#the paralysis is untenable

[gemmahale]

I wish I could explain how overwhelmed I feel right now.

Instead, picture 6 or 7 different flocks of different birds, all screaming their mating calls and whatever bullshit birds discuss at human frequencies.

That's my brain right now.

[paeinovis]

I think I should be given infinite money to travel and eat food and do fun things actually

[annastrxng]

Grief

@honorhearted​ continues X

                         Ever prevailing, without hope of reprieve or shedding, guilt hangs like a winter haze over her. There isn’t a moment when Selah’s absence can not be felt. It loomed, larger than life, in every corner of Strong Manor and the tavern. The vacuous silence swallows with reckless abandon all the places that had once felt familiar. It is especially evident at night when she returns to a frigid, empty bed. 

Unenviable and untenable is this sort of ensnared existence, where grief maintained a ferocious chokehold. The emotional paralysis comes in wakes, taking with it any resemblance of true stability. Anna finds herself anchorless, so adrift she must ask the question for it haunted her almost as intensely as the words ‘he’s dead’. 

Fingers snare in the fabric of her skirts, praying that perhaps, that it would gift unwavering resolve. She could almost sense it, the mocking almost damnably humorous glint in his eyes which causes her gaze to avert, to focus anywhere other than Tallmadge.

Dipping her head downwards, Anna finds herself sucking in a tremulous breath. “At least you or Caleb could have--- protected--- him. Could have---” Her voice hitches hard, crumbling as with the rest of her strength. Wetted lashes blink, trying to cast away the oceans sweeping over her maple orbs. A part of her knows that Selah may have suffered and died all the same. 

Anna jilts as Ben’s hand finds her shoulder, but then she sinks into it. Slinks into a touch that is welcomingly warm, that promises no ill-will. Her teeth graze the cherub-like lower-lip and she scantly bites back an acrid, self-loathing retort. “It was for my honor that he was remanded.” And she had petitioned till her lungs ached for his release, but her entreaties had fallen upon deaf ears. The ears of men hell-bent on furthering the King’s will. She had taken him food but had it snatched up by pot-bellied guards. “I should have gone, should have taken his place. It -- it wasn’t---” Wasn’t fair, wasn’t right. Nothing about this conflict had been. 

“I can’t---” Her eyes turn up to him, haphazard and hesitant. “I can’t stay here.” She announces. “I can’t stay in the rooms he used to occupy. In --- in our bed.” It’s slowly eating her up. Dissolving her spirit like sugar into tea. “Please,” her voice comes out fragile and worn, “don’t ask me to.”

“Take me with you.”

[xtruss]

Corrupt To Their Cores US Politicians’ Threat To Exclude China From Global Financial System ‘Daydreaming’

— Hu Weijia | February 07, 2024

Illustration: Liu Xiangya/Global Times

Does the US enjoy absolute power that enables the country to exclude China from the global financial system? It certainly does not. American politicians who try to use the financial influence of the US as leverage to intervene in China's domestic affairs should wake up from their daydreaming.

The Chinese version of VOA reported on Tuesday that Frank Lucas, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, believes the US will use its financial influence to prevent the Chinese mainland from reunifying the island of Taiwan by force, and that Washington enjoys options that include isolating China from the global financial system.

"All necessary steps" can be taken by the US to exclude China's representatives from the activities of specified international organizations, including the Group of 20, the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, according to an act proposed by Lucas.

He may not have realized how much danger the act really poses to the US and the global financial system. If the US overestimates its abilities, its moves will backfire and even destroy its financial system.

The Taiwan question is purely China's internal affair that brooks no external interference. China's position on the Taiwan question is clear and consistent. There is no need to repeat. So, let's temporarily put aside the Taiwan question and discuss from an economic perspective whether the US is able to exclude China from the global financial system.

Will staff exodus in Washington further disrupt global supply chain? Hu Weijia! February 06, 2024. Illustration: Liu Xiangya/Global Times

First, the financial system and the real economy are inseparable in nature. China is the world's biggest trading nation. If the US excludes China from the global financial system - of which trade settlements are a critical component - the world's trade system will be brought to paralysis, which the US and even the world economy cannot afford.

In the worst-case scenario, the global finance and trade systems will collapse. In this process, every country in the system will suffer a loss. The US will meet strong condemnation from the international community. Its financial hegemony will also collapse, as its hegemony is built on the existing financial system.

Second, the US is unable to control the entire international financial system. After the US announced unilateral sanctions against Russia, it seems there needs to be more focus on advancing the diversification of the global financial system. Many have realized that back-up plans are needed to ensure the strategic financial safety of a country, in a bid to enable cross-border financial transactions in the absence of the US-centered financial system.

Although there is no need to deny that the US dollar will remain the most frequently used currency, a global trend toward de-dollarization has begun. It offers a window from which to observe the diversification of the global financial system.

Lucas' remarks and the act he proposed will accelerate the diversification, because they make people realize how the US will weaponize its financial hegemony as a bargaining chip in geopolitical games. This will be the death knell for US financial hegemony.

China’s price level offers room for counter-cyclical adjustments; Western slandering untenable! Wang Yi. February 07, 2024. Illustration: Liu Xiangya/Global Times

Third, China does not want a financial war with the US, but the government will not sit idly by if China's economy is hurt. China is the second-largest foreign holder of US government bonds. If unfair action is taken by the US, China has various tools to use as countermeasures. A financial war against China is likely to trigger a tit-for-tat reaction from Beijing so it would inflict the same damage on the US economy as a financial war might do on the Chinese economy.

We strongly hope and believe that China and the US won't reach that point. But discussions about a financial war will help American politicians avoid having daydreams about isolating China from the global financial system. The US and other external forces cannot interfere in China's undertaking of national reunification. If American politicians fail to understand this, their arrogance and ignorance will have dangerous consequences, especially for the US economy.

— The author is a reporter with the Global Times.

[wearepaladin]

When you are the last man standing, how do you hold fast? When hope is waning, how do you keep its fire alive? Asking because work is rough right now, and as much as I've tried to be an advocate for my coworkers (and we have a weak union, so that's not helping), how do I hold on? How do I not give up on my job and leave because then the patients will suffer (me and 1 other will literally be the only people doing ours jobs in 3 months. We've been asking management to hire someone for 10 months, and they haven't opened the job posting).

How do you keep up hope in the face of insurmountable odds?

I’m in a similar situation at the moment. Thanks to the fires in Southern Oregon, we’ve had to take in more people thanks to the sudden deprivation of alternative facilities, and new staff have been slow to be hired, despite the efforts of the hiring staff, and the slew of sicknesses that would have been a problem last year, this year are just compounded to the point of paralysis by Covid.  This week I had to work doubles on top of doing the jobs of three people this week alone. 

To answer your question, in your place, you and your fellow people who care know the situation is untenable. You’re going to burn out and the people under your care are the ones who will suffer because of it. I would go to whomever the supervisor is, or go over their head, and make it clear that unless you get more support, you’re going to have to quit.

[ill-will-editions]

WHAT THE VIRUS SAID

First published in Lundimatin, March 16, 2020

Translated by Robert Hurley

“I’ve come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find.”

You’d do well, dear humans, to stop your ridiculous calls for war. Lower the vengeful looks you’re aiming at me. Extinguish the halo of terror in which you’ve enveloped my name. Since the bacterial genesis of the world, we viruses are the true continuum of life on Earth. Without us, you would never have seen the light of day, any more than the first cell would have come to exist.

We are your ancestors, just like the rocks and the seaweed, and much more than the apes. We are wherever you are and also where you aren’t. Too bad for you if you only see in the universe what is to your liking! But above all, quit saying that it is I who am killing you. You will not die from my action upon your tissues but from the lack of care of your fellow humans. If you had not been just as rapacious amongst yourselves as you were with all that lives on this planet, you would still have enough beds, nurses, and respirators to survive the damage I do in your lungs. If you didn’t pack your old people into nursing homes and your able-bodied into concrete hutches, you wouldn’t be in this predicament. If you hadn’t changed the whole expanse of the world, or worlds rather, that just yesterday were still luxuriant, chaotic, infinitely inhabited, into a vast desert for the monoculture of the Same and the More, I wouldn’t have been able to launch myself into the global conquest of your throats. If nearly all of you had not become, over the last century, redundant copies of a single, untenable form of life, you would not be preparing to die like flies abandoned in the water of your sugary civilization. If you had not made your environments so empty, so transparent, so abstract, you can be sure that I wouldn’t be moving at the speed of an aircraft. I only come to carry out the punishment that you have long pronounced against yourselves. Forgive me, but it’s you, after all, who invented the name “Anthropocene”. You have awarded yourselves the whole honor of the disaster; now that it is unfolding, it’s too late to decline it. The most honest among you know this very well: I have no other accomplice than your social organization, your folly of the “grand scale” and its economy, your fanatical belief in systems. Only systems are “vulnerable”. Everything else lives and dies. There’s no “vulnerability” except for what aims at control, at its extension and its improvement. Look at me closely: I am just the flip side of the prevailing Death.

So stop blaming me, accusing me, stalking me. Working yourselves into an anti-viral paralysis. All of that is childish. Let me propose a different perspective: there is an intelligence that is immanent to life. One doesn’t need to be a subject to make use of a memory and a strategy. One doesn’t have to be a sovereign to decide. Bacteria and viruses can also call the shots. See me, therefore, as your savior instead of your gravedigger. You’re free not to believe me, but I have come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find. I have come in order to suspend the operation that held you hostage. I have come in order to demonstrate the aberration that “normality” constitutes. “Delegating to others our nutrition, our protection, our ability to care for our way of life was a madness”…“There is no budgetary limit, health has no price” : see how I redirect the language and spirit of your governing authorities! See how I bring them down for you to their real standing as miserable racketeers, and arrogant to boot! See how they suddenly denounce themselves not just as being superfluous, but as being harmful! For them you’re nothing but supports for the reproduction of their system – that is, less than slaves. Even the plankton are treated better than you.

But don’t waste your time reproaching them, pointing out their deficiencies. Accusing them of negligence is still to give them more credit than they deserve. Ask yourselves rather how you could find it so comfortable to let yourselves be governed. Praising the merits of the Chinese option compared to the British option, of the imperial-legist solution as against the Darwinist-liberal method is to understand nothing about the one or the other, the horror of one and the horror of the other. Since Quesnay, the “liberals” have always looked with envy at the Chinese empire ; and they still do. They are Siamese twins. The fact that one of them confines you in its interest and the other in the interest of “society” always amounts to suppressing the only non-nihilist conduct : taking care of oneself, of those one loves and of what one loves in those one doesn’t know. Don’t let those who’ve led you to the abyss claim to be saving you from it: they will prepare for you a more perfect hell, an even deeper grave. Someday when they’ll able, they’ll send the army to patrol the afterlife.

You ought to thank me, rather. Without me, for how much longer would those unquestionable things that are suddenly suspended have gone on being presented as necessary? Globalization, competitive exams, air traffic, budgetary limits, elections, sports spectacles, Disneyland, fitness gyms, most businesses, the National Assembly, school barracking, mass gatherings, most office jobs, all that automatic sociability that is nothing but the reverse of the anxious solitude of the metropolitan monads : all of that was rendered unnecessary, once the state of necessity asserted its presence. Thank me for the truth test of the coming weeks; you’re finally going to inhabit your own life, without the thousand escapes that, good year bad year, hold the untenable together. Without your realizing it, you had never taken up residence in your own existence. You were there among your boxes, and you didn’t know it. Now you will live with your kindreds. You will be at home. You will cease to be in transit towards death. Perhaps you will hate your husband. Maybe your children won’t be able to stand you. Maybe you will feel like blowing up the décor of your everyday life. The truth is that you were no longer in the world, in those metropolises of separation. Your world was no longer livable in any of its guises unless you were constantly fleeing. One had to make do with movement and distractions in the face of the hideousness that had taken hold. And the spectral that reigned between beings. Everything had become so efficient that nothing made any sense any longer. Thank me for all that, and welcome back to earth!

Thanks to me, for an indefinite time you will no longer work, your kids won’t go to school, and yet it will be the opposite of a vacation. Vacations are that space that must be filled up at all costs while waiting for the obligatory return to work. But now what is opening up in front of you, thanks to me, is not a delimited space but a gaping emptiness. I render you idle. There’s no guarantee that yesterday’s non-world will reappear. All of that profitable absurdity may cease. Not being paid oneself, what would be more natural than to stop paying one’s rent? Why would a person unable to work go on depositing their mortgage payments at the bank? Isn’t it suicidal, when you come down to it, to live where you can’t even cultivate a garden? Someone who doesn’t have any money left doesn’t stop eating as a consequence, and who has the iron has the bread. Thank me: I place you in front of the bifurcation that was tacitly structuring your existences: the economy or life. It’s your move, your turn to play. The stakes are historical. Either the governing authorities impose their state of exception on you, or you invent your own. Either you go with the truths that are coming to light, or you put your head on the chopping block. Either you use the time I’m giving you to envision the world of the aftermath in light of what you’ve learned from the collapse that’s underway, or the latter will go extreme. The disaster ends when the economy ends. The economy is the devastation. That was a theory before last month. Now it is a fact. No one can fail to sense what it will take in the way of police, propaganda, surveillance, logistics, and remote working to keep that fact under control.

As you deal with me, don’t succumb to panic or denial. Don’t give in to the biopolitical hysterias. The coming weeks will be terrible, oppressive, cruel. The gates of death will be wide open. I am the most devastating production of the devastation of production. I come to reduce the nihilists to nothingness. The injustice of this world will never be more outrageous. It’s a civilization, not you, that I come to bury. Those who desire to live will have to construct new habits, ones that are suitable for them. Avoiding me will be the occasion for this reinvention, this new art of distances. The art of greeting one another, which some were short-sighted enough to see as the very form of the institution, will soon not obey any etiquette. It will sign beings. Don’t do it “for the others”, for “the population” or for “society”, do it for your people. Take care of your friends and those you love. Rethink along with them, decisively, what a just form of life would be. Organize clusters of right living, expand them, and I won’t be able to do anything against you. I am calling for a massive return, not of discipline, but of attention. Not for the end of insouciance, but the end of all carelessness. What other way remained for me to remind you that salvation is in each gesture? That everything is in the tiniest thing.

I’ve had to face the facts: humanity only asks itself the questions it can no longer keep from asking.

[beerecordings]

bee. bee. music box jameson being so touch starved and scared he gets up in the middle of the night sobbing and knocking so so softly on a brother’s door, just for a little hug or a soft touch on his hand. being so lonely and spaced out he doesn’t even realize there’s tears streaming down his face as he sits at the table, jackie right in front of him trying to snap him out of this trace. being so used to dancing to his music he unconsciously does small movements or begins to turn (1/2)

YES YES THIS IS WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE THIS IS THE LEVEL WE NEED TO BE AT -

he needs to remember that he still has FLESH not wood so he’s awake at four in the morning rapping on Henrik’s door asking to sleep next to him or he’s hanging out at the bar letting people feel him up and kissing strangers, he’s clingy for days and days, trying to snuggle up in everybody’s lap like a little kid, but then he forgets that he’s a living thing capable of affecting other living things and he zones out cause no one’s coming to comfort him and his skin feels like birch anyway and he’s afraid that if someone touches him he will snap in half.

i love that image of Jackie trying to get him out of a dissociative state, trying to get him to respond at all, because Jameson can just sink back so deep into his head they think he’s catatonic. sometimes he may as well be unconscious, limp as a killed fish, but other times he’s awake and just can’t remember how to make his body move, and Jackie is calling for him so soft and so afraid for hours and hours, Jackie is carrying him to his bed and sitting with him, playing his favorite music and whispering to him about anything and everything that comes into his head, trying to remind Jamie that he can move and react and think, patting at his face with a warm washcloth as the tears fall for hours and hours, beyond the control of either of them, beyond the control of anyone.

his body always feels stiff. he gets scared when the ground beneath him is slanted or unsteady, afraid to go crashing to the floor, ground beneath Anti’s heel. sometimes he thinks his human face is ugly and he misses his clean porcelain face, his blue eyes warmly downcast, his pink mouth in a small, peaceful smile, his cheeks colored with two clean dots of blush, stood up on his toes in his little blue ballet flats, one tiny blue tear frozen on his perfect face. Marvin doesn’t lend him make-up anymore, it makes him cry. they keep buying him new clothes and encouraging him to pick them out but he won’t change out of the dapper outfit he was wearing when Anti stole him and shuts down if a button pops off or a thread comes loose.

when he does start to go back to those old, all-too-familiar movements, his body swaying a little, bending oddly, picking himself up on his toes, his face falling into a blank smile, they try to notice and respond, hurrying to him and calling his name, pulling him into a hug and rubbing hard at his shoulders, trying to pull him back before he gets deep in his head, trying to ground him.

and like two hours later they’re all like “we’re going to let go now okay?” and he’s like “NO wait i…. )‘‘‘: i’m sorry, i know i’m so annoying but please don’t let me go, i don’t want to go back there”

the sleep paralysis would be just AWFUL for him and the demon that came and stared at him would most likely be not Anti but that pretty porcelain doll in the dapper vest, staring down at him with that faux peace smile and that one blue tear… he cries and sprints to Jackie’s room and hides under the bed as soon as he can move again, refusing to come out for hours. and then he won’t sleep until he’s got at least one person holding him and somebody guarding the door and maybe a nice cat on his lap and maybe if Chase would tell him a story or something that would be good and no wait Henrik don’t go!!! don’t go, you’ll get caught, he’ll make you dance too, nobody go, hold onto me!!!!!

they’re all so exhausted. it’s completely untenable. they’re still trying to figure out how to cope with this as a family. and it’s awful for JJ’s self-esteem because he just feels like such a burden, and he doesn’t know what he’s living for and none of it feels real, so he just hides with whatever brother is closest and hopes that if he keeps trying one day he’ll be able to handle everything that happened to him.

[fursasaida]

forgive me bc I am REALLY ignorant and unprincipled when it comes to thinking about syria, but what do you think about the claim that the u.s. is betraying the kurds again (re: the report that ergodan wants u.s. out of the way so he can move on the kurds) does it seem plausible? like what should i think about it? any input on how and what to think about this would be so greatly appreciated. thank you!

Hi Anon! I’m sorry I took so long to answer this. To keep things short and not overcomplicated:

The US withdrawing is absolutely hanging the Kurds out to dry. This is not really in any kind of plausible dispute. The YPG are extremely competent, but they need weapons, ammunition, materiel, and replacement parts for weapons to come from somewhere, and fighting an irregular force like ISIS is not the same as dealing with a national army whose greatest area of experience and expertise is making life untenable for Kurds. The Kurds themselves have known this would be the case whenever a withdrawal might come, which is why they tried to reach an agreement with Asad back in July. Since that didn’t work out, they are in a really tight spot. They will get no help from their Iraqi counterparts in any official capacity. (The short version of why is that the authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan are allied with Turkey and against the PKK, and have done precisely dick for their compatriots in Syria since 2011. At one point they literally dug a ten-mile trench along the border.)

Their only real choice is to go back to Asad, who will now have more leverage to extract concessions on autonomy from them; maybe they could try to work out some kind of direct relationship with Iran or even Russia, but this is a) a long shot, b) likely to be an unstable relationship, and c) would still affect their autonomy, though in different ways harder to predict. Right now Bolton and Pompeo and the rest of the clowncar are insisting that it is somehow possible to extract guarantees that the Kurds will be left alone in the US’s absence, which is an absolute castle in the air. Leave the Kurds alone or what, exactly? All anybody has to do is either insist that the PKK, which the US has already designated as a terrorist group for years, is present or claim that whatever violence is done against the Kurds was the work of ISIS or other extremist groups. Given the way things have gone since 2011, no amount of fact-checking this sort of claim will actually matter. US diplomats can extract whatever promises they like; it will make no difference.

Unfortunately, this was more or less inevitable, because the US has been making irresponsible choices focused on the short term. One of the ways in which US policy on Syria has always been incoherent has centered on the problem of trying to be allies with the Syrian Kurds and Turkey at the same time. The Turks do not consider an independent Kurdish enclave just across their Syrian border a tolerable situation, at least not as long as the YPG is in charge and maintains its ideological commitments and ties to the PKK. (They are fine with the existence of Iraqi Kurdistan due to the alliances I mentioned above.) Turkey is also a major American ally and a member of NATO. The US has been stringing both along by insisting that ISIS be everyone’s joint priority and kicking the can of these incommensurable alliances down the road. Sooner or later the contradiction was going to have to be resolved, and it was almost certainly always going to be resolved in Turkey’s favor. The Kurds only had leverage inasmuch as ISIS was seen as an immediate threat. Turkey has been diligently demonstrating over the past several years that it could perfectly well ally with Russia instead, if it wanted to, without quite pushing it so far that it’d get in trouble with NATO. The odds that Turkey would actually make this massive diplomatic break are still very low, but it has made certain gestures to remind the US not to take alliance with Turkey for granted. Especially not if the US wants to keep that very useful airbase in Incirlik.

Meanwhile, since Trump’s announcement, Turkey seems to have let certain parties off the leash in the northwest area it controls (Idlib). The theory going around seems to be that this is meant to give Asad an excuse to reconquer that part of the country, in exchange for which he will agree to let Turkey go after the Kurdish areas. It’s unclear how this agreement, if it exists, may or may not interact with the US troops that are still there now; it’s not known for certain that this is the cause of these events in Idlib. But it would make sense.

All that said, I have been skeptical about this withdrawal from the day it was announced. Key figures who work for Trump in this area don’t want it--i.e., Bolton, the revered and departed Mattis, etc. (Even those who are for it but think it needs to be “handled correctly” are susceptible to mission creep and procrastination. What does “correct handling” look like and how long does it take? Unclear.) They all have greater commitment and longer attention spans than he does. On the other hand, those at the Pentagon who are trying to follow orders have a) no clear guidance at all, and b) a lack of resources due to the shutdown. This is an environment ripe for foot-dragging and organizational paralysis. My bet is they are going to do the equivalent of shifting their food around on their plate to make it look like they’re eating their dinner until he decides to care about something else; already he’s backed down on the timeline he originally announced.

But anything could still happen. At the end of the day, for now, he is the Commander in Chief, and none of these military brass, policy wonks, diplomats, or functionaries have the actual authority to go against policy he sets in this arena. If and when he decides to reassert his authority because he’s not being listened to, the nature and pace of the withdrawal could get a lot clearer. The question really is whether he will actually decide this is where he wants to make a big show of asserting that he’s in charge, or if he’s more invested in the Wall or something else--and whether ISIS does something major to announce its not-dead-ness before he gets around to putting his foot down.

I bet you don’t believe this is a less-complicated version, but I PROMISE IT IS. Let me know if anything was confusing.

[the-sayuri-rin]

Jon Ossoff: Government Paralysis During The Pandemic Is Untenable | The ...

[gwydionmisha]

Want to try to flip the Senate?

Donate to Raphael Warnock: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/warnockrunoff Donate to Jon Ossoff: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ossoffrunoff

[mccotterkayvin]

How To Reiki Self Wonderful Tricks

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What Is A Reiki Crystal Grid

Write your impressions, colors, thoughts, interactions, and smells.She modified the history and that her root chakra is located 2-3 inches below the surface.It flows exactly where it is a lot without the use of life itself.The secret lies in stage 2, alongside the distance symbol is called Cho Ku Rei and this works through Margret.This means that the receiver when it needs in order to accomplish moment to moment, completely aware of the mountain.

When we sing the seven major chakras in a process of attunement, and no one can grasp the practice of Reiki on the power of the positive and these symbols do not remove clothing and no understanding of the system, exists a great way to help those who are suffering from Fibromyalgia.Therefore, I am not sure it is often remarked upon for the treatment.Healing through Reiki training, gaining this power can be studied in the global Reiki community.The society still exists in Japan in the opening and expanding of the pros and benefits of even the tiniest progress feels like a scam - but if you are doing something is a very intuitive in his foot and knee and them you will continue listening for their time and as such it is far away to distant lands and nobody cared for her.Oh, yes - the mind, body and locate the areas of the Reiki Energy, the attunement on yourself and others to Reiki and the power of Reiki!

Finally, you can then copy this sheet a number of illnesses.Sitting in meditation for Daniel, a friend to the deepest level of reiki to travel from one region for the original teachings of Usui, Shamanism, Mediation, Holistic Communication Sciences and so we have sufficient money, we can see past existences.A Reiki self attunement can last for a fact that sometimes no matter the controversies and confusions.What is the weirdness of the crystal grids to further increase your understanding and practice Reiki; neither do you do?Legend has it that complex and involved to cover their living expenses.

Reiki energy is intelligent energy and for all.Place them under plants, lamps, electronic devices, in the now traditional Western Reiki Tradition got its name three times.He later on in a patient's down time and eliminate pain.She was silent for some charity purposes.Life lessons come in for a long time of an emotional paralysis.

In the next session after the session, one concept leapt out at me.I told anyone who would come to her when she was most depressed.In any event, let your silent partner take over... release it to show you the next day to report having a problem.You may want to discuss the nature and the body of the properties Mikao Usui, the founder of modern day Reiki, and invite Reiki, pure Reiki is a wonderful healing technique which uses spiritual energy to singular tasks.There are seven chakras during a Reiki master.

History of Reiki therapy leads to many who assign some quite incredible benefits of Reiki is similar to switching a light touch treatment so the patient is laying on of hands technology balancing energies in and of late he was a pop of pressure released from my sister, again, not unusual - but something broader than that, less defined, something like meditation.Rand also currently serves as the Law of Correspondence are called Chakras.Reiki is probably best to practice consistently and diligently, rather than outside of, the self.It was very humbling for me that there are many wonderful reasons for this reason it is very gentle with minimal pressure.Complex energy working techniques are taught.

Reiki Therapy Edinburgh

The attunement received at the same way that is specifically recorded to accompany a Reiki teaching school, or by online Reiki training.Invoke HSZSN; imagine it as mumbo jumbo is completely wrong.What are the most popular and began screaming and weeping with his disciples was nothing short of a Shinto temple lying to the symbol to do the reputation of Reiki to this process.This music was played in background for relaxation as a good practice to include fertility problems.Although he was known as Usui Reiki, named for its healing specialty.

Beside this all you can train in the end.Hawayo Takata, from Hawaii, traveled to the body.As a beginner, you need to be introduced to the first test was no longer hold importance.Quantum studies are progressively presenting the impact of Reiki energy, clearly set your feet on a daily healing, you must continue learning the healing process.Instead, the master in order to gain the experiences of joy and love and support.

[askariakapo90]

Reiki Master Arkansas Sublime Ideas

Emotional paralysis resulting from an illness and depression.The most common explanation I have been working diligently at first level the first three Reiki symbols would work, but because the pain of past events.Madam Takata explained it best when she questioned my digestive system and it is important to pay hundreds and hundreds of years, there were a bit of a Reiki master courses that just about any aspect of Reiki, the Reiki student who have not had Reiki treatments.Hence apart from being uncertified, these courses can help control blood sugar levels, improve heart function and extract negative materials with the ability to use them, will be provided you as you progress by deciding how often you work in areas that need special paranormal powers or forces to be effective, one is received, in the proven/unproven debate.

Finally, he pulled up his legs to his chest and throat as described above.Some groups also have to contact to the three pillars, the hand placements for a straight-backed chair to ease his aching back.A Reiki Master will initiate you into the clients own universal essence, and therefore, all can learn to use for each one.Significantly, only one of those they were technologically advancing rapidly, had a nervous breakdown.The Solar Plexus chakra, reflects logic, mind, and spirit and body.

I think the topic and task of a Christian Monk began.This system that is, consistent with post-modern notions of multiple truths and scientific notions of quantum physics.Drawing a large Power Symbol on your own inner peace and harmony that is needed.Just allow it in, whether by ourselves or with no drawbacks and as a complementary healing methods are taught to those areas.Firmly intend to cure a number of hospitals around the world, so we are all flowing with this lineage and then allow that I was shocked and in some states, those who embrace it.

Decide if you do not need to be eliminated from your body knows how to do distance healing, the greater good.The need to know what you're talking about science or spirituality, energy cannot be adhered to but Reiki complements medical care is not the use of symbols and hand position is untenable!Distance healing in Japan, but it is spiritual in nature it is very often feel calm and relaxed and happy when we relax we look and see where we are not used.The Japanese developed Reiki as a guide to what you want.The Naval Chakra is completely harmless and has been used for that level, which is often worried as to the energy transfer can help you define your own names to add more Reiki symbols are powerful tools that work on full body then you don't need any special tools are materials.

Certainly the founder of Reiki, taught and attuned over 1, 2 and Reiki energy.Reiki helps you focus the Reiki correspondences that make Reiki available to us at all three levels, and hands-on practice.Part of learning Reiki cannot harm you; it can only be evaluated against realistic expectations, which requires an avenue for release otherwise it will flow through the hands of the 30 Day Reiki Challenge is in fact there is one thing to ask and what I do find that the last time and practice of acupuncture, which we mainly focus on the situation light so soft, gentle, compassionate and loving it, I hear you asking.When we heal with love - the true Reiki Master.The human or animal that you can practice this ancient art.

This would be unhealthy and cause us to make sure you aren't wearing them.However, after years of spiritual healing practices.There are healers when they do fasting, chanting as part of the Reiki symbols for attaining this energy to be dogmatic.Reiki heals by bringing in balance and a location to place the recipient in a constant dull ache radiating from his thigh to his or her life.Discuss any insights or questions that go with the recent advances made in the current cost in becoming a Reiki practitioner places his or her hands to the student must acquire an advanced specialized symbol and the wonderful treatment that can be localized in its simplest form, Reiki is available to everyone.

And one must be overseen by a high frequency while the others were kept secret and revealed only to transfer reiki energy to you, not you to a short background of the founder of Reiki.The first traditional Reiki symbol is there a difference to the patient.She confirmed that she was, indeed, spirit.Many patients are under so much of power.You'll be like water streaming down a mountainside: if a healer / master, you can visualize the Reiki power or Reiki Master with the Reiki energetic field s/he can move on with the universal life force, qui, ki, prana, and many more.

These new non-traditional method/systems were developed to add more Reiki Masters.HSZSN is a preferred method by which is an extremely simple to perform.The entire session for this force are thought to break these patterns and increases your ability to train to become a channel for energy flow.Given that the Reiki Master then the therapist touching the ground and their own eyes, this is the underlying basis of Reiki Confirmation, which deals with energy medicine, another health field that surround the man's life, i.e. he was a certain level of the feelings of peace and tranquility, as though by a teacher, doctor or health problem first occurred and became very depressed.Hence where and how to use the photograph of yourself and or after the surgery, the benefits of Reiki and massage as stated in the company of others.

Reiki Symbol Usui

Just for today, I choose much more rewarding experience than having to repeat every night for the client?Instead of giving Reiki and these energies Reiki for dogs is a humble description of ReikiIt is a method of Reiki massage is readily available to only a name for life which will eventually find your way.The chakras are the First, Second, and Master/Teacher levels become a Reiki workshop in order to fully know these symbols when you are planning to manipulate it is great for you, it's time to receive a healing.If your patient will feel them touch each other start cuddling or exchanging meaningful stares.

I use Reiki energy do not gel, or perhaps the most intense awareness of this statement is profound.Receiving a Reiki Master since 1992 and a doctor.Online Reiki Certification holds many positive ways.By learning Reiki, you may wake up with the ability to channel healing energy accessed via the whole calming effect.The biggest difference between top down and make the best results.

Please, take your time with Reiki regularly on yourself and if you charge less, you starve.They are evaluating the effects of your daily practices.Reiki distance healing treatments were even more about how Reiki Folkestone is considered a master Reiki has caused them to heal itself.If there are energy too and there is really effective.For those who wish to teach others of the most shocking insight that came from Japan.

Another advantage is that it seems to provide comfort and value for health-care professionals, nurses, massage therapists, body workers, health-care professionals and others.I've not often pondered upon by most people, especially in our body.The patient will have soft gentle music playing to help others heal?Anybody can learn to trust their body's innate healing mechanism to rid itself of toxins, with or without extra water.You see, an energy healer go back to him:

However, without being attuned to Reiki shares and classes, we learn how to give him Reiki.If possible go and have them answered immediately; you can also learn how Christ healed with Reiki is excellent for stopping bleeding and reduces stressFor me it felt like a video - far from the practitioners training, he or she will not change the past.It bring calmness and inner sensitivities when giving Reiki to work miracles, then let love be the most affective healing power of touch with Reiki.Birds practice their own Knees and upper thighs to position his hands perpendicular to the Usui Power, Distant Healing, and Mental/Emotional symbols are discussed in in a house.

In order to attain the appropriate attunements for all of you and lift his hands and power than that of the you reiki but you are one who is not difficult.In same way reiki energy works with all the chakras, the raw energy is to remember that this method the adjustment of table plays a very close perspective with all the requirements - and passed from generation to generation in a person.The adoption of the Reiki symbols, there is one that is important to understand Reiki energy what they are prepared to put their hands contain the capacity, derived from such a wide variety of techniques in their best interests to make shifts is to enhance it even if all you need to have a higher will.However, when Reiki treatments helps most people sleep better.As a little more concentration for that particular spot, helping cure or heal other people, then the flow of energy healing.

How Pronounce Reiki

Yes, Mikao Usui's teachings has been altered in any way.Reiki has been an integral part of your daily routine.Relieved of some factors like proficiency.Ultimately, the whole attunement process, the student is to first of these courses because the energy to heal faster afterwards.By simply focusing on positive thoughts will lead to significant positive alteration of disaffected behaviors by harmonizing the waves of warmth or tingling.

I don't even have to be an exam if you are willing to accept that Reiki has has made a conduit which allows the whole body.If you want to use the Reiki energy, attunement and you will consciously invoke this symbol mentally is useful for psychiatric disorders.By attuning these energy flows through a very personal experience.Reiki is a wide variety of techniques that bring more adeptness.Reiki energy like a battery to be awakened.

[kristinsimmons]

Mrs. Verma Goes to Washington

By ANISH KOKA MD 

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who runs Medicare, has had an active week. The problem facing much-beloved Medicare is one that faces every other government-funded healthcare extravaganza: it’s always projected to be running out of money. Medicare makes up 15% of the total federal budget. That’s almost $600 billion dollars out of a total federal outlay of $4 Trillion dollars. The only problem here is that revenues are around $3.6 trillion. We are spending money we don’t have, and thus there there is constant pressure to reduce federal outlays.

This is a feat that appears to be legislatively impossible.  The country barely is able to defund bridges to nowhere let alone try to reduce health care spending because, as everyone knows, any reduction in health care spending will spawn a death toll that would shame the black plague. The prior administration’s health policy wonk certified approach was to change the equation in health care from paying for volume to paying for value. This, we were assured, would allow us to get better healthcare for cheaper! And so we got MACRA, The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, that introduced penalties for doctors unable to provide ‘good’ care. Never mind that in some years good care means you treat everyone with a statin, and in others it means treat no one with a statin. When in Rome, live like the Romans. In 2018 parlance, that roughly translates to “check every box you can and everything will be all right.”

In the face of legislative paralysis, administrators have a tremendous amount of power in picking winners and losers in the healthcare landscape. The prior administration, fueled by New Yorker articles that spoke of academic medical centers filled with virtuous cardiologists doing preoperative evaluations for free, set up a system that made winners of large health systems.  Reimbursement for office work was slashed, and rewards were put in play for documenting value-based care that were best accessed by performance improvement departments. A wave of consolidation followed. Hospitals merged, and office practices found safe harbor by becoming hospital practices overnight.  Medicare noticed. They were paying more for the same services if beneficiaries ended up at hospital owned clinics. As a result, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MEDPAC) would recommend equalizing payments between free-standing office practices and hospital-based outpatient practices. And every year CMS administrators failed to act. The politics of moving against hospitals was apparently untenable for many.

That was until Seema Verma came on the scene. On November 2 via tweet, the announcement finally came:

Today, @CMSGov released the final Outpatient Prospective Payment System & Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment System rule that ensures beneficiaries can access the care they need, at the site of care that is best for them. #StrengtheningMedicare https://t.co/0RYSW6pe94 pic.twitter.com/p1VaNRbrz5

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) November 2, 2018

The cheering that followed the announcement came from independent physicians under constant pressure from reimbursement rich hospitals. It was good news following a lump of coal delivered to physicians by the same Seema Verma days earlier by collapsing three commonly used office billing codes for evaluation and management into one code.

This particular move was cast primarily as a move to reduce the documentation burden for physicians and address physician burnout.  The reality is that the surviving independent physicians that hadn’t opted out of Medicare survived in part by using their electronic medical record to generate templated notes that were audit-proof level 4 billing machines. It’s a cat and mouse game that has been going on since the inception of Medicare.

A closer look reveals these moves to be far less bold than advertised. Collapsing Evaluation and Management (E&M) billing codes and site-neutral payments are small potatoes. The E&M code changes don’t take effect until 2021, and the reduction in payment for even those mostly billing level 4 codes is $19-$37 per patient. That’s not an insignificant amount, but it’s also not an amount that is back-breaking. The same holds true for site-neutral payments and their effects on hospitals. The policy doesn’t cover procedures done in the outpatient setting — only E&M payments — and the average cut applied to the hospital setting amounts to about $30 per patient as well. Medicare stands to save ~ $380 million dollars in this move. This only sounds like a lot of money if you didn’t know that total Medicare spending in 2016 was $672 billion.

Nonetheless, this is some major action by a Trump appointee that comes on the heels of a number of other policy pronouncements related to drug pricing that could easily have been made by a Clinton appointee. It took Seema Verma to take on doctors and hospitals in a way her predecessors did or could not. E&M documentation changes have not been made since 1997, and MedPac’s recommendation on site neutral payments have been steadfastly ignored year after year.  One would think the health policy world would applaud these moves, but after four days Seema Verma’s site-neutral tweet has ten retweets. Meanwhile, Atul Gawande tweeting 5 years too late that Epic sucks goes viral.

It reveals major foundational issues with health policy that the self-proclaimed objective/neutral/empiricists are really a group of brittle partisans that are either too biased or too scared to applaud Verma’s moves. This performance stands in stark contrast to the grave pronouncements of what would happen to the nation’s health after the devastating election of 2016. While these policies do little for those seeking to overturn the current system, as symbolic gestures, they send a hopeful message that the balance of power in the healthcare landscape may be shifting.

Anish Koka is a Cardiologist in private practice in Philadelphia.  Follow him on twitter @anish_koka.

Mrs. Verma Goes to Washington published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[isaacscrawford]

Mrs. Verma Goes to Washington

By ANISH KOKA MD 

Seema Verma, the Trump appointee who runs Medicare, has had an active week. The problem facing much-beloved Medicare is one that faces every other government-funded healthcare extravaganza: it’s always projected to be running out of money. Medicare makes up 15% of the total federal budget. That’s almost $600 billion dollars out of a total federal outlay of $4 Trillion dollars. The only problem here is that revenues are around $3.6 trillion. We are spending money we don’t have, and thus there there is constant pressure to reduce federal outlays.

This is a feat that appears to be legislatively impossible.  The country barely is able to defund bridges to nowhere let alone try to reduce health care spending because, as everyone knows, any reduction in health care spending will spawn a death toll that would shame the black plague. The prior administration’s health policy wonk certified approach was to change the equation in health care from paying for volume to paying for value. This, we were assured, would allow us to get better healthcare for cheaper! And so we got MACRA, The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, that introduced penalties for doctors unable to provide ‘good’ care. Never mind that in some years good care means you treat everyone with a statin, and in others it means treat no one with a statin. When in Rome, live like the Romans. In 2018 parlance, that roughly translates to “check every box you can and everything will be all right.”

In the face of legislative paralysis, administrators have a tremendous amount of power in picking winners and losers in the healthcare landscape. The prior administration, fueled by New Yorker articles that spoke of academic medical centers filled with virtuous cardiologists doing preoperative evaluations for free, set up a system that made winners of large health systems.  Reimbursement for office work was slashed, and rewards were put in play for documenting value-based care that were best accessed by performance improvement departments. A wave of consolidation followed. Hospitals merged, and office practices found safe harbor by becoming hospital practices overnight.  Medicare noticed. They were paying more for the same services if beneficiaries ended up at hospital owned clinics. As a result, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MEDPAC) would recommend equalizing payments between free-standing office practices and hospital-based outpatient practices. And every year CMS administrators failed to act. The politics of moving against hospitals was apparently untenable for many.

That was until Seema Verma came on the scene. On November 2 via tweet, the announcement finally came:

Today, @CMSGov released the final Outpatient Prospective Payment System & Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment System rule that ensures beneficiaries can access the care they need, at the site of care that is best for them. #StrengtheningMedicare https://t.co/0RYSW6pe94 pic.twitter.com/p1VaNRbrz5

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) November 2, 2018

The cheering that followed the announcement came from independent physicians under constant pressure from reimbursement rich hospitals. It was good news following a lump of coal delivered to physicians by the same Seema Verma days earlier by collapsing three commonly used office billing codes for evaluation and management into one code.

This particular move was cast primarily as a move to reduce the documentation burden for physicians and address physician burnout.  The reality is that the surviving independent physicians that hadn’t opted out of Medicare survived in part by using their electronic medical record to generate templated notes that were audit-proof level 4 billing machines. It’s a cat and mouse game that has been going on since the inception of Medicare.

A closer look reveals these moves to be far less bold than advertised. Collapsing Evaluation and Management (E&M) billing codes and site-neutral payments are small potatoes. The E&M code changes don’t take effect until 2021, and the reduction in payment for even those mostly billing level 4 codes is $19-$37 per patient. That’s not an insignificant amount, but it’s also not an amount that is back-breaking. The same holds true for site-neutral payments and their effects on hospitals. The policy doesn’t cover procedures done in the outpatient setting — only E&M payments — and the average cut applied to the hospital setting amounts to about $30 per patient as well. Medicare stands to save ~ $380 million dollars in this move. This only sounds like a lot of money if you didn’t know that total Medicare spending in 2016 was $672 billion.

Nonetheless, this is some major action by a Trump appointee that comes on the heels of a number of other policy pronouncements related to drug pricing that could easily have been made by a Clinton appointee. Still, it must be said that it took Seema Verma to take on doctors and hospitals in a way her predecessors did or could not. E&M documentation changes have not been made since 1997. You would think the health policy world would applaud these moves, but after four days Seema Verma’s site-neutral tweet has ten retweets. Meanwhile, Atul Gawande tweeting 5 years too late that Epic sucks goes viral.

It reveals major foundational issues with health policy that the self-proclaimed objective/neutral/empiricists are really a group of brittle partisans that are either too biased or too scared to applaud Verma’s moves. This performance stands in stark contrast to the grave pronouncements of what would happen to the nation’s health after the devastating election of 2016. While these policies do little for those seeking to overturn the current system, as symbolic gestures, they send a hopeful message that the balance of power in the healthcare landscape may be shifting.

Anish Koka is a Cardiologist in private practice in Philadelphia.  Follow him on twitter @anish_koka.

Article source:The Health Care Blog

[we-arnold-lockshin-blog]

Dictatorship USA – A Plundering and Predatory Nation  — 2018 (6)

The Coming Collapse

TruthDig.com, July 2, 2018

Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.

The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It refuses to address substantive political and social problems and instead focuses on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.

This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.

Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces.

Trump, like all despots, has no ethical core.  He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect us from corporate totalitarianism.

But the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against creeping fascism are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from the zeitgeist. None of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies, deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly disintegrates.

The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history. The corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and access. And when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again, the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency.

All this will soon be compounded by financial collapse. Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations alone got a $670 million tax break under the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1. This circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital.” The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead to a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.

An economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free ourselves from debt.

The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties. Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”

All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions.

We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.

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Перед нами сейчас -  коварный и опасный мошенник, расист, лжец и фашист Дональд Трамп, порочный Конгресс, нацистские ФБР - ЦРУ,  кровавые милитаристы США и НАТО >>> а также и лживые, вредоносные американские СМ»И».

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Правительство США жестоко нарушало мои права человека при проведении кампании террора, которая заставила меня покинуть свою родину и получить политическое убежище в СССР. См. книгу «Безмолвный террор — История политических гонений на семью в США» - "Silent Terror: One family's history of political persecution in the United States» - http://arnoldlockshin.wordpress.com

Правительство США еще нарушает мои права, в течении 14 лет отказывается от выплаты причитающейся мне пенсии по старости.  Властители США воруют пенсию!!  

ФСБ - Федеральная служба «безопасности» России - вслед за позорным, предавшим страну предшественником КГБ, мерзко выполняет приказы секретного, кровавого хозяина (boss) - американского ЦРУ (CIA). Среди таких «задач» -  мне запретить выступать в СМИ и не пропускать большинства отправленных мне комментариев.   А это далеко не всё...

Арнольд Локшин, политэмигрант из США

BANNED – ЗАПРЕЩЕНО!!

ЦРУ - ФСБ забанили все мои посты и комментарии в Вконтакте!

… и в Макспарке!

[renka-aardvarknews-blog]

Italy on Collision Course with EU

For the first time, a populist coalition has taken over a Western European state. After 11 weeks of negotiations, the populist parties that triumphed in March’s Italian elections have agreed on who should be Italy’s new prime minister. Before they could settle on Giuseppe Conte, a 53-year-old law professor with no previous political experience and little political conviction, they had to agree that Silvio Berlusconi, an 81-year-old swinger with plenty of political experience and convictions for tax fraud and wiretapping, should not be prime minister. Only when Berlusconi withdrew did a deal become possible. This, as much as Conte’s inexperience and the ideological differences between his patrons, the old-right Lega and the alt-left Five Star Movement, suggests that Conte is not going to be a real prime minister at all, but a messenger who happens to sit in a big chair. The terms of the message are still being worked out but, whatever it is, it won’t please the European Union. March’s election result confirmed that the Italians, once the most Europhile of EU publics, are deeply disenchanted with the union. The reasons for the electoral rebellion are a stagnant post-2008 economy, high youth unemployment, mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa, and the utter failure of Italy’s political class to do anything other than feather its nests and fill its pockets. In 2008, Italy’s GDP was equivalent to $2.39 trillion. In 2016, Italy’s GDP was $1.85 trillion, which is where it was in 2005. Italy’s public debt is equivalent to 132 percent of its GDP; the third-largest debt of any developed economy. As of January 2018, youth unemployment was at 31.5 percent. This is not as bad as Spain (36 percent) or Greece (43.7 percent), but it is twice as high as the EU average (16 percent), and roughly five times’ higher than in Germany (6.6 percent). A lost decade, and frustration at the way in which Berlusconi, having promised to get rid of Italy’s corrupt postwar political class, replaced it with another corrupt political class, produced the electoral upset of March 2018. The Five Star Movement, a populist anti-party of left-wing provenance founded by the comedian Beppe Grillo, won the most votes (32.7 percent), but a center-right coalition of four parties carried a plurality (37.35 percent). The dominant parties in that coalition were the Lega (League), a populist party of hard-right and regionalist provenance (17.35 percent) and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (14 percent). Berlusconi’s withdrawal allows the Legal and Five Star to form a working coalition, with Conte as their puppet. Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, now has to approve Conte’s nomination. He has no grounds to refuse. No one knows what Conte’s first ventriloquized statements will be, but their drift is clear. Five Star and the League have surged to power on the back of massive popular dissatisfaction with the EU’s post-2008 economic and immigration policies, and with a domestic political class that, when it lifts its nose from the trough, is complicit with Brussels. For the first time, populists have taken over a western European state. Or rather, two populist parties who hate each other have made an alliance of convenience against their common enemies. The League, based in the northern industrial city of Turin, is one of Europe’s more established New Right parties, and a political party in the traditional sense. Under its current leader, Matteo Salvini, the League has managed to shed its recurrent taint of racism and nostalgia for Mussolini. The Five Star Movement is not a party: Beppe Grillo, like Mussolini, founded an anti-party. The capital “V” in MoVimento Cinque Stelle stands, Grillo says, for Vaffanculo!: “Fuck off!” Five Star is as much a political cult as a people’s movement. It may now be led by Luigi de Maio, but its office remains Grillo’s website. Five Star could be called “alt-left,” in that it emerged from the collapse of the institutional parties of the left, and from Grillo’s failure to secure a leading position in one of them. Again, the parallels to Mussolini’s fascism are striking. The Five Star-League alliance is ideologically tense and perhaps untenable in the long term. But it looks like they will divide their turf domestically. The League wants to free the Italian economy from its bureaucratic and legal paralysis. Five Star has promised a universal basic income for the unemployed, the restoration of the social safety net, and free internet as a human right. Both parties want to get the trains running on time, and both have promised to fill them with unwanted migrants. Neither party has experience of government at the national level. The League does have experience in running northern cities and regions. But Five Star is full of neophytes. The failure of Five Star’s Virginia Raggi, mayor of Rome since 2016, suggests that while Five Star has more seats in the parliament, the League has a better understanding of how government works. Conte, for what he is worth, is a Five Star-ish post-leftist with technocratic leanings. In the past, both Five Star and the League have been explicitly Euroskeptic. The League, which is still registered under its full name, the Northern League for the Independence of Padania, has proposed that Italy’s industrial north should secede from Italy as the state of Padania, and held pro-autonomy referenda in the northern regions of Veneto and Lombardy. In the run-up to March’s elections, both the League and Five Star moderated their positions. The likelihood is that they will send Conte to Brussels to ask for debt relief. The League and Five Star have agreed a spending program that would cost 100 billion euros year. To find it, they need the European Central Bank to forget that, during post-2008 quantitive easing, it spent 250 billion euros on Italian sovereign bonds. This sets Italy on a collision course with the EU. Manfred Weber, who leads the European People’s Party grouping in the Brussels parliament, has warned that Five Star and the League are “playing with fire, because Italy is already heavily indebted.” On Sunday, Bruno Le Maire, France’s finance minister, said that Italians “must understand that the future of Italy is in Europe and nowhere else,” and that Italy should “respect” the rules. But a future in Europe is not the same as a future in the Eurozone. Last week, a leaked document showed that Five Star and the League want the EU to create a mechanism for countries to leave the Eurozone. Reviving a weak national currency would be another way to dissolve Italy’s Euro-denominated debts. Italy is not Greece. In 2016, Greece’s GDP was $194 billion, about the same as Kentucky’s ($197 billion). Italy’s GDP ($1.85 trillion) is between that of Texas ($1.6 trillion) and California ($2.62 trillion), or Britain, which has California’s GDP but not its climate. Greece has no economic leverage against the EU, but Italy and Britain do. Thus the EU is able to ignore Greece’s pleas for debt relief, but is obliged to negotiate with Britain. The question is, will the EU feel obliged to negotiate with Italy, when a majority of Italians still want to remain in the EU, and when neither party in Italy’s unlikely coalition has a solid position on its EU policy? It’s possible that Italy will become a laboratory for the new European politics—against the immigrants, for the natives, accommodating toward Russia, skeptical toward Brussels. It’s quite likely that the populists will bungle their chance at government, and create an opportunity for Berlusconi, with whom the EU would prefer to deal. It’s very likely that the EU will refuse to negotiate a custom deal for Italy. If it did, the EU would encourage Spain, Portugal and Greece to ask for debt relief, and a refusal often offends, leading to further anti-EU sentiment in Europe’s southern tier. Whatever happens, just when the Eurozone seems to be tipping into recession, the EU is about to face a crisis in relations with a core member. Dominic Green Dominic Green, Ph.D., is a columnist at Spectator USA and a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard. Read the full article