A Cultural Tidal Wave

There's an intriguing demographic shift going on the the West, and particularly in the US.  As a child of the 1960s, I vividly remember the counter-culture liberals activating against an entrenched conservative elite.  Issues included ecology, economic inequality and the drug culture.  Free sex and feminism - yes, they were once related and exploded due to the Pill - were the catch phrases of my peers in the Baby Boom generation.

The Baby Boom was a unique phenomenon in world cultural history.  A huge group of post-WW2 children grew up in a world where economies always boomed, the US was the undisputed leader of the "Free World", and the majority of the population was no longer rural.

Freed from having to work the farm and milk the cows, and dripping with Daddy's money from the post-war boom, an entire generation was afforded the ability to turn in on itself and navel-gaze.

For better or worse, the liberal Baby Bommers made significant changes to society and culture.  In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was set up, marijuana is finally becoming more acceptable, and a mini-Boom of babies - commonly referred to as GenX - were the results of Boomer influence.

The Boomers also managed to elect two of the most corrupt presidents in US history: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  The former was elected because he was young, handsome, loved free sex, smoked dope and played the saxophone; the latter because he was black, which apparently was his only qualification - not to mention that many suspect he was the son of a radical 60s Marxist.

As these generational things do, the Boomers were Marxists because their parents grew up in a time when the US was dabbling in Marxist/Communist philosophy - the 1920s and 1930s, during the Great Depression.  The Boomers echoed, and then carried their parents' dabblings to the extreme.

GenX became the Greed Generation, immortalized in Oliver Stone's Wall Street film, while the Boomers themselves cashed in on organic grocery stores, herbal teas and environmentally-friendly plastics ( a la The Graduate).

Each time a new generation echoes their parents' politics, things got just a little more extreme.  The Capitalists went overboard in the Reagan years with derivatives and paper assets, while the Marxists went overboard with Identity Politics and Share The Wealth schemes, like Global Warming, etc.

What seems to be happening now is a blend of ecological consciousness with kinder, gentler capitalism, self-identifying as the new counter-culture.  In other words, the current emerging generation is creating a synthesis of the two extremes, while eschewing the more radical ends of the spectrum.

Now, you have the YouTube millionaires spouting anti-Liberal rhetoric while working out of their parents' basements.  They are anti-consumerist, preferring to rattle the economic order with cyber currencies and a Digital Revolution.  They are shunning Old Media like broadcast networks and Hollywood movies, in favor of producing and consuming each others' projects, and sharing the wealth through crowd-funding organizations.

Culturally, they are leaving the club scenes, swapping underground band MP3s and amateur film projects, and paying for it all with Bitcoin and Etherium.

It's really a bizarre amalgam of preceding philosophies, at least to the eyes of a geezer, and quite fascinating to watch.  These folks don't buy anything the social institutions tell them, and instead actually seem willing to do the work to research information for themselves - not the mention proudly crow their findings on YouTube.

In the end, the revolution that the Boomers promised, but never delivered, is coming out of their great-grandchildren.  The digital world has empowered them to the point that they can do with a phone what us geezers used to do with multi-million dollar rooms full of equipment and distribution licenses and Hollywood studio monopolies on media, and New York brokers.

In other words, there is a shift occurring that hasn't been seen since the Enlightenment and the birth of the Scientific Revolution.  The Gentleman Scientist of yore is now the YouTube producer.  The great composers of yore are now the synth track creators.  The great artists of yore are now the PhotoShop jockeys.

It is an explosion is slow motion.  This new generation is slowly discovering just how much power is at their fingertips.  They are re-evaluating things like college degrees, when all the materials (books, lectures, etc.) are available online for free.  Who needs an investment house when you can get $1 from one million people?  In fact, the Enlightenment ideal of the educated individual is coming to fruit 300 years later, as the technology catches up to the concept, and this new generation, many with no concept of the philosophical roots of their discoveries and efforts, is inheriting the wind.

It is quite a remarkable thing to watch, as the Liberals become the Conservatives, the Conservatives become the radicals, and both are panicking because there's a whole new deal on the horizon that they never considered.

What is truly gratifying is that all of it is moving toward a libertarian ideal that empowers the individual in a self-correcting marketplace of ideas, where feedback from consumers is immediate and the rewards are direct to your pocket with no middle men.  Better yet, they are impervious to the divisive machinations of the withering elite and have no concept of national borders, racial separation and economic boundaries.

Get your popcorn warmed up.  The show is just beginning.

The Blue, The Gray And The Dead

There is so much going on around the world right now that it is very difficult to narrow down just what to write about.  So much of it is interlinked just under the surface, and so much gets covered in local or regional news, but doesn't make it to the global "fake news" mill.  In fact, it is rather interesting to note which seemingly important stories don't surface in the Corporate Media outlets.

Take the murder of Kim Jong-nam, for instance.  The half-brother of the Beloved Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, was assassinated under rather curious circumstances in Malaysia.  Two women from Indonesia and Vietnam, and one man from Malaysia have been arrested in Malaysia for the murder.

What grabs my attention is that the two women pulled off the attack, Kim was traveling under an alias (Kim Chol), and he was killed presumably by something sprayed in his face.  The spray sounds suspiciously like ricin, though no autopsy results are as of yet unavailable, but just a few micrograms inhaled or injected can kill an adult rather quickly.  Death is caused by more or less a lethal allergic reaction, and considering Kim died on the way to the hospital, that would likely be the scenario in ricin poisoning.  It is not hard to make ricin, though it would take some expensive toys to purify it to a weaponized form.

Whatever the toxin was, the method was so unusual - why not just shoot, stab or otherwise physically assault the victim - as to draw attention to itself.  This is one of those spy-game scenarios that used to occur during the Cold War, when defectors were hit with tiny pellets of ricin, slowly killing the victim over 4 or 5 days.  In other words, this sounds like an organized and professional hit, rather than some homegrown political activists, and is obviously intended to send a message to Kim Jong-un.

The other curious story that is receiving quite a bit more attention is the increasingly obvious civil war being played out in the United States.  The various factions within the federal government are increasingly open about their animosities and efforts to oust each other.

I tend to reduce this war to the Capitalists versus the Financiers.  One could tack a lot of other names on to the two sides, but I view it as the Means of Production against the Financial Interests, or more simply Industrialists versus Bankers.

For those who are not yet aware, the United States is a corporation set up in 1871, under "An Act to Provide a Government for the District of Columbia."  As the rest of the States were dragged into the corporation as assets, along with the population under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, this effectively placed the country under Administrative Law and negated the Common Law and Constitution.  The latter is maintained as a showpiece, though is hardly worth the paper it is written on in US courts.

Like most corporations today, there is a constant battle between those who do the work, and those who play the odds.  One side produces actual products and employs people, while the other shuffles assets, liabilities and revenues around for profit.  If you've been keeping score, the Financiers have been winning the battle since more or less the time of the US Robber Barons.

The Financiers, a.k.a. Mercantilists, use equity and debt as weapons, harvesting the productivity of real work and products for their own profit, laying waste to everything in pursuit of the bottom line.  Note that Mercantilism is often mistakenly called Capitalism, but it not, as the latter produces real, tangible products, while the former produces nothing and only leeches off the real economy.

The Financiers have run the US for well over a century now, sucking up vast sums of money while doing nothing and producing nothing.  They simply lend money and buy equity, then profit from interest rates and playing high-low.  Great job if you can get it.

Trump, on the other hand, represents the Capitalists.  These folks have an adversarial relationship with Financiers, since they actually work and produce things while having to bow to the money folks who control the game with purse strings.

At least since Kennedy, the Financiers have enjoyed an endless stream of compliant occupants in the White House, who have simply enforced whatever regulations made the Financiers richer at the expense of the productive economy.  Thus, the national debt has spiralled out of control, the Bankers have held the country to ransom - as in 2008 - to extort vast sums of unearned money, and created wars that required endless borrowing to maintain.

Trump has threatened the Financier hegemony over the nation by focusing on infrastructure, business climate, reduced taxes, and ending wars - all things the Financiers really hate to hear, as these efforts do not profit them.

Consequently, the Financiers (a la George Soros, et al.) have declared open war against the Capitalists, who somehow managed to subvert the system they have carefully built up over the past century.  It is already a nasty war, and will get a lot worse.  Trillions of unearned dollars are at stake, and if things get really nasty, then history tells us a lot of Bankers will be hanging from lampposts - at least metaphorically if not literally - in the near future.

This war also explains the animosity against Russia, who has spearheaded the effort to create an alternative to the Dollar-Dominated Global Financial System, by way of the BRICSA alliance (Shanghai Accord).

The war has only just begun, and it will get very ugly before it is over.  The apparent tactic at the moment seems to be to keep the Trump Administration so busy with infighting and suspicions that it is rendered ineffective.  Any effort left over must be focused on things like the Oroville dam and other emergency situations.  In other words, keep starting fires to distract the enemy and tie up their time and resources.

Stand by...this is going to be a hell of a ride.  As Bill Hicks would say, "The world is just a ride...it has ups and downs, thrills and chills, and is very brightly colored."  Might want to buckle up before the first big drop.