Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
By the way, when Putin gets directly asked about Prigozhin, he asks
why the Western powers don't restrain George Soros.
  

    
My friend Mark Petrakis posted this, written by Gregory Prinsze, on
Facebook:

"Democracy" was a temporary phase of history which allowed bankers
to take control from the earlier generation of dominant power
players: the Church and the old European monarchies.

Once the influence of the Church and the monarchies was sufficiently
diminished, the next goal for the bankers and their oligarchical
cronies was to increasingly take control of "democracy" itself, a
process which picked up momentum and sophistication throughout the
20th century.

The next steps are increasing privatization (already well underway)
and eventually phasing out "democracy" altogether. The final
destination is intended to be a global tyranny run by a tiny gang of
supremacist psychopaths and their technocrat commissars... a utopia
for them, and a cleverly disguised gulag for everyone else.

There's no question that this is happening, yet most people keep
relying on bankster-owned mainstream media for their "understanding"
of the world, and keep voting for the same old D and R
bankster-approved politicians, almost all of whom serve the
oligarchs regardless of party affiliation.

Control of the "education" system and mainstream media has played a
huge role in making this possible, but it's still obvious
nonetheless. So, why does it continue? Because of cognitive
dissonance, laziness, group think, and fear of being seen as an
"outsider" or worse yet a "conspiracy theorist."

The result is a political form of Stockholm Syndrome, and it will
soon lead to what Manhattan Project physicist Charles Galton Darwin
described as the perennial ruling elite goal: "A more perfect form
of slavery"... one in which the population is so perfectly
conditioned that they don't even recognize their own servitude. As
Aldous Huxley correctly predicted, they will be taught to "love
their servitude"... we're almost there."
  

    
(That last was posted with permission from its author.)
  

    
...and it's depressing as hell. I marched today, not because I think
this or any other march will change anything, but because I want it
on the record that I disagree with the government takeover that
we're living under currently.
  

    
I'm thinking I don't have a clue what's true anymore. We're in a
storm of conflicting narratives.
  

    
Our MMXX State of the World jam is set to end Monday, which is
incidentally Martin Luther King Day in the USA.

Keep those cards and letters rolling in... inkwell at well.com. 

Keep reading and keep sharing: https://bit.ly/sotw-2020
  

    
*It's hard to count the oligarchs here.  On the other hand, it makes
one understand why Putin would say that Soros is the same as
Prigozhin.  Every player involved in the Trump Ukraine racket thinks
that Soros is the same as Prigozhin.  That's they're consensus: it's
all about oligarch-on-oligarch culture war.

*No wonder the top Republican guy in the impeachment is actively
involved in the scheme at the same time that he dismisses the US
Congress as a side-show.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/lev-parnas-dishes-on-kushner-maduro-and-soros?re
f=scroll

“The consensus was that the reason Trump had the Russiagate and
everything that was happening was because Soros and the Democrats
controlled certain U.S. embassies in Eastern Europe, particularly
the Ukrainian one, and were able to help with the Manafort stuff and
all other kinds of stuff that basically caused problems in the Trump
World,” he said. 

So the effort to influence Zelensky’s administration included
machinations against Soros, he said—in particular, to push Zelensky
to distance himself from people perceived to be close to
billionaire. That push and the push for political favors for Trump
were one and the same, he said. In retrospect, Parnas said, the
Soros focus grew out of an atmosphere he described as cult-like.
When asked if he believed his former allies’ claims about the
billionaire, he said he got sucked in at the time. 

“When you’ve got the president saying it, you’ve got his attorneys
saying it, you’ve got all these congressmen saying it, you’ve got
all these senators saying it—again, when I say Trumpworld, that
small inner-whatever, everybody would talk about it: ‘This Soros
guy.’ That’s why I look at it as a cult.” (((It's sort of like a
"cult," but it's a lot more like a group of courtiers who hang out
with an oligarch.  They're not supposed to be swayed by public
opinion, their whole purpose is in serving oligarchy.)))

Soros, a survivor of the Holocaust, has regularly been portrayed as
a super-villian in Kremlin propaganda, and some of Trump’s allies
have echoed that description as the president’s impeachment troubles
have grown. DiGenova sparked outrage just last month after claiming
Soros “controls” the State Department.... 
  

    
*Not looking real perky in the Libyan "peace talks." The pro-Russian
side just shut off the oil flow while the pro-Turkish side is flying
in hundreds, maybe thousands, of armed Syrian war veterans.

*The twenty-first century's terror-war never exactly ends, but it
does tend to migrate from place to place.  Maybe the future really
is about Africa, after an entire generation of the Mideast getting
torn-up.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-envoy-idUSKBN1ZH0AQ
  

    
This Deloitte tech-trends publication is interesting because of its
bold lack of objectivity about the future.  On the contrary, it's
full of free ads for Deloitte clients of the C-level who appear with
head-shots say stuff like, "oh yeah, we believe totally in
(buzzword), we think it's great."

Of course Deloitte are just consultants, so maybe the tech-trends in
tech trends will be to get more to the point.  I can imagine a
Chinese Politguro approved tech trends where Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent
and maybe Huawei all appear on the same page and declare, "Well,
these are the tech trends because we're going to MAKE them the tech
trends."  Like, twenty-first century futurism with Chinese
characteristics.

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/tech-trends.html
  

    
*I can't possibly let a State of the World MMXX go by without some
mention of this fantastic Dominic Cummings meditation.  Cummings is
a top political advisor to Boris Johnson.

*The whole thing is good, with a lot of extravagant links to weird
things that a modern political operative ought to properly know.  
Then it ends with this declaration that he wants to hire characters
from science fiction novels.  Since there's no way Cummings can
actually do that, it's more the declaration that he WANTS to do
that, which is interesting.  

*A virtual character like the Idoru from William Gibson's "Idoru," a
modern government might be able to generate and hire a fictional
character like that.  As press secretary, for instance. Or a
completely fake Dominic Cummings, a political expert that you claim
to have on staff, but is not really there.

https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-sc
ientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/

"G. Super-talented weirdos

"People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean
‘true cognitive diversity’. They are usually babbling about ‘gender
identity diversity blah blah’. What SW1 needs is not more drivel
about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates
but more genuine cognitive diversity.

"We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to
university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole,
weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as
a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or
that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB.
If you want to figure out what characters around Putin might do, or
how international criminal gangs might exploit holes in our border
security, you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat
about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news
about fake news.

"By definition I don’t really know what I’m looking for but I want
people around No10 to be on the lookout for such people.

"We need to figure out how to use such people better without asking
them to conform to the horrors of ‘Human Resources’ (which also
obviously need a bonfire)."


*And, for good measure, here's a recent piece from British offshored
SF writer and journalist, about how the science fiction of the
1980s, set in the 2020s, differs from the actual 2020s.  Some food
for thought here.  Am I sorry I did it, now that a lot of it looks
pretty goofy?  No. Not really.  On the contrary, it makes me want to
write something about the 2060s.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-science-fiction-imagined-the-2020s-f8e98a5bc729

  

    
Alberto Cottica remarks:

I enjoyed the broad, grim sweep of Bruce’s “everywhere is kind of
the same” in Posts 5 to 7. But I wonder: where does that leave the
European Union? That’s the one polity that can never go
ethno-nationalist, not without completely disintegrating. I live in
Brussels, with maybe half a foot in the Eurosphere. From where I
stand I can see the EU shudder and lurch, but to be honest I have no
idea where all this is going. The EU does seem to have a chance to
do something completely different – almost an obligation to do so,
just by sheer inertia in a world that has suddenly changed its
direction. The buzzwords are getting weirder (“Green EU Deal”,
“Internet of Humans”), and von der Leyen is still mostly an unknown
quantity.

Any intuition to share from you guys?

*It's all about Margrethe Vestager, the EU digital czarina.  She's
basically the only entity in modern tech that looks like governance.

*I follow Margrethe in social media and I gaze in mild wonderment at
everything she does... I think her aim is to tame Big Tech into an
enterprise that is more like aerospace.  Meaning Airbus style
aerospace, not like that American Boeing junk that falls out of the
sky.  

She's one of Europe's best technocrats. Pick of the litter, really. 
She's one of the least-scary power-players in modern politics.  If I
got email from Vestager, I wouldn't dive under the couch, I'd be
inclined to listen with care and be all cordial.  Whereas, if I got
email from Prigozhin, I'd be updating my will.

*With that said, though, there's something rather "curator" like
about Margrethe Vestager. It's like EU democratic politics just
sorta gave up and decided to let Margrethe handle everything because
actual governance  just gets in the way.
  

    
Cory Docotorow waxes techno-utopian:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-cities-where-youre
-the-sensor-not-the-thing-being-sensed

"The case for ... cities that aren't dystopian surveillance states"

"If we decide to treat people as sensors, and not as things to be
sensed – if we observe Kant’s injunction that humans should be
'treated as an end in themselves and not as a means to something
else' – then we can modify the smart city to gather information
about the things and share that information with the people."

City centers in large and popular metropolitan areas are starting to
feel more like theme parks. The people who live downtown pay seven
figures for condos in multiuse highrises. Tour guides are always
waxing nostalgic about how the city used to be a friendly and
affordable town, before the gods of commerce created the new digital
weather systems, raining profit on corporations.  Smart cities are
not smart for everybody. Ask the guy living in a box under the
bridge how smart he thinks the city is. 
  

    
Firehose media feed from Apple News, one of many sources of
patchwork news. Just part of today's feed, no wonder my head is
spinning:

Impeachment impeachment impeachment.
Amish sex scandals.
Meghxit
Immodium abuse
Conor McGregor's latest "ultimate fight"
Kidnapped teen snapchats a clue leading to her recovery
Trump's grudges
The FBI can unlock some phones, but not others
Ageotypes
Groom sexually assaults waitress at his wedding reception
GirlsDoPorn is no more
Trump "loves America" but hates American cities
Mrs. Maisel is marvelous
Amber Heard has a girlfriend
Kim Kardashian as criminal justice reformer
Casper, a mattress company that is a tech company
Roomba deals!
SpaceX launch
Apple's iPhone 12
Behringer clones synths from Moog to Roland
Police robots are not smart
Great USB hub!
The most excellent egg sandwich
Nazi propaganda in Brazil
Medicaid block grants
One Trump lawyer called another "dangerous"
Marlin Kemmerer wanted to hold Congress hostage in 1932
Biden Biden Biden
Bernie and Trump have something(s) in common
Guiliani ranting
Trump's legal wranglings.
Rebel Wilson lost weight
Reba McEntire is down for a "Tremors" reboot
US Companies pushing green energy in Europe
Google Home's music setup
Microsoft's new browser 
Natural alternative to diet pills
Lose weight fast!
Superfoods
Carb myths
Diagnosing flu
Giant squid
Hemorrhoid remedies
Coronavirus
Binaural beats
Relocating feisty lions
China phases out single use plastics
Wild bears in Alaska
Tunisia curbs coastal erosion
Solar power in Qatar
Daytrips
  

    
How is it that central and South America never are part of these
discourses?

So much going on there -countries like Venezuela imploding, native
tribes taking big corps to court, Amazon heading to ecological
disaster, how climate change is affecting the continent,
reforestation efforts where land has been logged out, oil industry
no longer pumping out revenues, general political governance heading
more and more to the right and cartels running Mexico - that’s all
off the top of my head.

I mean, jeez, if you wanna be all grim and depressed, take some big
looks there.
  

    
Via email from Bruce McLaughlin:

In his book, “Capitalism in the 21st Century,” Thomas PIketty
suggests that wide income disparity with a small group at the top is
the equilibrium state of capitalism. Events where large amounts of
capital are destroyed (wars, depressions, disasters, etc.) knock the
system out of equilibrium. What happens afterwards is that capital
owners have to pay people to rebuild (growth), rather than charging
them as much as possible for being alive (rent seeking).

With this theory he explains the post WWII prosperity in Europe,
Japan, and the US, along with the post WWII, Civil War, Famine, and
another Civil War prosperity of China. China was in the right phase
of development to be low bidder on the job of making a smartphone
for everybody on the planet, which extended their prosperity. They
are heading back to equilibrium now.

What makes the current cycle different from older cycles like the
Gilded Age in the US? Computers, cheap and fast communication and
transportation, cheap and deadly weapons. How will the oligarchs use
these new capabilities in the next decade? It’s not going to be
pretty...
  

    

*Well, it seems that everybody in the world agrees that the Libyans
ought to stop fighting, including the Russians, the Turks and even
the Libyan factions.  I hate to play the cynic here, because it
would be great to see an oil war negotiated away.  "Peace Breaks Out
in MMXX," that would be fabulous news.

*However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this cordial national
paperwork implies that the situation is about to explode with
extra-national proxy actors.  I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

*At least The Donald's not involved, so who knows, maybe this Berlin
agreement really is good news for the state of our world. 

*It's also of considerable interest that Prime Minister Boris
Johnson would simply stroll up to Putin face to face in Berlin and
tell Putin to knock it off with poisoning people (at least in
Britain).  Of course everybody knows Putin did that, while Johnson
lives in his own fantasy world and will riff nonsense at any length
about anything.  Still, it's odd that BoJo would just,
undiplomatically, truth-bomb that in a way, and in venue,  where all
the heavy players would overhear.  Boris Johnson is truly a strange
guy.  If his underling wants to recruit "super-talented weirdos,"
he'll have a hard time hiring someone weirder than the boss.
  

    


*Some of the Libya reportage from "Politico Europe."

"DIPLOMACY STILL WORKS: The international community, or at least the
parts that are most influential in Libya, agreed on a 55-point,
nine-page document at a conference hosted by German Chancellor
Angela Merkel in Berlin on Sunday. They call for the return to a
political process in the country, and most importantly, say they
will refrain from military interventions and respect the arms
embargo in place. The signatories include Russia, Turkey, Egypt and
the Emirates — which were represented at the highest level. Here
are the conclusions."

(((There's the pdf of the English-language version of the new
treaty.  It's odd to be in an era where they just pop up and you can
thumb through 'em for yourself.)))

https://www.bundeskanzlerin.de/resource/blob/656734/1713866/7982684117074dea50
70983ebb136249/2020-01-19-berlin-conference-on-libya-data.pdf

"Now the hard(er) part: Following up, implementing and guaranteeing
the agreement holds will be the next — difficult — task; EU foreign
ministers will attempt to do so as early as today at a meeting in
Brussels...."  (((Every government finds it easy to agree on
not-shipping arms, because all the arms-shipping is being done by
"curators," not governments.  There's a rumor that the current
leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, may be appointed by Putin as a
kind of satrap of Syrian and Libyan affairs.  If so, well, that
Kadyrov guy's a complete savage.  He's up for anything.)))

"Putin also squeezed in a tête-à-tête with British PM Boris Johnson,
who told him that Britain is still furious over the attempted
assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei
Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018, and that U.K.-Russia relations
can’t return to normal yet."
  

    
Libya's oil reserves, esp. with US fracked oil now in the global
equation, aren't considerable - at least in terms of the world price
of oil or geostrategically generally - so I assume the interest of
Libya, in particular for Russia, but Turkey as well, is as one more
lever that might destabilize Europe.  And not just for Libyans
leaving the country, since that population isn't large (Libya has a
population of only 6.375 mln.), but in particular other people
elsewhere in Africa (or futher east in the ME even as far as
Afghanistan) who want to flee to Europe.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/italian-foreign-minister-luigi-di-m
aio-europe-stands-to-lose-the-most-a-a4453de7-d1e8-464b-b220-c3cbbd153cab

There are currently 700,000 migrants in the country who want to go
elsewhere and that can pretty much only be Europe.

I imagine Johnson is feeling vindicated and in a position of
strength given the Conservatives' powerful December electoral
victory.  Labor in disarray, etc.
  

    
 

                   <rant on>

You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.  White guys pontificating
about the state of the world leaving out half the world - curiously
the brown and black part - Latin America and Africa.  I've begun to
suspect this is partically ignored because it is outside your
comfort zones or knowledge zones or interest zones so half the world
simply doesn't appear on the globes that you look at.

You could write a state of the world based on the Amazon and I'd bet
it *would* be a state of the world.  The environmental and
ecological issues alone affect the entire planet.

Latin America and Africa may not be the players of your world but
god knows without them there wouldn't be much of your world.  They
are exploited by the world you speak of - Eurocentric, US, Putin (do
you call it Russia these days, heck if I know or care), China,
Middle East Oil.  

This other half of the world is starving, much without potable
water, just barely surviving, without agency.  Latin America doesn't
have refugees, Africa has those. 

You can talk about oil yet here and getting closer is a huge water
problem that could instigate wars.  There isn't enough and more
there isn't enough clean water without toxins.  Australia is already
in the throes of dealing with this - desalination projects happening
or in the works.  Who's the likely leader and knowledge center? 
Israel.

What about looking at the state of the world through humanity?  One
that has decreasing empathy, increasingly tolerates sociopathy, has
less and less sense of the common good and welfare and increasingly
creates tribes (special interest groups) pitting themselves against
each other (or manipulate a la "Let's you and him fight")thus losing
what agency they had in the larger view, one that uses chemicals and
toxins to grow foods at the same time as they destroy the earth they
use?  

Where is love or kindness or compassion in any of these worlds?

How about discussing these things?

                       <rant off>
  

    
(Cheering)
  

    


bravo, lendie! wow.

yes. i want to hear about that state of the world, or the state of that
world.
  

    
Hey, <lendie>, thanks for the rant! I would feel more ashamed if I
pretended any kind of expertise about the Global South, but we
certainly welcome contributions like yours. 

The true "state of the world" is so much more than any of us can
grasp. I often feel like the blind man who happened to grab the
elephant's rectum, the world being so much more than I can ever
know, the awesome and terrifying breadth of global diversity. If we
think we know the world because we "read the news," we're just
kidding ourselves.

Especially if we think we know something because we were watching
Fox News, or MSNBC, or CNN, which are all about divisive politics.
Those cable channels facilitate by attention and misrepresentation
the power of the corrupt and unhinged. 

The exclusion of the Global South is unfortunately too common...
check out
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/15/opinion/politics-global-south.html

"... the global South has often been well outside the spotlight.
Much of our global attention and reporting have been focused on the
deceptions and distortions afflicting elections in the industrial
West, such as those that unfolded amid the U.S. presidential race in
2016.

"There is a grave danger in overlooking the consequences of this
inattention, not only in terms of global democratization and
democratic consolidation, but also in the specific ways the use of
social media is impacting democratic processes in the South."
  

    
So how are you going to change this next year?
  

    
Uhm, Libya is in Africa.

Venezuela is a kind of South American Libya.  Maybe some day someone
will write a definitive history about their endless panoply of
curses and disorders.  It's frankly beyond me.
  

    
It seems that Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst will not be able to
join us (unless they show up afterward for a post-midnight set). 
They got caught up in touring to support the new album.   It’s a
pity, because as musicians go they’re about the most erudite and
chatty ones that I’ve ever met.

As for next year, maybe Lauren Beukes could be persuaded to show up.
She’s the most cyberpunk South African ever.  Also, her new sci-fi
short story collection “Slipping” is pretty good.

I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t say more this year about the
ongoing ruckus in India.  I met some science fiction writers in
Bangalore last year, so now I kinda know what gives with them
social-media-wise, and man are they upset in MMXX.  I’ve never seen
such politically ticked-off science fiction writers.  They’re
yelling their heads off, but everybody’s too busy impeaching
Presidents or breaking up Europe to keep up with India.  Or Hong
Kong either, where the intelligentsia are smoldering every day.