How do you empty a civilization for a buck? The pictures are amazing but filled with people would be even more so. What was lost for a Mozart symphony or a Schubert serenade? How many silver bells in the processions of Seville came from these peoples dishes and trinkets?
http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/travel/in-peru-machu-picchu-and-its-sib ling-incan-ruins-along-the-way.html?hpw REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Saturday, June 25, 2011 8:47 PM To: 'Keith Hudson'; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] study-says-technology-could-transform-society Interesting comments from Mike Spencer and from Keith. Mike says he didnt know although he lives up there around the Mic Mac who do happen to know a lot about this. Of course they wont talk the way Im talking to you because we, on this list, have a lot of history of speaking to each other from a place of honesty. (Even though I do have my cultural break downs sometimes.) But, our history, together on this list, is why I speak face to face in the way that I am. Its an act of respect towards your spirit. If you want to talk with the Elder peoples, sometimes the best way is to do as Indian people do when they want to learn something. Go to a community basketball game and pick the oldest grandmother you can find and ask to sit and watch the game with them. Wait and observe. Gradually, if you smell right, they will open the door. But dont ask questions and dont think your time is more important than theirs or that you are going to get away without some kind of serious gift that you WILL miss. Cause and effect. Debts are owed. You debts cant be passed from immigrant to immigrant until someone forgets them. They are remembered and will eventually be paid either to those owed or worse, to ones own spirit in its ignorance of cause and effect. I feel it an honor to open up this history to you. Thanks for reading and sharing Mike. I feel the same way about Keith. We are pretty rough with each other sometimes but there is always a deep respect for the distance between our realities and the toughness in speaking from the heart. Keith, sometimes when I need tech support I get some guy in India trained by an ex-colonialist professor, (or a corporation with a script,) who will explain to me how my machine got the way that it did, and why they made it to be that way and fail and that I have no recourse other than NOT to buy from them again. It matters not that all of my information, from ten years of work, was erased as a result of their company strategies. It only matters that their value was maintained. (The new branding of the consumer as a subject of a confidence game is the most recent example in the metaphor that began with the barbarians of the Greeks, evolved into the Irish for the English and then was brought here and branded as the primal metaphor for the American Indian. American Indians were an older people that had whole histories of culture, economics, art, medicine and urban planning while Europe was in the Dark Ages and trying to come up with a way to replace the Silk Road for their silk and spices in 1400.) That particular consumer process has returned to the US in the foreign companies. Now Americans from Alabama also explain to me why it happened the way it did and implicit in the explanation is that they will do nothing about it. (One should remember that I learned this type of thinking from the way people were treated on an Indian reservation by the outside world.) The problem here is that their explanation is but one little sliver of the implications of what is being spoken of. That is sliver is: that money has value beyond agreement and that they will do nothing to endanger that. Paul Krugman knows that it DOESNT and that there is no implicit value in anything that you dont put there yourself. Keith, European wars and history mean nothing to me except for the Batesonian double bind that says: I love, and have dedicated my life to performing and teaching the product from Europe that came about as a result of the death of my lineage and culture. That truth has kept me singing but not, until this July, ever allowed me to travel to Europe. I have a wonderful Oneida Indian soprano who has just begun to scratch the surface of that toxic strain that could cut her throat as it has tried to cut mine. It has been a wonderful Jewish Maestro that has kept me open to the works of the spirit, even the Germans, in the depths of grief for how those works of Art came about. My wonderful young soprano will have to learn that or fail in her chosen profession. I will try to help. It was Albrecht Duerer who saw what was lost and what would be melted down for base metal only for the value of commerce. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text2/durerjournal .pdf What was just beginning in Europe had a history here and it had to be destroyed, or controlled in a Vatican vault, or Spain and Italy would have been overwhelmed the way the Italians overwhelmed that brief Dowland and Purcell vocal paradise in England. I remember when Dowland crossed the Mississippi and made it to Oklahoma long after Clementi and Handel were a regular part of the Oklahoma landscape. I sang the first Thomas Campion ever on a recital in Tulsa, in 1963. We were enthralled just as Duerer was by the Aztec feather paintings. We wondered how English music and the language, had disappeared and even more how the Germans had resisted it to have their own in Schubert and Wolf. I realize Cromwell and the Puritans helped that along and set up the atmosphere for the advent of the Italian opera with Handel in London as well as Clementi with his pianos. Was it Mozart and Beethoven that was the Germans musical Messiahs? Was Beethoven, the man who freed music from the Italian vice-grip? America is now firmly in the grip of Internationalists and has little identity beyond old European Art, Trinkets and Trash entertainment and church music. It was the law of cause and effect that set the demise of the Spaniards and Italians magnificent cultural achievements in the way they treated us. Individuals always believe in their specialness and usually treat people who are like them, but below them in power, with contempt. Often they refuse to believe they were ever that way themselves. The question that occurs to me here is: Did the magnificent Art and cultural achievements that Cortez discovered at Tenochtitlan and Chichen Itza go unrecognized, (except as base metals and trinkets,) because it wouldnt be until the 19th century that Spain, or the English, had such sophistication and urban planning as they found here in 1515? Is that why they simply didnt see the need for it? The Spanish corporate urban structure for Aztec labor killed the Aztec people by the millions from the Hanta Virus that the Mixteca had controlled through urban planning. The Spanish had no idea, but they would pay when lesser diseases here returned to become killers in Spain. Spain went through that money like a drunk and was soon broke but the Columbian exchange didnt just destroy us here. Their destruction is still going on in the economic systems of value in the present and the refusal to write or even acknowledge the history of economy of the pre-Columbian world and how it worked both in business and science as well as the glue of spirituality that tied it all together. Spain was soon returned to the bankrupt status while the Italian Church was absorbed in Vienna and transformed into Heilige Kunst in Berlin, and Leipzig. Some of the early masters were Italian but it would not be the Porpuras and the Cherubinis but Bach, Sechter, Albrectsburger, Niedermeyer, Weick and Leopold Mozart etc. who would carry the day in spite of the magnificent efforts of Friar Martini and Antonio Salieri who never took a dime for teaching Beethoven, Hummel, Mozart, Schubert or Moscheles. Even among the Italians, money wasnt the value here, competence was. And the first competence was in the development of the human potentials - not the marketplace! It was the musically bankrupt English and Scots who turned their stories to wastelands, profit, utility and pleasure as ownership of something outside yourself. Useful things that could justify theft in the colonies and the rebranding of murder as Collateral Damage in a greater market enterprise with monetary value being the only value. To paraphrase DeMilles Pharaoh in speaking of Moses God: The Romany actor Yul Brynner portraying Pharaoh spoke the words, The Hebrews God IS God. Except here it was To the English and Scottish Economists their money should be God to the whole world and will! Money not as contract and agreement but as the ultimate in value for all of reality. Collateral damage began here in the 16th century. Today it is rebranded as cost effectiveness and rules the entire market machine. I will argue that refusing to see, much less include, the whole circle of reality is not and has never been a way to discover real value. You cant blame Islam for resisting you on this as a slap against science. They just dont approve of the morality that goes along with Western Science and the idea of Cost Effectiveness. That is to them a Great Satan since they believe in super demons. But so does the English church and all of the other Christian Churches. We dont in super demons. Humans are quite demonic enough in their ordinary struggles, without the need for a super tempter. We believe that evil is banal. We dont need a great beast, or a Leviathan for a cop out and a refusal to be fully human. Evil is personal. Stalin was a jerk and Hitler was on drugs and was a jerk. You cant escape responsibility, you can only pay for your actions through becoming a real person who IS responsible. We even have a word for such a real person. Ayvwiyah. It is a rare businessman that qualifies as Ayvwiyah to an Indian. Being Ayvwiyah is about seeing the atrocities for what they are and going on in spite of them. The European Christian theologian Paul Tillich called it The Courage to be. Having the courage to step forward into the art even when it is from a pile of the most sacred objects, and people, being burned for the purpose of melting down the gold to be sent away for spices and tea. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, June 25, 2011 2:09 AM To: [email protected]; RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] study-says-technology-could-transform-society Most of the "New World" silver and gold that entered Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries pretty promptly left Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries in a vastly increased trade with India, China and the Far East in exchange for their cottons, porcelain, silks, spices, sugar and opium (we had little to offer them other than gold and silver). The European wars of the 18th century (with mercenary armies rather than conscripted ones) were, if anything, more limited than they might have been due to a shortage of gold coinage. The wars of the 19th and 20th centuries (with increasingly sized artillery regiments with increasing press-ganging and conscription with much lower average soldier-pay than previous highly-paid mercenaries) were paid for by printing money because there was insufficient gold and silver for governments to borrow. Because governments then discovered that money-printing was an easy way out, they have kept to it ever since. And banks have been enthusiastic supporters of this dodge because they knew that however much credit they created, governments would then have to print more and more banknotes. That's why the US$ and the UK£ are worth less than 5% of what they were pre-1914. And that's why we're in deep trouble today with no hope of remedy until we re-establish currencies on stable platforms -- and, furthermore, demote banks to the status of normal businesses. Keith At 06:05 25/06/2011, you wrote: Ray wrote: 1515 when the gold from the new world began to flood Europe and create almost everything that we consider important today as a result of the pillage. A completely new identity emerged in Europe with a blossoming of arts and culture in every nook and cranny. I trace my teachers and can go back no further than the 16th century. They even call that "pre-prosperity time", the dark ages that opened into the Age of Enlightened genocide, rape and pillage. Yes it did change Europe and lead to a century of carnage in the 20th century. Hundreds of millions dead but it all began here with 100 million dead. History is just history. You can't change it but you can understand cause and effect. Well, let me expose my ignorance of finance here. (What, again? :-) Europe was, AFAIUI, insulated or partitioned off from the pillage and genocide itself, connected only by a tenuous thread of ship, military and attendant exploiter adventurers. The blood and misery was in place so distant that it might seem nearly mythical. So from the European system as a whole, money was just being created out of thin air. A fleet of ships filled with gold or silver bars, even after a few were lost to (yes) Pirates of the Carribean, was so valuable relative to the capital and operational costs (to European monarchs and investors, if not to native Americans) that the cost was inconsequential. That appears to me to be approximately the equivalent of printing money. The cost of the press is inconsquential. In the 17th c. international bankers were getting involved and I'm guessing that some or much of the financial stream was diverted into loans, typically to monarchs to support armies. I'm further guessing that in the 16th c. that money was simply *spent* by the monarchs and investors who sponsored the trade. Maybe I have that somewhat wrong but the upshot seems to have been that having free money to spread around, albeit destined for less than praiseworthy purposes, financed a century or two of enlightenment, increasing prosperity, improved living conditions and even maybe the nascent rise of the middle class. Maybe the Fed should lose the loan/debt thing and just print [for hi-tech values of "print", of course] a lot of money and give it away or spend it on bridges, dams, urban sewage treatment, mortage relief and the like. Or is that what Paul Krugman is already saying? In ignorance, - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ <http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A 0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0> ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
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