At 01:46 26/06/2011, Ray wrote:
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.
I generally avoid using words like "rubbish" when
offering comments and I try as much as possible
not to speak from the heart, leaving that for
other matters. More than anything else I welcome
facts which contradict anything I might have
written because it gives me the chance of
changing my views -- something which I've done in
a substantial way on several issues since writing on Futurework many years ago.
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>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.
My own view is that music, along with philosophy,
graphic art, poetry and literature, peaked at
around the 1930s, having by then pretty fully
explored their techniques and potential. There is
much good enjoyable stuff still being created, of
course, but they're all variations around the
main discoveries and achievements that have
already been bedded down and which most people
appreciate. Those so-called creative individuals
who identify themselves as 'serious' exponents of
their art and prtoduce the most ridiculous stuff
might enjoy Warholian fame in the Sunday papers
and literary magazines, etc but only until they
are displaced by the next batch of individuals
who are patronized by the critics.
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.
Yes. That's the way all cultures are towards others.
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?
Yes, they had no conception of the previous
culture. Here in nearby Bath the Georgian
builders of the 18th century tore down almost
every scrap of the wonderful Tudor buildings that
then existed (one rear wall of one house
remaining). They were even more thorough than the
Germans when they bombed my home town of Coventry
-- in which case two Tudor houses managed to
survive (and have been restored -- together with
several other Tudor buildings which have been entirely reconstructed).
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.
They didn't control it through urban planning. It
was just that the whole of America, north,
central and south was isolated from many of the
diseases that had mutated in Europe. Never mind
the Spanish conquistadores, brutal though they
were. A kindly visit by any group of Europeans would have had the same result.
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!
That's just not so. Italian musicians and artists
from the Renaissance onwards were incredibly able
to extract the last penny from rich sponsors and
employers by way of commissions or salaries. As
for teaching talented proteges for little or no
money this was often the case in many other
professions and trades in order to build up a
following for reputational or economic (cheap labour) reasons.
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.
Nothing -- but nothing -- would work at all
without trade, as described by hundreds of
historians and proto-economists going back to
Roman times. Even in Adam Smith's own day, he and
other Scottish and English economists were saying
very little that was different from what scores
of Europeans, particularly the French, were also saying.
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.
It is little to do with a specific animus against
Western morality. That's very recent and only a
rationalization by a minority of their
intellectuals. For hundreds of years it has been
a result of isolation from the West as Muslims
became increasingly preoccupied with political
differences between Caliphates (nowadays
expressed as the hatred between Shias and
Sunnis) In its heyday as a wonderfully creative
civilization at around 1000AD, Islam would
welcome Jewish, Christian and merchants'
(European, Chinese, Indian) quarters in their
cities and freely translated ideas between one
and the other. Today, Islam is a religion which
has turned in on itself in a very nasty way.
Despite 9/11, Islam does more damage to itself
than it does to the West. In Iraq several dozen
Shias are blown up every week by Sunni
terrorists, and similar sort of incidents are now
beginning to occur in Pakistan.
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.
The burning of people in medieval Europe was
nothing to with gold but was carried out by the
Christian Church on people who thought a little
differently. Except for individual donations
perhaps, the Church got hardly a sniff of the
gold that was being plundered by the army, the merchants and the privateers.
KSH
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/%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0%A0>http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/
^^-^^
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/06/
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