Money is “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”

After he had won a Nobel in Chemistry for figuring out how radioactivity transmutes one element into another, Frederick Soddy turned his attention to banking systems and money creation.

“his disquiet about that power’s potential wartime use, combined with his revulsion at his discipline’s complicity in the mass deaths of World War I, led him to set aside chemistry for the study of political economy...

“In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. He was roundly dismissed as a crank...

“Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics...

“Soddy distilled his eccentric vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable: The first four were to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort. All of these are now conventional practice.”

His fifth proposal was to eliminate fractional reserve lending, which is responsible for the inverted debt pyramid that holds our economy in thrall in the present age.

Frederick Soddy was born this day in 1877. Quotes are from a NYTimes Op-Ed by Eric Zencey.

It is my humble opinion that the power to create money is a public trust, and that the privatization of that power in the Federal Reserve has led to huge distortions of our economy, as well as much corruption and even war. —JJM

Bruckner

Listen to Locus Iste of Anton Bruckner, born this day in 1824, as sung by the University Choir of Munich.

Prescient

“Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system.  With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.  Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark.  Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history.  He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four.  But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it.  That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.”

— George Orwell (1942)

To say nothing of God.

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.   That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied.  To say nothing of God.

— Rilke

Beginning by peeling back layers of deceit

I can’t foresee the path by which our country will get back on course, but I know that it must begin with an acknowledgment of reality. I know that ever since the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s, the news as reported has diverged progressively from the reality of who holds the reins in this country, what they are doing with their power, and what are their motives.

In this context, the successes of NYC-CAN have the potential to be revolutionary. This is a group that has worked for three years to put a measure on the New York City ballot by which the people might vote to authorize an independent investigation of what happened on 9/11. The authorized history was based on deception and withheld information, as is obvious to anyone reading it, and as admitted by John Farmer, who penned the 9/11 Commission Report, and hinted by Hamilton and Keane themselves.

Savvy organizers of NYC-CAN have framed the issue modestly in terms of supporting building safety by investigating the cause of collapse of high rise buildings. Well they know that steel-framed buildings don’t collapse in a fire, and that the investigation will inevitably reveal that the three World Trade towers were pre-wired by insiders weeks in advance of 9/11/01

Pulling gently and consistently on the thread of 9/11 truth will gradually unravel the vast corruption and deceit of those who have led our country into hatred, war, genocide, addiction, and theft on a vast scale, on the pretext of ‘keeping us safe’.

— (opinions of JJM)

That’s why they call it ‘realism’.

“Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination. Each moment of our lives affirms this.”

«Le réalisme, socialiste ou pas, est en deçà de la réalité. Il la rétrécit, l’atténue, la fausse, il ne tient pas compte de nos vérités et obsessions fondamentales: l’amour, la mort, l’étonnement. Il présente l’homme dans une perspective réduite, aliénée ; notre vérité est dans nos rêves, dans l’imagination; tout, à chaque instant, confirme cette affirmation.»

— Eugene Ionesco, Notes and Counter-notes

What will our children do in the morning
if they do not see us fly?

—Daniel Ladinsky, channeling Rumi

We are the outliers

Western (esp American) psychological researchers have long studied ‘us’, presuming they were studying human nature. Turns out that a lot of what we thought was human nature is really very culturally relative. Nothing underscores this more than when they started doing fMRIs, and realized that the way our brains are wired is a response to culture.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?”. By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors.  Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

— read more from Ethan Watters writing in the Pacific Standard

The Sea

The pull is so strong we will not believe
the drawing tide is meant for us,
I mean the gift, the sea,
the place where all the rivers meet.

  Easy to forget,
how the great receiving depth
untamed by what we need
needs only what will flow its way.

  Easy to feel so far away
and the body so old
it might not even stand the touch.
 
But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside
toward the place to which we go
washing over our worries of money,
the illusion of being ahead,
the grief of being behind,
our limbs young
rising from such a depth?
 
What would that be like
even in this century
driving toward work with the others,
moving down the roads
among the thousands swimming upstream,
as if growing toward arrival,
feeling the currents of the great desire,
carrying time toward tomorrow?
 
Tomorrow seen today, for itself,
the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,
unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface
of a great silence, the movement of a moment
left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,
safe in our unknowing, our very own,
our great tide, our great receiving, our
 
wordless, fiery, unspoken,
hardly remembered, gift of true longing.

— David Whyte

Ode

    O joy! that in our embers
    Is something that doth live
    That nature yet remembers
    What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest—
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
    Not for these I raise
    The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
    But for those first affections,
    Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
    To perish never:
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
    Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
    Hence in a season of calm weather
    Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
    Which brought us hither,
    Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

— Wordsworth

Exuberance and detachment

A lot of Shostakovich’s large works are tragic. But he also wrote with the tongue-in-cheek sense of the absurd that still keeps us laughing and listening.

In this album are his two Jazz Suites and other works in light style from the 1930s, a time when the composer almost lost his life to Stalin’s campaigns of artistic purity.

Дмитрий Шостакович was born on this day in 1906.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, born this day in 1821
      (liberal translation by JJM)

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
—H-F A

The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude,
chewing a piece of sugarcane,
in love with the one to whom every that belongs!

— (Coleman Barks) Rumi is 807 years old today.