#Global Order

[evaluationvault]

BRICS and the Rise of Multipolarity: Challenging the G7 and Redefining Global Order

REUTERSPIC The concept of BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, first emerged in 2001 when Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the term to highlight the growing economic influence of these emerging markets. Since its establishment in 2009, BRICS has sought to foster collaboration among member states in areas of economics, politics, and development.…

[withlibertyandjusticeforall]

The Western-led global order is BROKEN. Can we fix it?

[dosesofcommonsense]

I cannot understand how someone would vote for this, but I also know mental illness doesn’t make sense.

[queersatanic]

we all know the worst part of listening to a new metal band

thanks to Trigger Daniel and Global Order Of Satan's #S8NnotH8N campaign for doing work on that last bit for us

guys will listen to anti-bigotry metal and just say "hell yeah"

[mueritos]

not that i believe chappell roan is the spokesperson for palestine or leftist politics around voting/election year, but using her recent words being twisted in bad faith is prolly the best example i have about liberals' cognitive dissonance about genocide and their inability to not take other people's (specifically so called celebrities') decisions/thoughts personally.

anyway. really didn't enjoy d'angelo wallace's recent video about her but this one really ties up all the loose ends he refused to acknowledge (explicitly his refusal to talk openly about palestine and why Chappell is actually pro palestine)

but anyway, Dr. Devon Price has also spoken about this phenomenon on his substack/instagram and I recommend checking his page out. some of y'all project your morals onto people you absolutely don't know and have no right to know as intimately as you think you should, and it's fucking weird. the cognitive dissonance lies in the reality of our power: there is no power for us in democracy. if there was, perhaps world leader's would have stopped the genocide in Palestine considering an overwhelming majority of the world's citizens are against so called Israel committing it. But the truth is, we have very little power democratically, and I don't want any liberal to convince me otherwise. Do we have power in other ways? Yes, we so fucking do. But liberals keep trying to convince us our power ONLY lies in voting, and I refuse to conform my reality to that.

chappell roan was right, and some of you care too much about whether or not people will cast their vote in a month. Maybe listen to the people that chappell clearly listened to (marginalized, BIPOC, Palestinian, Arab, Jewish, etc) and you'll understand WHY people are so conflicted about voting instead of shaming them into voting.

[ophilosoraptoro]

"The Deep State Mafia is running both political parties" Journalist Whitney Webb reveals

[epitome-the-burnkid-viii]

[zvaigzdelasas]

Why are most of your posts in the English language?

Because most of my followers speak the English language and my non-english posts tend to get significantly less engagement.

[thereadingaddic7]

Okay, the Tiberian Sun track was actually called Killing Machine, but close enough

[fatehbaz]

Nothing in the past, moreover, gave any cause to suspect ginseng’s presence so far away. Or even closer by: since antiquity, for well over a millennium, the ginseng consumed in all of East Asia had come from just one area -- the northeast mountainous lands straddling Manchuria and Korea. No one had found it anywhere else. No one was even thinking, now, to look elsewhere. The [...] [French traveler] Joseph-Francois Lafitau didn’t know this. He had been [...] visiting Quebec on mission business in October of 1715 [...]. He began to search for ginseng. [...] [T]hen one day he spotted it [...]. Ginseng did indeed grow in North America. [...]

Prior to the nuclear disaster in the spring of 2011, few outside Japan could have placed Fukushima on a map of the world. In the geography of ginseng, however, it had long been a significant site. The Edo period domain of Aizu, which was located here, had been the first to try to grow the plant on Japanese soil, and over the course of the following centuries, Fukushima, together with Nagano prefecture, has accounted for the overwhelming majority of ginseng production in the country.

Aizu’s pioneering trials in cultivation began in 1716 – by coincidence, exactly the same year that Lafitau found the plant growing wild in the forests of Canada. [...]

---

Since the 1670s the numbers of people [in Japan] clamoring for access to the drug had swelled enormously, and this demand had to be met entirely through imports. The attempt to cultivate ginseng in Aizu -- and soon after, many other domains -- was a response to a fiscal crisis.

Massive sums of silver were flowing out of the country to pay for ginseng and other drugs [...]. Arai Hakuseki, the chief policy maker [...], calculated that no less than 75% of the country’s gold, and 25% of its silver had drained out of Japan [to pay for imports] [...]. Expenditures for ginseng were particularly egregious [...]: in the half-century between 1670s through the mid-1720s that marked the height of ginseng fever in Japan, officially recorded yearly imports of Korean ginseng through Tsushima sometimes reached as much as four to five thousand kin (approx. 2.4–3 metric tons).

What was to be done? [...] The drain of bullion was unrelenting. [...] [T]he shogunate repeatedly debased its currency, minting coins that bore the same denomination, but contained progressively less silver. Whereas the large silver coin first issued in 1601 had been 80% pure, the version issued in 1695 was only 64% silver, and the 1703 mint just 50%. Naturally enough, ginseng dealers in Korea were indifferent to the quandaries of the Japanese rulers, and insisted on payment as before; they refused the debased coins. The Japanese response speaks volumes about the unique claims of the drug among national priorities: in 1710 (and again in 1736) a special silver coin of the original 80% purity was minted exclusively for use in the ginseng trade. [...]

[T]he project of cultivating ginseng and other medicines in Japan became central to the economic and social strategy of the eighth shogun Yoshimune after he assumed power in 1716. [...]

---

China and Korea were naturally eager to retain their monopolies of this precious commodity, and strictly banned all export of live plants and seeds. They jealously guarded as well against theft of mature roots: contemporary Chinese histories, for example, record that the prisons of Shenjing (present day Shenyang) overflowed with ginseng poaching suspects. So many were caught, indeed, that the legal bureaucracy couldn’t keep up. 

In 1724, the alarming numbers of suspected poachers who died in prison while awaiting trial led to the abandonment of the regular system of trials by judges dispatched from Beijing, and a shift to more expeditious reviews handled by local officials. [...]

Even in 1721. the secret orders that the shogunate sent the domain of Tsushima called for procuring merely three live plants [...]. Two other forays into Korea 1727 succeeded in presenting the shogun with another four and seven plants respectively. Meanwhile, in 1725 a Manchu merchant in Nagasaki named Yu Meiji [...] managed to smuggle in and present three live plants and a hundred seeds. [...]

Despite its modest volume, this botanical piracy eventually did the trick. By 1738, transplanted plants yielded enough seeds that the shogunate could share them with enterprising domains. [...] Ginseng eventually became so plentiful that in 1790 the government announced the complete liberalization of cultivation and sales: anyone was now free to grow or sell it.

---

By the late eighteenth century, then, the geography of ginseng looked dramatically different from a century earlier.

This precious root, which had long been restricted to a small corner of the northeast Asian continent, had not only been found growing naturally and in abundance in distant North America, but had also been successfully transplanted and was now flourishing in the neighboring island of Japan. […]

---

Colonial Americans, for their part, had developed their own new addiction: an unquenchable thirst for tea. […] This implacable need could have posed a serious problem. [...] [I]ts regular consumption was a costly habit.

Which is why the local discovery of ginseng was a true godsend.

When the Empress of China sailed to Canton in 1784 as the first ship to trade under the flag of the newly independent United States, it was this coveted root that furnished the overwhelming bulk of sales. Though other goods formed part of early Sino-American commerce – Chinese porcelain and silk, for example, and American pelts – the essential core of trade was the exchange of American ginseng for Chinese tea. [...]

---

Yoshimune’s transplantation project had succeeded to the point that Japan actually became a ginseng exporter. As early as 1765, Zhao Xuemin’s Supplement to the compedium of material medica would note the recent popularity of Japanese ginseng in China. Unlike the “French” ginseng from Canada, which cooled the body, Zhao explained, the “Asian” ginseng (dongyang shen) from Japan, like the native [Korean/Chinese] variety, tended to warm. Local habitats still mattered in the reconfigured geography of ginseng. [...]

What is place? What is time? The history of ginseng in the long eighteenth century is the story of an ever-shifting alchemical web. [...] Thanks to the English craving for tea, ginseng, which two centuries earlier had threatened to bankrupt Japan, now figured to become a major source of national wealth [for Japan] .

---

Text by: Shigehisa Kuriyama. “The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs.” In: The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[priafey]

things the US needs to address:

the collective psychosis that leads people to make posts like these

[dosesofcommonsense]

Finally, someone is exposing the lies about fluoride for all to see. It’s not longer just a Conspiracy Theorist rabbit hole. It’s another Conspiracy Realist exposition on how the government, big pharma, dentists, and nuclear waste facilities have been working together to sicken and kill Americans.

Us Conspiracy Realists have been right so much that maybe you should find one and make a friend. They’ll alert you to the next season of the Corporate Media Machine’s bullshit and tell you this shit coming downstream.

[jangillman]

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[markfaustus]

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[froggibus]

of course it’s a faulty Windows update that ruins the world 😭

[nozomijoestar]

Asuka is a tragic figure, a figure of mystery, a wild card, all because the only thing she wants in life is peace and quiet for herself and to feel in control- yet her secret heritage that may be hidden from her for her own protection and the reality that life is unpredictable and will go on with or without you keep ruining that delusion, that vision of how the world is meant to work to her, and she suffers regardless of what she wants, what she does, and how little she understands anything

She was born into a family preaching peace and balance and order while being a creature of violence, and puts a dozen mental locks and excuses over this truth to justify giving into her impulse for fighting by pretending she's justice when she does it

She keeps trying to build a place of safety but she's using sand and life is a wave that destroys, yet she stubbornly persists rather than give up, not drowned to the point of self centered suicidal loathing like Jin- there's contrast, where Jin is cloaked in death Asuka stubbornly clings to life and humanity as a normal person in a terrifying world

She's not a fucking narrative clone for Jun's own purpose, Asuka's purpose must be determined by Asuka herself