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Simply put, when it's public government and private banking, the banks rule, so profit trumps quality and capital trumps community.

Government, as executive and regulatory function, is the nervous system of the communal organism, while money and banking function as blood and the circulation system.

As Michael Hudson has written about, this tension goes to the dawn of civilization, with debt jubilees instituted as circuit breakers to the feedback loop of compound interest siphoning all value out of society, by those with the biggest pocketbooks and control of finance.

That Jesus' original idea was, "Forgive them their debts." When the powers that be succeeded in revoking jubilees. Remember he was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers and that's when they crucified him.

Rome adopted Christianity as state religion around the time Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic, to validate The Big Guy Rules. Then it became, "Forgive them their sins." To invoke people as sinners and in need of control.

The Republic had collapsed because the oligarchs got to fighting amongst themselves, as they were sucking the life out of the state. So the Empire was imposed by Constantine when he came out on top.

The fact is that while our technology is fancy, our civil, cultural and social systems are as or more primitive than the Ancients. It's not like it's even complicated, just that society has been so totally drowned in noise and distraction for so long, it seems TINA.

Given that Charles 3 is English head of state should be proof enough that government in the West has been reduced to a hollow, ceremonial shell, in thrall to the financial interests, aka, The City.

http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org

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Interesting article by Dr. Luka Filipovic' although two terms used often enough I find disturbing. The "

Welfare State being one of them. How about calling it the Social State? But the worse use of a term is, n my opinion, the term neoliberal and neoliberalism. Someone asked me whatthe term meant, about twenty years or so, and I said, "shylocking at the national level," or "grand theft usury," of financial parasites.

Three books I recommend reading, John, or maybe you have already, which I recommend are:

"The Assassination of Julius Caesar" - A People's History of Ancient Rome" by Dr. Michael Parenti

"The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order" by Professor Michel Chossudovsky

"Epic Recession - Prelude To Global Depression" by Dr. Jack Rasmus.

The American people and the vassal states in Europe have swallowed the bait of selfishness , greed, and an increasing disregard for their fellow human beings around the world and salute the perpetual war machine for world conquest by the Imperial States of America. Very scary!

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I think it goes to the core of Western civilization, aka, monotheism. Which has proven to be profoundly egocentric, as a concept of reality, by conflating the ideal with the absolute.

I try peeling some of the layers in this essay;

https://johnmerryman.substack.com/p/why-culture-is-not-reality

One of my main reads is Gilbert Murray's, The Five Stages of Greek Religion;

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30250/30250-h/30250-h.htm

Having grown up on a farm, around more cattle and horses than people, it helped me connect nature with culture.

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The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.

Cultural Marxists encourage abortion, birth control, divorce, homosexuality, “carrier women,” drugs, miscegenation, the destruction of the traditional family, and unrestricted immigration of racial foreigners into white countries. This is a reflection of what the Cultural Marxists preach: white reproduction is evil, and that which prevents white reproduction is good.

https://nordicresistancemovement.org/what-is-cultural-marxism/

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Code Red, White and Blue

The Statue of Liberty is crying,

Uncle Sam wants you,

The U.S.A. is dying,

Code Red! Code White! Code Blue!

Make it all about the money

Save the bank too big to fail

In this land of milk and honey

We ignore the baby’s wail.

Between Medicare and Medicaid,

The coverage gap is very wide,

But let the contract stipulate

Your new prescription is denied.

Smash her lamp beside the golden door,

Build a wall as high as you can see,

Keep away your tired and teeming poor,

Wretched refuse dreaming to breathe free.

The Statue of Liberty is crying,

Uncle Sam wants you,

The U.S.A. is dying,

Code Red! Code White! Code Blue!

Bullets, bombs, and forever war,

Free speech control with bricks,

Merchants of death want more and more,

Give us liberty or at least Netflix.

Up is down and right is wrong,

The government lies to us, too

Our unfree press works all night long

To tell us those lies are true

The Statue of Liberty is crying,

Uncle Sam wants you,

The U.S.A. is dying,

Code Red! Code White! Code Blue!

Immigrants are out of luck

As losers say, it sucks to suck.

How can we change our life today?

What do we want our kids to say?

It’s time to sing a different song

Remember what we always preach,

After painful longing comes the dawn,

Let’s start to hope and hope to teach.

Revive the mighty woman and her flame,

Forgive our souls all torn apart,

Love and life be one and the same,

Mind and spirit be one with your heart.

The Statue of Liberty is crying,

Uncle Sam wants you,

The U.S.A. is dying,

Code Red! Code White! Code Blue!

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founding

Thank you, Patrick, for bringing Luka Filipović to the Floutist pages. His conjuring up of Carlin's critique of the "new language" with the excellent case in point of how the poor in slums are now the economically disadvantaged occupying substandard housing in inner cities, makes Filipović case well. How subtlety these tweaks to our terminology alter our very consciousness. Indeed the fundamental building block of a healthy society--that is, ensuring the common good--has certainly been sacrificed for individualism through political and economic systems that feed our delusions.

As I read "Humanity in Exile," I was taken to the work of two other authors. Raimond Gaita for his excellent book, "A Common Humanity," and just about everything ever written by Wendell Berry whose notion of "membership" necessarily calls us to thrift, kindness, hope and love.

One can hardly hide from the fact that "left" and "right" have found their own terms and techniques for ensuring a centralized control by assaulting the common good for the sake of keeping us divided. I certainly see it born out on a daily basis by those around me who worship at the altar of their god of power even though that god operates through absolute lies and obfuscation. They refuse to even consider that their party or their guy or gal or market notion, might not only be off kilter, it might actually be destroying the world. I'm hard pressed to see it as anything but the worst kind of "cult worship."

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“Simply put, when it's public government and private banking, the banks rule, so profit trumps quality and capital trumps community.

Government, as executive and regulatory function, is the nervous system of the communal organism, while money and banking function as blood and the circulation system.

As Michael Hudson has written about, this tension goes to the dawn of civilization, with debt jubilees instituted as circuit breakers to the feedback loop of compound interest siphoning all value out of society, by those with the biggest pocketbooks and control of finance.

That Jesus' original idea was, "Forgive them their debts." When the powers that be succeeded in revoking jubilees. Remember he was all peace, love and turn the other cheek, except when it came to the moneychangers and that's when they crucified him.

Rome adopted Christianity as state religion around the time Empire was rising from the ashes of the Republic, to validate The Big Guy Rules. Then it became, "Forgive them their sins." To invoke people as sinners and in need of control.”

Comment by John Merryman

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Much to think about - thanks to Luka Filipović - and nice to see Serbia featuring again in the world of ethical thinking.

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I second that, Jim! As you know, the Serbian people were victims of NATO bombings to destroy Yugoslavia and break it up, which they succeeded in doing.

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"Unlike the previous authors of the self-help books from the early eighties, these new 'life coaches' of the internet are heavily engaged in the relativization of ethics, with some going as far as to conclude that those who stay employed in times of low wages and worsening labor conditions, instead of risking their financial existence with private business gambles, have no one but themselves to blame for being exploited. Thus, in a perverted sense of logical framing, they arrive very close to an argument used by ancient Greek philosophers to justify slavery: 'An Athenian would rather kill himself than become a slave.'"

I'm sorry to say I think there are all kinds of levels of "life coaches" out there. They seem to be on fb dispensing New Age gems [will have to re-check Filipović's use of "New Age"], a new one every other day. These aren't the ones that are paid of course, but they seem to believe what's on fb will be good for ME. Pretty presumptuous. "Those who stayed employed"...boy if there wasn't a lesson in staying in that modality. It's a hard lesson to realize said modality might give one a fairly good a way to measure things like what, for example, Filipović writes. I measure what he writes as quite true. I floundered in preparing for anything like mad, but thank God I didn't chuck the OJT opportunity.

As far as relativization goes, they're out there on that net proclaiming the Palestinian question is involved, and that they will stay cooly above it all. Not start to rant'n. I guess I'm supposed to follow their example? No, but I think I'll thank God I had a chance (and some motivation) to learn something about what's going on vis a vis that massive scapegoating rite.

Apuleius' Lucius never got the chance to kill himself, but once he became a donkey he may have wished he'd drunken himself to death first. The hemlock used to seem to me a way to cut other possibilities short.

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The Frankfurt School adapted Marx’s theories on revolution to include Freud’s theory of the subconscious. The Cultural Marxists’ main focus was to reshape the subconscious of Western men and women and thus create new type of person: one who would react passively to provocations of all kinds.

Cultural Marxists encourage abortion, birth control, divorce, homosexuality, “carrier women,” drugs, miscegenation, the destruction of the traditional family, and unrestricted immigration of racial foreigners into white countries. This is a reflection of what the Cultural Marxists preach: white reproduction is evil, and that which prevents white reproduction is good.

https://nordicresistancemovement.org/what-is-cultural-marxism/

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Interesting, but ultimately futile composition due to the failure to understand and differentiate between different vintages of political left/right, economic neo-liberalism, and class-based actions and outcomes.

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