Civilization; geopolitics; post-materialism; contemplative traditions; haiku. Kaleidoscopically shifting perspectives. (Bad manners blocked; no DMs)
Mexico
Joined May 2024
- Tweets26.8K
- Following616
- Followers1.2K
- Likes33.7K
Ash retweeted
This Irish farmer hilariously sums up the entire world’s problems.
“Why we bes bend over…”
My man!
Ash retweeted
Things people aren't realizing:
Most SILVER mining is a byproduct of copper and zinc mining. There's almost no silver mining that happens on purpose as a primary target.
Copper and zinc mines use SULFURIC ACID to strip those elements out of raw ore. (The acid dissolves the metals into solution, where they can be poured off, living the raw ore behind, essentially.)
The war on Iran has collapsed the world's sulfur flows out of the Persian Gulf.
Without sulfur, copper and zinc mining nearly collapse. Without copper and zinc mining, silver production plummets (obviously). This is where we are right now in late 2026.
The main reason silver isn't exploding in price right now is because the same war that impedes sulfur flows is also impeding the energy flows used by manufacturing industries that demand silver as an input. (Simplified explanation, but largely valid.) Plus, of course, paper manipulation of silver markets by governments / central banks.
When industry does come back online at full speed, sooner or later, the above-ground silver supply will be drastically thin. What do you suppose will happen to silver prices at that time?
Almost nobody realizes that silver production depends on sulfur shipments out of the Persian Gulf.
Now you know.
Ash retweeted
"Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution."
- Aristotle
Ash retweeted
"greatest strategic blunders"?
No, it was not a blunder. A blunder would imply that they didn't understand going in what the outcome would be...that's where most ppl get this wrong. Normal ppl would see the potential of WW3, killing a million ppl, overthrowing an elected leader which results in a civil war as a bad thing. The international syndicate that has been doing this since WW2 doesn't view any of those outcomes as bad, as a matter of fact, they've been actively achieving them for 70 yrs.
You would look at assassinating JFK and getting the US into Vietnam as a blunder. IT WAS THE PURPOSE OF DOING IT.
You would look at assassinating Lumumba and the murder of over a million Congolese a blunder. IT WAS THE PURPOSE OF DOING IT.
NATO needed an excuse to to attack Russia. They overthrew Ukraine, provoked a civil war between the Donbas (ethnic Russians) and the Nazis of Azov and Right Sector with the intention of provoking a response from Russian...stage a false flag against a NATO country and presto, we're off to war again. If you can't see the historical pattern at this point, I can't help you.
🚨 "Had there been no movement to bring Ukraine into NATO, Ukraine would be intact today.
That is why I argue that bringing Ukraine into NATO was one of the greatest strategic blunders in modern history.
Because not only is it leading to the destruction of Ukraine, not only did it lead to this devastating war, but you're going to have poisonous relations between the Europeans and the Americans and the Ukrainians on one side and the Russians on the other side for as far as the eye can see. ," comments Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, John Mearsheimer, in our latest interview.
➤ Watch the full podcast episode: youtu.be/VXPUw1yJM0A
Ash retweeted
This suffering world ;
The flowers will blossom
Even at that. - Kobayashi Issa.
~
Autumn Flowers
Hiramatsu Reiji
Ash retweeted
James Burnham – The Trotskyist Who Saw How It Would End.
He was a Trotskyist first. In the 1930s he was one of the leading Marxist intellectuals in America – building the movement, debating Trotsky himself by letter, believing in the revolution.
But he was also an American. A practical mind, trained to look at what actually happens rather than what the theory promises. So he understood what it was really about – and explained to us how it would work out.
1. In 1940 he broke with Trotsky over one question: what was the Soviet Union? Trotsky said a workers’ state, temporarily deformed. Burnham looked at it and saw something else: a new ruling class. The workers owned nothing. The capitalists were gone. Someone else was in charge – the people who ran the machine. Trotsky spent much of his last year writing against him. Burnham was right.
2. In 1941 he generalized it in The Managerial Revolution. The future would belong neither to the capitalists nor to the workers, but to the managers – the administrators, technicians and bureaucrats who control things without owning them. Capitalism would fall, he wrote – but not to the working class. To the managers. The capitalist, who risks his own fortune, would be replaced by the manager, who risks nothing, owns nothing and runs everything. That is the whole difference. The capitalist pays for his own mistakes. The manager’s mistakes are always paid by someone else – the shareholder, the taxpayer, the citizen. Burnham saw the same class rising in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and New Deal America. Different flags, the same new masters. And he said what it meant: the end of capitalism and of freedom – even if the façade stayed standing.
3. Orwell read it, argued with it – and borrowed from it. The three superstates of 1984 come from Burnham. So does its ruling class, which owns everything collectively and nothing personally.
4. In 1943 came The Machiavellians. Burnham studied the realists – Machiavelli and his modern heirs, like Pareto – and drew the lesson idealists never want to hear: every society is run by an elite. The only question is whether there is more than one. Freedom does not come from the absence of elites. It comes from their competition – rival powers that check each other, a free press, an opposition that can actually win. A single elite with no rival is tyranny, whatever it calls itself.
5. Now look at what the long march actually produced. Not the rule of the workers. The rule of the managers – the administrators of the ministries, the regulators in Brussels, the HR departments, the editorial boards. The façade of capitalism still stands – but who actually rules? Corporate boards spending other people’s money on other people’s ideologies. Officials in Brussels. Directors of foundations and NGOs. No voter elected them. The revolution succeeded. Only the managers won it. Gramsci designed the march. Burnham told us who would be waiting at the end of it. A class that owns nothing, answers to no voter, pays for none of its mistakes, and runs almost everything.
6. In 1964 he wrote Suicide of the West. Its verdict: liberalism – the modern progressive kind, not the classical one – is "the ideology of Western suicide." It lets a civilization accept its own retreat and feel good about it. Every loss becomes a sign of progress. Sixty years later, it reads like a description of Brussels.
7. The ex-Trotskyist ended up a founding editor of National Review, and in 1983 Ronald Reagan gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. From Trotsky’s comrade to Reagan’s medal. He knew the left from the inside, and he had the American instinct to ask the only question that matters: not what the theory promises, but who ends up in charge.
In 1941 his answer was the managers. It still is – unless a rival elite rises.
For the first time in decades, one has: builders, not administrators. Burnham would have recognized the moment. Not a revolution – a rotation.
Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.
Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions.
Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.
1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.
2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.
3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.
4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.
5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.
6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.
7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march.
Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.
Ash retweeted
American an European friends,
I’m so ashamed, but you need to see what France has become.
Don’t make the same mistakes we did.
The only peaceful solution is to send them back to their countries of origin they love so much.
We cannot coexist. It will be them, or us.
Ash retweeted
A quiet rebellion is taking root across the fields of Italy. Far from the boardrooms of multinational agricultural giants, local farmers are banding together to build a powerful, independent seed network. Their mission is clear: to preserve the ancient, heirloom, and GMO-free seeds that have sustained their culture for generations.
This is about much more than just farming. It is a direct act of resistance against the massive agricultural corporations that seek to monopolize our global food supply. For too long, questionable government protections and corporate lobbying have prioritized profits over people, attempting to push independent farmers toward dependency on patented, genetically modified seeds.
By saving, sharing, and planting their own heirloom varieties, these Italian farmers are reclaiming their heritage and securing their livelihoods. They are proving that true food security comes from biodiversity, community cooperation, and a deep respect for the land, not from corporate monopolies. It is a powerful reminder that the most revolutionary act can sometimes be as simple as planting a seed.
Ash retweeted
The generation of kids being born today are in for the fight of their lives. Literally everything is stacked against them from the minute they are born. God help them.
Ash retweeted
Vonnegut on practicing art,
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
Ash retweeted
Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries: "It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.
There are some things in life that we need to always have in plenty, even if we will only use a small portion. If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!
Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it - they simply apply the consumer mentality to books- that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."
Ash retweeted
In Budapest, a rock has resurfaced in the Danube.
It's called the Rock of Starvation - Ínség-szikla. For centuries, its return has meant one thing: the river is so low the mills fall silent, crops fail, and hunger follows.
It surfaced in 1616. In 1718. In 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868. In 1947.
And now it's back, in 2026.
For the first time in 44 years, Hungary has shut down all but one of its Danube-cooled nuclear reactors.
A nearby farmer puts it plainly: "I've lost nearly 50% of my harvest, and it could hit 70%. Since I started farming after the end of communist rule, I've never seen a catastrophe like this."
The rock is a warning.
It's been delivering it for 400 years.
We know exactly what it says, but we haven't been listening.
Ash retweeted
Catherine Austin-Fitts just exposed what’s really going on with AI data centers.
It’s not only about mass surveillance.
They’re laying the foundation for a “full-blown social credit system.”
Big Tech, central bankers, and the government are all in on it.
This blew Tucker Carlson’s mind.
“They want to put on your currency, your bank deposits, and your stocks and bonds what I call an automatic third lock.”
“If I want to buy a Tucker Carlson hat … I give you cash, I get the hat, that’s a two-lock transaction.”
“Let’s say we have money in the bank, and I want to buy the hat.”
“The bank … has the ability to intercede and stop the transaction.”
“That’s … what I call a manual third lock.”
“The bank gets a third lock implementing the government regulations.”
“If you look at what happened to the truckers in Canada … most of the banks exercised that manual third lock under the direction of the government.”
But the government and central banks want something even more powerful.
“An automatic third lock.”
“I can turn off your money.”
“I can raise your taxes without anybody having any say about it.”
“Let me give you an example.”
“The pandemic.”
“If I say: you’re locked down, and you and your family can’t leave your house.”
“Your money won’t work outside your house if I have an all-digital system with an automatic third lock.”
“That’s what the data centers are for.”
“Spatial control involves tremendous data, because of the videos and the cameras.”
“But then you can imagine financial transactions all over the world.”
“What is AI great at?”
“Processing enormous amounts of mathematical information.”
“If they can put a manual third lock in a social credit system for every individual, and essentially automate the whole process with AI, then they have the ability to control many, many people.”
@TuckerCarlson @solari_the
Ash retweeted
I just want you to remember. That we live in a world where octopuses dream, otters have a favorite shell that they carry with them all their lives, cows have best friends, and bees have different "dialects" of dance depending on the region. Cats purr at a frequency that accelerates bone healing, the forest grows flowers first after a fire, and dolphins give each other names and respond to them. Penguins make proposals by giving each other the most beautiful pebble
Ash retweeted
I don’t stand with Israel.
I don’t stand with Iran.
I don’t stand with Ukraine.
I don’t stand with Russia.
I don’t pick sides because I don’t stand with government… period.
I stand with the innocent men, women, and children who are harmed by the things governments do to further the agendas of the bankers, billionaires, and shadow intelligence agencies that control them.