![[dr. bob]](/dr-bob-sm.gif)
Dr. Bob is Robert Hsiung, MD,
bob@dr-bob.orgShown: posts 19 to 43 of 61. Go back in thread:
Posted by beckett2 on February 20, 2019, at 15:25:35
In reply to Re: Richard Flanagan » beckett2, posted by sigismund on February 19, 2019, at 21:56:23
Shonk? I needed to look that up. I love Australian English. I assume shonk is used in your country and NZ.
>I gave up hoping that there was sufficient concern for future generations or the web of life. There seemed to be a cynical, hidden belief that, although it did not exist and wasn't happening, it was already too late, along with a perverse pleasure in seeing the poor and coloured suffer first and most.
Yeah. Idk sigi. I don't really understand. Our security and military agencies report global warming as a security risk-- but I don't know what anyone in gov or business does with that information. Maybe there's an idea that there will be winners in this scenario?
Here's something nice:
Posted by sigismund on February 20, 2019, at 19:09:15
In reply to Re: Richard Flanagan, posted by beckett2 on February 20, 2019, at 15:25:35
Goodness me! How beautiful!
There's some park in the US, somewhere dry where it snows, with wonderful rock formations. It's not called cathedral national park. Maybe it is in Utah or Arizona? I can't think of the name, but when the sun catches the snow it is magic.
I wish I could be this calm.......
Posted by sigismund on February 20, 2019, at 20:22:42
In reply to Re: Richard Flanagan » beckett2, posted by sigismund on February 20, 2019, at 19:09:15
This is it......I have no sense the scale.
Posted by beckett2 on February 21, 2019, at 17:00:52
In reply to Re: Richard Flanagan » beckett2, posted by sigismund on February 20, 2019, at 19:09:15
> Goodness me! How beautiful!
>
> There's some park in the US, somewhere dry where it snows, with wonderful rock formations. It's not called cathedral national park. Maybe it is in Utah or Arizona? I can't think of the name, but when the sun catches the snow it is magic.
>
> I wish I could be this calm.......
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_nFI2Zb7qEThank you! That was fantastic. Oddly, it was calming. His comments at Davos had the same effect. A little giddy, then calm, as though, "yes, it really is that simple, isn't it?"
Posted by sigismund on February 22, 2019, at 14:48:21
In reply to Re: Richard Flanagan, posted by beckett2 on February 21, 2019, at 17:00:52
I didn't know I could find this. One of my heroes, very smart and funny too. I'd never heard his voice. Oddly enough he was a military historian who, IIRC, estimated the current value (5 years ago) of a slave at $300,000.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/06/the-kingdom-of-survival-joe-bageant/
Posted by sigismund on February 23, 2019, at 15:25:45
In reply to Joe Bageant, posted by sigismund on February 22, 2019, at 14:48:21
Posted by beckett2 on February 24, 2019, at 18:38:15
In reply to Joe Bageant, posted by sigismund on February 22, 2019, at 14:48:21
I didn't know he was a military historian. Was he raised in a christian household? My father firmly believed we are our brother's keeper. How that gets tripped up with corporate US (which I'm afraid has globalized).
I understand going to Belize, just to be away from cultural suffocation.
We're in Venezuela again. Jeremy Scahill says the bridge that is blocked was never a functioning bridge-- and a google shows there are other bridges into Venezuela. I don't understand it-- but Bageant would be able to speak about it. Certainly, ordinary citizens pay for the political theater.
The thing he said about Obama, that at least the rhetoric is good. He didn't have a single investigation into his administration. We're drowning in scandal right now. And cruelty.
I'm reading a book by a conservative, and what I find refreshing is his interest in facts. Obama said recently that with facts, you can at least begin to have a discussion.
Posted by sigismund on February 25, 2019, at 4:14:33
In reply to Re: Joe Bageant » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on February 24, 2019, at 18:38:15
I think he died around 2011. The US is an older society than we are. He said, 'There WERE a time when the Democrats were getting their noses broken.....', it's an older English, isn't it? And the reference to Cain and Abel, rather than the New Testament, it feels as if from an older time.
Now most Democrats are lining up for freedom and Democracy. I wasn't paying attention when Obama named Venezuela a clear and present danger (or whatever) to the US. Anyway they will get their war by 2020 and unintended consequences. God knows, people may swallow it again, there will be chaos enough.
The fact that Trumps support is greater than GWB's at the end of his time makes me realise that I don't understand. 34%? That's huge, IMO.
Aryan Death Cult is not as extreme as it sounds. We are surrounded by cults and ponzi schemes. People have believed in and fought over all sorts of stuff.
Still, I can't see Trump being president after 2020.
Posted by beckett2 on March 3, 2019, at 19:27:53
In reply to Re: Joe Bageant, posted by sigismund on February 25, 2019, at 4:14:33
Perhaps my favorite comeback answer of the hearing. Mr. Cohen was certainly no pushover.
Posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 11:55:04
In reply to Michael Cohen » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 3, 2019, at 19:27:53
No he wasn't. I watched a fair bit of it (Majority Report).
Australian Politics 101 #The Greens
Posted by beckett2 on March 4, 2019, at 12:55:39
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen, posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 11:55:04
Haha, yes, I read this :) "I'm a cartoonist, I know what I'm doing!"
Here there is a similar bickering on the left (although your Greens are a third party). I call it the left eating it's young. Who is the most left is a destructive force. Hopefully we'll pull together rather than driving into a ditch while arguing.
A third party. I like to imagine how that would be here....
trump has thrown down the gauntlet over socialism. Gasp. So this is what 2020 will be about.
Michael Cohen said something about the peaceful transfer of power should trump lose. The other day trump remarked something about "we must take our country back!" From whom?
Posted by beckett2 on March 4, 2019, at 13:02:06
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen, posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 11:55:04
Btw, did you see this? https://www.propublica.org/article/oxycontin-purdue-pharma-massachusetts-lawsuit-anti-addiction-market
Jesus.
Posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 21:12:33
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 4, 2019, at 12:55:39
>trump has thrown down the gauntlet over socialism.
Oh, when I hear about socialism from the US I wonder what happened to your education system.
You have such good universities, the very best, and yet..........
Posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 21:16:10
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 4, 2019, at 13:02:06
I wish they would come to my door and at the point of a gun demand I take the oxymorphone one, not that oxycodone nonsense Yep. Just like the opium wars, something traditional and conservative. As Jardine said, 'Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ'.
Posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 23:11:39
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 4, 2019, at 13:02:06
Stunning article. Thanks.
Posted by sigismund on March 5, 2019, at 15:37:13
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » beckett2, posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 23:11:39
That article was impossible to satirise.
As you know the 3rd man in the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, is in jail in Australia on child abuse charges.
There were decades of events covered up or not dealt with. One, impossible to satirise, is when 2 priests enter a school yard, grab hold of an 11 year old boy and carry him off screaming to be raped elsewhere.
Yet we (still?) live with a sense of normalcy and progress.
Well, they have locked Pell up. I never thought I would live to see it.
Posted by sigismund on March 6, 2019, at 8:59:27
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » beckett2, posted by sigismund on March 4, 2019, at 21:12:33
She's from your neck of the woods.......
Posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:22:00
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen, posted by sigismund on March 6, 2019, at 8:59:27
Here's a review of a book on the border wall and American frontier. Because of your interests, I thought of you. I admit to tearing up because despite my spoken and desired beliefs, as an American, there has always been a feeling of expansion--in my case a sort of limitless internal space. But as he says, the American dream as powerfully symbolized and literal has closed and the violence this was predicated upon turns inward and begins to devour itself.
You'll need to click through the tiny url page to reach the New Yorker review.
Posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:30:34
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen, posted by sigismund on March 6, 2019, at 8:59:27
> She's from your neck of the woods.......
>
> https://www.joannamacy.net/mainThank you! This looks very interesting. And though out of fashion, I love love love Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orphius.
There are soooooo many books! So much to understand!
Almost 60, coming to terms with the end of understanding is difficult and presses on me. If I was a christian, I could anticipate a peace that surpasses understanding. Maybe that will come in some form or another. Who knows? I certainly don't.
My father-in-law, in late to final stage Parkinson said about his death, well, this is something interesting to look forward to.
Posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:32:48
In reply to Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 5, 2019, at 15:37:13
> That article was impossible to satirise.
>
> As you know the 3rd man in the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, is in jail in Australia on child abuse charges.
>
> There were decades of events covered up or not dealt with. One, impossible to satirise, is when 2 priests enter a school yard, grab hold of an 11 year old boy and carry him off screaming to be raped elsewhere.
>
> Yet we (still?) live with a sense of normalcy and progress.
>
> Well, they have locked Pell up. I never thought I would live to see it.It's like an evil, destructive sort of zen koan. To understand it snaps your mind.
My grandmother used to say sometimes of someone or other, 'hell isn't good enough'.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:33:26
In reply to blood meridian, posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:22:00
I have heard of Blood Meridian and read and loved The Crossing. But now I have reached my limit with the New Yorker. The Crossing would make a great series.
>But as he says, the American dream as powerfully symbolized and literal has closed and the violence this was predicated upon turns inward and begins to devour itself.
This is the wars coming home? Armoured vehicles or maybe even tanks on the streets of Fergusen. And that feeling that there is no new primitive place to take or exploit, maybe? An opening for a war on the poor?
In the years of GWB Harpers (who was the editor?) was emphasising the diminishment of empathy as a political move. Somehow this brought to mind something Chris Hedges said, maybe from his ordination, a liturgy, a question and response.......'where were you when x was strung up?' 'I was not there'.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:39:43
In reply to Re: Michael Cohen » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:30:34
>My father-in-law, in late to final stage Parkinson said about his death, well, this is something interesting to look forward to.
Oh, I'm very impressed, that was good.
Much of the problem with pain relates to mood. If the pain gets into your centre, as might be the case with depression, you are in trouble. If it is somehow felt to be external, one is more detached.
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:51:37
In reply to Re: Impunity » sigismund, posted by beckett2 on March 6, 2019, at 14:32:48
Last night I read that Australia was a hotbed of paedophilia in schools and most closed institutions. The royal commission (Gillard, ALP) really opened it up.
I was 11 when I went to a boarding school. Nobody talked about all this, not even the kids, but within a year for sure I had the feel of it. My words, if I had had any, would have been different, but I knew who among the boarding school masters was gay (as we say now) and who was cruel and who was both.
For every case involving anything like sex there were ten of cruelty. The rate was much higher with choir boys, and maybe higher again with altar boys, who did look angelic in red cassocks and white surplices.
Posted by beckett2 on March 7, 2019, at 11:55:59
In reply to Re: blood meridian, posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:33:26
Blood Meridian is most excellent and very brutal. The alternate history of the west. I needed a serious dictionary.
Here's the article if you have time.
"On Election Day, 2018, residents of Nogales, Arizona, began to notice a single row of coiled razor wire growing across the top of the citys border wall. The barrier has been a stark feature of the towns urban landscape for more than twenty years, rolling up and over hilltops as it cleaves the American town from its larger, Mexican counterpart. But, in the weeks and months that followed, additional coils were gradually installed along the length of the fence by active-duty troops sent to the border by President Trump, giving residents the sense that they were living inside an occupied city. By February, concertina wire covered the wall from top to bottom, and the Nogales City Council passed a unanimous resolution calling for its removal. Such wire has only one purpose, the resolution declaredto harm or to kill. It is something only found in a war, prison, or battle setting.
Living in Tucson, barely an hour north of the border, I have become familiar with both sides of Nogales, crossing over the border to shop, attend meetings, take gifts or supplies to deported friends, or volunteer at a soup kitchen for migrants. In December, as I walked through the pedestrian crossing, I passed by uniformed soldiers transporting long ladders to one side of the port of entry, but I barely registered their significance. The militarization of the borderlands has become so commonplace that one often grows numb to its manifestations. It can seem distant until it reaches out to touch you. Only months later, as I watched images of the concertina wire proliferating on my social-media feeds, did I finally understand what those ladders had been for.
In The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan), the historian Greg Grandin argues that Americas urge to wall off its borders marks the death of our most potent myththe galvanizing vision of men and women seeking freedom along a vast frontier, a space for reinvention, unburdened by society, history, and ones own past. Since the very inception of our country, he writes, the presence of a frontier has allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence. The ever-shifting and expanding frontier also acted as a physical barrier against invasion; as a national-security buffer against foreign enemies, Native Americans, and Mexicans; and as a tenuous escape valve for freed slaves, European migrants, and discontented laborers from crowded Eastern cities.
The frontier did not always have mythic connotations. In early America, the words frontier, border, and boundary held little emotional significance and were used interchangeably to describe the physical limits of the nation. Americas first dictionaries didnt even include the word frontier. But as the U.S. government began to coördinate campaigns for the removal and the extermination of Native Americans, clearing the way for westward settlers, the meaning of frontier came to be pegged to the notion of civilizational struggle. By the dawn of the twentieth century, with Native Americans dwindling in number and largely relegated to reservations, the frontier had been fully transformed into something romantic and beckoningan entire way of life. It became, Grandin writes, a state of mind, a cultural zone, a sociological term of comparison, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, a disciplining mechanism, an abstraction, and an aspiration. For the dominant white culture, the word meant freedom.
The frontier also provided a new way of understanding American identity, history, and politics. At the end of the nineteenth century, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced his frontier thesisthe idea that, in his words, the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development. American identity hinged upon its perpetual expansion. Our democracy, Turner wrote, came out of the American forest and it gained strength each time it touched a new frontier. Expansion was thus a fundamental good and an integral part of what set us apart from Europeit was the very thing that made America great. But on the frontier, Grandin reminds us, settlers won greater freedom for themselves only by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.
The End of the Myth aims, in part, to reposition race-based violence to the center of the frontier narrative, exposing it as foundational to todays border brutalism.
In passages like this, The End of the Myth is effectively in conversation with Cormac McCarthys seminal novel Blood Meridian, which follows a band of scalp hunters as they wreak carnage across the borderlands. Indeed, Grandin quotes from the novel, borrows its title for one of his chapters, and even draws on the cover art of the original, 1985 edition for his own book jacketa closeup of one of Salvador Dalis phantom carts, in which a horse-drawn wagon and its occupants become, upon further examination, indistinguishable from the expansive landscape and architecture that surround them. Blood Meridian is propelled by grisly, deeply researched depictions of the violence perpetrated by remorseless white American men, unconcerned with the traumas they were unleashing into history. Long celebrated as a disabused, revisionist anti-Western, McCarthys novel can also be understood as fuelling the illusion of frontier masculinity. Grandin, to his credit, rejects the temptation to dismiss the violence as being somehow typical of a particular time or place. The atrocities accompanying expansion are shocking now, and were shocking then: even war-hardened men like General Winfield Scott, the commander of U.S. forces during the Mexican-American War, found them heinous enough to make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country.
As settlement supplanted Americas physical frontier, a new project arose to extend Manifest Destiny beyond its former geographic limits. American imperialism provided the opportunity for a new revolution, Woodrow Wilson declared in 1901, a little more than a decade before ascending to the Presidency. During the Spanish-American War of 1898 and ensuing military campaigns in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, Americans had, in Wilsons view, made new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas. This form of expansion allowed a nation still recovering from the Civil War and Reconstruction to channel its aggression outward once more. Former Confederate soldiers were able to don the uniform of a newly unified country and earn patriotic recognition while still fighting to exert racial superiority over people of color. Letters sent home by soldiers enlisted in these campaigns, Grandin tells us, are notably similar, lightheartedly narrating to family and friends how they would shoot n*gg*rs, lynch n*gg*rs, release n*gg*rs into the swamp to die. . . . Like those who had collected Native American scalps first as mercenaries and then as soldiers, these men learned that Americas new frontier was a place that could legitimatize a racist thirst for violence.
For Americas leaders, the new age of imperialism also reaffirmed old lessons: expanding the countrys borders beyond the domestic sphere could provide a space to divert anger, resentment, and extremism. Frederick Jackson Turner had recognized that the frontier was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated. He also recognized that, at the end of the nineteenth century, America was closing in upon itself. But he hoped that the experience of having constructed civilization on a vast frontier would lead to the building of a stable inward society, one rooted in lessons of coöperation, progress, and equality. He failed to imagine that the seductiveness and the convenience of the frontier would, instead, propel America through a new century of global expansion.
As America thrust itself into the wider world, it simultaneously began a process of shoring up its domestic borders. With its entrance into the First World War, the country started to implement race-based quota systems and other immigration controls, culminating in the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, which excluded all Asian immigrants and sought to insure that ninety-six per cent of Americas immigration slots were reserved for Europeans. Business interests shielded Mexican migrants from such immigration quotas. But the 1924 act provided for the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol: the previously irregular and ad-hoc policing of the boundary was replaced by a new paramilitary police force that would come to wield extraordinary power along the Mexican border. White supremacists and members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan saw the nascent Border Patrol as a venue for unchecked brutality, Grandin writes, and they quickly joined its ranks, turning it into a vanguard of race vigilantism. The new agency became the bastion of a Wild West mentality in which patrollers easily imagined themselves as guardians of frontier forts in hostile territory, holding off barbarians."
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
March 11, 2019
I
Posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:57:46
In reply to Re: Impunity, posted by sigismund on March 7, 2019, at 11:51:37
The government is mostly avoiding parliament until the election by May lest it lose a vote on the floor. Therefore.........
'The resources minister, Matt Canavan, has declared now is the time to build new coal-fired power, as the prime minister insisted his pre-election priorities were securing passage of budget bills and helping north Queensland recover from the recent floods.
The comments from Canavan and Scott Morrison follow a new push from Queensland Nationals for immediate government action to underwrite new power station construction in regional Queensland, and a separate demand the government pass the big stick energy package in the final sitting week of the 45th parliament.'
This will provide support for Adani in the Galilee Basin......will it be the biggest coal mine in the world? Just the time to do it.
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