eric walberg

The history of our Story
Firing the first shots: Honduras and odious debt
Out of control, permanent crisis, role of government
клин клином or Make love not war
Exercise: rethink the Story, demonetize What you can do
Cold ugly cynicism or warm beautiful passion

'Sacred economics' is the final instalment of my series of essays Harnessing Human Nature to Save the World.
Eisenstein's The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self (2007) and Sacred economics: Money, gift and society in the age of transition (2021) are proto-texbooks for the new-old worldview and the understanding and backbone necessary to save humanity and Earth.

Kisin reacts viscerally to Critical Race Theory, but his hatred of all things Soviet prevents him from appreciating that precious part of Soviet reality: an end to racism, and to make sure, you tax the rich and keep income distribution within bounds. Racism is, in the last analysis, economic.

No question I prefer Naomi Klein to Naomi Wolf, her Other. The social issues (feminism, gaylib) are secondary and will sort themselves out in due course. We can all agree that human behavior is still a mystery. The real issue is fighting capitalism/ imperialism. Klein didn't lose the thread like her Other ...

Time future contained in time past, as the saying goes, not just 5,000 years past to the Neolithic, but a million years past to the prehuman era, completing the circle of life to the very beginning of time, to find the solutions to our crises. ReGenesis.

As we marched, I mingled to check out slogans. From the river to the sea, Palestine is almost free morphed into From the sea to the river, Palestine will live forever. Lots of Jews, looking thoughtful and subdued. Jews against genocide, Jews against ethnostates.

Religion is on the rebound. Europe is now desecularizing, mostly because of Muslim immigration, which has in turn spurred a rightwing return to 'family, homeland, religion'. Ironically, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah are strong supporters of democracy, as it seems many citizens want to turn away from neocolonialism and would approve a theocratic state. Dry atheism even with the leaven of humanism and modern art, can never compete with rich emotions evoked by religion.

Muslim apologists argue that, yes, the original Bible contained the apocryphal story of Jesus making and animating clay birds, and that the Quran was actually correcting a wrongful exclusion of this apocryphal from the canon. Fine. Oscar Wilde thumbed his nose at such nitpicking: talent borrows, genius steals.

Imagine if Judaism and the non-Pauline Jesus movement had been able to coexist as Jesus-James/Jacob wanted. James/Jacob kept both faiths and attracted many Gentiles who wanted to convert to both Judaism and the new Jesus branch. Win-win. Paul came charging in and upset the applecart. Win-lose. But what was the prize? Pauline Christianity?

The original eros, ecstatic self-transcendent desire, was not for the masses. The new romantic love is the central expression of sovereignty of the self. Romeo and Juliet.  Falling in love solves your identity problem. Life without love is suddenly meaningless. Life with love is tragic, love sickness. A dialectical inversion making death acceptable if life is to be redeemed through love.
Dangerous stuff.

To clarify the complexity of imperialist strategies from the twentieth century onwards, I defined three ‘games’ in Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games (2011). During the nineteenth century imperial game—what I call Great Game I (GGI)—Britain kept Afghanistan, Iran and the Ottoman Caliphate as nominally independent political formations, though in compliance with British interests. Great Game II was the stand-off with Soviet Union, Great Game III the post-soviet shifting order.

We can use computers to plumb the depths of human civilization for social darwinian 'laws' for how societies form. Just as stunning is how we can now look back at the rise and fall of civilizations and detect 'laws' for how and why they collapse.

Kugle's sifting through Islamic history and jurisprudence reveals that this whole debate took place at various times in Islamic history, starting with the time of the Prophet, the first caliphs, and the debate continued until at least the 12th c.

The Russian law is clearly in response to the campaign mounted by the 'gay international' not only against Russia but against the world: to make gay rights a key part of all countries' laws. Forget about trying to make people like gays. Just make sure the 'gay international' can police your country's behaviour.

More visitors came to see these strange new Inca Jews, Jungle Jews. Israeli Rabbi Jacob Krauss came with his family. He thought they looked like something out of the Flintstones, but realized they were in fact out of the Torah. This was how Israelis must have lived in the desert, with however much or little God provided.

A hedgehog is on a mission, a fox plays, drops its toy, and starts a new game. Darwin and Marx were both. Men on missions but having fun in the process. Evolution is not just survival of fittest, but about charm, sensory delight, subjective experience.

Q: Prior to Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, the media was full of rumors that the Saudis were being sweet-talked into recognizing Israel.
A: Wishful thinking. Israel wants the Saudis to acknowledge it as chief terrorist-cop in the Middle East. The Saudis see themselves are head honcho,

To clarify the complexity of imperialist strategies from the twentieth century onwards, I defined three ‘games’ in Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games (2011). During the nineteenth century imperial game—what I call Great Game I (GGI)—Britain kept Afghanistan, Iran and the Ottoman Caliphate as nominally independent political formations, though in compliance with British interests. Great Game II was the stand-off with Soviet Union, Great Game III the post-soviet shifting order.

A 1930s study showed that most intersex seem to cope just fine with their disfigured gonads. Boooring. Much more fun (profitable) to con desperate parents into buying a nice model from your array of high tech doodads. How did this quackery -- if in doubt, chop ‘it’ (penis, clitoris) off; if penis, castrate, so no messy gonads left to fester (they don’t) -- became the rage in the 1950s?

I'm sure Trump assassinated General Soleimani with two aims.
First, to show what a clever, fearless leader he is, what a solid friend of Israel. Surely that would let him sail through the electoral slog, guarantee his reelection (with Zionist media support), and let him get back to serious golfing.
But he and Pompeo had another motive.

Chappelle is the American Hamas, lobbing his homemade rockets, flying his balloons out of besieged America at the dastardly foe, which relentless steals and then colonizes our minds, forcing us to our knees to atone for our inbred antisemitism.

Lao she's Cat country (1932) is a kind of playful Nostradamus, full of prescient insights, inspired by China's century of humiliation at the hands of greedy, downright horrible imperialists and the scattershot attempts at revolution in the early 20th century.

Review Andrei Martyanov, Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse, 2021.

There are lots of modern day shoe shiners, busily shining every day, inflating statistics, but producing no value. Viewed in real teams, the US looks more and more like a 3rd world country. Subtract finance and advertising from GDP, and what's left?

The intersex condition is explicable by science, and as such, is a straightforward issue of civil rights, not really a movement out to transform society. It is not really controversial, despite occasional prejudice depending on how sever the condition, in contrast to the gay or transgender movements which are indeed movements with political goals and are bound to face resistance, despite attempts to claim the 'battle' has now been 'won'.

Solzhenitsyn gave no thought to Islam, even though it was clear to all that a genuine theocracy, Solzhenitsyn's implied 'good society', came about on the Soviet Union's southern border, even as the faux communist utopias (both the Soviet Union and Afghanistan) were disintegrating. Shia Iran pretty much fills Solzhenitsyn’s checklist.iv Though persecuted, Iran was distant enough and with a strong enough culture to resist the capitalist trap, and its 1979 revolution was overwhelmingly popular, unlike the mini-revolution in Afghanistan in 1978, which was really more a palace coup.

Andrews’ victims are Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, Sonia Sotomayor. Their victims are the millennials (1980+), who, Andrews argues, are using the laid-back liberalism of their parents/ grandparents against them, in a perverse version of ‘the revolution eating its children'. I.e., the revolution eating its parents. The cult leaders of the 1960s+ ate the old left communist revolutionaries, leaving only ‘drugs, sex and rock&roll’, which has deformed into ‘cultural Marxism’ today.

There are many fascinating stops on Falk's life journey, but my favorite is this sudden appearance in Tehran in January 1979, as Chair of the Committee Against Intervention in Iran. 'How different might have been the whole history of the region had the United States decided to live with this expression of the Iranian people’s right of self-determination? It was the same type of fundamental and costly geopolitical mistake that the U.S. made in Vietnam, and elsewhere.'

While colonial Muslims began appearing in the ‘mother’ country as sailors, servants, students, soldiers as early as the 17th century, there were few Muslims crossing the Atlantic. It was not till the 19th century that a few brave souls popped up in Canada. Now Islam is arguably the most influential spiritual force here. What's the secret?

Jung: Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.'
Tarnas takes this seriously, which means, yes, your birth event has cosmic connections. And now with computers and Hubble, we can churn out the numbers from 500BC on and start to connect the dots. Make astrology empirical, scientific.

As for Auschwitz, it was 'possible because God had been pronounced dead and all the old 'thou shalts' declared null and void.' 'Western democracies were morally superior in large part because they still hewed to a Judeo-Christian line, however faded.'

Whereas Hitler's supporters are in jail for Holocaust Denial, and most of Stalin's supporters in the West disappeared after 1991, Trotsky's heirs and supporters are entrenched in academia, university campuses, the media. The 'revolution' snuck in the back door.

More than just good theology, it's a dramatic epic, right up there with Shahnameh, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Homer's Odyssey. But it's not just a linear plotline. It is episodic, like musical variations, improvisations. And that works for us.