Re: Mind's Eye turning the world Greek

People being too taken up with survival and 'homeward mobility' to
want to listen to the wise men's advises and sermons coined the
corresponding German idiom which literally translates: To understand
only train station
(http://german.about.com/od/idiomsandproverbs/a/German-Expression-Nur-Bahnhof-Verstehen.htm).
German WW I soldiers did the Odysseus thing and put wax in their ears.

Now, what exactly do you have to do in order to not mistake the
messenger for his message? You need to know how the distillation
process works! Repeating or pushing up what the seemingly best has
said and loading it up with your own history only fosters the
development of the fool's gold production technique.

If you use fear as a transport means for your message instead of using
it as a catalyst for progress, I'd call this a systemic misucation of
fear that you are propagating. The system is rotting, let's rot the
next!

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 8:17 PM, Vam <atewari2007@gmail.com> wrote:
> Neil, 'many likes' and 'much love' ... for bringing this crux to focus.
> Fran, you hit it on the head about our times.
>
> Maybe, Don will take it forward with his passionate disputation.
>
> The puppeteers have "unlocked" the value, they say.
> Means, people have been effectively harnessed into the system which reaps
> the 'value' they create in a high-GINI hierarchical structure, in which too
> they are made to pay for their needs at costs that leave them poor. Except
> for the smart few who agree to actions they might be indicted by law for or
> stoned to gore by the people !
>
> The whole of education serves to provide an inexhaustible stream of such
> 'whizkids.' The entire environment is made subtly captive with massive
> obfuscation of meaning, PR, propaganda, paid media and editorials,
> legislatures and senates, and 'iconic' bizwigs.
>
> And people... remember, most of them are too taken up with survival and
> 'upward mobility' !
>
>
> On Saturday, September 1, 2012 8:03:18 PM UTC+5:30, frantheman wrote:
>>
>> It's a rigged game, Neil, with rigged rules, from beginning to end. One of
>> the excellent points made by Graeber is how little of that which is really
>> important to us in life lets itself be quantified in monetary/economic
>> terms; things like love, honesty, beauty, trust. Trust ... ? The strange
>> thing is that any monetary system is based on trust - yet what exemplifies
>> the current financial roulette systems which dominate the global and
>> national "markets" is a complete lack of trust. He who trusts will be
>> conned.
>>
>> The system is rotten, played to the advantage of the 1% (or the 0.001%
>> globally). Unfortunately we are all caught up in it, are dependent on it,
>> suffer from it (or even - in the case of those of us living in the rich
>> countries - occasionally profit from it). There are plenty of models for
>> ways of doing things differently. What I can't see - without systemic
>> breakdown and the immeasurable suffering and death of tens, even hundreds of
>> millions - is how to move from where we are now to where we could be. In my
>> more pessimistic moments, I fear that this systemic collapse is probably
>> inevitably imminent anyhow.
>>
>> On 1 September 2012 14:35, archytas <nwt...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> A common phrase in my childhood when we couldn't understand something
>>> was 'it's all Greek to me'. Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy are all
>>> Euro periphery nations now on the brink of collapse. I've been trying
>>> to explain what's going on in a series of lectures recently. I start
>>> from the premise that economics is all Greek to me. This is some
>>> combination of me not understanding the muck and my belief that what
>>> it's all about is a politburo imposing the Greek fate on us all.
>>> Michael Hudson has written extensively on this.
>>>
>>> Most of us can't debate economics because we can't get our attitudes
>>> out of the Idols that generate our 'understanding'. I usually start
>>> with a few questions about debt and what money is. It's rare anyone
>>> has much sensible to say on either, let alone knowledge of the history
>>> on might find in, say, David Graeber's 'Debt: the first 5000 years' or
>>> Paul Ormerod's 'Dr Strangelove's Game'. I veer off a little and
>>> explain that when I started university teaching, you could base a
>>> course on text like this aiming at truth than than quantitative
>>> manipulation. These days, education has shifted towards producing
>>> technocrats with instantly transferable job skills. Teaching doesn't
>>> get much further than compiling and manipulating spreadsheets.
>>>
>>> Ask yourself who owns the debt, what is its size in comparison with
>>> the productive economy. The answers are startling, but less so than
>>> the general ignorance in which we have been educated not to know. I
>>> test the latter with a bit of computerised button-pushing before I
>>> start.
>>>
>>> The debt is several times the productive economy - or rather the
>>> consuming economy. It's owned, in the main, by a small number of
>>> people through stock markets and bonds (bonds are much bigger than
>>> shares these days). As few as 92,000 people own most of it around the
>>> world. These are the politburo or alien lizards who run the show.
>>>
>>> I venture off into some Thorstein Veblen and a book on Germany and the
>>> world wars by an Italian - 'Conjuring Hitler'. This is really to show
>>> that current economics isn't new at all. I run through some economic
>>> modelling and then ask what results we'd get if we designed our
>>> spreadsheets from history rather than theory, including a turn on
>>> delta, gamma and Poisson leap hedging.
>>>
>>> My last question is 'where did the money go'? You see, all the
>>> spreadsheets work, but they don't show what money is or where it ends
>>> up. Something called the Cantillon effect helps here. Money is
>>> effectively 'radioactive' and the plan worldwide Greek. We cut
>>> schools, police and welfare services and the money goes to a rich
>>> oligarchy who fund our politics, destroying the hope of democracy.
>>> Viewed as a physical system, economics is a control system that uses
>>> more resources in control than in production. We don't go for this in
>>> science, except in highly complex experiments as at CERN and
>>> Fermilab. The essence of economics is a plot by a government of he
>>> rich to own everything and rent it back to us. This is the essential
>>> Greek model.
>>>
>>> It's easy enough to get to this stage. The arguments can be made very
>>> accurately. This is only stage one. Underlying the argument are the
>>> Idols - complex soaked-up collective ignorance that actually prevent
>>> economics as a science and our recognition that finance is a
>>> complicated, religious control fraud (Veblen comes free on the Net).
>>>
>>> Lecture two starts with the question 'what is our evidence that
>>> private sector disciplines work better than the public sector and if
>>> so, why is the private sector so interested in running the public
>>> sector rather than producing radical, innovative, better
>>> alternatives'? This is something of a Wittgensteinian turn as I think
>>> organisation itself is misunderstood in private versus public sector
>>> debate. Underlying this is the ideology of meritocracy and its
>>> contradictions that money buys unfair advantage and wealth results in
>>> rents the rest of us pay.
>>>
>>> Is your country turning Greek?
>>>
>>> --
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Francis Hunt
>> http://francishunt.blogspot.de/
>>
> --
>
>
>

--