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Oct 11, 2022Liked by John Day MD

more&more, Dr.John, seems that amerika is using a script from a 3 stooges film...but inserting it's armageddon denouement. Merci for Your insites!

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Much to unpack and a lot to consider vis a vis the Ukrainian conflict. In the first place governments who are tyrannical at home are displeased the Post-Cold War order is brutal as well. Ok. A kinder and gentler tyranny is preferred. One that is more in keeping with traditional governance by local elites that are not constrained by noble ideas. In saying this I am not suggesting the Atlantic Imperium is constrained by noble ideas only that unlike China the law once upon a time was a bit of a brake on ambition. It may still be so today in the West since as yet no formal dictatorship has arisen. Informal networks - crime gangs-exist and hold power but importantly these are still rooted in law no matter how suborned. In China Xi is judge, jury, and executioner. And Chinese law permits it.

With Covid being international and the idea of depopulation of 80% of humanity to save Earth agreed upon the arguments of the Great Powers come down to Que es mas macho. A world where China was key and not the Atlantiscists would be different but not superior as any African state knows.

If we had the magic lamp of Aladdin and made one wish as Galeano wrote, asking the Genii to bring back our mother we would be told by the Genii this could not be done and given that, we ask for world peace and the Geni then asks us about our mother once more.

Then the question must and again is rarely raised about Transnational policy. War is politics by brutal means. Nation states are obliged in the International State System to have allies lest they get eaten alive by the strong. Abolition of the International State System by world government is unspoken but generally an objective of Transnational elites. All Transnational elites are supporting Covid vaccination. As are all nation states, China especially.

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Oct 12, 2022Liked by John Day MD

Nice selection of articles and their addresses to be informed by. The truth is useful beyond the words to print it.

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Thank You, I seek to be of service.

We need to find a thousand ways to block the holocaust which is being staged for us.

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Oct 12, 2022Liked by John Day MD

The social coercion the USA uses to undermine the integrity of other cultures by touting an extreme cynicism of freedom underlines this holocaust and needs revealing . Reading the Iranian woman’s letter about the hijab issue shows delightfully how intelligent the rest of the world is in comparison to the brainwashed or whatever it is so eagerly supported by the wealthy media owners without a conscience to tell the truth. This requires a humility they lack.

One can do nothing about this nuclear imagined Holocost but do what your doing . Courage in the face of death isn’t what these politicians have so that is on our side when hell begins to breathes down their neck from us.

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There is also prayer/meditation.

"Prayer is not asking God to carry your water for you. Prayer is carrying your water."

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Oct 12, 2022Liked by John Day MD

Prayer/meditation is a wonderful motivation without having to understand the reasons why.

I’m glad for what you doing.

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Oct 11, 2022Liked by John Day MD

Sorry. Whatever may be true of some of the dimwitted Neocons and Epicurean fools among the "Straussians" cannot be said of Strauss. This view was refuted long ago by Nathan Tarcov here: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2006/09/01/will-the-real-leo-strauss-please-stand-up/

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Perhaps you refer to this statement near the end of the article:

"Strauss insisted that communism had revealed itself as Stalinism or “actually existing socialism” rather than Trotskyism, which is “condemned or refuted by its own principle” as an historical failure condemned by the principle of historical materialism. Strauss’ adverting here to the opposition between Stalinism and Trotskyism suggests the thought that the Western impulse to make the whole globe democratic rather than establish democracy in a single country is the democratic equivalent of Trotsky’s “world revolution” as opposed to Stalin’s “socialism in one country.”

The article mainly discusses lectures by Leo Strauss during WW-2 regarding fascism, communism, then closes by saying that Straus was not a "Straussian", which puts him in the same boat with Marx and Keynes not being Marxist or Keynsian.

"What Strauss did say about foreign policy hardly resembles the errors with which he has recently been charged. First of all, he spoke not of unilateral American foreign policy or American hegemony or even American national interest, but in 1942 and 1943 of the policy of “the United Nations” (the wartime Allies, not the post-war organization), “the liberal powers”, “the Anglosaxon nations and the other nations interested in, or dependent on, Anglosaxon preponderance”, and in 1963 of “the West.” Furthermore, he stressed the impossibility of imposing a lasting form of government through conquest,"

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Oct 12, 2022Liked by John Day MD

Strauss: "Are there no dangers threatening democracy not only from without but from within as well? Is there no problem of democracy, of industrial mass democracy? The official high priests of democracy with their amiable reasonableness were not reasonable enough to prepare us for our situation: the decline of Europe, the danger to the West, to the whole Western heritage which is at least as great and even greater than that which threatened

Mediterranean civilization around 300 of the Christian era. It is childish to believe that the U.N. organization is an answer even to the political problem. And within democracy: it suffices to mention the name of France and the commercials and logical positivism with their indescribable vulgarity. They have indeed the merit of not sending men into concentration camps and gas chambers, but is the absence of these unspeakable evils sufficient? Nietzsche once described the change which had been effected in the second half of the nineteenth century in continental Europe as follows. The reading of the morning prayer had been replaced by the reading of the morning paper: not everyday the same thing, the same reminder of men's absolute duty and exalted destiny, but every day something new with no reminder of duty and exalted destiny. Specialization, knowing more and more about less and less, practical impossibility of concentration upon the very few essential things upon which man's wholeness entirely depends-this specialization compensated by sham universality, by the stimulation of all kinds of interests and curiosities without true passion, the danger of universal philistinism and creeping conformism."

I don't see how the proponent of this view could be said to support anything like what we associate with the Neocons or Neoliberals or Neo anything, to be honest.

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Oct 12, 2022·edited Oct 12, 2022Author

Wolly said, and I agree:

" I don't see how the proponent of this view could be said to support anything like what we associate with the Neocons or Neoliberals or Neo anything, to be honest."

Strauss, in the writing quoted above, addresses the intermediation by bureaucracy, "industrial mass democracy" and specialization, between humans and their diverse human functions, and especially their relationship with divine-knowing.

"Disintermediation" is the task for us, to know "God", to grow vegetables, to help another human with a necessary project, to walk and bike together, to stay warm and talk together and crack nuts together in winter, perhaps...

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Oct 12, 2022Liked by John Day MD

That's fair.

I mean, though, more or less the following: Strauss was above all a student of Plato and Aristotle and not a modern liberal. He thought that the modern scientific/technological project to "conquer nature for the relief of man's estate" (Bacon) and the liberal democratic political reshaping of the world and man to be content with commodious living (Hobbes) or comfortable self-preservation (Locke) without God which became that project's natural ally ("Machiavellianism come of age") were ultimately very bad for human beings. He thought this was bad both for people in their highest or best aspirations and for regular folk in their most common aspirations to decency and happiness. Liberalism, as he puts it in Natural Right and History, becomes, at best, the "joyless quest for joy." His students, on the other hand, became a bunch of sniveling academics spouting off atheism and immorality and therewith radicalizing the modernity that their teacher sought to eschew. Marx (I don't know enough about Keynes to comment on what you say about him, really) is guilty of something much more than Strauss: He actively contributed to a revolutionary movement that saw the overthrow of the existing order (for perhaps sometimes understandable reasons, to be sure); by his own admission, philosophy HAS to CHANGE the world, not merely understand it. He wrote a MANIFESTO of the Communist Party that ends in a clarion call to action. Strauss, I think it's fair to say, was more interested in simply understanding the world, NOT changing it; he was especially interested in understanding how modernity had prevented human beings from grasping philosophy (which he tries to show is the highest human possibility) in its original, premodern sense. He was not for radical schemes of reform, let alone civilization-altering projects to establish cabals of secular Jews with supposedly liberalizing schemes, as some, without reading much, if anything, of what he wrote have intimated.

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Wolly said:

"Liberalism, as he puts it in Natural Right and History, becomes, at best, the "joyless quest for joy." His students, on the other hand, became a bunch of sniveling academics spouting off atheism and immorality and therewith radicalizing the modernity that their teacher sought to eschew."

Thank you for your research. I am better informed after reading your comments.

I have not read a lot of Marx, but I have read Marx with interest, seeking to understand him in historical context. The young Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto as paid writing work, though he subscribed to it, to be sure. He cut a lot of corners in his arguments. He was a lawyer, and he was arguing before a jury in his style. In later years, after the class wars in Germany died down and Bismarck solved a lot of problems, Marx had much less to say about revolution, which was everywhere already when he wrote the Manifesto.

I'm not a Marxist, but he is worth understanding in our world. He was an atheist, the son of a Jewish lawyer who converted to Christianity for professional/economic reasons.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

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Oct 11, 2022Liked by John Day MD

We will have to live with it if not exit life, Putin, Xi and many other North Korean or Afghan and Iranian Mullahs are there to stay....during our lifetime no Biden, Macron, Stolz and others EU, WEF, WHO, Wall Street, Hollywood, Gates, Twitters, LinkedIn ,NATO, CIA and other DARPAs can make them go away.

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