The World to Come

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει
Everything changes and nothing remains still
δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης
You cannot step twice into the same stream

Heraclitus

 

The one with the most oil...so in this case the one in your backyard...but it has nothing to do with the distance.

 

Exactly and profoundly absurd.

 

Entirely logical.

Followed your link...Ayn Rand...objectivism.

Personally I couldn't get past the fact that Ayn Rand writes such turgid clunky prose. If you're going to read a Russian writer then let it be Tolstoy, Gorky, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev or Gogol.

 

Okay, understood.

Trading with the Enemy: During WWII numerous powerful American corporations traded with the enemy (Nazi Germany). This included Standard Oil providing oil to power Nazi U-boats, building half tracks and most of the trucks used to transport German soldiers. In the UK, the very pwoerful De Beers sold industrial diamonds to Nazi Germany throughout the war without which the Nazi war machine would've come to a shuddering halt in about two weeks.

Wall Street & Hitler: Western banking interests funded Hitler's rise to power and his development and construction of weapons needed for WWII.

Wall Street & the Bolsheviks: Western banking interests funded the Bolsheviks in Russia. The West also ensured that the White Russians lost the battle for Moskow (by withholding / diverting critical war materiel) leading to victory of the Communists in Russia

The Bormann Brotherhood: The very worst Nazis and top SS were enabled by the west and the Vatican to flee to freedom in Argentina and elsewhere. Bormann, Hitler's No. 2 fled there in 1947 to take charge of the vast sums of capital that had been off-shored (and out of the Allies hands) beginning in August 1944. The plan was for the re-emergence of a Fourth Reich post WWII based on financial power not military power.

That's the short version. Hope it helps, but please feel free to discuss further if you wish,

 

Large blue states are more like caste systems and resemble India in many ways. Visit wiki and view poverty rate when adjusted for cost of living. California is at the bottom at 24%. It and New York both have poverty rates worse than Mississippi. People are fleeing blue states for red states. This is the issue that terrifies red states the most. Blue state residents fleeing their red states and turning red states blue. People who do not share values, who actively loathe them, move to their state in large masses and change their culture. This explains the hopelessness of those on the right. They realize they can't win. Demographics are going to win out. Responsible states with healthy budgets will be plundered. Every state will end up resembling California, massively overpopulated, massive wealth inequality, massive pollution, horrible quality of life, etc..... I would appreciate it if you could find any data points that reflect prosperity for the working and middle class in large progressive states. All the data I can find reflects the exact opposite.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/upshot/the-growing-blue-state-diaspora.html

Blue state insolvency....
https://www.mercatus.org/statefiscalrankings

 

Bormman didn't flee anywhere. His remains were dug up in berlin in the 70's.

 

First, she wasn’t a Russian writer; she was an American writer— a very, very, American writer...right down to very core of her being, and in every sense of the American ideal, the self-made soul.

Second, Heraclitus’s observation is logical only if one believes sticking a pencil in water bends the pencil.

And lastly, your critque of her writing explains your love of Chavez and Maduro and your hatred of Rand.

What Ayn Rand said, and why both the left and right wannabe tyrants hate her:

Your life is yours to live, not God’s to command, not the state’s to rule, and not your neighbor’s to own.

Or as she stated: By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—everyman—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/happiness.html

How turgid, how clunky, how...wonderously sacred and holy.

Now, how you going to rule someone who thinks like that? Who thinks their life is their’s, and not anyone else’s. How are you going to put that soul into the chains of socialism? How are you going to get the thinking mind to ignore reality and refuse to think.

You can’t, without a gun. Chavez and Maduro understood this, as do you. The result is Venezuela today.

The independent soul can neither be ruled, nor forced to obey. But it doesn’t stop the soulless from trying.

 

We are in the process of doing that now, and we attempted to do that some years back with Chavez.

The US is in preparation for yet another round of military aggression.

 

Yes I just checked We the Living again and it is dreadful. Stilted turgid prose, poor metaphors, unsubtle in its "ideology" (a right wing version of the socialist realist drivel that communist writers were pumping out at the time). It's set in Russia. She's Russian-American. So I recommend some Russian writers who are way, way better than her. You want American writers who are better? Not difficult: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Updike, Steinbeck, Bellow, Roth.

Your drivel about the "self-made soul" being American is tedious. You just agree with her. Self made souls are everywhere in history, in every culture and country and in every period of history. How sad it must be to have your appreciation of human culture limited so acutely to right wing American writers.

Sheer gobbledegook.

It's actually quite rational. Ayn would probably get it. People change. I am not the same person today that I was ten years ago. All the cells have changed and I am older. Also the river changes because it is always composed of different water, and over time the course of a river alters. This is why you cannot step into the same river twice.

Ah how sad, you are just trolling. People must have very empty lives. This isn't even clever. You can see that I am strongly opposed to Chavez and Maduro and so you think accusing me of the opposite will wind me up. Quite pathetic.

I don't hate her. I like conservative intellectuals. I seek them out because they are so rare as they live amongst numskulls and trolls. I know they attract sycophantic uncritical followers in the same way that "wannabe tyrants" do but that is not their fault. I bought two of her books. I just couldn't get through the appalling writing. I was very disappointed.

By the way, being a bad writer does not make her a bad thinker. It just makes her a bad novelist that's all. There are worse things.

Is this all the quote? I hope it's just the first sentence because the second one is awful syntax, like the third. It's hardly inspirational stuff. It's more bland and obvious. Big woolly waffly statements means very little.

One person who really hated Rand was no kind of socialist. It was William F Buckley, the public intellectual of the US Right in the twentieth century. Wanted her excluded from the conservative community. Hated her even though she admired him.

If you wish to make a case for libertarianism, have a go. Have you got an independent soul? Or are you reliant on Ayn Rand to do your talking for you? My political profile thingy that people do on here shows me to be slightly Left libertarian. Not any kind of Maduro fan.

Or do you just due trolling?

 

I already won the argument and demonstrated you are full of ****.

 

Sooooo, the claim that we have already "stolen" their Democracy is BS.

When was the first round of Military aggression in Venezuela? Or is this something else you imagine occurring in the future

 

Another round of military aggression AROUND THE WORLD. Our military aggression is not confined to specific regions, though it seems the countries of the Mideast have received more than their share.

 

Wouldn't it be more interesting for each of you to have a position as to whether military intervention in Venezuela is justified. There are a number of possible scenarios - arrest of Guaido, forcible expulsion of US diplomats, shooting demonstrators (already happening) - and do they justify invasion by US ground troops, a naval blockade, or air strikes?

You see I think there is a suspicion that the US Right doesn't know what it believes in any more. They just wait for Trump and support him whatever. On here it should be about what we think, not what tribe we belong to.

I am personally for doing everything to support Guaido (whose party is a member of the Socialist International by the way, same as the UK Labour Party) except military intervention. If there was military intervention in the event of some cataclysmic humanitarian disaster (i.e. mass murder by the authorities which killed tens of thousands of people with an out of control military) it should be a multinational, preferably Latin American force.

 

I was going to "like" your post, until I read the last 2 sentences.

If by chance you're into the US Constitution and favor constitutional governance, might you offer some insight as to how and where the document authorizes the federal government to engage in 'regime change'?

 

Tell you what, you go your way, and I’ll go mind.

 

I'm not American so even though I am interested in the US Constitution, I have not questioned why every major US intervention in the last hundred years has been unconstitutional. I have assumed that if authorised by Congress and executed by the POTUS, it is constitutional.

In exceptional circumstances regime change is justified and has been successful (Bosnia, Sierra Leone). It is helpful if it done by a multinational force so that one country cannot be accused of acting in selfish interest. That helps win the hearts and minds of the populace. In today's circumstances I think we are a very long way off these "exceptional circumstances" so I support Guaido but oppose military intervention.

 

That's best. Trolls always lose with me. A supposed Ayn Rand fan who wants to troll rather than discuss ideas... I think you maybe missed the point she was making about reason, ideas and logic being everything.

Attacking a strong opponent of Maduro and calling them a Maduro fan without the slightest evidence whatsoever suggests to me that Starlet and Rand are not perfectly aligned right now. That's more like the kind of Soviet behaviour she satirised and condemned (in that awful turgid prose) than something that would endear you to her.

 

Couldn’t let it go could you? Just remember: whatever was a moment ago, no longer is. Everything's changed. I’m not me, nor are you, you. All is flux. So be a good Hericlitan and keeping moving along to whatever or wherever you wish, but it won’t be there when you get there. It will be something else.

Just to clear up a misunderstanding, I did indeed mistake you for a socialist statist, my mistake. Of course, as you believe, everything changes, so maybe tomorrow you will be. Best wishes, in the ever changing world you live in. Live and let die.

Me. I’ll stick with Rand—she’s a good litmus test to filter out unintended noise. I’m sure you’ll agree, though backwards.

 

You will find that if you pretend to involve me in a friendly discussion and the troll me when I disagree with you.

The sarcastic points about Heraclitus... not worthy of a response.

 

Friendly. I think not.

 

I have no problem discussing ideas, but abhor data and statistics—they’re pointless in regard to ideas and principles.

It’s like arguing who shot the first shot of the revolution, the Minutemen or the Red Coats?

Irrelevant. Is it not? The shot was fired, and the revolution for liberty against British tyranny began. Liberty won. The ideas of Locke prevailed. Americans became rich. The rest is history.

I have gone back and read some of your posts. They mostly attack, rarely defend or present an idea.

So, I’ll ask straight up: In any conflict between the rights of man and the needs of the many, who do you side with?

Also, do you know what syntax is?

 

It's not the most critical point but it's not completely irrelevant.

You see history has different versions. The story of the Revolution is largely made up to suit a particular point of view. I think it is interesting to know if 3% of American colonists or 33% supported the American Revolution. I have heard both numbers. I also heard that the people who signed the Declaration of Independence were a motley bunch but that a year earlier they agreed on nothin other than the fact that they did NOT want independence (I heard that in Philadelphia from a guide). Facts are important unless you want idealised history...made up to support a political point of view...again a version of history that Ayn rand would abhor because she could see what had happened in Russia with that kind of nonsense.

So you need some facts and statistics or the ideas get too fuzzy. But it is the ideas that are interesting yes.

 

"Sure thing, Barney."

 

For the record, a body claimed to be Bormann's has been "discovered" at least three times over the years, if memory serves. In 1998 DNA tests showed that a body found in Berlin in 1972 was that of Bormann.

Of course, that does not preclude him dying in Paraguay and his skeleton being returned to Germany and re-interred - only to be "rediscovered", tested for DNA (mitrochrondrial DNA to be precise). The skeleton was, after all, smothered in red clay that is alien to Germany but local to Paraguay.



This, of course, also assumes that the DNA wasn't fabricated which is possible as Israeli scientist's have demonstrated which was reported in the NYT's article in August 2009 (HERE). The author of the scientific paper, Dr. Dan Frumkin, concludes that "you can just engineer a crime scene."

The following is just some of the proof that Bormann escaped to Argentina (later moving to Paraguay after Peron lost power) where he managed post WWII Nazi assets. Below Commissioner Colotto speaks of his personal knowledge and meetings with Bormann at the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires.



Then we have Colonel Ian Bell's account on Bormann's escape:



Should one have any remaining doubts I recommend a careful reading of Paul Manning's excellent Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile where he details Bormann's escape via a ship from an Italian port. Manning, a well respect American newspaper man, had access to a confidential report from the FBI and describes Bormann escape in detail. A free downloadable .pdf copy of his book is available HERE.

There are a number of other books that also focus on Bormann's post war survival. The best of these are William Stevenson's (another respected reporter - Canadian) The Bormann Brotherhood and Ladislas Farago's Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, and Hugh thomas's excellent The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler that covers Borrmann's death in Paraguay circa 1959. Thomas had access to a Paraguayan intelligence report confirming this (HERE).