#European Student Think Tank | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

the-unspeakable-tsar · 1 year ago

Text

Chapter 2 - X-Manson by Doctor Benway - Annotated By Tsar.

Many of you are familiar with Hank "The Tank" McCoy and his works. my college @brw is the formost McCoy Scholar. But as you'll see here this AU's version of Hank takes many cues from his Age of Apocalypse self. But he lacks any kind of the fuzzy goodness of your average Hank McCoy.

[Shot of a very large man in an expensive suit in a lushly appointed office, possibly that of an investment banker but possibly that of a professor who is very good at getting grants. The man is wearing rimless high-fashion European glasses and a look of extreme urgency. Plainly, this interview is keeping him from something very important. He also has unusually large hands.]

[Caption: Henry McCoy, Trofim Lysenko Professor of Genetics at Northwestern University, Chicago IL]

*I didn't catch this on my first read through, but Trofim Lysenko is a soviet pseudo-scientist who rejected the idea of Medelivian genetics. He was primarily focused on hybridizing crops by grafting them together. It's frankly bizarre that an american institution in a post-soviet world would have such a position, but it's a weird world, isn't it?

HM: I was at the School For Gifted Youngsters for three of the best years of my life.

Int: You chose to attend?

HM: I had a rough time at my first high school, very rough. It was in the Midwest, where any deformities would make one the object of the most vicious ridicule. At the School, I set myself on the path to understanding that which had made me different.

Int: You worked with Charles Xavier on his genetic experiments?

HM: Charles Xavier had a profound intellect. Everything I am today I owe to him. His breakdown and demise were most unfortunate.

Int: You are aware of the controversy surrounding his background?

HM: Overblown, completely overblown. Xavier had a remarkable mind, one that transcended the petty certifications that we so often use to indicate the size of a mind.

Int: Such as your PhD from Princeton?

HM: Such as that, yes. I am certain that Charles Xavier could have easily attained all that I learned at Princeton in a much shorter time, had he not known it already. He was a most remarkable teacher, and I am but a humble fool by comparison.

*Simp.

Int: Were you close to the other students?

HM: As close as my studies would allow. My program of study was quite intensive, and I spent little time with them. I found their company pleasant, when I had time to indulge in it.

Int: Were they happy at the School?

HM: So far as I knew.

Int: What do you think happened to Robert Drake?

HM: I have no idea. He was still there when I left the School and went up to Princeton.

Int: Didn't you stay in touch with the others?

HM: I had limited contact with the Professor. Otherwise, I lost touch with them. I certainly wish I had not, knowing now what happened. If only I had known, I might have been able to prevent it.

[Shot of a much less well-appointed office with no windows but plenty of steam pipes. The place is in a state of almost pure chaos, with books and papers piled on every free surface. A middle aged man who obviously runs marathons is staring a little too keenly into the camera.]

[Caption: Sir Bernard Quatermass, RA Fisher Professor of Eugenics at the London School of Hygiene]

*Bernard Quartermass is another cross-media reference. He is derived from a 1955 british sci-fi serial called "The Quartermass Experiment. Quartermass is however not a Professor of Eugenics but an Aerospace Engineer.

**The London School of Hygiene is somewhat real, The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has had a few reports of eugenicist attitutes and white supremacy stances, though that can be expected from an institution that was founded as Britain was colonizing the world.

BQ: McCoy would sell his own mother to the gypsies to get the Nobel. For that matter, he missed his mother's funeral on account of some experiment he was involved in. Disgusting man. No one with any sense of honour will work with him.

*The only reason why B.Q isn't seen as a monster is because he is being placed in comparrison with this AU's Hank McCoy.

Int: Why is that?

BQ: His early career consisted almost entirely of publishing work weeks or even days ahead of others who had been working on their ideas for decades.

Int: So he had no ideas of his own?

BQ: Oh no, no, no. He did have some very good ideas, completely original ones as far as anyone could tell. He developed the anti-retrovirals that cured that awful venereal disease that the Africans caught from monkeys and that infected all those pederasts in California twenty years back. He has a better understanding of mutant genetics than almost anyone in the field. Of course, he would have, given his connections.

*evil Hank McCoy cured AIDS.

Int: How do you mean?

BQ: His work, and indeed all of our work, depends upon getting large quantities of genetic material in a fresh condition. He's always had and still has the best supplies of it.

Int: This material, it comes from cadavers?

BQ: Cadavers and those on their way to becoming them. It may be something as simple and harmlessly taken as blood, it might be a pituitary gland torn from a technically still-living brain. Brain, kidney, and liver tissue in particular can't be taken ethically until the source has died, and Henry always has had an unusually good supply of brains and kidneys.

*i think Bernard is jealous because he wants to get in on some illegal organ harvesting.

Int: You're suggesting that he may have gotten these by illegal means?

BQ: All I'm saying is, he always had tissue, whenever he needed it. If you want a subject for another documentary, try looking at how much cable traffic there is from his lab to China every time they have one of their anti-corruption campaigns.

[Shot of Dwight Hammer]

DH: The autopsy report on Robert Drake showed that he was missing several organs.

Int: Which ones?

DH: Brain, both kidneys, liver. Maybe more, he was down in that muck over ten years, but the coroner was sure that those ones were missing.

Int: Were any of the other bodies found in the lake missing organs?

DH: Some of them. Usually brains. Only one of the bodies was fully intact, the one that they call the Lady of the Lake. Some of the live ones we arrested were missing parts. Summers was missing a kidney and both eyes.

*two victims in the lake now, six remaining:

Robert Drake

Rogue

Int: What do you think happened to them?

DH: We know what happened to Summer's eyes, but we don't know what happened to his kidney. Maybe they ate it. Just assumed it was some sort of mutant thing.

*i think they took Summers' eyes as a means of keeping him powerless to stop them.

Int: Did you vote for the Kelly Amendment?

DH: Way I see it, the founding fathers set everything up assuming we were all equal. There's no call to make some more equal than others.

Int: So you don't feel that mutants need extra protection?

DH: Hell, no. Some of my best friends are mutants, and they never complained.

#marvel #xmen #xmen fanfiction #annotated fanfiction #hank mccoy #beast #bobby drake #tw cannibalism #tw gore #tw eugenics #tw organ harvesting #Trofim Lysenko #bernard quartermass

2 notes · View notes

earaercircular · 2 years ago

Text

From mushroom to luxury handbag: will fungi soon take over from leather?

In the search for alternatives to animal leather, fungi seem to be the new ecological gold. Will they soon hang in our wardrobe?

A shoe, handbag or wallet that naturally recovers from a scratch? For that tour de force, the fashion sector looks to fungi.

Research into mushrooms (or fungi, those are synonyms) as an ecological alternative to leather is on the rise. The possibilities sound futuristic: from self-healing material to 3D printing techniques. Fashion brands such as Balenciaga[1], Stella McCartney[2], PVH[3] (the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger, among others) and Hermès have all entered into partnerships with companies that use fungi.

Or rather: on mycelium[4]. The true potential lies in that network of hyphae, explains Professor of Bioscience Engineering Eveline Peeters (VUB). “Mushrooms are the tip of the iceberg. You can compare the hyphae with the fruit, such as an apple. Mycelium, that's the tree itself.”

9,000 euros coat

How is fungi leather created? First you grow the fungus. A small amount of fungus is added to large containers of nutrient liquid. If you leave it for two weeks at the right humidity and temperature, a layer of hyphae will grow on it.

‘We call that layer the skin,’ says Peeters. "After two weeks it is harvested and treated to make it look like leather." Two weeks of production time is considerably less than the three years that you have to count on average for leather.

Moreover, you need less than a hundred litres of water per square meter of mycelium. For the same amount of leather, that is about 10,000 litres. An interesting advantage for fashion companies that want to get rid of the large ecological footprint of leather. "And then you haven't even mentioned animal suffering," says Peeters.

All this means that many brands trip over each other to test mycelium, especially in the luxury segment. In 2022 Stella McCartney released a first handbag, for his winter collection of 2022 it was Demna Gvasalia at Balenciaga who released a first coat in the material. An oversized, long black coat, with a wink to the movie The Matrix.

But between a limited edition jacket worth €9,000 and a mass-produced product, there are still years of research, says Maurizio Montalti, co-founder of Sqim[5], the company that produced the material for Balenciaga's jacket. It is probably the largest European producer of mycelium with several thousand sheets of one square meter per year. “Within six years we hope to be able to produce on an industrial scale. Scaling up a biological process cannot be done in the blink of an eye,” says Montalti.

Elite ecology

The fact that you can make mycelium in a lab makes it interesting and complex at the same time. "I compare it to antibiotics," says Peeters. “It took years of intensive research to perfect it.”

One of the variants with which the researcher achieves the best results comes from a fungus that one of her students picked in a forest in Linkebeek[6], near Brussels. "How many other varieties would be even better, we have no idea yet."

Mycelium may be more environmentally friendly than leather, but it is not cheaper. Currently, it costs about the same as high-quality leather[7], the leading fashion website Business of Fashion (BoF) reports.

That price tag prevents the material from quickly reaching the general public. ‘And that is a pity,’ says sociologist Aurélie Van de Peer (KU Leuven), who studies the mechanisms behind ecological fashion. “Ecology takes on an elitist side, it becomes a status symbol. That can't be the intention.”

Doubts as to whether mycelium will meet customer expectations also seem to dampen the fashion companies' initial eagerness. In 2021, starting companies that worked on non-animal leather raised almost 900 million euros. A year later that had already dropped to 420 million dollars. This is evident from a report by think tank Material Innovation Initiative[8]. ‘While more research is needed,’ says Montalti.

As good as leather?

Hermès, maker of luxury handbags, invested 125 million dollars in Mycoworks[9], a California company, in early 2022. But apart from some photos of a prototype, we don't see anything on the shelves. The launch was delayed several times.

An official reason is not given, but presumably the end result did not correspond to what luxury brands such as Hermès want to offer: timeless heirlooms that are passed down from generation to generation.

That customers do not adjust their expectations for ecological alternatives, designer Stella McCartney experienced with her first handbag, she told BoF[10]. “To make mycelium a success story, customers should not feel that it is a compromise. From the way it looks to the way it feels, there should be no difference from leather. As long as that is not the case, many brands will not take the plunge.”

Source

Karlien Beckers, Van paddenstoel uit Linkebeek tot luxehandtas: nemen schimmels het straks over van leer?, in: De Standaard, 13-04-2023, https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20230412_94376113

[1] Read also: https://www.tumblr.com/earaercircular/664321527312957440/from-dirty-to-vintage-luxury-embraces?source=share

[2] Read also: https://www.tumblr.com/earaercircular/676457111952179200/fashion-brands-are-launching-buy-back-programs-in?source=share & https://www.tumblr.com/earaercircular/672470746450345984/sustainable-luxury-between-recycling-and?source=share

[3] PVH Corp., formerly known as the Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation, is an American clothing company which owns brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Warner's, Olga and True & Co. The company also licenses brands such as Kenneth Cole New York and Michael Kors.PVH is partly named after Dutch immigrant John Manning Van Heusen, who in 1910 invented a new process that fused cloth on a curve.

[4] Read also: https://www.tumblr.com/earaercircular/667314088734507008/mushrooms-as-raw-material-for-leather-accessories?source=share

[5] SQIM is founded on the belief that innovative natural materials, grown by means of microbial fermentation, hold the promise for the creation of a near future where human activities and the rhythms of the larger ecosystem are not in conflict with each other. Accordingly, SQIM co-designs with nature to develop cutting edge technologies and deliver naturally grown products with superior properties, employing fungal mycelium as its engineering and manufacturing platform. https://www.sqim.bio/

[6] Linkebeek is a Belgian municipality in Flanders, part of the province of Flemish Brabant, and in the administrative district of Halle-Vilvoorde. The municipality only comprises the town of Linkebeek proper. As of 1 January 2006, Linkebeek has a total population of 4,759. The total area is 4.15 km² which gives a population density of 1,147 inhabitants per km².

[7] SARAH KENT, Would You Buy a Mushroom Handbag? In: BOF, 23-05-2022, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/sustainability/would-you-buy-a-mushroom-handbag/ For the first time, brands including Stella McCartney, Balenciaga and Hermès are bringing products made of mushroom-based materials to market, an early test for whether the next-generation fabrics could one day hit the mainstream.

[8] 2022 STATE OF THE INDUSTRY REPORT: NEXT-GEN MATERIALS. Next-gen material companies raised at least US$456.75 million from 28 publicly disclosed deals in 2022. The 2022 State of the Industry Report: Next-gen Materials highlights the investments, innovation, and industry partnerships that significantly impacted the next-gen materials industry in 2022. 16-2-2023, https://materialinnovation.org/reports/2022-state-of-the-industry-report-next-gen-materials/

[9] MycoWorks is a biotechnology company based in Emeryville, California, with the mission to create the highest quality materials using mycelium. The company was founded in 2013 by Philip Ross, Sophia Wang, and Eddie Pavlu. https://www.mycoworks.com/

[10] SARAH KENT, Would You Buy a Mushroom Handbag? In: BOF, 23-05-2022, https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/sustainability/would-you-buy-a-mushroom-handbag/

#leather alternative #mycelium

2 notes · View notes

kramlabs · 2 months ago

Text

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE STRAUSSUIANS

Let us stop for a moment to consider this group, the Straussians, about whom Westerners know little. They are individuals, all Jewish, but by no means representative of either American Jews or of Jewish communities worldwide. They were formed by the German philosopher Leo Strauss, who took refuge in the United States during the rise of Nazism and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. According to many accounts, he had formed a small group of faithful students to whom he gave oral instruction. There is no written record of this. He explained to them that the only way for the Jews not to fall victim to a new genocide was to form their own dictatorship. He called them Hoplites (the soldiers of Sparta) and sent them to disrupt the courts of his rivals. Finally, he taught them discretion and praised the “noble lie”. Although he died in 1973, his student fraternity continued.

The Straussians began forming a political group half a century ago, in 1972. They were all members of Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s staff, including Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. They worked closely with a group of Trotskyite journalists, also Jewish, who had met at the City College of New York and edited the magazine Commentary. Both groups were closely linked to the CIA, but also, thanks to Perle’s father-in-law Albert Wohlstetter (the US military strategist), to the Rand Corporation (the think tank of the military-industrial complex). Many of these young people intermarried until they formed a compact group of about 100 people.

Together they drafted and passed the “Jackson-Vanik Amendment” in the midst of the Watergate crisis (1974), which forced the Soviet Union to allow the emigration of its Jewish population to Israel under pain of economic sanctions. This was their founding act.

In 1976, Paul Wolfowitz [1] was one of the architects of the “Team B” charged by President Gerald Ford with assessing the Soviet threat [2]. He issued a delirious report accusing the Soviet Union of preparing to take over “global hegemony”. The Cold War changed its nature: it was no longer a question of isolating (containment) the USSR, it had to be stopped in order to save the “free world”.

The Straussians and the New York intellectuals, all of whom were on the left, put themselves at the service of the right-wing president Ronald Reagan. It is important to understand that these groups are neither truly left nor right wing. Some members have switched five times from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and back again. What is important to them is to infiltrate power, whatever the ideology. Elliott Abrams became an assistant to the Secretary of State. He led an operation in Guatemala where he put a dictator in power and experimented with Israeli Mossad officers on how to create reserves for the Mayan Indians in order to eventually do the same thing in Israel with the Palestinian Arabs (the Mayan Resistance earned Rigoberta Menchú her Nobel Peace Prize). Then Elliott Abrams continued his exactions in El Salvador and finally in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas with the Iran-Contra affair. For their part, the New York intellectuals, now called “Neoconservatives”, created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Institute of Peace, a mechanism that organized many colored revolutions, starting with China with the attempted coup d’état of Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang and the subsequent repression in Tiananmen Square.

At the end of George H. Bush’s (the father’s) term of office, Paul Wolfowitz, then number 3 in the Defense Department, drew up a document [3] based on a strong idea: after the decomposition of the USSR, the United States had to prevent the emergence of new rivals, starting with the European Union. He concluded by advocating the possibility of taking unilateral action, i.e. to put an end to the concerted action of the United Nations. Wolfowitz was undoubtedly the designer of “Desert Storm”, the operation to destroy Iraq that allowed the United States to change the rules of the game and organize a unilateral world. It was during this time that Straussians valued the concepts of “regime change” and “democracy promotion.”

Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky and Paul Wolfowitz entered the US intelligence community through the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence’s Working Group on Intelligence Reform. They criticized the assumption that other governments think the same way as the US government [4]. Then they criticized the lack of political leadership in intelligence, leaving it to wander into unimportant issues instead of focusing on the essential ones. Politicizing intelligence is what Wolfowitz had already done with the B-team and what he would do again in 2002 with the Office of Special Plans, inventing arguments for new wars against Iraq and Iran (Leo Strauss’ “noble lie”).

Richard Perle

In 1994, now an arms dealer, Richard Perle (a.k.a. “the Prince of Darkness”) became an advisor to the President and ex-Nazi Alija Izetbegović in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was he who brought Osama Bin Laden and his Arab Legion (the forerunner of Al Qaeda) from Afghanistan to defend the country. Perle was even a member of the Bosnian delegation at the signing of the Dayton Accords in Paris.

In 1996, members of the PNAC (including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) wrote a study at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) for the new Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This report [6] advocates the elimination of Yasser Arafat, the annexation of the Palestinian territories, a war against Iraq and the transfer of Palestinians there. It was inspired not only by the political theories of Leo Strauss, but also by those of his friend, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of “revisionist Zionism”, of whom Netanyahu’s father was the private secretary.

Robert Kagan

Thanks to the 9/11 attacks, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz installed Admiral Arthur Cebrowski in Donald Rumsfeld’s shadow. He played a role comparable to that of Albert Wohlstetter during the Cold War. He imposed the strategy of “endless war”: the US armed forces should not win any more wars, but start many of them and keep them going as long as possible. The aim would be to destroy all the political structures of the targeted states in order to ruin these populations and deprive them of any means of defending themselves against the US [7]; a strategy that has been implemented for twenty years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen…

Bernard Lewis and Benjamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister Office

Some individuals, such as Bernard Lewis, have worked with all three groups, the Straussians, the Neoconservatives and the Revisionist Zionists. A former British intelligence officer, he acquired both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, was an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu and a member of the U.S. National Security Council. Lewis, who halfway through his career assured that Islam is incompatible with terrorism and that Arab terrorists are in fact Soviet agents, later changed his mind and assured with the same aplomb that the religion preaches terrorism. He invented the strategy of the “clash of civilizations” for the US National Security Council. The idea was to use cultural differences to mobilize Muslims against the Orthodox, a concept that was popularized by his assistant at the Council, Samuel Huntington, except that Huntington did not present it as a strategy, but as an inevitability that had to be countered. Huntington began his career as an advisor to the South African secret service during the aparteheid era, and later wrote a book, The Soldier and the State [9]understanding national security needs.

After the destruction of Iraq, the Straussians were the subject of all sorts of controversies [10]. Everyone is surprised that such a small group, supported by neoconservative journalists, could have acquired such authority without having been the subject of a public debate. The U.S. Congress appointed an Iraq Study Group (the so-called “Baker-Hamilton Commission”) to evaluate its policy. It condemned, without naming it, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy and deplored the hundreds of thousands of deaths it had caused. But Rumsfeld resigned and the Pentagon inexorably pursued this strategy, which it had never officially adopted.

In the Obama administration, the Straussians found their way into Vice President Joe Biden’s cabinet. His National Security Advisor, Jacob Sullivan, played a central role in organizing the operations against Libya, Syria and Myanmar, while another of his advisors, Antony Blinken, focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. It was he who led the negotiations with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of key members of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s team in exchange for the nuclear deal.

Regime change in Kiev in 2014 was organized by the Straussians. Vice President Biden is firmly committed to it. Victoria Nuland came to support the neo-Nazi elements of the Right Sector and to supervise the Israeli “Delta” commando [11] in Maidan Square. A telephone intercept reveals her wish to “fuck the European Union” (sic) in the tradition of the 1992 Wolfowitz report. But the leaders of the European Union do not understand and protest only weakly [12].

“Jake” Sullivan and Antony Blinken placed Vice President Biden’s son, Hunter, on the board of one of the major gas companies, Burisma Holdings, despite opposition from Secretary of State John Kerry. Hunter Biden is unfortunately just a junkie, he would serve as a front for a gigantic scam at the expense of the Ukrainian people. He would appoint, under the supervision of Amos Hochstein, several of his stoner friends to become other front men at the head of various companies and to plunder Ukrainian gas. These are the people that President Vladimir Putin called a “clique of drug addicts”.

Sullivan and Blinken relied on mafia godfather Ihor Kolomoysky, the country’s third largest fortune. Although he is Jewish, he financed the heavyweights of the Right Sector, a neo-Nazi organization that works for NATO and fought in Maidan Square during the “regime change”. Kolomoïsky took advantage of his connections to take power within the European Jewish community, but his co-religionists rebelled and ejected him from international associations. However, he managed to get the head of the Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, appointed deputy secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council and to get himself appointed governor of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Both men would be quickly removed from any political function. It was their group that President Vladimir Putin called a “clique of neo-Nazis.”

Joe Biden is not a Straussian, but he has been doing business with them for about fifteen years. Here with Anthony Blinken.

THE STRAUSSIANS ARE STILL THE SAME AS EVER

Since Joe Biden returned to the White House, this time as President of the United States, the Straussians have been running the show. “Jake” Sullivan is National Security Advisor, while Antony Blinken is Secretary of State with Victoria Nuland at his side. As I have reported in previous articles, she went to Moscow in October 2021 and threatens to crush Russia’s economy if it ded not comply. This was the beginning of the current crisis.

Undersecretary of State Nuland resurrected Dmitro Yarosh and imposed him on President Zelinsky, a television actor protected by Ihor Kolomoysky. On November 2, 2021, he appointed him special advisor to the head of the army, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The latter, a true democrat, rebelled at first and finally accepted. When questioned by the press about this astonishing duo, he refused to answer and mentioned a question of national security. Yarosh gave his full support to the “white führer”, Colonel Andrey Biletsky, and his Azov Battalion. This copy of the SS Das Reich division has been staffed since the summer of 2021 by American mercenaries formerly from Blackwater [13].

Having identified the Straussians, we must admit that Russia’s ambition is understandable, even desirable. To rid the world of the Straussians would be to do justice to the million or more deaths they have caused and to save those they are about to kill. Whether this intervention in Ukraine is the right way remains to be seen.

In any case, if the responsibility for the current events lies with the Straussians, all those who let them act without flinching also have a responsibility. Starting with Germany and France, who signed the Minsk Agreements seven years ago and did nothing to ensure that they were implemented, and then with the fifty or so states that signed the OSCE declarations prohibiting the extension of Nato east of the Oder-Neisse line and did nothing. Only Israel, which has just got rid of the revisionist Zionists, has expressed a nuanced position on these events.

This is one of the lessons of this crisis: democratically governed peoples are responsible for the decisions taken for a long time by their leaders and maintained after alternations in power.

Thierry Meyssan

[1] “Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s Soul”, by Paul Labarique, Voltaire Network, 4 October 2004.

[2] Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, Anne H. Cahn, Pennsylvania State University Press (1998).

[3] This document was revealed in “US Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals Develop”, Patrick E. Tyler, New York Times, March 8, 1992. See also the excerpts published on page 14: “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: ’Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival’”. Additional information is provided in “Keeping the US First, Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower” Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, March 11, 1992.

[4] Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, Abram N. Shulsky & Gary J. Schmitt, Potomac Books (1999).

[5] « Toward a neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy », Robert Kagan & William Kristol, Foreign Affairs, july-august 1996, vol. 75 (4), p. 18-32.

[6] «A Clean Break : A New Strategy for Securing the Realm», Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (1996).

[7] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.

[8] «Sommet historique pour sceller l’Alliance des guerriers de Dieu », Réseau Voltaire, 17 octobre 2003.

[9] The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Samuel Huntington, Samuel Huntington, Belknap Press (1981).

[10] This controversy is still ongoing. To write this article I have mainly consulted these eight books: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, Shadia B. Drury, Palgrave Macmillan (1988). Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, Anne Norton, Yale University Press (2005). The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy, Catherine H. Zuckert & Michael P. Zuckert, University of Chicago Press (2008). Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians Against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers, Peter Minowitz, Lexington Books (2009). Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, Paul E. Gottfried, Cambridge University Press (2011). Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianism, East and West, Harry V. Jaffa, Rowman & Littlefield (2012). Leo Strauss, The Straussians, and the Study of the American Regime, Kenneth L. Deutsch, Rowman & Littlefield (2013). Leo Strauss and the Invasion of Iraq: Encountering the Abyss, Aggie Hirst, Routledge (2013).

[11] «Qui sont ces anciens soldats israéliens parmi les combattants de rue dans la ville de Kiev ?», AlyaExpress-News.com, 2 mars 2014. « The new Gladio in Ukraine », Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto (Italie) , Voltaire Network, March 18, 2014.

[12] “What about apologizing to Ukraine, Mrs. Nuland?”, by Andrey Fomin, Oriental Review (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 7 February 2014.

[13] « Exclusive : Documents Reveal Erik Prince’s $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine », Simon Shuster, Time, July 7, 2021.

Via: https://www.voltairenet.org/article215855.html and here: https://www.voltairenet.org/article221176.html

#Thierry Meyssan #neocons #BRICS vs NATO #BRICS vs WHIGS #ziocon #team b #straussians

0 notes

dhampiravidi · 1 year ago

Text

PJO/HOO oc form (Jas Wayland; AU)

template adapted from this one!

Basic Information

Full Name: Jasmine "Jas" Kythereia Wayland DOB: Sept. 15, 1990 (age 19 as of The Lost Hero) Gender: Cis Female Sexual Orientation: Bisexual Ethnicity: Black (African-American) & (Ancient) Roman Divine Relative: Aquilon (father), Hekate (maternal ancestor) Hometown: Stanford, California Previous Places: Athens/Athina, Greece (birthplace) Languages: English, Latin & Québécois French (fluent), Modern Greek (currently learning)

Appearance

Jas is a 5'3" (1.6 m) young woman. She takes after her mother, Kaya, so she has light brown skin (with warm undertones encouraged by lots of time in the sunshine), curling (shoulder-length) dark brown hair, even darker eyes & curvy hips despite her overall petite frame. Years of training have given her some muscle tone, visible in her forearms and thighs. She wears Camp Jupiter tank tops and breezy band t-shirts over shorts all year round, because she tends to get hot easily. For the same reason, she often ties her hair back into a small, rough ponytail. Jas only ever wears flip-flops or ankle boots, depending on her activities. Her accessories typically include stud earrings, black eyeliner, a leather bracelet & leather knee pads.

FC: Kat Graham

Background

Kaya Loren met Aquilon when she was teaching English & French to her Greek students, at the prestigious National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA). She thought he, who claimed to be a Canadian tourist, was a little suspicious initially, with his tendency to pop up whenever she was lonely. She didn't even feel particularly motivated to date him, because the Québécois version of French was so different from her European French (he claimed to only speak a bit of English). He won her over with his romantic gestures, good listening, and warm laugh. & then he revealed who he was (besides his English fluency), once he sensed she was pregnant with his child. She was more irritated than shocked. He advised her to return to the US, where she'd grown up, near Camp Jupiter, so their daughter could be safe. Kaya complied. He never told her that she was a legacy/descendant of a demigod child of Hekate since the Greek and Roman demigods were being kept apart in the modern day. When Jupiter confronted him over nearly exposing the big secret, Aquilon replied that he'd only been visiting his brother Favonius, the West Wind (which wasn't a lie). Aquilon would go on to dote on his only demigod child, sending her her beloved Imperial Gold short-swords as well as the occasional letter. Jas loved getting to speak to both of her parents, as she did living at the camp. She's currently studying Psychology at the camp's university.

Personality

Jas is an introvert. She spends lots of time with just one or two people, whether they're studying for an exam or the next War Games. Her favorite activities (reading, swimming & sword-fighting) all tend to be those that don't involve a crowd. However, she likes playing Siege &/or the Gladiatorial Fights, as those events force her to think quickly if she's going to win. Speaking of, her self-confidence jumps from 10 to 0 very quickly. She tends to get deeply frustrated when a seemingly easy task is hard & she equates taking a break with failure. Because of this, she is a hard worker. She's also incredibly loyal and protective when it comes to her friends. This is where her fatal flaw comes in. Jas can spot an enemy's weakness quickly, but it's almost impossible for her to find her strengths. While making a plan, sacrificing herself would be more logical than simply retreating. & in a relationship, she might never believe that her significant other loves her unconditionally. Her fatal flaw is her lack of philautia (self-love).

Demigod Stats:

Inherited Abilitie(s): cold tolerance, ice generation, Latin & French fluency, a knack for learning Greek faster than most, Weapon: dual shortswords (called gladii), named Frontinus I & II Mist Version: two long, bronze hairpins Best At: cleaning the aqueduct/sewer, gladiator fighting, siege, (some) Coliseum training (she sucks at using ranged weaponry) Worst At: deathball, construction, testing/fixing the catapults Rank: Senator/Centurion; Third Cohort

#demigod #pjo oc #jkw: headcanon

0 notes

undiscoveredclassics · 2 years ago

Photo

Here’s the next American Special we’re highlighting that will be at the 2023 Amelia Island Concours in our own class of 9 cars, the 1955 Bosley GT Mark I. Recognized as one of the finest hand-crafted specials built in the 1950s, the Bosley GT Mark I has wowed crowds around the world since it was first introduced via @roadandtrack magazine to the public in 1955. Richard Bosley, a horticulturist from Mentor, Ohio had never built a hot rod or car of any sort. In 1952 when he was 21 years old, he decided he wanted to build his dream car that would surpass anything on the market at the time. Len Frank, writing in Road & Track magazine, said that when he first saw the article in 1955, that the Bosley was the most exciting, gorgeously proportioned shape he had ever seen. Strother Macminn who was director of the Transportation Department of Pasadena Art Center of Design, stated that the Bosley changed the thinking of his students at that time. They had previously been influenced by European designers of the day. Bosley went sailing past their self-imposed limitations. Powered by the revered Chrysler Hemi engine, the low slung, fiberglass Bosley had an advertised top speed of more than 160 miles per hour. Intended as a dual purpose sports and racing car, the Bosley had a 55 gallon gas tank which made it ideal for long distance races. Ohio based creator Richard Bosley found it difficult to secure funding to produce his car in quantity. Built at a cost of over $9000, this prototype remains the only Bosley GT Mark I ever produced. . . . . #undiscoveredclassics #forgottenfiberglass #fiberglasscar #fiberglass #handbuilt #sportscar #sportscars #americansportscar #restoration #restorationproject #restorationcars #carrestoration #classiccar #classiccars #cars #carsofinstagram #carswithoutlimits #vintagecars #customcars #carcheology #theamelia #bosleygt #bosley #richardbosley #strothermacminn (at Tampa, Florida) https://www.instagram.com/p/CmtnjEGrY_i/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

0 notes

irradiate-space · 2 years ago

Text

The Mardi Bash, 1984, and SAC_2045's Sustainable War: How do we achieve peace if the Mardi bash' is right?

I'm going to put most of this under a spoiler, but this is inspired by a tag I once saw from @isaacsapphire: "the mardi bash was right". It stuck with me because it's an apt condensation of Great Powers diplomacy-via-proxy-war, and because I've seen more fiction recently that deals with the perpetual wars.

Spoilers follow for Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045's second season, and basically the entire Terra Ignota series starting with Too Like The Lightning. Spoilers also for the endgame of Worth The Candle and the early settings of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and The Matrix.

The Mardi bash was a think tank whose working theory of war was that the longer a period of peace there was, the more horrible the next war would be. They spent their lives to answer the question: How do you prevent the next war from being apocalyptic?

I. A list of solutions in Minecraft

SAC_2045's second season reveals that the first season's "sustainable war" — a Great Powers conflict managed by AIs and fought primarily with robots and mercenaries, to relieve international conflict via the minimum of violence and destruction necessary — was created and orchestrated by an American Empire AI called 19A4. 19A4's tasking included the requirement for world peace and a benefit to all humanity, but the American Empire should benefit the most.

Terra Ignota's OS Conspiracy is revealed to be a hereditary band of assassins who relieve inter-Hive (read: international) conflict via deaths chosen by human computers who can find the one person on Earth whose death will resolve the conflict. Their choice of whom to kill is subject to practical and political restrictions: only someone whose death will have a significant impact, only an unpromising person (no members of OS' own Humanist Hive), no one whose death will expose OS, no member of the European or Mitsubishi Hives.

Also in Terra Ignota, the Mardi bash' is a family group like OS, but rather than maintain peace in our time via assassination, they studied war. They concluded that long periods without armed conflict mean that technology advances beyond the knowledge of weaponization, and when a war occurs after a long period of peace, not-yet-weaponized technology is quickly weaponized in unanticipated ways. Too long without war, and we may end up with humanity-extincting weapons being used because no one knew that they would cause extinction. Therefore, says the Mardi bash', let us have a small war. A war which is not too extreme. A minimal number of deaths, to prevent more deaths.

OS says, let us kill this one person, so that interhive conflict does not result in a greater number of deaths.

JEDD MASON says: if we are to have war in the future, let the laws of war be the same as the laws of daily life, which means no killing now that we have nonlethal methods of making war.

19A4 and the sustainable-war AIs say, let us fight over here, because these deaths and destruction will maintain the greater international peace.

Did the wars in 1984 actually happen? Or was the description of the distant wars enough to relieve the population's need for war?

The culmination of these different technologies is the doublethink of The N in SAC_2045: Each person lives in a bubble which makes them content, as they carry on in a shared physical reality with every other person on the planet. This solution was set up by Takashi Shimamura, a high school student and programming prodigy interested in perceived-reality hacks.

Now for three other simulated-reality peaces:

The final Heaven of Worth The Candle, where a benevolent god helps you do whatever makes you happy. The world runs on narrativium now; what the new god says is what happens.

The initial setting of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, where a Three-Laws god helps you do whatever makes you happy. Your reality is implemented through physics hacks and the power of distributed computing.

The Matrix and The Animatrix use that same simulated reality, but put humanity in pods to support it. Their Earth is trashed by apocalyptic wars; the pod people provide the compute while the pods provide them life.

These benevolent gods tend to partition people off in their own realities, physically disjoint from the fantasies of other people. Not so for The N: their benevolent implementor has no godlike abilities. The N's doublethink software can only manipulate the Cartesian theatres of people who use cyberbrains. Their different perceived realities still overlap physically with each other and with the offline, so the doublethink has to make sure that no N actually takes action which destroys the world. Sisyphus' body rolls the rock up the hill each day; we must imagine his cyberbrain is happy.

II. Solutions in Minecraft

If the Mardi' bash is right, if a longer war makes the next war more terrible, how do we prevent that war's terrors? Indeed, how do we prevent the terrors not just of any particular future war, but of all wars?

A summary of answers:

OS puts off the war indefinitely, one murder at a time.

The Mardi' bash plans a small, safe war to interrupt the current happy peace, so that there may still be people left after the war scheduled for 300 years in the future, but they do not prevent the war.

JEDDM allows that there might be war, so let's make illegal for war to be lethal.

19A4 and the American Empire fold the upcoming war into the eternal, forever, small-scale conflicts called "sustainable war", which is more about stroking the AE's military-industrial complex' collective dick than it is about uplifting the rest of the world.

1984 tells people about all the successes they're having in the big war, but doesn't actually make their lives better or pleasant.

The Matrix gives people a happy life, so long as they're in pods hooked on to 1990s Simulator: Beige Edition.

Takashi Shumamura set up the software which links The N together, sharing a physical reality but perceiving whatever makes them happy.

Prime Intellect and the ascended Juniper Smith solve the problem by ending the world, but they're benevolent omnipotent gods, so they can do that.

III. But we're not in Minecraft, are we?

We don't seem to have a benevolent omnipotent god handy, and we don't have cyberbrains. We don't even have reliably-nonlethal weapons. Is the best solution to the problem of war the current status quo (ignoring Ukraine) of small lethal conflicts, or is there a better way to solve the tensions which give rise to war?

1984 proposed state control of the media environment in order to deceive a populace into a state of complacency. Would the information environment of 1984 work if people self-sorted into their desired filter bubbles, not just in the Internet, but in meatspace as well?

IIII. A preview of coming attractions

It looks like speculative fiction has caught up with the war in Afghanistan. But now I'm wondering about filter-bubbles, and the things which pop them. The neo-Victorians' media environment in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age and the social filters in Charles Stross' Accelerando come to mind as examples of the genre, but

What other stories address the effects of living in your own media environment?

How would the third season of SAC_2045 play out? I have my thoughts, but I'd like to know yours.

#the mardi bash was right #terra ignota #worth the candle #ghost in the shell: sac 2045 #sac_2045 #sac 2045 #ghost in the shell #edited

26 notes · View notes

natache · 3 years ago

Text

Ita Rina

First and Forgotten Yugoslav Film Star who provocated Gestapo

Ita Rina was born on 7 July 1907 in the small town of Divača (then Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Yugoslavia, now Slovenia) as Italina Lida Kravanja. She was called Ida Kravanja for short. She was named after a journalist Finzi Haydée, Jewish family friend from Trieste. The first daughter of Jožef a railroad worker and Marija Kravanja, Rina had a younger sister Danica. Shortly after the outbreak of the World War I, the family moved to Ljubljana, where Rina matriculated in 1923. She was not a good student; she repeated the third grade of elementary school. However, her dream was to be an actress.

In October 1926, Slovenski narod (Slovenian People) magazine organized a beauty pageant, and Rina entered the competition. She was crowned Miss Slovenia and was to travel to the final event for Miss Yugoslavia, which was supposed to be held on 20 December 1926 in Zagreb. However, her mother did not want to let her go to Zagreb. After a group visit from the Slovenian delegation, Marija Kravanja relented. Unfortunately, when Rina arrived in Zagreb, the jury was already choosing the most beautiful of three finalists. She was, however, noticed by Adolf Müller, the owner of Balkan Palace cinema in Zagreb. He immediately sent her photographs to German film producer Peter Ostermayer. As her mother did not want to let her go to Berlin, Rina ran away from home.

Her escape was enabled by a family friend, a painter Alojz Malota and his wife Hedvig Šarc. They invited her to come with them on a trip to Austria, and instead she went to Berlin. She has said that she felt very lonely and scared during the train ride and thought about returning home.

“That was my longest and hardest journey. I huddled myself in a corner of a coupe and looked around myself in fear. I only knew few words in German...”

Rina arrived in Berlin in 1927. Shortly after she had her first audition, following which she had classes in acting, diction, dancing.

"They would shine a spotlight on me" she later said "cameras would buzz. There were cables everywhere. Some complete strangers would stare at me, whispering amongst themselves. They told me to scream, to laugh, wave and cry. I think I looked most natural in scenes where I was crying. All I had to do was remember how far away from home I've gone and how I've deceived my mother."

"You don't know how to walk!" a director was yelling. I've dedicated all my strength on walking as gracefully as possible, and I thought to myself "how's it possible that I, who have climbed Triglav thrice, all of sudden am incapable of walking." I must admit, first few steps on film were harder than any danger definitely mountaineering.

After several small film roles in 1927 and 1928, the critics finally noticed her in the 1928 film The Last Supper. The same year, Rina met at a Yugoslav embassy party, her future husband Miodrag Đorđević, a shy engineering student from Belgrade, son of a general director of the Royal Post Office.

He asked her out to dinner in a little more upscale restaurant. What he would find out later is that his students account was not enough to pay for the meal. He went to the phone in an attempted to call a friend who could lend him money. Ita figured out what was going on, and since she was already rich, secretly passed him a few bank notes, to spare him the embarrassment. She always liked him, and they understood each other well.

Around that time newspapers in Yugoslavia started to sensationalize her love life, as a counter she published an open letter.

Cenjeni g. urednik!

Vsikdar sem bila ljubeznjiva napram g. dopisniku Vašega lista. Želela sem na ta način izražati simpatije, ki sem jih gojila do “Vremena”. Toda nežentlementski dopis Vašega dopisnika od 15. t. m. je zlorabil to mojo ljubeznivost in me prisilil, da Vas naprošam zaradi istine za uvrstitev naslednjih vrstic: Prišla sem domov na oddih, da se pripravim za bodoče delo, ne pa da se zaljubljam kakor goska. Zaradi tega ne potrebujem nikakih senzacij, zlasti pa ne senzacij, ki gredo preko meja dopustnega. Čudim se prostosti, ki si jo jemlje g. Ambrož, da izmišlja kar imena mojih idealov. Prava senzacija bi bila šele, ko bi g. Ambrož nekoliko srečneje uganil moje ideale. Kar pa piše g. Ambrož, je bilo doslej meni in vsem mojim znancem docela neznano. Odpotovala bom tedaj, ko me pokliče novo delo. Senzacijonalni odhod avtomobilov itd. je prosta glupost.

Da končam. Žal mi je, da se je edini g. O. Ambrož smatral za najpametnejšega od vseh tukajšnjih novinarjev in da je segel po tako nehvaležnem poslu. Naši javnosti je treba servirati resnico o mojem delu in moji osebi, ne pa glupih izmišljotin. Prejmite g. urednik izraze itd.

Ita Rina.

Her breakthrough into European stardom came after taking a role in a controversial film Erotikon by a Czechoslovakian director Gustav Mahaty. As soon as she read the script about a seduced and then abandoned daughter of a guard of a railroad station, she understood it as her big chance, and she was right.

Erotikon premiered in Prague. Czechoslovakian censors cut out the scene of her giving birth to a child, but the movie garnered great success with film critics and audiences across Europe. At the premiere in Paris in Moulin Rouge and the film goers carried her out of the theatre on their hands.

The films success angered the puritans. Especially the french catholic theologian, abbot Betteleme who wrote: "... First, they lie next to each other, and then one to another ... It is true that the cover hides their figures, but it certainly does not hide their movements... The protagonists are shown in particularly long shots, especially Ita... A viewer can recognize her excitement, then her expression of anxiety mixed with longing, then the pain and at the end... I blush while describing the scenes". He went though streets of Paris tearing down the posters that were plastered all over. That only raised the popularity of the film.

In 1930, Rina acted in three films, most notable being the first talking Czechoslovakian film Tonka of the Gallows, which is often named her best role. Meanwhile, she married Miodrag Đorđević in 1931. Although she had announced her retirement from her film career, but she actually continued her acting until the outbreak of World War II. Her last prewar film was crime drama Zentrale Rio.

The situation in Germany was getting tense, especially for anybody who was considered undesirable which included actors who were foreign. She left Germany on the insistence of the then ambassador of Yugoslavia Ivo Andrić. In 1939, very close to the start of WW2 every time she went to work or went home, there was a man who sat in the car. In the beginning he was very quiet and she thought he was an assistant of the producer and that he might represent some new custume, a way of saying thanks to the actors. And then he spoke. At first there were talks of the superiority of the German race, but later his changes because more apparent. "I argued with him in that car" she told to the operator in the studio and retold him the whole conversation. "How could you have dared, that man is from Gestapo." said the operator. The story was retold to Ivo Andrić, and he ordered her and her husband to urgently leave Germany. The taping of the film was mostly done. That night they packed all of their belongs. In the morning she taped a few leftover scenes and absconded for Belgrade that same day.

"Only on the road I understood what's going on. Tanks everywhere, soldiers."

They went to live in Belgrade. She didn't act as the war was starting to rage and had her first child Milan in 1940 and thee years later a daughter Tijana. Her in-laws disagreed with the marriage to a controversial actress at first. And they had a permanent table for themselves and their friends at the local tavern.

After the bombing of Belgrade they moved to Vrnjačka Banja. Life during wartime was hard and she laboured and sold all of her possessions to keep family fed. She even rescued her husband from jail where he landed after he, in a tavern proclaimed that Hitler will have the same fate Napoleon did in Russia.

They moved back to Belgrade after the end of World War II in 1945. Although she was promised several roles in Yugoslav films, all projects were cancelled and she was treated unfavorably. After receipt of a letter she had written to President Tito, Rina began working as a co–production advisor in Avala Film. But she soon left Avala Film and moved to Lovćen Film.

She returned to the silver screen once, in the 1960 film War, about nuclear war fallout, directed by Veljko Bulajić. This was her last role. She got her role not though a studio, but through her husband asking nicely.

“Before the shooting of the film War began, I was approached by a very likable gentleman, that was the husband of Mrs. Ita Rine Miodrag, and in a very discreet, shy way, asked if we can talk and during that conversation, suggested to cast Ita. Honestly speaking, I have already completely forgotten about her. There was war, and they she didn't work for a very long time. She wasn't listed anywhere in cinematography as an active actress. I remembered her from her films. I suggested we meet. So we met, I don't know where in Zagreb or Belgrade, I cannot remember, but she impressed me. She made a strong impression, of a smart woman, an actress who didn't want to be in a film for no other reason, but to be filmed. She wanted to know about her role. I really liked that, so we made a deal.”

As she suffered from asthma, Rina and her husband moved to Budva (then Yugoslavia, now Montenegro) in 1967. There, she took care of her husband, who was ill with sclerosis. Rina died on 10 May 1979 from an asthmatic attack during the great earthquake that leveled the capital of Montenegro. She was buried a few days later in Belgrade, in the presence of numerous film artists, admirers, friends and family. Her husband died next year.

Best source is in Slovene here:

#ita rina #slovenia #german cinema #european cinema #20s #fritz lang #german expressionism #1920s #1930 #Yugoslavia #natache

67 notes · View notes

beardedmrbean · 3 years ago

Text

"I'm scared that there will be a nuclear war," said Henry, 13 in the town of Sarstedt in northern Germany.

He is not alone. Young Germans are increasingly worried about the war in Ukraine, specifically the idea that the conflict may spill into other countries, or that Russia might make use of its nuclear weapons. This is according to a survey of 206 13- to 17-year-olds polled on March 2 and 3 by theInternational Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI) in Munich, a think-tank funded by Bavarian public broadcaster BR.

"Nine out of ten teens are anxious and worried about the situation in Ukraine," the study found.

They have two specific concerns: First "that other countries will be attacked because one country is not enough for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin." This could specifically be a NATO or EU nation like Poland, thus bringing about "World War III."And secondly: "Russia will threaten us with nuclear bombs" and the German authorities wouldnˈt be able to warn people about an imminent attack in time to reach safety.

'Where should I flee to?'

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made young Europeans think what only three weeks ago was unthinkable: that war could come to the European Union.

"The possibility of World War III, or even worse, nuclear war, terrifies me and many of my friends," said Gül, 17, who lives in Rheinfelden, near Germany's border with Switzerland. "My parents came to Germany from Turkey in search of a better life. And now I ask myself what we will do if there really is a world war. Where should I flee to? What will my life look like? Will I even get out of this country alive?"

German teenagers were born after the wars in the Balkans that saw NATO involvement and German participation in the late 1990s. Fears of Russian aggression are even more a thing of the past — not only for the youngest in society.

"For my parentsˈ generation, growing up during the Cold War, nuclear conflict felt like a real possibility," said Julia, a 35-year-old high school teacher in southern Germany.

"And even after the fall of the Soviet Union, they continued to be skeptical of Russia and didn't see it as changing very much. They say they feel prepared for this moment, though the large scope of the attack surprised them. But for my generation and the generation I teach, war, especially nuclear war, in Europe felt like the most remote thing imaginable … until three weeks ago."

German TikTok and Instagram are flooded with videos about how to prepare emergency rations, as well as speculation on how likely an attack on Germany may be. They are attracting hundreds of thousands of likes.

Google searches for potassium iodide tablets, which help prevent radiation poisoning, have skyrocketed across Germany following reports of an attack on Ukraine's largest nuclear power station.

Depressing and difficult

"It is difficult listening to the news because what is happening right now in Ukraine is scary, even for us German teens," said Erin, 17, in Frankfurt.

"It is depressing because we have sympathy with the teenagers in Ukraine. Seeing daughters and fathers having to say goodbye and not knowing when they will see each other again is very hard for me," she said. She added that the subject was barely discussed in school, but she was divided on whether or not it should be, since the topic weighed so heavily on her.

The IZI study found that despite what adults might assume, most German teens were still getting the bulk of their information about the war from their parents, public television, and the website of mainstream news services — sources they considered more likely to be accurate.

13-year-old Henry said that he was "worried about the people in Ukraine" and that students in his class quickly began collecting donations for refugees.

According to IZI, after news on the ground, the thing teens most wanted most was to know how to assist people their own age who had to flee their homes.

Not only was social media filled with "how you can help" posts, but interest groups like sports clubs and the environmentalist movement Fridays for Future have temporarily shifted focus to collecting donations and organizing solidarity marches in support of Ukraine.

Sociologist Klaus Hurrelmann with the Hertie School in Berlin believes this might turn out to be part of a real shift in young Germans' priorities: "Fear of war could replace concerns about climate and the environment, which have always been ahead in surveys over the past ten years," he told the daily Die Welt.

IZI study leader Maya Göth calls on parents and teachers to allow teens to "express their thoughts and concerns," in a constructive way, instead of downplaying them.

#nunyas news #they'll have to get through Poland first #they won't be able to #the instant they hit a nato country #their goose is cooked

11 notes · View notes

lizzie-saltzman · 3 years ago

Text

I’LL CRAWL HOME TO YOU

A Hizzie fanfiction / update

Pairing: Hope Mikaelson/Lizzie Saltzman Fandom: Legacies Rating: M Chapters: 2/? Summary: In many ways, meeting Hope in a different reality had helped Lizzie put things in perspective, and perhaps even understand her in ways she hadn’t before. Understand them, their connection, the palpable animosity that had turned into a reluctant friendship and now something far more tangible. The rest, well, she doesn’t tell Josie. Not about waking up after three weeks away from her real home, tucked under the covers of Hope’s bed with their clothes discarded around the dormitory, with a light sheen of sweat on her forehead and her hair sticking to her cheekbones. There were some things better left unsaid. (Upon her return from an alternate timeline a Malivore monster teleported her to, Lizzie must deal with the aftermath of her time spent away, and her newly doormat feelings for Hope Mikaelson.)

chapter 1 here

READ CH. 2 HERE ON AO3 or under the read more

[ 3 WEEKS AGO ]

A muddy splash sends speckles of murky water coating a pair of white boots. Under the full moon, an owl hoots, as Lizzie Saltzman breaks through the branches that leave a bloody mark on her left cheek. She reaches for it, with a mumbled expletive as her breathing grows heavier and her knees start to give. Behind her, a black wolf with yellow tinted eyes that shine through the darkness of the woods gives chase, snarling as it draws closer to her.

She’s been sprinting for a while; Lizzie’s exhausted, pushing past the burn on her thighs as she rounds a corner and leaps over a log dangerously set on the ground, almost losing her balance as her boot skids through the mud. Its drizzling, her clothes are weighing her down, her hair is ruined – if she had the mind to complain about the other terrible but insignificant, personal circumstances, she’d be holding an ice pack to her cheek and ranting over a Strawberry Smoothie. Instead, she finds herself here, in the outskirts of the woods in Mystic Falls, barely managing to get on her feet before the wolf catches up to her.

“Lecutio!” She’s all out of magic after –– the ball of energy flies ahead of the wolf and crashes against the tree behind it, effectively snapping off the branches and watching as they fall near the wolf long enough to distract it. It wasn’t her intention, really – she was aiming for it’s head. Soon enough, the wolf turns it’s head (and it’s disorienting eyes) in her direction, growling.

“Crap…” And she takes off again, her boots splash, splash, splashing rapidly on the wet floor. This is not how she pictured spending a Sunday night.

Her lungs are giving out, her body begs her to stop running; she might pass out from exhaustion alone, and her vision – on top of that – blurs as the light drizzle of rain washes over her face. She wipes it away with the palm of her hand, but it obstructs her already impaired vision in the dark, and trips over a boulder on the ground. Lizzie groans, her body rolling through the mud, and the wolf slows it’s approach. She’s cornered. She’s screwed. She’s dead.

The wolf stalks forward. Lizzie raises her hands to her face, and it launches itself through the air.

Lizzie screams, anticipating the powerful impact, the bite, but instead another wolf collides in the air with her attacker. White, with speckles of grey. They roll around in the mud, snarling at each other, growling, taking bites anywhere their teeth can sink into until they’re both back on their feet. Lizzie watches, covering her mouth as she gasps, pushing herself back until her shoulders meet one of the trees behind her.

Then, the white wolf attacks the black one again. They begin their vicious snarling, and as Lizzie finds the force to pick herself off the ground, she hears one of them whimper. When she looks back, the black wolf is retreating, disappearing through the trees, and the white one turns, even slower in its approach. Lizzie’s eyes widen, out of magic, and out of breath, but she turns around in an attempt to try and run away again.

Except she spins out, when she feels her black hoodie being yanked away from her body, leaving her in a tank top under the rain that starts to pick up. She turns around angrily, but instead of finding a white wolf stalking back, she finds –

“Hope?”

Hope is sporting her too-big-for-her hoodie over her naked body and watching her with her arms crossed over her chest. It covers just enough. Not everything. Just enough.

“Oh, thank God!” Lizzie exclaims, throwing her arms around Hope in sweet, sweet relief as she tries to catch her breath. “I thought I was dead. Dead, dead.”

But she knows Hope Mikaelson. Always coming through with her last minute heroics.

Except this time, Hope pushes her away, hands on her shoulders, taking a step back to get a good look at her. They look at each other, almost comically; Hope with an eyebrow quirked and Lizzie, with her mouth agape. Then, Hope’s strange behavior is perfectly clear –

“Who the hell are you?”

------

[ PRESENT DAY ]

“Lizzie!”

Hope’s tired voice carries down the hallway. Behind her, Lizzie can hear her footsteps approaching – faster, faster – until they stop at her side, walking in tandem with her into the vast, otherwise dusty library at the end of the hall, where students gather quietly over a pile of books raging from anything about the occult to the mundane – European History and an old, thick Gaelic book about Magical Portals that thuds on the ground as it falls sloppily from the top of the bookshelf and almost takes Lizzie out. Talk about head trauma.

“Hey, watch it!” Lizzie looks up as dust gathers below her. Alyssa Chang stands on the top of the rolling ladder, shrugging nonchalantly. Whoops.

Lizzie picks up the book, coughs, swatting the dust away and piling it on top of Hope’s already busy hands. Hope says nothing, only blinks away the speckles of dust as she trails behind Lizzie with concern.

“I haven’t seen you all day. Is everything okay?”

She shouldn’t be taken aback, but she is, by the genuine worried inflection in Hope Mikaelson’s voice. Hope is tired, the evidence marked clearly on her face, vaguely darkened circles under her eyes that Hope barely had mind to conceal this morning with even the smallest layer of makeup. No one would be able to tell, not really, but Lizzie can. She knows that look Hope carries around like a weight on her back when something’s been keeping her up at night.

In front of the tinted window sill, Lizzie turns. The yellow light reflects off Hope’s exhausted, blue eyes, and Lizzie almost stutters, opting to instead, snatch the book back from the pile already gathered on Hope’s arms and toss it onto the nearest unoccupied table.

No, Hope. I’ve been avoiding you all morning until this very unfortunate meeting where we’ll be subjected to a torturous hour of incessant nerd rambling on how to kill the very same monster that sent me through a hell portal into another dimension where I hooked up with you and your unforgettable muscles and now I can’t even look at you in the eyes without thinking about it, so–

“I’m fine”. Lizzie says, saccharine sweet. Too sweet. Enough to make Hope suspicious, as she looks at the book Lizzie tossed on the table with an eyebrow raised. “I was having a perfectly fine morning until MG interrupted my strictly scheduled morning meditation and after reluctantly agreeing to meet here in exactly five minutes, the kitchen was out of Belgian Waffles, so I had to settle for a non-fat Greek yogurt. So yes, I’ve been severely inconvenienced, but it has nothing to do with you”.

“I never said it has –” Hope starts. “Shouldn’t we talk about it? About what happened…”

Lizzie stiffens.

“With the monster…”

She deflates.

“We still don’t know if there are any side effects to any of this. Doctor Saltzman said you refused to talk to Emma about what happened –”

“And now you’re giving me advice about what I should and shouldn’t talk to our school therapist about?” Lizzie scoffs, on the defensive, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “That’s rich, Hope”.

“That’s not what I meant –”

“Everyone at this school is so prolific at internalizing every shitty thing that happens to us on a weekly basis but since this one particular thing happened to me, then of course I’m the one who has to have the damage control, witchy therapy sessions with Emma despite the fact that I’ve already told everyone who’s asked that I’m fine!”

“Lizzie –”

“Is that why you were looking for me this morning? You wanted to check up on me?”

“Yes”. Hope says sincerely. Its her version of an olive branch – honesty. Lizze frowns, but Hope touches her wrist and she stays frozen in place, like she’s been jolted and immobilized by an invisible force. “The same night you found your way back to us you rushed into the woods on a near suicide mission to help me fight a monster we’re still not sure how to kill. Of course I wanted to check up on you. I was worried. You left my bedroom so suddenly last night that I didn’t even have time to ask how you were feeling. I wasn’t sure if you were ever going to come back. I wasn’t sure if we were ever going to see you again.”

Lizzie takes a breath, defeated. We, we, we – she has no right to be stung by the plurality of the word, but it gives her that feeling in the middle of her throat, like it runs dry, like one wrong word from Hope and she might break down in tears.

“I want to make sure you’re okay”. Hope continues. “You’re my best friend”.

And that’s the tragedy of it. She’s Hope’s best friend. Anything beyond that is nothing but something she could only clearly wish for in another timeline. One where Hope doesn’t know about her baggage, one where they got a clean slate to restart their history, no rumors, no backhanded comments…

“Me too”. Lizzie whispers. She brings her thumb up to brush over the side of Hope’s hand.

She thinks about holding it. She almost does, until –

“Yo, guys. We should get this show on the road”. Jed interjects, seemingly out of nowhere, picking up the book Lizzie had discarded on the table earlier and hopping over the banister towards the center table in the now empty library, where the rest of the squad has now gathered around one of Wade’s Dungeons and Dragons books.

By the time Lizzie pulls her hand back and they both gather around the table, Wade’s already settled in with the group.

“– That’s the thing though. Dimensional Warpers don’t usually engage in combat, but they do like learning about their enemies and their battle tactics. They’re not usually ones to initiate but they’ll fight if they sense that their life is in danger.”

“That explains why it disappeared last night and didn’t come back”. Hope pushes her way in between MG and Jed at the front and center of the table. “Do you think it’s after something?”

“Maybe. I can’t imagine another reason why Malivore would’ve spit that particular monster out. They’re elusive, hard to kill, and they only come out at night. Their night vision is impeccable”.

“How do we kill it?”

“Well, they are giant, bipedal, flying snakes, but they’re still snakes. I think we all know what the easiest way to kill one is –”

“Cut off it��s head”. Lizzie deadpans. Everyone turns, and Lizzie stands on the other side of the table, looking intently at the picture of the creature on Wade’s book.

And Hope, looking at the magical artifacts on the far side display, slumps her shoulders.

“We’re gonna need a very big sword”.

------

[ 3 WEEKS AGO ]

“Is your name Lizzie Saltzman?”

“Yes”. Between two slender and shaky hands, an orb flashes blue.

Across the antique, expensive looking desk in front of her, and a family portrait in the space where a tinted window used to sit, Klaus Mikaelson looks at Hope with concern and curiosity. Hope, looking taller and prouder as her hand rests upon Klaus’ leather chair, gives him a side eye.

She remembers Klaus from when she was younger, just as intimidating and commanding as he had been the day he’d sought out their help to save Hope from the Hollow all those years ago. She also remembers the Klaus she’s read about, in the books tucked away in the very same library a couple of doors down the hallway; the tales about The Great Evil. The boogeyman to end them all. The man who had terrorized Mystic Falls and claimed New Orleans like a dynasty, the man who had courted her mother until the day he died — but she also remembers the Klaus Mikaelson that Hope had told her about. The father. The man weighed down by the consequences of his choices and the drive to ensure his family’s survival, their safety, no matter the cost. In one universe, it had already cost him his life. In this one, the story seems to have been painted differently.

In this story, Hope is different. She’s prouder, she wears a scowl like armor but not with the purpose of pushing everyone away. This Hope reminds her of an heiress. Someone destined to inherit something bigger and greater than herself. Maybe it’s all this, Lizzie thinks. The Mikaelson School. Maybe it’s another kingdom entirely.

She looks… Good. Really good.

“Are you Alaric Saltzman’s daughter?” Hope continues.

“Yes”. Blue again.

“That doesn’t make any sense”. Klaus moves to take the orb from her hands, but Hope is faster — much faster — grabs his father’s arm before he can snatch it.

“Dad, you can’t fool the magical lie detector. They’re simple yeses or no's”.

Klaus respects her, she can tell, because he backs off and opens a drawer in his desk, takes out a heavy looking file — and pulls out a picture of her dad. He puts it in front of her.

“This man is your father?” He asks her again.

“Yes”.

And like clockwork, the orb shines blue again.

“That doesn’t make any sense —” Lizzie goes to interject but Klaus holds his finger up, standing from his chair with his hands behind his back, circling around the office like a man with a decision to make. Technically he is… a man with a decision to make. About her.

Which really, really gives her the chills. The bad kind.

“— You see, Alaric is a slobber of a drunk man who unfortunately lost his wife on his wedding day. He was supposed to father two children, twins actually, and his psychopathic to-be brother-in-law murdered his fiancé at the altar. His daughters perished with her. He lost his Tenure at Mystic Falls High, now teaches a second-rate-history class at a local college, and he let the rest of his dreams die in the bottom of a bottle of stale whiskey and fatty liver disease. That man never got to father any children. He’s barely a man at all. No purpose. No drive”.

“Apparently not in this life —” Lizzie mutters. The orb flashes blue and Hope’s eyes immediately snap to Lizzie’s.

“What is that supposed to mean?” She’s the one taking the orb from her hands in a blink of an eye. She’s fast. Really fast. It takes her a second to realize, as Hope holds it between her fingertips and looks at her with blind distrust, that the Hope in this universe might not be jaded by the loss of her family, but this one might be jaded by something else.

Like her own death.

Oh.

“You’re gonna want to sit down for this one”.

------

The Mikaelson School library is even bigger than The Salvatore School’s. The Stallions were branded as the rich, spoiled, and troubled children of Mystic Falls, but the Mikaelson school rivals the self-made stereotype by a tenfold. Lizzie’s staring at a row of books about magic she could have only ever dreamed of reading — it’s obvious to her that Klaus Mikaelson’s vision for a school for the Supernatural was slightly different than her father’s. Somewhere witches, vampires, werewolves and others could live their powers to their full potential.

She picks a book from the rack, takes another one down with it, but Hope catches it before it can fully fall off the shelf — Necromancy: The Art of the Undead — and pushes it back in its place.

“If what you told me is true then your father built a school with the same purpose my father did”. She offers. This Hope, now a little less guarded and lit by the light of the full moon by the library window, is much softer, willing to momentarily let her guard down around the pretty stranger with the wavy blonde hair. “He wanted a place where I felt like I belonged. Somewhere he could offer a safe haven not only for me, but for all the witches, all the vampires, and all the werewolves who are forced to do all of this all on their own. The world is cruel and unrepentant. My dad knows that. So he and my mom bought this mansion, expanded it, and made it into a school for the Supernatural. It’s taken off since; we have a branch in Belgium and another one in development in South America. Argentina. Something about the wine…”

For the first time since she’d been blindly dropped into this dimension, Lizzie smiles. But after a much noticeable glance at Lizzie’s lips, Hope continues. “We thought all the Gemini witches were dead. They’re rare. Powerful —” Hope says. It takes a second for Lizzie to notice she’s sizing her down.

She doesn’t want to talk about how that makes her feel.

“You have to take someone’s magic to use it, right?”

And Hope offers her hand. Lizzie’s brows furrow, but she takes it anyway. She’s siphoned magic from Hope before, but not a fully triggered Tribrid Hope. When she drains her power Lizzie feels an adrenaline rush like no other, like sticking her hand directly into a fuse box and taking all the energy in Mystic Falls with it. She watches Hope carefully for any sign of pain, but Hope doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t move, only watches their joined hands.

Then Lizzie raises her wrist, flicks it, and closes all the doors of The Mikaelson school in simultaneous fashion, making the building tremble.

“Something like that”. Lizzie grins and Hope lets her hand go. She’s grinning back and Lizzie doesn’t know why that makes her feel drunker than taking all that power from her. “The stronger the source the stronger and the magic we can do, but we can take from anything that’s come in contact with magic. This building, for example. A vampire, a werewolf — miscellaneous…”

“Well, here at the Mikaelson school we’re always looking for other powerful witches. I know you want to go back home eventually, once we figure out how to send you back, but if you want to stay, we can make room for you.”

They walk past the archway, to a display case with magical artifacts and weapons of all kinds. Some she recognizes, like the dagger that had started it all that brutally eventful day when Rafael joined the school, the urn, an enchanted compass, Papa Tunde’s blade…

“We’ve collected those over the years”. Hope motions to the display case. “Some of them were already in my dad’s possession before we put them here. The display case was enchanted by my aunt, so it’s practically impenetrable and impossible to open unless you’re a Mikaelson, but my mom thinks it’s important to teach these kids everything we can about magic and everything that could hurt them. Some of them —” She continues, sliding her finger over a display case of weapons. “— are just purely decorative though”.

Lizzie watches Hope’s finger land on the glass over a large broadsword.

“What exactly do you know about my family?” Hope asks. When she looks at the display again, Lizzie can see her own reflection next to Hope’s on the glass, and when she looks closer at the weapon, their faces on the side of the broadsword.

“Oh, you have no idea”.

------

[ PRESENT DAY]

Sparks cloud Lizzie’s vision. At the old mill, in the dead of night, Hope sharpens a sword Lizzie thinks is larger than her standing up. She’d poke fun at her, for wielding such a big weapon for such a small person, but if the past few weeks — days — weeks — whatever, had taught her anything, is how immeasurable the power Hope wields at her fingertips is. Maybe she could provide them both with a quip, if she wasn’t so busy staring at her, agape.

God, get it together, Lizzie.

She clears her throat and Hope stops.

“Hey! I thought we could get a head start with this old thing. Your dad kept it downstairs but I think it’ll give us the firepower we need. It’s a shame though, it’d make for a nice decoration”.

Lizzie wants to laugh. No, it would make for an awful piece of decoration. She’d seen it displayed neatly on a case, but ancient artifacts and old swords make her think of ancient cursed castles and the ghosts within them.

“So asks-too-many-questions Hope has now become knight-in-shining-armor Hope. I gotta say, I think I like this version a little bit better”.

“Because I’m not asking questions?” Hope challenges.

“That’s part of it”.

They both laugh, look at each other as Lizzie takes her place beside Hope, until Hope goes stoic again. She puts the blade down, wipes her hands on her dark jeans.

“Lizzie, I know this isn’t by far the most threatening monster we’ve ever faced but, I think you should stay inside the school. Kaleb and I designed a foolproof plan to kill the —”

“Why are you sidelining me?” Lizzie frowns. “I was of perfectly good help last time you almost got sucked into a portal too, remember?”

“That’s not what I meant —”

“Then what do you mean Hope? I know this isn’t about glory. So what is it? Martyrdom? Pushing people who care about you away?”

And Hope is surprisingly calm, despite the tension in Lizzie’s voice, despite the way she raises it, despite the way it cuts through the sound of the chirping crickets in the woods. “No. It’s the opposite, actually. It’s about trying to keep the people I care about safe. I don’t want you to end up somewhere you won’t be able to come back to us if we risk it”.

“What about Kaleb, then? Surely you care about him”.

A beat.

“Not the way I care about you”.

They stand there, in the cold of the Old Mill, looking at each other as Hope picks up the sword on the table, and Lizzie realizes for the first time, Hope is making an entirely selfish decision… And it’s all about her.

#hizzie #hizzie fanfiction #hizzie fic #hope x lizzie #legacies fanfiction

30 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago

Text

Political economy vs inflation

As Biden lays out ambitious plans to stimulate the US economy and fight inequality with new money creation (spending) and money destruction (higher taxes on corporations, capital gains and the right), a firing squad of economists assembled to issue dire inflation warnings.

They're repeating the economic doctrine of the pasty 40 years, an austerity doctrine that focuses on the inflationary risks of "deficit spending" (when governments don't tax as much money out of the economy as they inject in the same year).

It's a doctrine that made a pretense to being a science, going to far as to create a fake "Nobel Prize" in economics in a bid for scientific credibility (the Nobel administrators eventually folded the economics prize into its administrative remit).

The "neoclassicals" used abstract equations to "prove" a bunch of economic truths that - purely coincidentally - made rich people much, much richer and poor people much, much poorer.

Tellingly, the most exciting development in economics of the past 50 years is "behavioral economics" - a subdiscipline whose (excellent) innovation was to check to see whether people actually act the way that economists' models predict they will.

(they don't)

It's this vain, discredited and shambolic group who have assembled behind leaders like Larry Summers to decry Biden's stimulus spending plans, insisting that we are flirting with hyperinflation and the collapse of the USD as a global reserve currency.

But economists aren't the last word in understanding stimulus and inflation. If you're trying to figure out whether Summers is right and inequality, poverty and crumbling infrastructure are the price of American stability, it's worth checking out the *political* economists.

Here's a great place to start: Brown University economist Mark Blyth's interview with The Analysis, available in audio, video, and as a transcript:

https://theanalysis.news/interviews/mark-blyth-the-inflated-fear-of-inflation/

Blyth doesn't dismiss Summers' inflationary fears out of hand, but he does say that Summers is vastly overestimating the likelihood that stimulus spending will trigger inflation - Summers says there's a 1-in-3 chance of inflation, while Blyth says it's more like 1-in-10.

To understand the difference, it's useful to first understand what we mean by inflation: "a general, sustained rise in the level of all prices."

It's not a short-term spike (like we saw with GPUs when everyone upgraded their gaming rigs at the start of the pandemic).

It's also not an asset-bubble. House prices in Toronto are high, but that's not inflation. They're high because "Canada stopped building public housing in the 1980s and turned it into an asset class and let the 10 percent top earners buy it all and swap it with each other."

For inflation to happen in the wake of the stimulus, the spending would have to lead to too much money chasing not enough goods. Blyth gives some pretty good reasons to be skeptical that this will happen.

Start with the wealthy: they don't spend much, relative to their income. Their consumption needs are already met (that's what it means to be rich). You can only own so many Sub-Zero fridges, and even after you fill them with kobe beef and Veuve Cliquot, you're still rich.

What rich people do with extra money is *speculate*. That's why top-level giveaways generate socially useless, destructive asset bubbles. Remember, these aren't inflation, which is good, because everyone agrees that inflation is hard to stop once it gets going.

They're speculative bubbles. We have a much better idea of how to prevent bubbles: transaction taxes, hikes to the capital gains tax, and high marginal tax rates at the top bracket.

Okay, fine, so the rich won't be able to spend us into inflation after a broad stimulus, but what about poor people? Well, the bottom 60% of the US is grossly indebted, suffocating under medical debt, student debt and housing debt. A *lot* of that will disappear.

That will transfer a lot of stimulus money from poor people to rich people (who own the debt), which is why we need high capital gains and top-bracket taxation. But it will also sweep away a vast swathe of the financialized economy.

The point of long-term debt isn't to get paid off - it's to generate ongoing cash-flows that can be securitized and turned into bonds. Securitization converted "advanced" economies into shambling, undead debt-zombies.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

It's securitization that led to the 2008 financial crisis, and it's securitization that sustains Wall Street's speculative acquisition of every single-family dwelling for sale in America as part of a bid to turn every home into an extractive slum.

Blythe explains that if the rich have nothing to buy and the poor use most of their stimulus to get out of debt, it will likely reorient the US economy to useful things: creating jobs to make stuff that people want to buy.

But what about the dollar's status as a global reserve currency? Won't all that stimulus send other countries scurrying around for another form of national savings? Blyth's answer is pretty convincing.

First, because there aren't any great alternatives: the European economy is growing at half the rate of the US. The Chinese economy is booming, but if you buy Chinese assets, there's a good chance you'll never be able to get them out of China.

Gold? Bitcoin? Leave aside the deflationary risk of pegging your currency to an inelastic metal or virtual token, leave aside the environmentally devastating effect of cryptocurrency (cryptos consume enough energy to offset the entire planetary solar capacity!).

Instead, think of the volatility of these assets, with their drunken, wild swings - countries that dump USD due to inflationary fears are hardly likely to switch to a crypto that can lose 20% of its value in a day.

And remember how much of that volatility is driven by out-and-out fraud, with major crypto exchanges and gold schemes imploding without warning, taking hundreds of millions of dollars with them. This is not a stable alternative to the dollar!

Beyond the lack of an alternative, there's another reason to believe that the USD will remain a global reserve, as Blyth elegantly explains.

Think of a Chinese company supplying the US market. Chances are, that's actually US company's subcontractor, getting paid in USD.

These end up swapped with the Chinese central bank for Chinese money, because Chinese companies need to pay salaries, rent, and other expenses in Renminbi, not dollars. The Chinese central bank holds onto the USDs, using them as a national savings, a reserve currency.

If China were to dump all its USD holdings into the world economy, it would tank the US dollar - which is to say, it burn China's own national savings. China's central bank needs to do something with those dollar savings, so they buy 10-year US T-bills.

Same goes for Germany - net exporters depend on a net importer to buy their stuff, and primarily that's the USA. They are stuck in a form of "monetarily assured destruction," and a crisis of confidence is unlikely "because you’ve got nowhere else to take your confidence."

Next, Blyth takes up is the proposed increase in the corporate tax rate, and he says that investors are actually surprisingly okay with this - he reminds us of Buffett's maxim, "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

A hike in the corporate tax rate has the potential to reveal which of the "great" firms "are just really good at tax optimization" rather than efficient production. It'll smash those unproductive firms to pieces that can be bought by good firms for pennies on the dollar.

The final issue that Blyth takes up is an excellent one for this May Day: the relationship of higher wages to inflation. When the US had large, centrally managed industries with large, centralized unions, there was the risk that higher prices would trigger higher wages.

But the US doesn't have a unionized workforce with guaranteed COLA inflationary rises - there's no "wage-price spiral" risk of higher prices leading to higher wages and then higher prices.

The neoclassical theory of wages is based on the "marginal productivity" and "higher than outside option" theories: wage-levels are the product of how much money they stand to make from your work, and how much someone else is willing to pay you to work for them.

But economists like Suresh Naidu describe how high-tech surveillance can disrupt this equilibrium: you can spy on workers instead of paying them more, can impose onerous conditions on them that wring them of everything they can produce.

This kind of bossware was once the exclusive burden of low-waged, precarious workers, but thanks to the shitty technology adoption curve, it is working its way up the privilege gradient to increasingly elite workforce segments.

Digital micromanagement went from the factory floor to remote customer-support reps to office workers who are minutely surveilled by Office 365, all the way up to MDs and other elite professionals:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

This has led to increased profits for firms - firms now take a larger share of their productivity gains, and workers see stagnant or declining wages. That excess profit represents slack in the system.

It means that even if companies' costs go up, they can hold prices steady - all they need to do is reduce their retained profits.

We've had 40 years of price stability at the expense of a living wage for working people.

Higher wages are only inflationary if we assume that the 1% will continue to extract vast sums from their investments and use them to kick off destructive asset bubbles.

Image: badsci https://www.flickr.com/photos/7941730@N06/8625213990/

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic

52 notes · View notes