In 1923 George Sylvester Viereck interviewed Hitler. Guardian published some excerpts. Already then Hitler openly spoke of The Baltic as a “German Lake”, why no one was listening? There is also this interesting rant about National Socialism and Marxism:
“Why,” I asked Hitler, “do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?”
“Socialism,” he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, “is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.
“Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.
“We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”
Now the above rhetoric could be readily found in any union convention but what makes Hitler indeed indistinguishable from the Bolsheviks is that they both started from the founding principal that the end justifies the means (read the interview there about the economic expansion). The rest of the differences are just nuances compared to this mortal taboo.
by Ben Atlas on 04.29.2011.5:01am · 1 comment
Saint George's tomb in Lod, Israel
Here what is know about the actual Saint George (wiki): “It is likely that Saint George was born to a Christian noble family in Lod, Syria Palaestina during the late third century between about 275 AD and 285 AD, and he died in Nicomedia. His father, Gerontius, was a Roman army official from Cappadocia and his mother, Polychronia, was from Palestine. They were both Christians and from noble families of Anici, so by this the child was raised with Christian beliefs. They decided to call him Georgius (Latin) or Geōrgios (Greek), meaning “worker of the land”. At the age of 14, George lost his father; a few years later, George’s mother, Polychronia, died. Eastern accounts give the names of his parents as Anastasius and Theobaste.” In short Georgius was perhaps of the Jewish extraction, at least on the side of his mother. Saint George was an officer in the Roman court of Diocletian. At some point Diocletian decided to purge his Christian officers. Saint George was allegedly tortured and killed. Significantly Saint George was brought back to his hometown in Lydda to be buried. Note there is no dragon in this story yet.
Diocletian was the same Roman emperor who imprisoned St.Nicholas of Myra, later known as the Santa Claus. The century before Christianity became the state religion was the time of heroism and also the time for the formation of many lasting christian legends. In those days Diocletian was the rare Roman emperor to retire, instead of being assassinated. Diocletian went back to his native Croatia and took up gardening around his palace in Split. During Diocletian’s rule Christianity was spreading among the Roman officers. So was the case of Constantine himself who came up through the army ranks and eventually made Christianity the state religion. “People begged Diocletian to return to the throne, to resolve the conflicts that had arisen through Constantine’s rise to power and Maxentius’ usurpation. Diocletian’s reply: “If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.” ►click to continue
Someone asked me today what is a honorable man. The “Immortal Chaplains”, Methodist Reverend George L. Fox, Rabbi Alexander D. Goode, Roman Catholic Priest John P. Washington, Reverend Clark V. Poling were honorable.
This follows Nassim Taleb’s maxim – “Captains go down with ships, all captains and all ships.” Of course Nassim was referring to the last financial crisis where the “too big to fail” captains float and the middle-class sailors drown. Specifically speaking of the recent cuts in the architecture firms. It’s the slaves, then people who actually do the work, then the people who are paid “too much” while all the principals, many of them direct cause of the trouble, they all still on deck. There is a strong sense of honor in the Japanese culture although in today’s America or the Jewish culture, honor is an abstract concept. But this is not just honor, when “leaders” can weather a storm by throwing sailors overboard it makes the ship uninsurable. Swim ashore while you can.
One often meets people who think (and even say) they are not terribly attractive but almost never people who think they are not too smart. In reality the opposite is usually the case. One should expect this in a culture that defines “smartness” as accumulation of knowledge. So you got people who are plain stupid, then people who confuse being “informed” with being smart, plus the nerds, plus the aspergers “geniuses”. Not many people have the rigor and the catalysis of a misfortune to probe and to treat the knowledge as a subtraction rather than an addition. They are far and few.
Google is shutting down Google Video tomorrow, asking the users to manually move the files over to YouTube. Thousands of videos, longer than ten(?) min limit initially set by YouTube, they all are going silent tomorrow. Many precious documentaries, especially the links and the embeds to the life changing Adam Curtis multi part documentaries on this blog are no more.
Our reliance on Google tools is growing and it involves the increasing risk. In case of a small or major breakage there is no recourse, no sensible way to get an issue resolved beyond the auto-responders. Can this continue? The risk is even more severe because Google is of the opinion that a free service can be shut down at any time without regard to the time and the effort invested by the users. Witness the shut down on the Google Video or the discontinued hosted domains on blogger two years ago.
I am more than willing to pay a fee for the ability to speak to a customer service rep. I still have the never resolved legacy issues with Google, these are small things like, why did I get a note from the Google Apps about the upgrade for an inactive domain? Or bigger issues like why a blog is not longer listed on blog search after I used the little known proxy service offered by the Feedburner, etc.
Can we continue to rely on Google to host a major part of our creative output without any service or obligation on the part of the young and the reckless company?
John Gray reviews Richard Mabey’s latest book in the New Statesmen:
“For those who still subscribe to the orthodoxy of “two cultures” (and there are many), science and Romanticism are bound to be at odds. If you think there are two distinct ways of seeing the world – one scientific and detached in its outlook, the other humanistic and Romantic, asserting the importance of subjective experience – then Romanticism can never be more than an exercise in imagination, valuable for what it contributes to the emotions but intrinsically inward-looking. To such people, science is concerned with the nature of things while the humanities deal with human responses to the world, two vastly different things.
The assumption made by those who subscribe to this orthodoxy is that human beings are set apart from the world. Philosophers in the dominant western tradition have tended to think of consciousness as a defining human attribute, one that no other animal possesses. Even militant Darwinists, committed to the notion that we emerged by natural selection from other animal species, invariably claim that human beings alone have the capacity to frame an objective view of the world. The insistence that human beings are great exceptions among the animals owes much to Christianity, but the idea that humankind does not belong fully in the natural world has continued to wield influence even as religious belief has declined. In many ways, the old argument about two cultures turns on this sense of separation.”
John Gray says something very important here. Environmentalism is a post-Christian thinking and it inherited the patronizing approach to nature. The very idea that the nature needs to be “protected” presumes that the nature is small and helpless, unable to cope with the superior human species. And this very megalomania denies our humble oneness with the plants, the animals and the fury.
An example is the fanatical refusal by the environmentalists to admit that the Gulf of Mexico appears to heal itself after the BP oil spill. I recently heard on the NPR: “But you surely think that the oil is still somewhere there…” To admit otherwise would be to deny earth’s helplessness and more significantly to admit that the humans are not the superior species in charge of the weak planet but are one with it.
Belted Galloways in the snowstorm on Stillmans Farm
I have this feeling that haunts me all the time lately. Everywhere I look – government, religion, business, nutrition, even music, they all appear broken. There is a certain exhaustion as if nothing could be said or done to repair them. And I stumble on the broken pieces everywhere. Now even in farming.
Example is the Stillmans Farm here in Western Massachusetts. The farm brings seasonal workers from Jamaica every summer. The Jamaicans became “part of the family” and more importantly they don’t need to be trained. And now the well-intentioned government requires Stillmans Farm to hire a local person to match every Jamaican, or any worker who comes on the H2A visa. Understandably this is not a sound business proposition. I wrote to Stillmans asking to clarify, why can’t they hire local people, especially in this dire economy. Geneviève Stillman responds:
“…we advertised in 5 papers in the surrounding towns and didn’t have one single call from it. Where are these willing workers? We do have about 18 local, Massachusetts employees on payroll right now, as well (while we only have 11 Jamaican workers). Some of them have worked for us for several years and go on unemployment for 4 months in the winter, the rest are new hires for the summer. We even have people who live in Boston and nearby areas who work for us at the markets. The situation with work is dire, but people still need to realize part of the problem with any job is having the skills. We train new people every year and, because it is only a seasonal job, they generally find another job during the off season and do not return to work – then we have to train new people the next season and it takes a whole season here to learn every job. So, aside from the willingness, we still need some percentage of workers who aren’t on a steep learning curve. Also, many people will not work for $10.25 an hour. I don’t believe the market can bear higher prices to compensate workers more than that and the margin is already pretty slim. We make a huge effort to hire locally. If someone can figure out a way we can find and retain skilled farm workers locally, we, and all the other farms who participate in the H2A program would benefit tremendously, as the guest worker program is very expensive (fees, transportation costs, advertising for the job – just the advertising was about $2000 this year) and very paperwork intensive. Believe me, it is much easier to put our local help on the payroll service and call in the hours once a week. In the end, the guest worker program has become what most of the orchards and many of the farms over 20 acres in the state depend on – we must have a skilled workforce who can return year after year to get the job done.”
It’s one thing to say that we all support the local agriculture, it’s another thing to institute the well-intentioned Government polices that drive the farms out of business. Please follow the details of this breakage on Stillmans Farm Blog. It seem that this is the most fundamental government fail, unable to protect the livelihood of the citizens, even for it’s own benefit.
by Ben Atlas on 04.27.2011.9:13am · 1 comment
I have experienced many miraculous changes after starting the Paleo lifestyle, for example my migraines are gone! No more debilitating headaches and the expensive and nauseating painkillers. When I tell this to people, the inevitable reaction is that I now know approximately what foods (groups of food) caused the migraines, perhaps it was gluten, etc. Well, the link between migraines and foods is well known but I challenge anyone on a conventional “agriculture age” diet to discover definitively what food is connected to the pain, let alone to be able to get rid of the migraines entirely! What I am saying is not “science” but my own empirical experience. Turns out that under most caloric restricted diets and especially the low carb diets, the human body goes into Ketosis. It changes the primary fuels for the most vital organs and especially for the brain. The change is from from the Glucose to the Keton Bodies:
“The brain gets its energy from ketone bodies when glucose is less available (e.g., when fasting). In the event of low blood glucose, most other tissues have additional energy sources besides ketone bodies (such as fatty acids), but the brain does not. After the diet has been changed to lower blood glucose for 3 days, the brain gets 30% of its energy from ketone bodies. After about 40 days, this goes up to 70% (during the initial stages the brain does not burn ketones, since they are an important substrate for lipid synthesis in the brain). In time the brain reduces its glucose requirements from 120g to 40g per day.”
And this worked like a clockwork for me. First week I felt dizzy and light-headed, I was even afraid to drive, when I would drive over a bump, it made me feel like there is no blood in my head and then it all came back to “normal” with multiple improvements, too many to list with this post. So it is not that there is a connection between food and migraines, but the brain fuel source itself more natural, for my head at least.
This video (my guess from the 30s) describes the laborious process of printing a book. It was virtually yesterday but it feels so remote. In fact this is the perfect video to illustrate how a recent history, paradoxically might look like a futuristic science fiction. It makes me feel guilty for discarding some of the books after seeing how much craftsmanship and effort has gone into creation of a page.
Another paradox is that the process is very labor intensive but in the ubiquitous post industrial fashion, the humans are just the accessories for a machine. This was obviously the archetypal mechanical slave labor of the industrial age. Marshall McLuhan spoke about printmaking as the mother of the industrial age, this video is a fitting testimony to his ideas.
If there was another video a century or two before this one, we would see a very similar process but one where machines are just an accessory to a craftsman, not the industrial way around. In those days you can still see and smell the craftsmanship and the art, the unique flavor.
Fast forward…, never mind. It’s a Frankenstein progression. First a man speaks and then writes his daydreams. Then a man gets a machine apprentice. The machine slowly turns the master into a salve and finally in the digital age the machine disposes of the man and the author. The machine still occasionally needs a human for the “cut and paste” but not for long, the machine indexes, aggregates ans scrapes together the pulsating, barren assembly line of the digital age.
I built a new Google Maps powered CV, please find the link on the new “About Ben” page. Hopefully you will get to know a little more about the author of this blog. This is a bit of an experiment and I welcome your feedback.
by Ben Atlas on 04.6.2011.12:35pm · 1 comment
Humans are wired for the three main activities: hunting for food, making love and daydreaming. Any tools, knowledge, music, art or religion, the all only aim to enhance these three master goals, it’s the natural state of existence. But the servants lost their purpose, the tools became the goal rather than the means. And the rest as they say is history.