Times did a wonderful portrait of him,, in which he was described as a ‘slim and youthful .. Mr Çeku, 44, exudes an effortless authority born of long experience as a military commander.’ Ho ho. You bet he does.

“Chris Hitchens got in on the act last month when he tried to explain why the slaughter of twenty-four Iraqi civilians at Haditha didn’t mean a return to the days of My Lai massacres.¹² So here we go. ‘Unjust though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that on November 19th, 2005, US Marines of Kilo company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha…’ Get it? Their comrades had just been killed by insurgents. So the Americans may have ‘cracked up’ and ‘cut loose.’ Later, Hitcens describes the massacre at Haditha as ‘a white-hot few minutes,’ and later still he talks of a ‘coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip.’ A few seconds later and he is is going on about the ‘alleged rampage.^’13 Rampage! Ho ho. The point, of course, is that it takes much more than a ‘clip’ of ammunition to kill twenty-four civilians. And it takes a long time – not a ‘few’ miniutes.- to go from room to room, amid the shrieking children who are being slaughtered and the women who are trying to protect themselves from murder, to blast that many people to death. Some rampage.

“So what does it take to run the earth these days? Effortless authority, I supposed. A little bit of ‘excess,’ plenty of ‘technique’ and a mere clip of ammunition. Completely and absolutely.”

John Blundell 🦘🇦🇺

Economy, Sociology, Human Health, 2-5 set Event Fact Object Affect Call Quantum Maths, Learning-, Healing-, Growth-, Upskilling- & Living Culture Neurolinguistics, Philosophy of Authentic Ecologically-anchored 21st Century Science

.¹ at tail-end of Essay Heading (1) at this difficult time في هذا الوقت العصيب

² Salat al-Istikhaara (Arabic: صلاة الاستخارة), which translates to Prayer of Seeking Counsel, is a prayer recited by Muslims who are in need of guidance from  God Almighty (Allah) when facing a decision in their life. The prayer, known as salah in Arabic is performed in two units of prayer or raka’ah followed by the supplication of Salat al-Istikhaara….

³ إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللّٰهُ‎ • (ʔin šāʔa llāhu) God willing; inshallah, if it is God’s will (literally, “if God has willed [it]”

⁴ Alhamdulillah (Arabic: ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ, al-Ḥamdu lillāh) is an Arabic phrase meaning “praise be to God“,^[1] sometimes translated as “thank God”.^[2] This phrase is called Tahmid (Arabic: تَحْمِيد, lit. ‘Praising’).^[3] A longer variant of the phrase is al-ḥamdu l-illāhi rabbi l-ʿālamīn (ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَالَمِينَ), meaning “all praise is due to God, Lord of all the worlds”, the very first verse of Surah Al-Fatiha, the opening chapter of Al-Qur’an.

⁵ https://ultimopress.com.au/products/scope-of-permissibility

^{6 Robert Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was an English writer and journalist.[1][2] He was critical of United States foreign policy in the Middle East, and the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians @Wikipedia}

⁷ [the near manic or at least feverish usage by contemporary Australians apparently in fear of assault, public ridicule and/ or summary dismissal from their jobs by politically powerful others who may be watching or at least listening in]

8 My italics & bolding - who in this country particulary atm with any grit, laughs or recent history in them could have resisted that?

⁹ Readers will forgive me inserting another Australian cringeing pusillanimous journalism Reality Check at this point – the more you study up on our putrid history of supposed professionals on $250k salaries doing the absolutely unquestioning bidding of any psychopath who happens to be passing by seeking donations & assorted ideologically fascist shysters from the USA – or, Heavens, Great Britain, whoops ‘the UK,’ Old Chap, the easier it is to see why we have a Prime Minister who figures Mr Assange should be killed because such barbarity will please the variously demented or otherwise seriously unwell old rich people whose electoral support he’s himself thick enough to believe his party needs to win re-election. Yes, this federal government amongst its other achieves is of course doing flying motorcars, exciting new coal mines and, curiously the ploughing in of the entire top one-third of the Northern Territory on behalf of the 1965 Norman Bourlag’ Green Revolution

¹⁰Oh Australia – oh Australian Labor Party federal ministers O’Neil, Giles & Watt – you Mark Latham 2004 aspirational KPMG people may choose to discard your language and culture for a mess of e-commerce Start Up high national inflation-rate/ big alpha imvestment returns but don’t you dare lay a finger on ours

¹¹New era mathematicians and lethal student-enemies of military-industrial-scientific era false-eqivalences mechanomph-geomorph cartoon graveyard econometrics immediately spot this as an erroneous almost certainly neurodegenerative (in this instance delusional or hallucinogenic) Scale fail. Happy Moses Maimomides/ 9th century Islamic al-Khwarizmi Algebra Day cum ‘World Mental Health Day,’ team الحمد لله رب العالمين : alhamdulillahi rabbi al alameen

¹²Comparisons are odious – since 1440 in England so they say but for goodness sake don’t waste precious study-time reading up on the malodourous plethora of essentially idiosyncratic, discursive, derivative a-historic post-fact fictitious & phoney ‘literary’ internet read-outs on the aphorism. – though you could maybe find out what Oscar Wilde had to c’est about it (?) – myself I say We don’t have time for any personal vanity-project self-indulgence – above all when so much of this Gates-Bezos-Bannon internet junk is tailored by ideological totalitarian DOGS, contrived for the twin-towering purposes of getting consumers to pay for it and to ACCELERATE Big Oil’s ecocidal AND genocidal fossil-fuel burning orgy as TENS of millions of otherwise decent middle class people hop along like play-bunnies, pre-schoolers or lewdly, obscenely deranged proto-human cartoon characters themselves, streaming, binge-watching & chilling out after ‘Workin’ for the Man’ kidding themselves it’s authentic research and ‘good for’ their Bertrand Russel, HG Wells & George Bernard Shaw 1920s minds for Christ’s loving sake.. Go Here: make a quick study on odious comparisons AS false eqivalences – this time it’s reminiscent not specifically of the Algebra Algo man Al-Khwarizmi 780 – c850 but of he who put metaphysics way down the list of Learnings for Humanity – last, wasn’t it?

¹³ my italics

For unto us a child is born. What? Another one? #Jesus

Your music, Australian, NEW, alive, authentic: the Australian ABC’s @triplejunearthd – so good you could eat it. Please don’t take that amiss, reader. Well, OK. Meanwhile as a neurolinguistics Jonnie counsellor & sociologist I shall continue to work diligently & manfully on the hypothesis that all the grown-ups in Australia are now under 25. Hair-raising, that.

..a new twist on the retirement homes, high level aged-care facilities, lock-up boarding houses, guardianship ‘public trustee’ Australian Taxation Office virtual-imprisonment facilities, group homes, refugee containment projects, private-sector loony bins, NDIS milking projects investment bonanza for OLD rich people and Nth American pension funds and Chinese ‘business-persons’ ABC & SBS #Finance, AFR & Murdoch’s ‘Australian‘ Bernard Salt Ageing Population economic growth paradigm!!!

And some of you good folk thought Howardism, Reverse Class Warfare (Menzies ABC Boyer Lectures 1944), screwing low-income people, disaster entrepreneurialism, Resilience Training by people of say Year 10 level education who’ve done ‘a course’ on $85k were hard to get your heads around? Don’t give up your Wordle¹ ‘n Sudoku will you? Try jogging too – for all our sakes not just the abovementioned sagacious though catastrophically incoherent Under 25s oh Australia 😳

The DEDICATION of this document is to the memory of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed written in Portuguese in 1967 and ’68 as I myself exited an Adelaide Sth Austrln Church of England boys’ school and took off into the fanciful twentieth century stratosphere, that era of really bad deracinated metaphors with no foundation or basis in lived human experience (which latter micro domain is really the only mentally healthy, robust or even sane way to tackle the gig (trust me, I’m a real estate salesperson who began his rather sparkly career with the Queensland Police), that era of repeatedly copping head highs in Australian Rules football matches because you could play a bit; that magnificent though philosophically and neurocognitively unhinged Euro Romance Era the experts and historians – can somebody run this past @adam_tooze? – assure us began as Hernan Cortes^1A stood upon a peak in Darien (Darién, geographic region of the easternmost Isthmus of Panama that extends into northwestern Colombia, around the Gulf of Urabá and which is nowadays of course a complete barrel of laughs) and strode into the Southern Hemisphere version of Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit’s Paris 1968. – which was OK but to be brutally frank we did NOT get a helluva lot done and so disappeared into industry, the armed services, the public service, insurrection projects in South Asia/ Central Asia/ Mongolia/ eastern Russia/ the Pacific – or so these crazy-arsed people from government, security ‘n intelligence and the Mad Hatters Tea Party Australian Defence Force reckoned anyway..

I’ve not read the @Wikipedia entry. I just put it up and squeezed my eyes tight, clenched both fists/ anal sphincter and hoped for the best as I figuratively scampered away from the Google-Goodreads, Medium, Daily.jstor, Amazon, SanSerriffe, Zinnedproject, Nationalaffairs, and wait for it, well no, harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral entries, gender-inclusively clutching both my pearls/ hippie love-beads AND ngahmbu in fear of off-duty cops, bikie or blackfella friends of the Government with razor-sharp machetes or semi-automatic firearms..

GEA and Billionaire Monkeys with Olivettis proudly presents Robert Fisk writing for The Independent 25 May 2002

You are not welcome²

” President George W Bush adressed the German Bundestag on 23 May 2002.

” So now Osama bin Laden is Hitler. And Saddam Husein is Hitler. And George bnush is fighting the Nazis. Not since Menachem Begin fantasised to President Reagan that he felt he was attacking Hitler in berlin – his Israeli army was actually besieging Beirut, killing thousands of civilians, ‘Hitler’ being the pathetic [Johnny Walker Black Label drinking – as later reported from Libya] Arafat – have we had to listen to claptrap like this. But thge fact that we Europeans had to do so in the Bundestag on tThursday – and, for the most part, in respectful silence – was extraordinary. Must we, forever, live under the shadow of a war that was fought and won before most of us were born? Do we have to live forever with living diminutive politicians playing Churchill (Thatcher and, of course, Blair) or Roosevelt? ’He’s a dictator who gassed his own people,’ Bush reminded us of saddam Hiussein for the two thousandth time, omitting as always to mention that the Kurds whom Saddam viciously gassed were fighting for Iran and that the United States, at the time was on Saddam’s side.

” But there is a much more serious side to this. Mr Bush is hoping to corner the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, into a new policy of threatening Iran. He wants the Rusians to lean on the northern side of the ‘axis of evil,’ the infantile phrase which he still trots out to the masses. Morer and more, indeed, Bush’s rhetoric sounds like the crazed videotapes of bin Laden.And still he tries to lie about the motives for the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Yet agai, in the Bundestag, he insisted that the West’s enemies hated ‘justice and democracy, even though most of America’s Muslim enemies wouldn’t know what democracy was.’

” In the United states the Bush regime is busy terrorising Americans, Tnere will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding belts – note how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to America’s ever weirder ‘war on terror’ and yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush. Vice President Dick Cheney and the ridiculous ‘national security adviser’ Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, you’ll find they’ve issued more threats against Americans than bin Laden. But let’s get to the point. The growing evidence that Israel’s policies are America’s policies in the Middle East – or more accurately, vice versa – is now being played out for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Commitee announcing that Hizballah – the Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israel’s demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year 2000 – is planning attacks on the US. After that, we had an American television network ‘revealing’ that Hizballah, Hamas and al-Quaeda have held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US.

American journalists insist on quoting ‘sources’ but there was, of course, no sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American [news]media. The take the ‘Syrian Accountability Act’ that was introduced into the US Senate by Israel’s friends on 18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards ‘operate freely’ on the southern Lebanese border. And I repeat, there haven’t bee Iranian Revolutionary guards in Lebanon – let alone the south of the country – for fifteen years. So why is this lie repeated yet again?

Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threat – its ‘terrorism’ status has been heightened by the State Department – and so is Iraq. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister held personally responsible for the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beruit, is – according to Mr Bush – ‘a man of peace.’ How much further can this go? A long way, I fear. The anti-American feeling throughout the Middle East is palpable. Arab newspaper editorials don’t come near to expressing public opinion. In Damascus, Majida Tabbaa has become famous as the lady who threw the US consul Roberto Powers out of her husband’s downtown restaurant on 7 April. ‘ I went over to him,’ she said, ‘and told him, “Mr Roberto, tell your George Bush that all of you are not welcome – please get out.” ‘ Across the Arab world, boycotts of Amerrican goods have begun in earnest.

How much longer can this go on? America praises Pakistan president Musharraf for hos support in the ‘war on terror,’ but remains silent when he arranges a dictatorial ‘referendum’ to keep him in power. America’s enemies, remember, hate the US for its ‘democracy.’ So is General Musharraf going to feel the heat? Forget it. My guess is that Pakistan’s importance in the famous ‘war on terror’ – or ‘war for civilistaiom’ as, we should remember, it was originally called – is far more important. If Pakistan and india go to war, I’ll wager a lotb that Washington will come down for the undemocratic Pakistan against democratic India.

Now here’s pause for thought. Abdelrahman al-Rashed writes in the international Arabic daily Asharq al-Awsat that if anyone had said prior to 11 September that Arabs were plotting a vast scheme to murder thousands of Americans in the US, no-one would have believed them. We would have charged that tis was an attempt to incite the American people against Arabs and Muslims,’ he wrote. And rightly so. But Arabs did commit the crimes against humanity of 11 September. And many Arabs fear that we have yet to see the encore from the same organisation. In the meantime, Mr Bush goes on to do exactly what his enemies want; to provoke Muslims and Arabs, to praise their enemies and demonise their countries, to bomb and starve Iraq and give uncritical support to Israel and maintain his support for the dictators of the Middle East.

Each morning now, I awake beside the Mediterranean in Beruit with a feeling of great foreboding. There is a firestorm coming. And we are blissfully ignoring its arrival, indeed, we are provoking it. “

John

Australia

ماشاء الله

¹ What is that?

^{1A Hernán Cortés de Monroy y Pizarro Altamirano, 1st Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca (/kɔːrˈtɛs/; Spanish: [eɾˈnaŋ koɾˈtes ðe monˈroj i piˈθaro altamiˈɾano]; December 1485 – December 2, 1547) was a Spanish conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of what is now mainland Mexico under the rule of the king of Castile in the early 16th century. Cortés was part of the generation of Spanish explorers and conquistadors who began the first phase of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.}

² The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings Harper Collins 2008 pp 38-41 – Robert dec’d 2020, Dublin, the author of The Great War for Civilistion: the Conquest of the Middle East 2005 and recipient of six honorary doctorates for journalism

DOCUMENT IS DEDICATED to the memory of my old man who passed away in 1986¹ when I was State Coordinator for Seniors Week.. You have probably noticed that we do Irony around here as well as Gags and Heavy Shit. There follows a pic of my dad’s 400 year male-line ancestor he as an orphan babe rendered virtually homeless at age 2 1/2 was so emotionally swept up by.. Recquiescat in Pace.

Or in other words it’s good to remember the old people: *THIS DOCUMENT is dedicated to the memory of a rambunctious life, the 14 year-old from O’Neil St Springbank now Panorama who blew his eye out while fishing for a feed with railway detonators (the yarn was it was gelignite but wouldn’t that have been fairly piss-poor gelignite?) in a Sturt Creek rockhole (well no, it must have been gelignite) that used to be up near the Lynton Rlwy Stn Thomas Reginald Pole Blundell who passed away as his first-born was State Co-ordinator for Seniors Week 1986: ironies we do ironies as well as gags proudly patriarchic descendant of the ancient English cardinal pictured below

Essay..

Hello, how are you, a-wha-hoo-hwaaa/ D0-wopp-dooie-dyuw-whopp and the money and job security are fantastic.

[..base funding to the ABC of: $1,061.7 million in 2022-23, $1,083.7 million in 2023-24 and $1,101.3 million in 2024-25. As provision for this funding has already been included in the forward estimates, it has no net budget impact… these June ’23 numbers]

– I published more recent Google Alphabet nuimbers on this journal’s big-sister organ @greeneconomyact (no grinding monkeys or 1960 Olivettis, that’s here) yesterday.

Branding’s such a try-on but once readers (or viewers) get it big-time as you as the Creative have gone and been and done and navigated and craftily negotiated your way right over @TheAtlantic’s Canadian rich people’s chatter-columnist Malcolm Gladwell’s 979 metre-high tipping point waterfall somewhere in Venezuela!

Now imagine you’re nicely refreshed, after a week’s work, of a Saturday morning, listening to a radio station or some podcast

Imagine, however, an SMS app text msg you could not send to anyone at a Contact Us number on any webpage belonging to, say, a billion-dollar per annum spectacularly responsive broadcasting organisation. Do you recall when the term INTERACTIVE emerged as prime branding for commercial talkback radio stations, say in 1997. This was probably, or at least notionally – and academically neoclassical notions, euphemisms, false equivalences and seriously bad metaphors are are all we are allowed to communicate with in Biden’s, Putin’s, Sunak’s, Trudeau’s, Bolsonaro’s (so make a note), Xi Jinping’s & Bilbo Baggins’ – the Australian dude’s – neoliberal universe, right? – and now with the rise and rise of e-comms provider fascist propaganda and USSR-style censorship – what’s next is 1930s show-trials – you knew that) the greatest early Internet era porky of them all – and the competition amongst those solecisms is truly gruesome – like bodily torture – Christ have Mercy for its now millions of real victims and all of our love, personal attention and the transcendent mental power of revenge also figuratively sent to Muslim Kashmiris this morning 24/12/2023 – for any serious scholar of cultural linguistics and neurolinguistics – ever listening to the voices of selected groups of affluent Australian people including woke/ bespoke/ is-it-a-joke? identity politics lobbies supposedly of the ideological left though all of them from the Red Cross Salvos and RFDS through to WWF Greenpeace and the ACF are run as procedurally hidebound closed shops and actual antagonists of free, open and participatory public engagement – exactly on the Them & Us angry exclusive tribal mental dualist binary lines of the political parties operating in state and federal legislative chambers (parliaments) building or rather amassing the crude and violating power, obscene prestige and preposterous wealth of their obedient if not bovine members to the exclusion of all other interests including monstrously, those of women, teenagers and children as entire statistical classes of human person became exactly as ecosystems local regional quadrispheric and global in that they do not merit inclusion¹, being statiscally too complex and derivative algorythms derived from derivative algorhyms too haptic, erratic, sectional and unreliable – and the only way out for the deracinated postmodern social computing nutter, oh, expert, is to render all his (typically his/ What is Patriarchy/ What is Pederasty) the Harvard, MIT, Chicago, @PwC @McKinsey @EYnews @KPMG @MSFTMechanics @Apple @GoogleAI @CambridgeEcon global neoliberal human deskilling orgy, enjoying favour, largesse and lavish tax deductibility: the now beleaguered, broken and wildly thrashing about if not completely out-of-control Australian post World War II USA military alliance’s busted political class…

Sure these people in Adelaide South Australia have a text & phone number that I could have called had I made the requisite note, but what am I, a fan of this lot or an internationally-read journalist with vastly bigger 🐠 🐟 🎣 to fry?

So it’s Good Morning – we’re always polite and formal in Adelaide well we better class of well-to-do white persons are – veteran Australian Broadcasting Corporation Rural “Division” 1960 Norman Bourlag toxic synthetic chemicals in food & fibre production scalliwag John Lamb!

“You say banànas but I’d say banánas, neither of which behgins to explain the assault upon all life on earth and upon the geophysical integrity and stability of the material troposphere by excessive solar radiation ☢️

“And there’s an interconnection there with chemical nitrogen as you say – air is zany stuff containing zippy zingy waves rays & sunbeams⚡️⚡️ ⚡️as well as chemical gas particles 🌩⛈🌤🌧☁️, right?

“As an aside that is not so much an aside as an urgent message to the entire human race & species – to get into total tropospheric ecology for “surviving” – or some gravely diminished muddling along or “sustainable” agriculture purposes you probably haven’t heard that 7-10 km up (I think it is) our upper level Ozone protection from direct solar ☢️ has AGAIN been damaged, this time by smoke from Canada.. which is ALSO blackening the terrestrial albedo – this is what Global Heating scholars call cryosphere (white ice and snow that fabulously refelect millions – it may be billions, the METRICS here are not my special area of study although the global current systems certainly are – of kilowatts of energy right across NE Canada 🍁and onward eastward.. Gulp.

“People will ‘pshaw’ that it was a cool mild summer, so what are these awful @Greens coming out with now!? Mischievous bastards – or as the leader of once-was Her Majesty’s Loyal South Australin Opposition Mr David Spiers so sagely suggested ten days (November) ago they’re lucky this is not Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: they could get their heads chopped off, he said. Passers by were naturally agog and quickened their pace a little – so as not to attract police attention. The bloke, Spiers, is, like nearly all of the leading lights of the broadcasting corporation since 1932 a Pom. Goodness me.

Great scientific discovery – indeed the world’s best – of (very) late 2023 – earth is the product of paleolthic chemistry, molecular biology and wave-particle physics but you can’t be there, OK? ..https://global.oup.com/academic/product/gaia-9780198784883?cc=us

Acute readers – and I truly joyfully celebrate with you all our healing learning and growing compassionate intelligent grip on reality troth sentient, inert and thermodynamic together with a dramatically renewed and expanded awareness of historical method or historical lines of HUMAN enquiry – will only glean in the following THE ACTUAL YEAR of Gaia’s presentation to us all.

“Published in 1979, Gaia offered a radically new hypothesis: the Earth, Lovelock argued, is a living entity. Together, the planet and all its separate living organisms form a single self-regulating body, sustaining life and helping it evolve through time. Lovelock sees humans as no more special than other elements of the planet, railing against the once widely-held belief that the good of mankind is the only thing that matters.” (@Routledge – kindly see hyperlinks below²)

You’d wonder and well you might how any clustering of human society urban, rural, remote or heroic – Example Primo Gaza City · مدينة غزة ; Gaza Strip · قطاع غزة ; European Gaza Hospital · مستشفى غزة الأ…could not only ignore but utterly waste and burn 45 years – a precious two human generations – for Ayn Rand – Alan Greenspan – Milton Friedman fascist polemics and its motive driver namely Machiavellian raison-d’etat colonial gross accumulation.

“This packer’s best-quality Washington Navel oranges have hard tight skins presently: Jumaluk Fruit Packers, wholesaler in Waikerie SA..”

– So as you and I well know, ABC “Rural” dude, 2 factors ALWAYS go to 3 & all that adds up to 5 in the real world 🌞🌱🐇😀. That’s #science – publicists & charlatans say a lot about it, pay lip-service to it by uttering the word three or four times daily in June 2023 but frankly don’t give a flying f… for our diligent highly professional practice of it – which in my opinion is a TRULY MONSTROUS crime against humanity.

“Stay well old bloke – and absolutely terminate your participation in that 20th century proudly South Australian evil project to search out, destroy and kill the authentic organic, biodynamic and regenerative primary producers of this country – what’s left of the bastard now.

John Blundell

Economist, Sociologist, Neurolinguistics and NEW New Genuine Quantum Logic Post Ancient Maths scholar, Philosopher of Science

Blundell Orchards 1986¹ – 1999

²so now reduced (though dialectically expanded to the grinding, grating, globally enervating yet conveniently inaudible to the biddable neuroplastic ever willing for a fight, a fuck, a feed or possibly putting a Brave Face on ignominious defeat and resorting to flight Homeric Supply Side consumer with a pumped credit or debit card dancing to the literally inconceivable incomprehensible countless terabyes – petabytes? – frankly demented Gyro Gearloose George Jetson Information Economy entrepreneurs’ tune as colourful swirly things these jerks say represent forecast weather

³ Critical Thinking & Study Skills Study Skills Environmental Studies Human Geography Critical Theory Critical Thinking Literary/Critical Theory Critical Theory General Psychology Psychological Science Behavioral Sciences Education Environment and Sustainability Geography Continental Philosophy Philosophy Humanities Literature Language & Literature Political Theory Politics & International Relations

Where can you find spectacularly honest barbs like ‘flunkies’ in the Bill Gates and Akshata Murthy era? And as the greatest journalists in history have not screamed at us or delivered anodyne deadpan reports with nasal Walter Cronkite accents (perhaps shedding an “Oh look he’s not completely wooden, mechanical or robotic” tear, or choking up, just a little, in such a manly fashion, upon the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy¹ – oh look, the guy’s got a hard exterior and cuts it with the best the American Century can serve up at him but “obviously” if not “absolutely” has a heart of gold) but delivered swingeing/ excoriating lines exquisitely laying out (for the ever-thoughtful, fascinated and above all other humanised relational transactional considerations engaged – if not charmed like a fan-boy or -girl – reader) the psychological and cultural apotropaic ideational sequence² Fence ..Security Barrier ..Wall. Or to be reminded of good old Harris Tottle’s advices on public-spirited explication and effective teaching or leading forward – no, not how to play a crowd/ win friends & influence people/ feed ‘lambs’ or kill fatted calves for good old Uncle Jesus (every time he sneezes we all come down with a lethal novel upper respiratory tract infection, such were the toimes, aaarrgh) finding out the existing means of persuasion.

Yes I keep going back to my Robert Fisk. A word of suggestion dear reader here: if you’ve not already, get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_for_Civilisation. If like me you read chunks of it when it was first published, then you might want to get the book out again. To briefly jump from the micro-content to the macro “WTF-is-human-civilisation-supposed-to-be-about” processual, reflective intelligent grown-up demands placed on all thoughtful people by acts of genocide by fascist governments please get some Robert Fisk.. deceased 12/10/2020 St Vincents Hospital, Dublin, Ireland.

I am delighted to reproduce this 2007 piece for The Independent because it represents a blunt yet high-order professionally crafted acerbic fearless journalism that has obviously died in the arse all over the world this century and was in my opinion rarely if ever seen in Australia after World War II at all..

And if it was written as for example with some of Wilfred Burchett’s epochal work, it was never widely read anyway because the dead hand of sycophantic Amerophile Marshall Plan & Lend Lease authoritarianism pumped up by Christian fundamentalist frenzy and fear of ‘World Government.’ – whatever the hell that may have meant to Hugh Morgan, the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney and the Wool Board – in the style now raised to a Harvard programmed learning & dislearning art form by the vast electronics communications and accountancy firms and finance houses with their Manichaean economic AND social policy strangleholds on five continents got it siloed off, marginalised and censored.

The Independent 23rd June 2007..

Robert Fisk

“I supppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beiruit when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut-al-Amara was going to create ‘Palestine.’ I checked the date. No, it was not 1 April – but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands, is really contemplating being ‘our’ Middle East envoy.

“Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle East hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he had a role in the region – he whose own ridiculous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to no avail – is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world’s last colonial war, is simply overwhelming.

“Of, course, he’ll be in touch with Mahmoud Abbas, will talk endlessly about ‘moderates;’ and we’ll have to listen to him pontificating about morality, how he’s absolutely and completely confident that he’s doing the right thing (and this, remember, is the same man who postponed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year in order to share George Bush’s forlorn hope of an Israeli victory over Hizballah) in bringing peace to the Middle East…

“Not once – ever – has he apologised. Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name. Yet Blair actually believes – in what must be a record acty of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up thje fake evidence of Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – that he can do good in the middle East. For here is a man who is totally discredited in the region – a politician who has signally failed in everything he ever tried to do in the Middle East – now believing that he is the right man to lead the Quartet to patch up ‘Palestine.’ In the hunt for quislings to do our bidding – ie. accept even less of Mandate Palestine than Arafat would stomach – I suppose Blair has his uses. His unique blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty will no doubt go down quite well with our local Arab dictators.

“And I have a suspicion – always assuming this extraordinary story is not untrue – tha Blair will be able to tour around Damascus, even Tehran, in his hunt for ‘peace,’ thus paving the way for an American exit strategy in Iraq. But ‘Palestine?’ The Palestinians held elections – real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety – and Hamas won. But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas. He’ll need to talk only to Abbas’s flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as ‘a government without imagination.’

“The Americans are talking – and here I am quoting the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack – about an envoy who can work ‘with the Palestinians in the Palestinian system’ to develop institutions for a ‘well-governed state.’ Oh yes, I can see how that would appeal to Lord Blair. He likes well-governed states, lots of ‘terror laws,’ plenty of security – though I’m still a bit puzzled about what the ‘Palestinian system’ is meant to be. It was James Wolfensohn who was originally ‘our’ Middle East envoy, a former World Bank president who left in frustration because he could neither reconstruct gaza nor work with a ‘peace process’ that was being eroded with every new Jewish settlemnet and every Qassam rocket fired into Israel. Does Blair think he can do better? What honied words will we hear?

“I bet he doesn’t mention the Israeli wall which is taking so much extra land from the Palestinians. It will be a ‘security barrier’ or a ‘fence’ (like the famous Berlin ‘fence’ which was actually called a ‘security barrier’ by those generous East German Vopo cops at the time). There will be appeals for restraint on all sides, endless calls for ‘moderation,’ none at all for justice. And IOsrael likes Lord Blair. Indeed, Blair’s slippery use of language is likely to appeal to Ehud Olmert, whose government continues to take Arab land as he awaits a Palestinian with whom he can ‘negotiate,’ Mahmoud abbas now having the prestige of a rabbit after his forces were crushed in Gaza. Which of ‘Palestine’s’ two prime ministers will Blair talk to? Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more ‘security,’ tougher laws, less democracy.

“Once, our favourite trouble-shooter was James Baker – who worked for George W.’s father until the israelis got tired of him – and before that we had a whole list of UN secretary generals who visited the region, frowned and warned of serious consequences if peace did not come soon. I recall another man with Blair’s pomposity, a certain Kurt Waldheim, who – no longer the UN’s boss – actually believed he could be an ‘envoy’ for peace in thye Middle East, despite his wartime career as an intelligence officer for the Wehrmacht’s Army Group ‘E.’ His visits – especially to the late King Hussein – came to nothing, of course. But Waldheim’s ability to draw a curtain over his wartime past does have one thing in common with Blair. For Waldheim steadfastly, pointedly, repeatedly, refused to acknowledge – ever – that he had done anything wrong. Now who does that remind you of?”

John Blundell.. Philosophy of Science, Economy, Human History South Australia 🇦🇺 🦘

Gaza – Translation and Meaning in All English Arabic Terms Dictionary ; Gaza City · مدينة غزة ; Gaza Strip · قطاع غزة ; European Gaza Hospital · مستشفى غزة الأ…

¹ ..and for many decades on a generation of now old people acculturated by movie & television screen dementedly – or at least like socially, culturally and ecologically unhinged mathematics enthusiasts – chatter about where they were geo-located at a certain time on 22/11/1963, was it?

² YES, it’s my little pride & joy in neurolinguistics & quantum (interrelational 3-5 set series) maths trom way back in 1999 sequentia, everyon’e key now to not only explaining Self Other & world about them but of course also the only effective or even sensible schema and methodology for short-term recall dysfunction diagnosis, management and healing in fact since the days prior to TWENTIETH Century leucotomy (for Christ’s sake), lobotomy and Electro-convulsive Therapy, 15th Century European phrenology and the days of when-the-fuck-ever ancient Egyptians chiselling out neat carpenter’s squares^2A of human skull

^2A ever the grandiose study of mechanomporphic symmetrical operations, even recognising constructionism as a mere phase in human intellectual evolution, as we did in the Michel Foucault period 25 – 35 years ago, yet nary a moment’s reflection on Sir Isaac Newton’s perturbations, Sigmund Freud’s parapraxes or Adam Smith’s, and Milton Friedman’s, belated thoughts about rampant free-marketism and the ideology of neoliberalism 200 years after him – no doubt cribbed, he and @Harvard’s Michael Porter being @BBC Talks or @Google Technology Engineering & Design-style ‘look-at-me’ commercial-for-profit publicists of the late 19th Century English and East Coast USA neoclassical Fact & Value studies conducted along historical lines ilk

..this is a bunch of notes really. At this truly awful moment in post-feudal heraldic geopolitical history when we have plagues of diseases old & new, food insecurity/ starvation, a global engineered literary AND scientific deskilling DUMBDOWN and the monumental assault not any longer on low income people (they’re all broke mostly displaced) but now with the aid of fancy apps and artificial “intelligence” troll-botting the middle class – except of course for its upper echelons for they are the people who OWN the so-called Information Economy, who make & break governments, the new untouchables and frankly halfwitted virtual knuckle-dragging ahistoric influencers or performing artists (you what? Seriously??) AND AN ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE THAT NO NEWSPAPER OR TV NEWS EDITOR EVEN GRASPS for Christ’s loving sake.

..who even in his or her or their right minds even wants to know about geopolitics – or is able to dutifully watch, zombie-like (are the poor sods?) this Greed Lust Laziness Ambition & Manly Thrusting Sinophobe Islamophobe geopolitics shit anyway? Who can watch it? Or the speech of B Netanyahu, his zombie-warriors and mesamphetamine or cocaine-inflamed copywriters??

THE OLD MANDATES,, Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Britain and France, the principal victors of the First World War, received mandates from the league of Nations to govern most of the Levant. The British were given Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq; the French received Syria (and initially, northern Iraq). The French government tore off the south-west corner of Syria and created the state of ‘Greater Lebanon’. Robert Fisk lived in Beirut from 1976,^[25] remaining throughout the Lebanese Civil War. He was one of the first Western journalists to report on the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon,^[26] as well as the Hama Massacre in Syria.^[27] His book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the Nation, was published in 1990.

Please also see the second part of this essay: Robert Fisk: From Beirut to Damascus, published by the Euro-Gulf Information Centre

1. Robert Fisk writing for The Independent, 5th March 2005..

“I’m sure this applies to the old Afghan Airlines jets when they were flying under the Taliban. Back in 1997, I was on my way to Afghanistan – to see Osama bin Laden, no less – and could only find a flight to Jalalabad from the old Trucial state of Sharjah, a home for pariah aircraft like the old Boeing 727 that was waiting for me on the runway. On boarding, however, I found that only the first row of seats remained in place. The rest of the aircraft was taken up by large wooden boxes containing ‘mechanical imports,’ according to the crew, each heavy crate chained to the floor of the plane. Even more trouble was the forward lavatory. For only minutes after takeoff, the door opened of its own accord and a dark tide of sewage slowly washed over our shoes and then surged down the cabin. I didn’t feel like an in-flight meal. I was sitting next to two Afghans, the second of whom – vastly bearded to abide by the Taliban’s tonsorial rules – was dressed only in jeans and an open-necked shirt and who kept glaring at me while squeezing and resqueezing a large and very dirty oil rag in his left hand. Over Kandahar, we flew into heavy turbulence, the plane bucking about, the chains clanking as the wooden boxes tried to move across the cabin, the tide of sewage revisiting us from the forward lavatory. It was at this point that the purserarrived at my seat. ‘Mr Fisk, you are our only passenger and you have no need to worry about safety,’ he said. ‘You see, you have the honour to be sitting’ – and here he pointed at the bearded hostile figure at my left – ‘next to our senior flight engineer.’ “

[A dubaious tale indeed – imagine sitting next to an industrious @IPCC_CH researcher in December 2023! Anway that was fun so here’s one more from the same ‘Independent’ article..]

“It began when I endured a crash landing at Tehran airport just after the Islamic revolution. The front wheel failed to emerge from its pod before landing – for aerobuffs, it was a Boeing 737, but Iran was now under @UN sanctions – and the plane came down with the biggest bang i have ever heard in my life. No lives were lost. But almost immediately afterwards, the fuselage filled with thick clouds of blue smoke, which – I realised after a few seconds – was every terrified passenger lighting cigarettes at the same moment. I returned to Beiruit with the worst case of flying fear in the history of the world.

“Fortunately, I knew every pilot then working for Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines – they were flying the mighty old 707s in those civil war days – and one of them immediately told me to turn up next morning for a series of Boeing test flights out of Beiruit airport in stormy weather. He sat me down behind his pilot seat on the flight deck, poured me a huge glass of champagne, strappped earphones onto my head and took off into the kind of turbulence seen only in the movie The Day After Tomorrow. He flew the empty airliner over the desolate, frothing Mediterranean, turned around, landed on runway 1 – 18, took off again into the storm, landed and went on and on – each takeoff accompanied by another glass of champagne – until, after 14 take-offs and landings, I was giggling like a baby. I never lost my fear of flying – but I no longer believed I would die every time I boarded a plane.

“Deep down, of course, like almost everyone I know, I don’t believe in powered flight. I simply do not accept that it is natural to tie oneself to a seat in in a metal tube and hurl oneself into the sky at 500 miles per hour for seven hours, with or without a gin and tonic. And I have come to realise that I employ my old friend, the suspension of disbelief.”

[And here the lesson seems to be the ubiquitous post WWI and particularly II American alpha male big noisy machines BF Skinner CIA operation.. er, Operant Conditioning behaviour modification procedure commonly called ‘If you’ve got them by the balls their hearts & minds soon follow’ no but hang on it’s obviously the flipside in this instance ‘Give them pleasure and they’re yours for a song.’ STUDENTS may like to work up an exciting #ChatGPT report feeding in the big binary Pleasure-pain (war-peace, black-white, donkeys-elephants, love-hate et cetera AND 20th century United States of America Foreign Policy. You may include red, yellow and brown people in the read-out, OK? I feel better now.]

2. Robert Fisk: From Beirut to Damascus by Romy Haber

Robert Fisk (71), a veteran Middle East reporter and author, died on 30 October 2020 in Dublin after a suspected stroke. Fisk was considered an expert on the troubled and dangerous region of the Middle East. He was famous, notably, for his work on Lebanon’s wars encapsulated in his famous book Pity the Nation (1990) and interviews with Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden. His works served the anti-war movements and he won accolades for his fierce critic of US foreign affairs in the Middle East. For many in the media sector a journalist-hero has been lost. However, many in the Middle East remember him differently.   

Fisk, having been brought in by Edward Said’s Orientalism had, similarly, the tendency to elevate pan-Arabist and pan-Islamist concerns above those of the Middle East’s many minority communities. His book, Pity the Nation — much praised by Western journalists — especially in the pre-internet era, does not impress Lebanese readers. It stands accused of whitewashing the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), while taking a tougher stand on Lebanese Maronites:

​‘The Maronites brought the war down on their own heads. The first event of the civil war was a massacre of Palestinians by a group of phalangists trying to win power.’

This statement shifts the blame to Maronites, who did not want their country to turn into a playground for foreign militias and guerrilla warfare and who were tired of being harassed at checkpoints by Palestinian militiamen in their own country. A few hours before the massacre Fisk was referring to, the PLO tried to kill Christian leader, Pierre Gemayel, but failed and instead they killed two civilians and two Kataeb members.

​Fisk’s historical accounting was often accompanied by derogatory remarks and he had no problem calling an ethno-religious group ‘stupid’ or even justify their killing. In one remark, Fisk said ‘Is it any wonder that the Hezbollah headbangers now want to kill them all?’ In reference to the Maronite Christian minority in Lebanon. Defending and downplaying the killing of a minority (Maronite in this case) by a terrorist organisation is never ethical, even if it was meant to be sarcastic.

‘…suppose Robert Fisk had written the truth about the Islamic militancy? which is now at work in Lebanon: would he have been able to reside comfortably in the Iranian capital? Suppose he had, over the years, writing the truth about the Syrian occupation: would he have been able to claim that special expertise which attaches – he hastens to inform us – to those who can travel freely ‘North of Baalbek’ (i.e. into the zone occupied for the past ten years by Syria)? Or suppose he had written the truth about the Palestinians, whose lawless cohorts roamed the countryside of Lebanon, tormenting Shi’ite and Christian alike, and driving thousands from their homes, long before the Israeli invasion: would he have been able to enjoy the comfort, along with so many other Western correspondents, of a West Beirut hotel owned by Palestinians?’

What Fisk called ‘getting close to the truth’ usually meant getting close to authoritarian regimes and their intelligence services. However, whitewashing the Syrian government’s massacres in Darayya, Eastern Ghouta, Douma and Khan Sheikhoun was the match to the powder keg and he denied some of the most heinous war crimes of the 21st century.

​Of course, speaking ill of the dead is not the right path. Fisk made some very important contributions to unpacking some of the more pressing issues that grip the Middle East. He worked hard and acted as a source of inspiration for many people in the region—not least the Palestinians. So, despite the controversies, Fisk was an influential correspondent and it is a shame that his track-record is speckled and his legacy is tainted. While it is better to remember people for their positive achievements, since journalists write the first draft of history, it is history itself that judges them and on this Fisk’s work needs to be understood.

Romy Haber, undated

John BLUNDELL

Economy, Human Health, 2-5 set Maths, the new Neurolinguistics, Philosophy of Science

South Australia 14th December 2023

🇺🇦

غزة

My Introduction..

I have found to my mild alarm¹ as a neurolinguistics scholar and indeed as any ana-ngu yet to grasp and relish a second cup of black coffee this morning in Sthn Australia that shalom is an acronym. So now i understand the nitty-gritty oh how it’s come to pass that i as a highly professsional journalist went from being a subscriber to both @Guardian and @GuardianAus five years ago to a dismissive non-reader for weeks on end in 2023. As a student I picked up a copy of.. TPoL and never read it beyond page 20 or nipped to its final chapter either, in which I am informed by Barnes & Noble (a defunct 20th century bookshop chain that no longer offers friendship only stuff) Wolff provides here an examination of four concepts central to liberal political concerns: Liberty, Tolerance, Loyalty, and Power. We need, Wolff states, an ideal of society more exalted than the mere acceptance of opposed interests and diverse customs. We need, moreover, a new philosophy of community, and in his last chapter Wolff undertakes to outline the first steps toward such a philosophy.. damn, I missed that..

And on second thoughts am inordinately if not ‘over-the-moon’ glad I did.

Anyway, scholars, a greeting – in Arabic salām (سَلاَم), Maltese sliem, Hebrew Shalom ( שָׁלוֹם‎), Ge’ez sälam (ሰላም), Syriac šlama (pronounced Shlama, or Shlomo in the Western Syriac …¹

John

Your Chunk of Historic Text:

“But even Professor Bain, friend and biographer of Mill, commented incredulously, ‘he leads us to suppose that the relations of men and women betweeen themselves may work upon a purely voluntary principle.’

“23 years after Mill’s death, Frederic Harrison, the distinguished positivist, in an appreciation of Mill in The Nineteenth Century (September 1896), appeared to find difficulty in restraining himself on this painful subject: ‘The subjection of women is a mere historical sophism in itself. The remedy proposed to cure it is rank moral and social anarchy.’

“- The prolonged and frequently bitter struggle finally overcame all resistance; and the main aims were attained. The right of women to compete with men in virtually every form of employment not exclusively dependent on physical strength is no longer a matter of serious controversy. Nor is there need to speculate what might be achieved by women given equality of opportunity in education. the facts are there for all to see. Mill’s book has dated by the very success of his arguments. This part of the book, trite though it may now seem, remains an eloquent testimony to the climate of opinion ion which Mill was required to argue. That he in no wise exaggerated the power and prejudice of contemporary masculinity is evidenced by the anonymous Blackwood’s reviewer:

“Mill was obviously touching a hypersensitive nerve. Why was this? At one level, the explanation is obvious enough. Much of Mill’s argument demonstrates the potential equality of women with men in vocational and professional terms in order to open the gates of employment to them on the same terms as men. This side of the case led directly in the political field to the whole suffragette campaign. The prolonged and frequently bitter struggle finally overcame all resistance; and the main aims were attained. The right of women to compete with men in virtually every form of employment not exclusively dependent on physical strength is no longer a metter of serious controversy.. Nor is there need to speculate what might be achieved by women given equality of opportunity in education.The facts are there for all to see. Mill’s book has dated by the very success of his arguments. This part of the book, trite though it may now seem, remains an eloquent testimony to the climate of opinion in which Mill was required to argue. That he in no wise exaggerated the power and prejudice of contemporary masculinity is evidenced by the anonymous Blackwood’s reviewer:

“In the world, as we and all mankind that has preceded us have known it, women under no conceivable circumstances can have the law on their side but by the permission of men’; therefore they seem to us to act wisely by owning the natural law of subordination, and submitting to ‘subjection’ as a Bible word… ( Blackwood’s Magazine July-Dec 1869)

“Mill’s choice of title was deliberate and went to the heart of his subject. He was not just discoursing upon the ancient theme of the attributes of the sexual category. He did not believe that the blanket label of sex was used to conceal and stifle at birth the richness and diversity of human creativity. But he was also challenging at the deepest level the very notion of ‘woman,’ in her social and personal roles. Frederic Harrison was right, when he noted:

“The Subjection of Women, however, is not a simple sermon against male arrogance. It is a systematic effort to recast the whole form of our domestic, social, and political life, and, as such, it must be judged.

“The Blackwood’s reviewer clearly thought he had disposed of the matter by observing: ‘He exactly corresponds to the lunatic who has proved logically that all th e rest of the world was insane. It is nothing to him that mankind from the beginning has seen the matter in another light.’

“The reviewer was right in grasping the extreme radicalism of Mill’s position. Doubtless there is also a strong prima facie case of error where a man claims to be the only member of the regiment who is in step; although, if the rule were infallible, no advance in human knowledge or ethical understanding would ever have been possible. Mill had in fact made a profound and revolutionary discovery at the heart of our society. The force of the resistance he touched off only confirms this. But the implications of what Mill had grasped went deeper than even he realised.

“The insight was weakened by its polemical force. To make an impression on such a stolid wall of prejudice, it was necessary to evoke strong emotions. It became a dearly cherished Magna Charta which young girls kept under their pillows for years to come in many parts of the world. But the polemic gets in the way of the vision. The institution of contemporary marriage, which is his real subject, he dissects admirably up to a point. But beyond that point he cannot go because of his emotional commitment, the parti pris [prejudice] of a modern Galahad taking up the cudgels on behalf of an outraged class of people, viz. one half of the human species. No doubt social therapy required a militant attempt to break through the armoury of male arrogance. But the temptation is to overlook the complicity of the other sex; and thus to fail to see that the real problem is a cultural one in which both sexes are corrupted in different but equally crippling ways.

“The book’s strength lies in its awareness that the quality of the marital relationship has effects which ramify into every aspect of the life of society. The thesis is that the the existing marital relationship is one of subordination of the female to the male; that such a relationship is morally indefensible; that this moral defect is the fons et origo of all the moral deficiencies of the greater society; and that until it is remedied and put on a basis of completee equality, it will be vain to look for any appreciable measure of human advancement in other spheres. ‘We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry andgenerosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.’ Existing sexual relations are an anachronistic survival in a society whose needs are no longer met. The consequences of this relationship are then traced for the male, the female and the children of the union.

“The portrait of the male in particular is exceptionally well done, wholly convincing, and the unflattering verisimilitude of the portrait so near to the bone that few male readers could have failed to recognise something of themselves. This itself would explain some of the hostility the book aroused. Mill drew fron life; the portrait is of the bourgeois Victorian male. The lot of women delivererd over to that large number of men who are ‘little higher than brutes’ is a conjecture that evokes in him a scarcely represssed shudder. This aspect of the question, touching on unplumbed depths of human misery, strikes him as so appalling as to require no further argument. He proceeds to dissect the more subtle effects of bourgeois marriage upon the males of the society in which he himself was nurtured. Here he could speak from first-hand knowledge.

“No doubt there are families which exemplify the ideal to which the institution is supposed to conform. But such families, working by the light of sympathy and self-forgetfulness, are rare exceptions. Much oftener the pattern of family life stems from the fact that the husband is the linchpin of the institution³.”

The Last Bit:

..just a note about economy: in live economics or the study of transactions from individual out to geo-community in the micro we refer to adult individuals and social formations couple household, neighbourhoods and communities organisations and their trading in this context, and not to neoclassical authorities, institutions, halls of government, corridors of rhetorical power, our central premise being, after VG Childe 1951, that oekomene is household, repository, situation and context of the fundamental careful parsimony and Household Management – now irreversibly irreparably exploded or imploded scarce material and human resources of David Ricardo’s 1840 nether-world of upper middle class liesuring, pleasuring and spouting gibberisch to declare it to be art, science or diplomacy – of literally domestic affairs, which in turn may never be no more than a poor metaphor for regional, national, quadrispheric, hemispheric or international affairs and relations.

JOHN BLUNDELL nlgstx, qntm logic, economy, human health & philosophy of 21C #Science

Australia

So try locking me up again NOW Mr Police Commisssioner

¹ .. ‘dismay’s way too strong a word as the acronymisation of science, culture and society has been yea-close to top-dead-centre in MY economic sociology for 54 years

² Arabic: As-salāmu ʻalaykum (السلام عليكم) is used to greet others and is an Arabic equivalent of ‘hello’. The appropriate response to such a greeting is “and uponyou be peace” (wa-ʻalaykum as-salām).

³ ..the body of this essay being extracts from The Subjection of Women, 1869, in RV Sampson, Equality and Power, 1965 Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, Sampson also the author of Progress in the Age of Reason, the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day Harvard UP 1956 ,, I now add for the predilactation or whatever it was in the world of Lady Ottoline Morells, Oprah Winfreys, Jerry Springers, Rhett Butlers, Judge Judys, Doctor Phils, Barbara Streisands, James Stewarts, Doris Days, Diana Dors’es (born Diana Mary Fluck; 23 October 1931 – 4 May 1984), Hattie Jacques’es, Norma Jean Bakers, Neil Diamonds or indeed any or all of the post 1871 LBE Euro-american haute-bourgeois shitfuckery a note about Mill’s chick: “In marriage the claims Mill unconsciously made for himself were in marked contrast to the unquestioned subservience he demanded of his wife. Although we do not know a great deal about Harriet Burrows, her lot as Mrs Mill could not have ben very different from the role so brilliantly portrayed by Robert Graves of Mary Powell as ‘wife to Mr Milton.’ She is tempered. The most serious criticism Francis Place permitted himself to make was that she was ‘not a little vain of her person, and would be thought to be still a girl.’ Mrs Grote’s contemptuous reference in a letter to Lady Amberley tells us more about Mrs Grote and incidentally James Mill than it does about Mrs Mill. ‘He married a stupid woman – a housemaid of a woman & left off caring for her & treated her as his squ..“ ..Jesus f…ing wept is this script for the 2024 Shaun Micallef show? By’ee.